NAMC – Newsletter of the Asian Mycological Committee

syllabus and take his exams within 10 months. With four sultry O-level grades he was offered a
job in a chrome plating factory as a chemical apprentice and his father, John Hyde,
recommended that he take this up. However, after discussions with the teachers at Poole
Grammar School they persuaded his father to allow Kevin to pursue his A-levels which John
fortunately accepted. Following his A-levels Dr Hyde carried out his B.Sc. in Zoology at Cardiff
University at the University of Wales between 1976 and 1979, followed by a one year M.Sc. at
Portsmouth University. At this stage he decided to leave academia and carried out a one year
Post graduate diploma in teaching and in August 1980 took up his first job as a high school
teacher at Hurst School near Basingstoke. His strong desire to travel soon saw him travel to
Seychelles, landing a teaching position where he spent 24 months teaching in a high school. He
had maintained constant contact with Prof. Gareth Jones his M.Sc. program supervisor and in
September 1984 he returned to Portsmouth University in UK and commenced his Ph.D. in
Marine Mycology under the guidance of Professor Jones at University of Portsmouth. Never
happy to be back in the UK, Dr Hyde finished his Ph.D. in two and a half years and moved to
Brunei and again opted out of academia to take up yet another high school teaching position in
this oil-rich state. In Brunei, he was able to continue his marine mycology research with the
help of two microscopes borrowed from Prof Jones (Portsmouth University) and in about three
years had published 50 international research articles. By 1989, Dr Hyde tired of high school
teaching, migrated to Australia where he was jobless for a while. After four months of seeking
research or university positions in vain, disillusionment set in and he almost accepted that a
career in research would never be possible for him. To make matters worse he walked through
a glass door seriously injuring a knee cap which had to be removed, cleaned and replaced.
Fortunately, Ian Moorhead who was the director of Department of Primary Industries,
Queensland at this time, saw Dr Hyde’s mycological potential and invited Dr Hyde for an
interview as a NAQS scientist. Dr Hyde attended the interview on crutches but was offered the
position. The subsequent new job surveying plant pathogens throughout north Queensland and
Papua New Guinea set the tone for future research on tropical fungi. Although the NAQS job
was pretty routine involving looking for 20 or so target organisms, he spent as much time as
possible looking at other fungi of interest and by 2002 had more than 100 SCI publications,