James McKernan FRS (born 1964) is a mathematician, and a professor of mathematics at the University of California, San Diego.

McKernan was educated at The Campion School and Trinity College, Cambridge, before going on to earn his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1991.

[1] His dissertation, On the Hyperplane Sections of a Variety in Projective Space, was supervised by Joe Harris.

He gave an invited talk at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010, on the topic of "Algebraic Geometry".

He was elected as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in the 2020 Class, for "contributions to algebraic geometry, in particular his proof of the finite generation of the canonical ring, the existence of flips and the boundedness of varieties of log general type".