Ricky Allen Kendall, age 53, of Oak Ridge, died Tuesday, March 18, 2014, at Parkwest Medical Center in Knoxville.

He was born March 8, 1961, in Jefferson, N.C., the son of Charles and Ola Jean Shepherd Kendall.

The family moved to Indiana soon after, living in a handful of places before settling in Rush County in 1972. It was here that Ricky earned his reputation as a farm boy until he left for Indiana State University in Terre Haute in 1979. He graduated magna cum laude from Indiana State in 1983 before undertaking graduate studies at the University of Utah, where he was awarded the PhD in 1988 for his work in computational quantum chemistry.

After a short stint of postdoctoral training at Argonne National Laboratory, he took up a staff scientist position at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in 1989. During his tenure at PNNL, Ricky received a number of awards, chief among them a highly prestigious R&D 100 Award in 1999 for his work on the Molecular Science Software Suite, a set of software tools that is still used today by hundreds of scientists to perform cutting-edge research. [Read more…]