List of University of Michigan alumni

Alumni

Nobel laureates

• Stanley Cohen, co-winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering growth factors in human and animal tissue
• Jerome Karle, Chief Scientist, Laboratory for the Structure of Matter, Naval Research Laboratory; Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1985
• Marshall Nirenberg, Chief of Biomedical Genetics, National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, NIH; Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1968
• H. David Politzer, physicist; professor at California Institute of Technology; Nobel Prize in Physics, 2004
• Robert Shiller, economist, academic, and best-selling author
• Richard Smalley, chemist, Nobel Prize in 1996 for the co-discovery of fullerenes
• Samuel C. C. Ting, physicist, awarded Nobel Prize in 1976 for discovering the J/ψ particle
• Thomas H. Weller, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1954

  Activists

• Benjamin Aaron, scholar of labor law; director of the National War Labor Board during World War II; vice chairman of the National Wage Stabilization Board during the Truman administration
• Ricardo Ainslie, native of Mexico City, Mexico; Guggenheim award winner
• Santos Primo Amadeo, a.k.a. "Champion of Hábeas Corpus;" attorney and law professor at the University of Puerto Rico; Senator in the Puerto Rico legislature; counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union branch in Puerto Rico, established in 1937; winner of a Guggenheim award
• Huwaida Arraf, Palestinian rights activist; co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement; chair of the Free Gaza Movement
• Jan BenDor, women's rights activist, member of Michigan Women's Hall of Fame
• Bunyan Bryant, environmental justice advocate
• Mary Frances Berry, former chairwoman of United States Civil Rights Commission
• Cindy Cohn, attorney for Bernstein v. United States, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Richard Cordley, abolitionist minister who served Lawrence, Kansas during the 19th century
• George William Crockett, African American attorney; state court judge in Detroit, Michigan; US Representative; national vice-president of the National Lawyers Guild; participated in the founding convention of the racially integrated National Lawyers Guild in 1937, and later served as its national vice-president; first African American lawyer in the U.S. Department of Labor
• Clarence Darrow, Leopold and Loeb lawyer, defense attorney for John T. Scopes
• Terry Davis, member of the UK Parliament for 28 years, now Secretary General of the Council of Europe and human rights activist
• Geoffrey Fieger, attorney; defense attorney for Jack Kevorkian
• Alan Haber, first President of the Students for a Democratic Society
• Tom Hayden, author of Port Huron Statement; member of Chicago Seven; co-founder of Students for a Democratic Society; member of each house of California's Legislature
• Alireza Jafarzadeh, Iranian activist and nuclear analyst
• Lyman T. Johnson, history graduate; the grandson of slaves; successfully sued to integrate the University of Kentucky, opening that state's colleges and universities to African-Americans five years before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling
• Maureen Greenwood, human rights activist active in Russia
• Belford Vance Lawson, Jr., attorney who made at least eight appearances before the Supreme Court; attended Michigan and became the school's first African American varsity football player
• Michael Newdow, made headlines by challenging the constitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance
• Carl Oglesby, writer, academic, and political activist; president of the radical student organization Students for a Democratic Society from 1965 to 1966
• Milo Radulovich, became a symbol of the excesses of anti-Communism when he challenged his removal from the Air Force Reserve and his story was chronicled by Edward Murrow in 1953 on the television newsmagazine program See It Now; in 2008 the Board of Regents approved a posthumous Bachelor of Science degree with a concentration in physics
• Ralph Rose, six-time Olympic medalist, began the tradition of refusing to dip the United States flag during opening ceremonies
• Jack Hood Vaughn, second Director of the United States Peace Corps, succeeding Sargent Shriver
• Raoul Wallenberg, Swedish diplomat, rescued thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, primarily in Hungary
• Jerry White, co-founder and executive director of the Landmine Survivors Network
• Hao Wu, documentary filmmaker and blogger; controversially imprisoned by Chinese government for 5 months in 2006

