Albert Ghiorso (July 15, 1915 – December 26, 2010) was an American nuclear scientist and co-discoverer of a record 12 chemical elements on the periodic table.

Ghiorso's ability to develop and produce these instruments, as well as a variety of electronic tasks, brought him into contact with the nuclear scientists at the University of California Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, in particular Glenn Seaborg.

[9] After the war, Seaborg and Ghiorso returned to Berkeley, where they and colleagues used the 60" Crocker cyclotron to produce elements of increasing atomic number by bombarding exotic targets with helium ions.

The discovery of each successive element was made possible by the development of innovative techniques in robotic target handling, fast chemistry, efficient radiation detectors, and computer data processing.

The 1972 upgrade of the HILAC to the superHILAC provided higher intensity ion beams, which was crucial to producing enough new atoms to enable detection of element 106.

He is generally credited with implementing the multichannel analyzer and the technique of recoil to isolate reaction products, although both of these were significant extensions of previously understood concepts.

Partially as a result of the failure to build the Omnitron, Ghiorso (together with colleagues Bob Main and others) conceived the joining of the HILAC and the Bevatron, which he called the Bevalac.

[10] In his later years, Ghiorso continued research toward finding superheavy elements, fusion energy, and innovative electron beam sources.

He was a non-participating co-author of the experiments in 1999 that gave evidence of elements 116 and 118, which later turned out to be a case of scientific fraud perpetrated by the first author, Victor Ninov.

He also had brief research interests in the free quark experiment of William Fairbank of Stanford, in the discovery of element 43, and in the electron disk accelerator, among others.