New Memoir Published on eScholarship by Prominent Sio Emeritus Faculty

We’re thrilled to announce the publication of Charles Kennel’s autobiography, From the Cold War to Global Warming: A Scientific Odyssey.

Charles F. Kennel, between 1970 and 1985. SIO Photographic Laboratory Collection. SAC 44. Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego. https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb66222247 . Photograph used with permission.

In November of 2021, a colleague in the library, Peter Mueller, had a chance to visit with Ellen and Charles Kennel and learned that during the Covid “lockdown,” Professor Kennel had taken the opportunity to write his memoirs. Peter suggested that he work with the UC San Diego Library’s Scholarly Communication to publish the autobiography on the UC’s open access institutional repository and publication platform, eScholarship. It was important to partner with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s embedded librarian and Subject Specialist for Earth and Marine Sciences, Amy Butros. Amy works tirelessly to build the OA collection of SIO research on eScholarship and has a deep knowledge of SIO’s history and the impact of its former director.

We guided the publication through image rights review and publication metadata best practices. Given the time-consuming nature of rights review, we hired a student, Xinbei Li, to help track down rights holders and locate openly licensed alternatives. Eight months into the project, Amy recommended that Dr. Kennel hire Tim DeBold, who had recently worked at SIO as Instructional Scheduling Coordinator and had begun to freelance in editorial services. Tim came on board to finalize the manuscript as a proofreader and copyeditor. In a little over a year after the introduction of the project, Amy did the final review and posted the final manuscript on eScholarship January 23, 2023!

Charles F. Kennel is an American plasma physicist who served as the Executive Vice Chancellor of UCLA, the Associate Administrator of NASA, the Director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, and is the inaugural Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Science and Policy at the University of Cambridge. This volume contains his autobiography, which not only covers Dr. Kennel’s own life but also offers perspectives on the history of science in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including the author’s work in space research, plasma physics, astrophysics, climate change science, and sustainability.

Description written by Timothy DeBold for Kennel, C. F. (2023). From the Cold War to Global Warming: A Scientific Odyssey. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6pj6c3rf

For more information on Dr. Kennel’s illustrious career and personal papers see the catalog of his archives in the UC San Diego Library Special Collections, Charles F. Kennel Papers, 1989-2012 (SMC 9).

Charlie Kennel and Ellen Lehman at Charlie Fest. Photos from the August 28-29, 2014 celebration of Charlie Kennel at Scripps Seaside Forum. Scripps Institution of Oceanography on Flickr.