Richard Wrangham (born 1948, PhD, Cambridge University, 1975) is Ruth B. Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University and founded the Kibale Chimpanzee Project in 1987. He has conducted extensive research on primate ecology, nutrition, and social behaviour. He is best known for his work on the evolution of human warfare, described in the book Demonic Males, and on the role of cooking in human evolution, described in the book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Together with Elizabeth Ross, he co-founded the Kasiisi Project in 1997, and serves as a patron of the Great Apes Survival Partnership (GRASP).

Wrangham began his career as a researcher at Jane Goodall's long-term common chimpanzee field study in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. He befriended fellow primatologist Dian Fossey and assisted her in setting up her nonprofit mountain gorilla conservation organization, the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund (originally the Digit Fund)

Wrangham's latest work focuses on the role cooking has played in human evolution. He has argued that cooking food is obligatory for humans as a result of biological adaptations and that cooking, in particular, the consumption of cooked tubers, might explain the increase in hominid brain sizes, smaller teeth and jaws, and the decrease in sexual dimorphism that occurred roughly 1.8 million years ago.