Paul John Werbos (born September 4, 1947) is an American social scientist and machine learning pioneer.

He is best known for his 1974 dissertation, which first described the process of training artificial neural networks through backpropagation of errors.

[2] Werbos was one of the original three two-year Presidents of the International Neural Network Society (INNS).

[4][5] He also has interest in larger questions relating to consciousness, the foundations of physics, and human potential.

He served as program director in the National Science Foundation for several years until 2015.