Kent received his undergraduate degrees in business and chemistry from Baylor University and his PhD in Chemical Physics from the University of Texas at Austin. Milfeld spent several years as a faculty member at the University of Houston a teaching Quantum Chemistry and Numerical Analysis, and was appointed as the Director of Computing in the Chemistry Department, before joining the TACC staff.

Over the last 30+ years at the center, now named the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), Kent has fulfilled many roles, including directing HPC training programs, teaching Computational Chemistry and HPC courses in the UT Chemistry and CS Departments, organizing conferences, consulting, and collaborating on computational projects with fellow colleagues within NSF, DoD and DOE programs, and at UT institutions such as the Institute for Advance Technology (IAT).

Kent enjoys collaborating with his colleagues on conference proceedings and papers. Recent topics of interest include Affinity (amask utility), Interactive Development HPC access (idev utility), and OpenMP programming (Member of OpenMP Language committee).