Richard Barry Bernstein was an American physical chemist. He was born on October 31, 1923 in  Long Island, New York, United States. Bernstein received an MS degree from Columbia in 1946 and began to carry out doctoral research with T. I. Taylor on gas-phase processes for isotopic separation. He was awarded a PhD in physical chemistry in 1948 and accepted a position in Chicago as assistant professor of chemistry at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1989. Among his awards were the National Medal of Science and the Willard Gibbs Award, both in 1989. He died on July 8, 1990 in Helsinki, Finland.