  Aerospace

• Claudia Alexander, member of the technical staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; the last project manager of NASA's Galileo mission to Jupiter; project manager of NASA's role in the European-led Rosetta mission to study comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko; once named UM's Woman of the Year
• Aisha Bowe, NASA aerospace engineer; CEO of STEMBoard, a technology company
• Robert A. Fuhrman, pioneering Lockheed engineer who played a central role in the creation of the Polaris and Poseidon missiles; during more than three decades at Lockheed, he served as president of three of its companies: Lockheed-Georgia, Lockheed-California, and Lockheed Missiles & Space; became president and chief operating officer of the corporation in 1986 and vice chairman in 1988; retired in 1990
• Edgar Nathaniel Gott, early aviation industry executive; co-founder and first president of the Boeing Company; senior executive of several aircraft companies, including Fokker and Consolidated Aircraft
• Robert Hall, designer of the Granville Brothers Aircraft Gee Bee Z racer that won the 1931 Thompson Trophy race; Grumman test pilot; credited with major role in the design of the Grumman F4F Wildcat, F6F Hellcat and TBM Avenger
• Willis Hawkins, Lockheed engineer; contributed to the designs of historic Lockheed aircraft including the Constellation, P-80 Shooting Star, XF-90, F-94 Starfire, F-104 Starfighter and C-130 Hercules; later President of Lockheed
• Clarence "Kelly" Johnson, founder of the Lockheed Skunk Works; designer of the Lockheed P-38 Lightning, P-80 Shooting Star, JetStar, F-104 Starfighter, U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird; winner of the National Medal of Science
• Edgar J. Lesher, aircraft designer; pilot; professor of aerospace engineering
• Elizabeth Muriel Gregory "Elsie" MacGill OC, known as the "Queen of the Hurricanes"; first female aircraft designer
• Joseph Francis Shea, manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program office during Project Apollo

  Art, architecture, and design

Arts and entertainment

Astronauts

• Daniel T. Barry, engineer, scientist, retired NASA astronaut
• Theodore Freeman, one of the third group of astronauts selected by NASA; died in T-38 crash at Ellington Air Force Base
• Karl G. Henize, STS-51-F, 1985
• James Irwin, Apollo 15, 1971
• Jack Lousma, Skylab 3 1973; STS-3, 1982
• James McDivitt, graduated first in his class; Command Pilot Gemini 4, 1965; Commander Apollo 9; Program Manager for Apollo 12–16; Brigadier general, U.S. Air Force; vice president, Rockwell International Corporation
• Donald Ray McMonagle, retired USAF Colonel, USAF; became manager of launch integration at the Kennedy Space Center in 1997
• David Scott, Apollo 15, 1971; first man to drive a lunar rover on the Moon
• James M. Taylor, Air Force astronaut, test pilot
• Ed White, first American to walk in space, 1965; died in Apollo 1 test accident, 1967
• Alfred Worden, Apollo 15, 1971

Belles lettres

Business

[Churchill Scholarship] or [Marshall Scholarship]

• 2011–2012: David Montague, Pure Mathematics
• 2009–2010: Eszter Zavodszky, Medical Genetics
• 2007–2008: Lyric Chen, BA in Political Science and Economics from the University of Michigan, Marshall Scholar 2007
• 2006–2007: Charles Crissman, Pure Mathematics
• 2005–2006: Christopher Hayward, Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics
• 2005–2006: Jacob Bourjaily, graduated with honors, degree in Mathematics, Physics Marshall Scholar 2005
• 1996–1997: Amy S. Faranski, Engineering
• 1993–1994: Ariel K. Smits Neis, Clinical Biochemistry
• 1990–1991: David J. Schwartz, Chemistry
• 1989–1990: Eric J. Hooper, Physics
• 1987–1988: Michael K. Rosen, Chemistry
• 1985–1986: Laird Bloom, Molecular Biology
• 1984–1985: Julia M. Carter, Chemistry
• 1979–1980: David W. Mead, Engineering, Chemical

