Wilfrid Rall is an American neuroscientist and physicist.
Rall was born in 1922 in Los Angeles. He received a B.S. from Yale University before being hired to work on the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago.
During his time at the Chicago Met Lab, Rall worked as a research assistant in the physics division. Among his work there included the construction of a mass spectrometer. Rall would later recall, “I think what was special about it – which is why you had a number of European scientists who were contributing to the effort – is because they were afraid the Nazis were going to get it. So it was a race against the Nazis. I don’t think many people felt too much qualm against it. They felt it was important to win that race.” Nevertheless, Rall also signed the Szilard Petition, which protested the use of the atomic bomb.
Rall went on to receive an M.S. from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from the University of New Zealand. He spent the majority of his career working at the National Institutes of Health, where he was one of the pioneers of computational neuroscience.