[5] She moved to the United Kingdom at the age of 15 with her family in the face of growing antisemitism in Hungary.

She attended Newnham College, Cambridge, studying Natural Sciences at a time when women did not formally receive a degree.

The resource was borne of her belief that "collective use of data would lead to the discovery of new knowledge which transcends the results of individual experiments".

[6] Kennard was awarded a doctorate of science by Cambridge in 1973 and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1987[13] and appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) "for services to Scientific Research on the Structure of Biological Molecules" in the 1988 Birthday Honours.

[10][14] In recognition of her work, an Olga Kennard Research Fellowship in crystallography was created, administered by the Royal Society.

[17] In 2020, the IUCr awarded Dr Kennard the 12th Ewald Prize for her "invaluable pioneering contribution to the development of crystallographic databases".

She was an 'architecture aficionado' and lived in a Grade II listed house designed by Danish architect, Erik Sorensen.