Kelly was born at Humboldt, Saskatchewan and raised mainly in Saskatoon, but spent most of his summers on his father's small grain farm near St. Brieux, Sask. He received a Bachelor’s of Science in Agriculture in Agricultural Biology from the College of Agriculture University of Saskatchewan in 1985, and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Plant Pathology from the Department of Biology at the University of Saskatchewan in 1988 and 1991, respectively. Since November 1996 he has been a plant pathologist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), in Lacombe, Alberta Currently, Kelly’s main focus is on cereal diseases, especially those of barley and wheat, while he also works on canola as part of collaborative studies with colleagues from across Canada. Kelly started working on fusarium head blight (FHB) in cereals and corn as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the AAFC Ottawa Research Centre in 1991 as part of a project looking at the impact of tillage and rotation on FHB in wheat and ear rot in corn. At Lacombe, Kelly continued his work on fusarium head blight in the mid-1990s with projects related to monitoring for Fusarium graminearum in cereals, grasses and corn, as well as investigating chemotype shifts in the pathogen in the 2000’s. In addition, his research has looked at the development of risk management strategies for fusarium head blight in relation to infected seed and feed as well as forecasting the potential distribution and severity of F. graminearum over the prairie region under dryland and irrigated production scenarios. Most recently Kelly has led projects related to post-head emergence fungicide timing in wheat and barley as well as other FHB management tools.