Orso Mario Corbino (30 April 1876 – 23 January 1937) was an Italian physicist and politician.

[1] He is noted for his studies of the influence of external magnetic fields on the motion of electrons in metals and he discovered the Corbino effect.

[2] There he worked as assistant of Damiano Macaluso, discovering the Macaluso-Corbino effect,[2] a strong magneto-rotation of the plane of polarization observed at wavelengths close to an absorption line of the material through which the light is travelling.

[2] In politics, he served as president of the Superior Council of Water and Public Works in 1917, senator in 1920, Minister of Education in 1921 and Minister of National Economy in 1923–24 on direct assignment from Benito Mussolini, although Corbino was not a member of the National Fascist Party.

As director of the Institute of physics he was the supervisor of the Via Panisperna boys, which included Enrico Fermi, Edoardo Amaldi, Franco Rasetti, Emilio Segrè, Bruno Pontecorvo, Oscar D'Agostino, Ettore Majorana, and Elena Freda.