Lauri Vaska (May 7, 1925 – November 15, 2015) was an Estonian-American chemist who has made noteworthy contributions to organometallic chemistry.
Vaska was born in Rakvere, Estonia. He was educated at the Baltic University in Hamburg, Germany (1946) and subsequently at the University of Göttingen (1946–1949), where he received his Vordiplom (equivalent to the American B.S. degree). He emigrated to the United States in 1952 and pursued his Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry at the University of Texas (1952–1956). He was a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University (1956–1957) where he conducted research on magnetochemistry. In 1957 he took a position as Fellow at the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh, where he remained until 1964. During that time, the Mellon Institute housed a number of future chemists, including Paul Lauterbur and R. Bruce King. Vaska moved as an associate professor to Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, where, from 1990 to his death, he was professor emeritus of chemistry. His brother  is a philosopher. He died in Basking Ridge, New Jersey in 2015, aged 90.