Joseph Leon Birman (May 21, 1927 in New York City – October 1, 2016 in New Rochelle) was an American theoretical solid-state physicist.
Birman organized symposia in the 1970s between American and Soviet scientists in Moscow, New York and St. Petersburg.
In the 1990s he organized a support program with Pierre Hohenberg for scientists who had emigrated to the United States, especially from Eastern Europe and China.
In 2010, he received the Andrei Sakharov Prize of the American Physical Society, of whose Human Rights Committee he was a member of.
In 2006, he received the Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientists Award from the New York Academy of Sciences.