José Leite Lopes (born 28.10.1918) is a Brazilian theoretical physicist and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. He graduated from the universities in the state of Pernambuco (1939) and in Rio de Janeiro (1943), and in 1946 he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Princeton. From 1946 he was professor at the university in Rio de Janeiro and from 1949 at the Brazilian Centre for Physical Research (scientific director in 1960—64).
His research has concerned nuclear physics and the physics of elementary particles. He studied nuclear shell effects in photonuclear reactions and the capture of a muon by a proton. Independently of others he put forward in 1958 the hypothesis of neutral currents.