Neil Adam Gershenfeld (born December 1, 1959) is an American physicist. He is a professor in the MIT Program in Media Arts and Sciences and the director of the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms. He works mainly on interdisciplinary topics in physics and computer science, such as quantum computing, nanotechnology, and personal fabrication. He has been called the "intellectual father of the maker movement".

Gershenfeld was born on December 1, 1959 in Ardmore, Pennsylvania to a Jewish family. His father, Walter Gershenfeld, was a labor arbitrator and mediator and emeritus professor of management at Temple University, and his mother Gladys Gershenfeld who was also an arbitrator.

He attended Plymouth-Whitemarsh High School in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania. Later he attended Swarthmore College, graduating in 1981 with a B.A. degree in physics with high honors. In 1990, he earned a Ph.D. in physics at Cornell University; his thesis was titled Representation of chaos.

He received an honorary doctorate from Swarthmore College in 2006. In 2012 he received an honorary doctorate from Strathclyde University.

In 1998, Gershenfeld started a class at MIT called "How to make (almost) anything". Gershenfeld wanted to introduce expensive, industrial-size machines to the technical students. However, this class attracted a lot of students from various backgrounds: artists, architects, designers, students without any technical background. In his interview to CNN, Gershenfeld said that "the students... were answering a question I didn't ask, which is: What is this stuff good for? And the answer is: Not to make what you can buy in stores, but to make what you can't buy in stores. It's to personalise fabrication". Gershenfeld believes that this is the beginning of a new revolution: digital revolution in fabrication that will allow people to fabricate things, machines on demand.

Gershenfeld has presented his course on "How to make (almost) anything" at the Association of Professional Model Makers (APMM) 2010 Conference. In 2023, his course won the Irwin Sizer Award for the Most Significant Improvement to MIT education.

This class later has led Gershenfeld to create Fab lab. Gershenfeld feels very passionate about this project, as he believes that teaching kids how to use technology and create it themselves will empower the future generations to become more independent and create technology that each individual community needs, not a technology that is currently available on the market. Fab labs exist in over 150 countries. In his interview with Discover magazine on the question what personal fabrication might be useful for, Gershenfeld said, "There is a surprising need for emergent technologies in many of the least developed places on the planet. While our needs might be fairly well met, there are billions of people on the planet whose needs are not. Their problems don't need incremental tweaks in current technology, but a revolution".

Gershenfeld chairs Fab Foundation, leads the Fab Academy, which grew into the "Academany" platform for distributed hands-on education.