Dr. Charles F. Kennel, NASA Associate Administrator for the Office of Mission to Planet Earth, will leave the space agency by late spring to return to the University of California, Los Angeles, NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin announced today.
Kennel has been appointed by the University of California Board of Regents as the new Executive Vice Chancellor and Chief Academic Officer of UCLA. He started work at NASA in January 1994 under a two-year appointment from his post as a professor in the UCLA Department of Physics.
"Under the leadership of Charlie Kennel, the Mission to Planet Earth program has made significant progress in helping improve our understanding of our changing planet," Goldin said. "Dr. Kennel has been instrumental in putting the program on a sound budgetary footing while emphasizing its solid science focus. He has also led development of a coordinated educational program that will help increase students' understanding of Earth's environment."
Key agency accomplishments during Kennel's tenure as Associate Administrator include the restructuring of NASA's Earth Observing System, increasing usage of advanced technology in the agency's future Earth science missions, the definition of the first steps toward an integrated global observing strategy, and the launch of the first next- generation GOES weather satellite.
"I am extraordinarily grateful to NASA, and especially to Dan Goldin, for giving me the opportunity to work on such a fascinating program, which deals with issues of importance to the whole world," Kennel said. "I've met and worked with some of the most creative and dedicated people I have ever known. It is especially satisfying that I will now be able to apply what I learned from them on behalf of my home institution, UCLA."
Kennel received an A.B. from Harvard College in 1959 and a Ph.D. in Astrophysical Sciences from Princeton University in 1964. He has been a tenured member of the UCLA Department of Physics since 1967, and was its chairman from 1983 to 1986. He is the author or co-author of more than 225 experimental and theoretical publications in plasma physics, space plasma physics, planetary science, astrophysics, and nonlinear science.
Dr. Kennel has been a Fulbright scholar, a Guggenheim scholar, and a Fairchild Professor at the California Institute of Technology. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the International Academy of Astronautics and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.