Charles F. Kennel (born August 20, 1939) is an American plasma physicist and former Associate Administrator of NASA.^[1][2] He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences^[3] and won the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics in 1997.^[4] In 2009, he was advertised by NASA Watch as a potential pick by Barack Obama as the next NASA Administrator.^[5]

Kennel received a bachelor's degree in astronomy from Harvard College and a doctorate in astrophysical sciences from Princeton University. His doctoral thesis was advised by Edward A. Frieman.^[1][6]

Charles Kennel was a former Associate Administrator of NASA. He was the director of Mission to Planet Earth, a program during the Clinton Administration to perform a comprehensive survey and observation of our home planet. He was a member and chair of the NASA Advisory Council (NAC) Science Committee which he quit in 2006.^[7]

• Ninth Director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography^[8]
• Vice Chancellor of Marine Sciences at the University of California, San Diego, from 1998 to 2006.
• Member and chair of the NASA Advisory Council (1998–2006)
• Chair of the National Academy of Science's Space Studies Board^[9]
• In May 2009, Kennel was named a member of the Review of United States Human Space Flight Plans Committee an independent review requested by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) on May 7, 2009.
• In January 2014, Kennel was elected the inaugural visiting research fellow at the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP), University of Cambridge.^[10]

Kennel was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987^[11] and was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in 1991.^[3] He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2003.^[12] In 1997, he received the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics from the American Physical Society.^[4]

• Unstable growth of unducted whistlers propagating at an angle to the geomagnetic field – 1966 – Trieste : International Atomic Energy Agency, International Centre for Theoretical Physics
• What we have learned from the magnetosphere – 1974 – Los Angeles, Calif. : Plasma Physics Group, University of California, Los Angeles
• Matter in motion : the spirit and evolution of physics – 1977 – Charles F. Kennel and Ernest S. Abers – Boston : Allyn and Bacon
• Convection And Substorms: Paradigms Of Magnetospheric Phenomenology – 1996 – Oxford University Press, Usa – ISBN 0-19-508529-9
• The Climate Threat We Can Beat, in May/June 2012 Foreign Affairs with David G. Victor, Veerabhadran Ramanathan, and Kennel (website is paid while article is current)