Kim Kenobi spent seven years as an undergraduate in Edinburgh University from 1994 to 2001, completing the pre-clinical phase of a medicine degree and eventually graduating with a first class honours degree in mathematics. He went on to be part of the first year of the new Mres in Environmental Biology Conversion Course for Mathematicians, Physicists and Molecular Biologists that was set up in St Andrews in 2001. His final project was about the shapes of dolphins and whales, and the relationship between time since most recent common ancestor and shape distances for pairs of cetaceans.

This shape project led very naturally on to a PhD in statistical shape analysis at the University of Nottingham, supervised by Ian Dryden and Huiling Le. Kim obtained his PhD in 2006, by which time he was working as a research training convenor at the Graduate School of the University of Nottingham, training PhD students in transferrable skills. Returning to mathematics in 2007, Kim spent a year as a statistics lecturer in Nottingham before joining the Centre for Plant Integrative Biology as a statistics postdoctoral researcher in 2008. He there completed two postdoc positions, the first looking at gene regulatory networks in the model organism Arabidopsis thaliana, and the second focussing on the shapes of wheat roots as part of an ERC grant, FutureRoot.

Kim started a lectureship in statistics at Aberystwyth University in October 2014

Outside his academic life, Kim is a keen musician, playing piano, clarinet and saxophone. He has a particular interest in jazz.