Martin Lewis Perl (June 24, 1927 – September 30, 2014) was an American chemical engineer and physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 for his discovery of the tau lepton.

His parents, Fay (née Resenthal), a secretary and bookkeeper, and Oscar Perl, a stationery salesman who founded a printing and advertising company, were Jewish immigrants to the US from the Polish area of Russia.

After graduation, Perl worked for the General Electric Company, as a chemical engineer in a factory producing electron vacuum tubes.

Perl's thesis described measurements of the nuclear quadrupole moment of sodium, using the atomic beam resonance method that Rabi had won the Nobel Prize in Physics for in 1944.

[1] While at Michigan, Perl and Lawrence W. Jones served as co-advisors to Samuel C. C. Ting, who earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1976.

[3] He had the opportunity to start planning experimental work in this area when he moved in 1963 to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), then being built in California.

Work done at DESY-Hamburg, and with the Direct Electron Counter (DELCO) at SPEAR, subsequently confirmed the discovery[2] and established the mass and spin of the tau.

[14] He served on the board of advisors of Scientists and Engineers for America, an organization focused on promoting sound science in American government.