Jerome Karle (Jerome Karfunkle; June 18, 1918 – June 6, 2013) was an American physical chemist. During World War II, he and his wife Isabella Karle worked on the Manhattan Project.
With Herbert A. Hauptman, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1985, for the direct analysis of crystal structures using X-ray scattering techniques.
Karle was a former president of both the American Crystallographic Association (ACA) (1972) and the IUCr (1981-1984), as well as a co-recipient of the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on direct methods. Among the many additional honors he received for his work, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1976 and the American Philosophical Society in 1990.
Karle died of liver cancer at the Leewood Healthcare Center in Annandale, Virginia on June 6, 2013 at the age of 94.