Robert William Boyle (October 2, 1883 – April 18, 1955) was a physicist and one of the most important early pioneers in the development of sonar.

Boyle left Newfoundland for Montreal, Quebec in Canada where he trained at McGill University under Nobel Prize winner Sir Ernest Rutherford, in the then fledgling field of radioactivity.

In 1912 he returned to Canada at the request of Henry Marshall Tory to become head of the physics department at the University of Alberta, and shifted his research to ultrasonics.

[1] In 1919 Boyle returned to Alberta and shortly thereafter became dean of the Faculty of Applied Science, a position he held until 1929.

Boyle also recruited engineering professor John Hamilton Parkin from the University of Toronto to head aeronautical research at NRC.