Mehran Kardar (Persian: مهران کاردار; August 1957) is an Iranian born physicist and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute (USA). He received his B.A. in physics from the University of Cambridge in 1979, and obtained his Ph.D. from MIT in 1983. Kardar is particularly known for the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang (KPZ) equation in theoretical physics, which has been named after him and collaborators. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001.