Knut W. Urban (born 25 June 1941 in Stuttgart) is a German physicist. He has been the Director of the Institute of Microstructure Research at Forschungszentrum Jülich since 1987.Knut Urban's research focuses on the field of aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopy (both regarding the further development of instruments and the control software), the examination of structural defects in oxides and the physical properties of complex metallic alloys. He also works on Josephson effects in high-temperature superconductors and the application of these effects in SQUID systems and magnetometers as well as on the application of Hilbert transform spectroscopy in examining the excitation of solids, liquids and gases on the gigahertz and terahertz scale.

He received  BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Basic Sciences category goes in this sixth edition to physicists Maximilian Haider, Harald Rose and Knut Urban for “greatly enhancing the resolving power of electron microscopy by developing aberration-corrected electron optics, a breakthrough enabling subatomic precision.”