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Charles L. Bennett (born November 1956) is an American observational astrophysicist and the Alumni Centennial Professor of Physics and Astronomy and a Gilman Scholar at Johns Hopkins University. He is the Principal Investigator of NASA's highly successful Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).

His National Academy of Sciences (NAS) membership citation states, "As leader of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) mission, Bennett has helped quantify, with unprecedented precision and accuracy, many key properties of the universe, including its age, the dark and baryonic matter content, the cosmological constant, and the Hubble constant." Membership is a great honor bestowed upon the most distinguished scholars in engineering and the sciences. He was awarded the National Academy of Sciences Henry Draper Medal in 2005 and the Comstock Prize in Physics in 2009, both for his leadership of WMAP. Bennett received the Harvey Prize [1] in 2006 for, "the precise determination of the age, composition and curvature of the universe." Bennett shared the 2010 Shaw Prize in astronomy with Lyman A. Page,Jr. and David N. Spergel, both of Princeton University, for their work on WMAP. The 2012 Gruber Cosmology Prize was awarded to "Charles L. Bennett and the WMAP Team" for "transforming our current paradigm of structure formation from appealing scenario into precise science." "By observing the relic radiation from the early universe, Charles L. Bennett and the WMAP team established the Standard Cosmological Model."[2] Bennett was named the 2013 Karl G. Jansky Prize Lecturer. [3]