  Computers, engineering, and technology

• Benjamin Franklin Bailey, studied electrical engineering; chief engineer of the Fairbanks Morse Electrical Manufacturing Company and Howell Electrical Motor Company; director of Bailey Electrical Company; vice-president and director of the Fremont Motor Corporation; became professor of electrical engineering at UM in 1913
• Arden L. Bement Jr., Director of the National Science Foundation ; awarded the ANSI's Chairman's award in 2005
• James Blinn, 3D computer imaging pioneer; 1991 MacArthur Fellowship for his work in educational animation
• Katie Bouman, developer of the algorithm used in filtering the first images of a black hole taken by the Event Horizon Telescope
• Lee Boysel, did pioneering work on Metal-oxide semiconductor transistors and systems during his years at IBM, Fairchild Semiconductor and McDonnell Aerospace Corporation; founded Four-Phase Systems Inc., which produced the first LSI semiconductor memory system and the first LSI CPU; president, CEO and chairman of Four-Phase, which was purchased by Motorola in 1981
• John Seely Brown, former Chief Scientist of Xerox, co-author of The Social Life of Information
• Jim Buckmaster, President and CEO of Craigslist since November 2000; formerly its CTO and lead programmer
• Alice Burks, author of children's books and books about the history of electronic computers
• Arthur W. Burks, member of the team that designed the Eniac computer as well as the IAS machine;frequent collaborator of John von Neumann; pioneer in computing education
• Robert Cailliau, co-developer of the World Wide Web; in 1974 he joined CERN as a Fellow in the Proton Synchrotron division, working on the control system of the accelerator; in 1987 became group leader of Office Computing Systems in the Data Handling division; in 1989, with Tim Berners-Lee, independently proposed a hypertext system for access to the CERN documentation, which led to a common proposal in 1990 and then to the World Wide Web; won the 1995 ACM Software System Award with Berners-Lee
• Dick Costolo, former COO and former CEO of Twitter; founder of Feedburner, the RSS reader bought by Google in 2007
• Edward S. Davidson, professor emeritus in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan; IEEE award winner
• Paul Debevec, researcher in computer graphics at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies; known for his pioneering work in high dynamic range imaging and image-based modelling and rendering; honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2010 with a Scientific and Engineering Academy Award
• Tony Fadell, "father" of the Apple iPod; created all five generations of the iPod and the Apple iSight camera
• James D. Foley, professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology; co-author of several widely used textbooks in the field of computer graphics, of which over 300,000 copies are in print; ACM Fellow; IEEE Fellow; recipient of 1997 Steven A. Coons Award
• Stephanie Forrest, Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque; recipient of ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award 2011
• Lee Giles, co-creator of CiteSeer; David Reese Professor of Information Sciences and Technology, Pennsylvania State University; ACM Fellow; IEEE Fellow
• John Henry Holland, first UM Computer Science PhD; originator of genetic algorithms
• Larry Paul Kelley, founder of Shelby Gem Factory
• Thomas Knoll, co-creator of Adobe Photoshop
• Robert A. Kotick, also known as Bobby Kotick; CEO, president, and a director of Activision Blizzard
• John R. Koza, computer scientist; consulting professor at Stanford University; known for his work in pioneering the use of genetic programming for the optimization of complex problems
• David Kuck, professor at the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 1965–1993; IEEE award winner
• Chris Langton, computer science; "father of artificial life"; founder of the Swarm Corporation; distinguished expellee of the Santa Fe Institute
• Eugene McAllaster, distinguished Seattle naval architect and marine engineer with his own firm, McAllaster & Bennett; designer of Seattle's historic fireboat Duwamish ; consulting engineer on Seattle's massive Denny Hill and Jackson Street regrades
• Sid Meier, considered by some to be the "father of computer gaming"; created computer games Civilization, Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon, SimGolf
• Kevin O'Connor, founder of DoubleClick, initially sold for $1.2 billion, and later acquired by Google for $3.1 billion
• Kunle Olukotun, pioneer of multi-core processors; professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University; director of the Pervasive Parallelism Laboratory at Stanford; IEEE award winner
• Larry Page, co-founder of Google; named a World Economic Forum Global Leader for Tomorrow ; member of the National Advisory Committee of the University of Michigan College of Engineering; with co-founder Sergey Brin, winner of 2004 Marconi Prize in 2004; trustee on the board of the X PRIZE; elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2004
• Eugene B. Power ; founder of University Microfilms Inc. ; K.B.E., hon.; president of the Power Foundation; honorary fellow of Magdalene College
• Niels Provos, researcher, secure systems and cryptography
• Avi Rubin, a leading authority on computer security; led the research team that successfully cracked the security code of Texas Instruments' RFID chip; holds eight patents for computer security-related inventions
• Claude E. Shannon, considered by some the "father of digital circuit design theory" and "father of information theory"; a paper drawn from his 1937 master's thesis, "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits", was published in the 1938 issue of the Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers; this won the 1940 Alfred Noble American Institute of American Engineers Award
• Joseph Francis Shea, manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program office during Project Apollo
• Michael Stonebraker, computer scientist specializing in database research; founder of Ingres, Illustra, Cohera and StreamBase Systems; former CTO of Informix; received IEEE John von Neumann Medal in 2005
• Irma M. Wyman, systems thinking tutor; first female CIO of Honeywell
• Niklas Zennström, founder of Skype; has a dual degree in business and computer science from Uppsala University; spent his final year in the US at the University of Michigan

  Turing">Turing Award">Turing and [Grace Murray Hopper Award] winners

• Frances E. Allen, first woman to win the Turing Award ; IBM computer science veteran; honored by the Association for Computing Machinery for her work on program optimization and Ptran: program optimization work that led to modern methods for high-speed computing
• Edgar F. Codd, mathematician; computer scientist; laid the theoretical foundation for relational databases; received the Turing Award in 1981
• Stephen A. Cook ; Turing Award 1982; formalised the notion of NP-completeness in a famous 1971 paper, "The Complexity of Theorem Proving Procedures"
• Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems; given 1986 Grace Murray Hopper Award by the ACM for his work on the UNIX operating system
• Jennifer Rexford, winner of ACM's 2004 Grace Murray Hopper Award for outstanding young computer professional of the year
• Michael Stonebraker, computer scientist and Turing award winner specializing in database research

