John Cowdery Kendrew (March 24, 1917–August 23, 1997) was a British molecular biologist.

He was born in Oxford, England, and was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford, as well as Clifton College in Bristol and Trinity College, Cambridge.
In 1945 he approached Dr. Max Perutz in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. Joseph Barcroft, a respiratory physiologist, suggested he might make a comparative protein crystallographic study of adult and fetal sheep hemoglobin, and he started that work.
In 1947 he became a Fellow of Peterhouse, and the Medical Research Council(MRC) agreed to create a research unit for the study of the molecular structure of biological systems, under the direction of Sir Lawrence Bragg.
In 1954 he became a Reader at the Davy-Faraday Laboratory of the Royal Institution in London.
Kendrew shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for chemistry with Max Perutz for determining the first atomic structures of proteins using crystallography. Their work was done at what is now the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Kendrew determined the structure of the protein myoglobin, which transports oxygen in muscle cells.