Merlin Peterson was an American chemist.
Peterson was born in 1910 in Provo, Utah. He received a B.S. from Vanderbilt and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley.
In 1943, Peterson was hired to work on the Manhattan Project at the Chicago Met Lab. In conjunction with his work at Chicago, Peterson would also work at the Clinton Laboratories at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
After the war, Peterson went on to teach at Vanderbilt and Columbia University. He later worked at the Argonne National Laboratory.