List of Nobel laureates affiliated with the University of Edinburgh
This list of Nobel laureates affiliated with the University of Edinburgh comprehensively shows the alumni, faculty members as well as researchers of the University of Edinburgh who were awarded the Nobel Prize or the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The Nobel Prizes, established by the 1895 will of Alfred Nobel, are awarded to individuals who make outstanding contributions in the fields of Chemistry, Literature, Peace, Physics, and Physiology or Medicine. An associated prize, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, was instituted by Sweden's central bank, Sveriges Riksbank, in 1968 and first awarded in 1969.
As of 2019, 19 Nobel laureates have been affiliated with the University of Edinburgh as alumni, faculty members and researchers. Among the laureates, 6 are Edinburgh alumni and 5 have been long-term academic members of the Edinburgh faculty. Three additional laureates had acted as administrative staff of the university.
Inclusion criteria
The university affiliations in this list are all official academic affiliations such as degree programs and official academic employment. Non-academic affiliations such as advisory committee and administrative staff are generally excluded. The official academic affiliations fall into three categories: 1) Alumni Long-term Academic Staff, and 3) Short-term Academic Staff. Graduates are defined as those who hold Bachelor's, Master's, Doctorate, or equivalent degrees from Edinburgh, while attendees are those who formally enrolled in a degree program at Edinburgh but did not complete the program; thus, honorary degrees, posthumous degrees, summer attendees, exchange students, and auditing students are excluded. The category of "Long-term Academic Staff" consists of tenure/tenure-track and equivalent academic positions, while that of "Short-term Academic Staff" consists of lecturers, postdoctoral researchers, visiting professors/scholars, and equivalent academic positions. At Edinburgh, the specific academic title solely determines the type of affiliation, regardless of the actual time the position was held by a laureate.Further explanations on "visitors" under "Short-term Academic Staff" are presented as follows. 1) All informal or personal visits are excluded from the list; 2) all employment-based visiting positions, which carry teaching/research duties, are included as affiliations in the list; 3) as for award/honor-based visiting positions, to minimise controversy this list takes a conservative view and includes the positions as affiliations only if the laureates were required to assume employment-level duty or the laureates specifically classified the visiting positions as "affiliation" or similar in reliable sources such as their curriculum vita. To be specific, some award/honor-based visiting positions such as the "Gifford Lectureship" at the University of Edinburgh are awards/honors/recognition without employment-level duty. In particular, attending meetings and giving public lectures, talks or non-curricular seminars at Edinburgh is not a form of employment-level duty. Finally, summer visitors are generally excluded from the list unless summer work yielded significant end products such as research publications and components of Nobel-winning work, since summer terms are not part of formal academic years.
| Laureate | Nobel Prize | Year | Role in University of Edinburgh |
| Randy W. Schekman | Physiology or Medicine | 2013 | Exchange student |
| Winston Churchill | Literature | 1954 | Administrative staff: Rector |
| Edward Victor Appleton | Physics | 1947 | Administrative staff: Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh |
| Alexander Fleming | Physiology or Medicine | 1945 | Administrative staff: Rector |
| Niels Bohr | Physics | 1922 | Gifford Lectures entitled Causality and Complementarity: Epistemological Lessons of Studies in Atomic Physics in 1949 |