Miles Joseph Berkeley (1 April 1803 – 30 July 1889) was an English cryptogamist and clergyman, and one of the founders of the science of plant pathology.

He acquired an enthusiastic love of cryptogamic botany (lichens) in his early years, and soon was recognized as the leading British authority on fungi and plant pathology.

[2] He was well known as a systematist in mycology with some 6000 species of fungi being credited to him, but his Introduction to Cryptogamic Botany, published in 1857, and his papers on Vegetable Pathology in the Gardener's Chronicle in 1854 and onwards, show that he had a broad grasp of the whole domain of physiology and morphology as understood in those days.

As a microscopist he was an assiduous and accurate worker, as shown by his numerous drawings of the smaller algae and fungi, and his admirable dissections of mosses and Hepaticae.

His investigations on the potato murrain, caused by Phytophthora infestans, on the grape mildew, to which he gave the name Oidium Tuckeri, and on the pathogenic fungi of wheat rust, hop mildew, and various diseases of cabbage, pears, coffee, onions, tomatoes, and other plants, were important in results bearing on the life-history of these pests, at a time when very little was known of such matters, and must always be considered in any historical account of the remarkable advances in the biology of these organisms made between 1850 and 1880.