Roberto Busa (November 28, 1913 – August 9, 2011) was an Italian Jesuit priest and one of the pioneers in the usage of computers for linguistic and literary analysis. He is known for being the creator of the Index Thomisticus, an innovative tool used for performing text searches on the bibliography of Thomas Aquino. The project indexed 10,631,980 words over the course of 34 years, initially onto punched cards. It is considered a pioneering project in the field of digital humanities.

Roberto Busa was born in Vicenza, Italy.  In 1928, as a 15 year old, he entered the Episcopal Seminary of Belluno, completing high school there, and took the first two-year course of Theology with Albino Luciani, the future Pope John Paul I. In 1933 he joined the Society of Jesus, where he got a diploma in Philosophy in 1937 and one in Theology in 1941 and where he was ordained priest in 1940. He was, then, an auxiliary army chaplain in the National Army and later in the partisan forces. He was full professor of Ontology, Theodicy and Scientific Methodology and, for some years, a librarian in the "Aloisianum" Faculty of Philosophy of Gallarate.