Jan Peter Toennies (born 3 May 1930) is a German-American scientist.

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He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 3 May 1930 to German immigrant parents.^[1] He is the grandson of sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies.

He graduated from Lower Merion High School, outside of Philadelphia, in 1948. He went on to Amherst College, where he finished with a BA in 1952, and to Brown University, where he received a PhD in chemistry in 1957. During graduate school he was a Fulbright student in Göttingen 1953–1954.^[1]

• E. F. Greene and J. Peter Toennies: Chemische Reaktionen in Stoßwellen, Dr. Dietrich Steinkopff Verlag, Darmstadt, 1959
• E. F. Greene and J. Peter Toennies: Chemical Reactions in Shock Waves, Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd. London, 1964
• G. Benedek and J. Peter Toennies: Atomic Scale Dynamics at Surfaces: Theory and Experimental Studies with Helium Atom Scattering, Springer, Heidelberg, 2018