Professor Sir Kenneth Blaxter PhD, FRS, PRSE was a former director of the Rowett Research Institute.
After graduating, he worked at the National Institute for Research in Dairying (NIRD). With the onset of World War II, he was conscripted and served with the 10th Field Regiment of the Royal Artillery from spring 1940 to the end of 1941, when he returned to NIRD. He completed his PhD thesis, entitled ‘The maintenance of the winter milk supply in wartime’; in 1944. Shortly thereafter, he requested to be seconded to the biochemistry department of the Ministry of Agriculture in Weybridge, where he conducted blood analysis and researched lead toxicity in ruminants. In 1946, he moved to Illinois to work with animal nutritionist Harold Mitchell at the University of Illinois.
In 1947, after returning to England, he applied for the headship of the Nutrition Department at the Hannah Dairy Research Institute in Ayr, Scotland and received the position in 1948. During his tenure at the Hannah Dairy Research Institute, he wrote over 200 papers, focusing primarily on the issues of energy metabolism and feed usage by ruminants. He also investigated nutritional diseases and magnesium deficiency in calves, the effect of temperature and other environmental effects on sheep, and ruminant digestion and feed intake.
In 1965, he was appointed director of the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland. There, he and his team of researchers studied topics of importance to the Scottish farmer, including deer farming, llamas, human nutrition, feed evaluation, environmental stress and animal calorimetry.
He was named a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1967 and was knighted in 1977. From 1972 to 1975, he served as vice-president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and acted as its president from 1979 to 1982. In 1979, he received the Wolf Prize in Agriculture for his research into the nutritional requirements of ruminants, and the Rank Prize in Nutrition for his lifetime contributions to nutrition science.
He was also the recipient of honorary doctorates from Queen's University in Belfast, the Agricultural University in Norway, the University of Leeds, the University of Aberdeen and the University of Newcastle.