Rudolf Podgornik (born August 27, 1955 in Ljubljana, Slovenia) is a physicist. His fields of research are: physics of soft matter, physics of Coulomb fluids, physics of macromolecular interactions, Lifshitz theory of Casimir - van der Waals dispersion interaction, Casimir effect, physics of membranes, polymers and polyelectrolytes and physics of DNA, RNA and viruses.