Robert Penneman was an American chemist.
Penneman was born in 1919 in Springfield, Illinois. He received a B.S. from Millikan University and an M.S. from the University of Illinois, before he was hired to work on the Manhattan Project at the Chicago Met Lab in 1942. Penneman worked as a research assistant at Chicago, and towards the end of the war he also worked briefly at the Clinton Laboratories at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
After the war, Penneman went back to the University of Illinois, where he received a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry. He then went to work at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, where he would eventually become an associate division leader.