Kenneth Wade, FRSC FRS (1932–2014) was a British chemist and professor emeritus at Durham University.

He was educated at Carre's Grammar School,[2] and graduated from the University of Nottingham as the first PhD student (1954–1957) of Norman Greenwood,[3][4] and Cornell University.

[5] After spending two years as a post-doctoral student at the University of Cambridge and two further years lecturing successively at Cornell University and Derby College of Technology, in 1961 Wade became a Lecturer at Durham University.

In 1971, he was appointed Senior Lecturer and was promoted to Reader in 1977.

[2] Wade's Rules, also known as Polyhedral skeletal electron pair theory, are a set of electron counting rules to predict the shapes of borane clusters.