Sir Ernest Laurence Kennaway FRS (23 May 1881 – 1 January 1958) was a British pathologist and Royal Medal winner.

He first became interested in natural life when, due to a childhood illness, he was encouraged to spend time outdoors.

After graduating he worked for The Lister Institute for Preventive Medicine and UCL before returning to Oxford, this time to Brasenose College on a Hulme scholarship in 1909.

[1] In 1930, Kennaway and Izrael Hieger showed for the first time that single polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), such as dibenz[a,h]anthracene, are tumorigenic in mouse skin.

At a conference commissioned by the Medical Research Council in 1947, he suggested that cigarette smoking rather than air pollution might be a cause of the large and continuing increase in lung cancer.