John William Negele (born 18 April 1944 in Cleveland, Ohio) is an American theoretical nuclear physicist.
Negele studied electrical engineering at Purdue University with a bachelor's degree in 1965.
He received his PhD in theoretical physics from Cornell University in 1969, under the supervision of Hans Bethe, with the dissertation The Structure of Finite Nuclei in the Local Density Approximation.
Negele's research deals with many-body theory in nuclear physics (including local density approximation,[3][4] time-dependent Hartree-Fock (TDHF) methods, and path integral methods) and also with many-body theory in spin systems.
He originated the first density functional theory of finite nuclei starting from realistic (experimentally justified) nucleon-nucleon interactions.