Josef Michl (12 March 1939 – 13 May 2024) was a Czechoslovak-American chemist. Michl has made important contributions to numerous areas of chemistry during his career: theoretical and experimental aspects of organic photochemistry, magnetic circular dichroism, chemistry and theory of biradicals and biradicaloids, electronic and vibrational spectroscopy with polarized light, silicon chemistry and electronic structure, theory and experiment of sputtered frozen gases, properties and theory of organic Reaction intermediates, cluster-ions, molecular building blocks for supramolecular structures and boron chemistry.

Michl was editor of the ACS journal Chemical Reviews from 1984 to 2014. He is co-author of five textbooks on Photochemistry and Polarization spectroscopy, is author of more than 570 scientific publications and holds 11 patents.