Lawrence Hugh Aller (September 24, 1913 – March 16, 2003) was an American astronomer. He was born in Tacoma, Washington. He never finished high school and worked for a time as a gold miner. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1936 and went to graduate school at Harvard in 1937. There he obtained his master's degree in 1938 and his PhD in 1943. From 1943 to 1945 he worked on the Manhattan Project at the University of California Radiation Laboratory. He was an assistant professor at Indiana University from 1945 to 1948 and then an associate professor and professor at the University of Michigan until 1962. He moved to UCLA in 1962 and helped build its astronomy department. He was chair of the department from 1963 to 1968.