Robert William Scheifler (born June 24, 1954) is an American computer scientist. He was born in Kirkwood, Missouri. He is most notable for leading the development of the X Window System from the project's inception in 1984 until the closure of the MIT X Consortium in 1996. He later became one of the architects of the Jini architecture at Sun Microsystems. Scheifler holds a B.S. in Mathematics and an M.S. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.