Michael Blanton (born 1 February 1973) is an American physicist whose expertise is in the fields of galaxy evolution and cosmology. An associate professor in New York University’s Department of Physics, Blanton has primarily focused on mapping the universe. Blanton has also helped to develop a new prism spectroscopy technique to obtain large numbers of redshifts of very distant galaxies to determine how galaxies have changed over the past eight billion years. The work was completed as part of the multi-institutional PRIMUS project.