Albert Wattenberg, was an American experimental physicist. During World War II, he was with the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago. He was a member of the team that built Chicago Pile-1, the world's first artificial nuclear reactor, and was one of those present on December 2, 1942, when it achieved criticality. In July 1945, he was one of the signatories of the Szilard petition. After the war he received his doctorate, and became a researcher at the Argonne National Laboratory from 1947 to 1950, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1951 to 1958, and at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign from 1958 to 1986, where he pursued studies related to the atomic nucleus.

The Metallurgical Laboratory was a scientific laboratory at the University of Chicago that was established in February 1942 to study and use the newly discovered chemical element plutonium. It researched plutonium's chemistry and metallurgy, designed the world's first nuclear reactors to produce it, and developed chemical processes to separate it from other elements. In August 1942 the lab's chemical section was the first to chemically separate a weighable sample of plutonium, and on 2 December 1942, the Met Lab produced the first controlled nuclear chain reaction, in the reactor Chicago Pile-1, which was constructed under the stands of the university's old football stadium, Stagg Field.