Rene Prestwood was an American nuclear chemist.
Prestwood was recruited for the Manhattan Project as a young chemist from the University of California-Berkeley. He worked on the neutron source for the Fat Man implosion bomb. He was married to Sarah (Dowson) Prestwood, who worked as a nurse at Los Alamos.
After the war, he completed his PhD in nuclear chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis. He worked for the Los Alamos National Laboratory for most of his career.