Robert Lamb Sproull (August 16, 1918 – October 9, 2014)[1][2] was an American educator, physicist and US Department of Defense official.

He began a promising and productive career as a physicist at Cornell and headed the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics (LASSP) and the Materials Science Center.

Sproull left Cornell to become director of ARPA, where he was a strong advocate of cooperation among academia, government, and industry to meet US scientific needs for defense and competition with the Soviet Union.

After taking up an administrative post at Cornell, he became provost and vice president of the University of Rochester in 1968.

During his term as President of the University of Rochester, Sproull was known by the nickname "Particle Bob", a reference to his background in physics.