Captain Albert Richard Behnke Jr. USN (ret.) (August 8, 1903 – January 16, 1992) was an American physician, who was principally responsible for developing the U.S. Naval Medical Research Institute. Behnke separated the symptoms of Arterial Gas Embolism (AGE) from those of decompression sickness and suggested the use of oxygen in recompression therapy.

Behnke is also known as the "modern-day father" of human body composition for his work in developing the hydrodensitometry method of measuring body density, his standard man and woman models as well as a somatogram based on anthropometric measurements.

Behnke was born August 8, 1903, in Chicago, Illinois. He moved to New Mexico and settled in Whittier, California, by 1912. Behnke graduated from Whittier College in 1925 and moved to San Francisco to attend medical school at Stanford University. Stanford Medical School required a one-year internship prior to conferring a medical doctorate. Behnke joined the United States Navy and completed his internship at the Mare Island Naval Hospital in 1930. In 1932, the Navy sent Behnke to the Harvard School of Public Health.

Following medical school in 1930, Behnke found his lifelong interest in deep sea diving when he was assigned as an assistant medical officer to USS Holland and Submarine Division Twenty in San Diego under the command of Chester W. Nimitz. In addition to his other duties, Behnke spent time covering medical watch on USS Ortolan, a submarine rescue ship, where he performed his first hard hat dive.

In 1932 Behnke wrote a letter to the Surgeon General that was published in the United States Naval Medical Bulletin outlining the possible causes of arterial gas embolisms he was seeing related to submarine escape training. This separated the symptoms of arterial gas embolism (AGE) from those of decompression sickness. This letter caught the attention of the director of the submarine medicine in the Bureau of Medicine, Captain E.W. Brown. Brown sent Behnke to do postgraduate work at the Harvard School of Public Health and research on diving and submarine medicine with fellow student Charles W. Shilling. Philip Drinker asked Behnke to stay for two additional years and the Navy allowed it.^{[citation needed]}

Lieutenant junior grade Behnke was then sent to Pearl Harbor in 1935 to the Submarine Escape Training Tower. Later that year, Behnke et al. experimented with oxygen for recompression therapy. Evidence of the effectiveness of recompression therapy utilizing oxygen was later shown by Yarbrough and Behnke and has since become the standard of care for treatment of DCS.

Behnke also began to outline his idea for a medical laboratory in 1936. That outline would eventually become the Naval Medical Research Institute (NMRI) now located with the National Naval Medical Center. In 1937, Behnke introduced the "no-stop" decompression tables.

After being transferred to Washington, D.C., in 1938, Behnke was assigned to medical duty at the Experimental Diving Unit (NEDU).