He was a graduate student in astronomy at the University of Washington, where he received his master's degree in 1976 and his Ph.D. in 1978.
Kennicutt formulated a version of the Kennicutt–Schmidt law, which is an empirical relation between the gas density and star formation rate (SFR) in a given region.
Kennicutt is the principal investigator for the Spitzer Infrared Nearby Galaxies Survey (SINGS), a legacy project that performed a multiwavelength survey of 75 nearby galaxies with the Spitzer Space Telescope.
[6] He was awarded the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics in 2007 by the American Astronomical Society.
He shared the 2009 Gruber Prize in Cosmology with Wendy Freedman of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and Jeremy Mould of the University of Melbourne School of Physics, for their leadership in the definitive measurement of the value of the constant of proportionality in Hubble's law.