Ali Javan (born in 1928 in Tehran, Iran) is an Iranian-American inventor and physicist at MIT. He invented the gas laser in 1960.

In 1975, he received from The Optical Society of America their most prestigious honor, the Fredric Ives Medal, with a citation that praised him for "producing an optical device (the Gas Laser) of unparalleled applicability to scientific research." In 1993, he received the Albert Einstein Award.