Don Eigler, an IBM Fellow, is a physicist at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, where he has been a leader of the Low-Temperature Scanning Tunneling Microscopy Project. His research is aimed at understanding the physics of nanometer-scale structures and exploring their applications to computation.

He is most widely known for his demonstration of the ability to manipulate individual atoms. Don received his bachelor's and doctoral degrees from the University of California, San Diego, and was named its Outstanding Alumnus of the year in 1999. He has been recognized for his accomplishments with the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience, the Davisson-Germer Prize, the Dannie Heineman Prize, the Newcomb-Cleveland Prize, the Grand Award for Science and Technology, the Nanoscience Prize, and numerous honorary lectureships. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and is a member of the Max Planck Society.