The Reverend Frederick Valentine Melsheimer (September 25, 1749, Negenborn, Brunswick – June 30, 1814, Hanover, Pennsylvania) was a Lutheran clergyman and early American entomologist, called the "Father of American Entomology" by successor Thomas Say. He was the author of the first major entomological work in the United States: A Catalogue of Insects of Pennsylvania (1806), a sixty-page work that describes 1,363 species of beetles.