Kendall is professor of statistics at University of Warwick.
He earned a DPhil in probability theory from the University of Oxford in 1979, authored or edited 5 books, published around 100 scientific articles in theoretical and applied probability and has been the president of the Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability (2013-2015).
He is founding co-director of the UK Academy for PhD Training in Statistics (established in 2007), which each year provides training for around 90 first-year Statistics PhD students from UK and Republic of Ireland.