  Criminals, murderers, and infamous newsmakers

• François Duvalier, repressive dictator, excommunication from the Catholic Church; estimates of those killed by his regime are as high as 30,000
• Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, one of UM's most promising mathematicians; earned his Ph.D. by solving, in less than a year, a math problem that his advisor had been unable to solve; abandoned his career to engage in a mail bombing campaign
• Jack Kevorkian, guilty of second-degree homicide after committing euthanasia by administering a lethal injection to Thomas Youk; spent eight years in prison
• Nathan F. Leopold, Jr., thrill killer of Leopold and Loeb, transferred from Michigan in 1922 to the University of Chicago, before murdering 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks
• Richard A. Loeb, thrill killer of Leopold and Loeb, youngest graduate in the University of Michigan's history, murdered 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks
• Larry Nassar, USA national team doctor who sexually assaulted approximately 250 people
• Herman Webster Mudgett, a.k.a. H.H. Holmes, 19th-century serial killer; one of the first documented American serial killers; confessed to 27 murders, of which nine were confirmed; actual body count could be as high as 250; took an unknown number of his victims from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair; his story was novelized by Erik Larson in his 2003 book The Devil in the White City

  Educators

• Frank Aarebrot, professor of comparative politics at University of Bergen
• Theophilus C. Abbot, third President of Michigan State University
• Charles Kendall Adams, historian; second President of Cornell University ; President of the University of Wisconsin
• Dr. Khaled S. Al-Sultan, third rector of King Fahd University for Petroleum and Minerals, a public university in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia
• Ida Louise Altman, author of Emigrants and Society
• Edgardo J. Angara, Secretary of Agriculture and former Executive Secretary of the Philippines
• James Rowland Angell, tenth President of Yale University
• W. Brian Arthur, Lagrange Prize in Complexity Science 2008; Schumpeter Prize in Economics 1990; Guggenheim Fellow 1987–88; Fellow of the Econometric Society
• John "Jack" William Atkinson, psychologist who pioneered the scientific study of human motivation, achievement and behavior
• Henry Moore Bates, dean of the University of Michigan Law School ; Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• William J. Beal ; namesake of W. J. Beal Botanical Garden
• Mitchell Berman, Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School
• Mary Frances Berry; Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought, Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania; Civil Rights Commissioner, 1980–2004
• Lewis Binford Ph.D., archaeologist most known for his role in establishing the "New Archaeology" movement of the 1960s
• Frank Nelson Blanchard, herpetologist and professor of zoology at the University of Michigan
• Elise M. Boulding, educator and author in the field of Peace & Conflict Studies
• George W. Breslauer, political science professor and Russia specialist at the University of California, Berkeley; Berkeley’s executive vice chancellor and provost
• Allen Britton, music educator; former president of
• Urie Bronfenbrenner, helped create the federal Head Start program; credited with creating the interdisciplinary field of human ecology
• Stratton D. Brooks, president of the University of Oklahoma and the University of Missouri
• Gaylen J. Byker, President of Calvin College; Offshore Energy Development Corporation Partner, Head of Dev
• William Wallace Campbell, astronomer; tenth President of the University of California ; elected president of the National Academy of Sciences in 1931
• Frederic G. Cassidy, Editor-in-Chief of the Dictionary of American Regional English from 1962 to his death in 2000
• June Rose Colby, professor of literature 1892–1931; first woman at the University of Michigan to receive a Ph.D. by examination
• Katharine Coman, social activist and economist; specialized in the development of the American West; professor of history 1883–1900; chaired the Economics Department; dean of Wellesley College, which named a professorship in her honor
• Charles Horton Cooley, sociologist, most known for his concept of the "looking glass self", which expanded William James's idea of self to include the capacity of reflection on one's own behavior
• Joanne V. Creighton, 17th president of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts; provost and professor of English 1990–1994 at Wesleyan University; Wesleyan's interim president 1994–1995
• Natalie Zemon Davis , Canadian and American historian of the early modern period; awarded the 2010 Holberg International Memorial Prize, worth 4.5 million Norwegian kroner, for her narrative approach to the field of history
• Bueno de Mesquita, political scientist and game theoretician
• John DiBiaggio, president, University of Connecticut 1979–1985, Michigan State University 1985–1992, Tufts University 1992–2001
• Paul Dressel, founding director of Michigan State University's Counseling Center
• James Stemble Duesenberry, economist; made a significant contribution to the Keynesian analysis of income and employment with his 1949 doctoral thesis "Income, Saving and the Theory of Consumer Behavior'
• Aaron Dworkin, 2005 MacArthur Fellow; founder and president of Detroit-based Sphinx Organization, which strives to increase the number of African-Americans and Latinos having careers in classical music
• W. Ralph Eubanks, author, journalist, professor, public speaker, business executive, Guggenheim award winner
• David Fasenfest, Associate Professor of Sociology at Wayne State University
• Heidi Li Feldman, law professor
• Saul Fenster, 6th President of New Jersey Institute of Technology 1978–2002
• Sidney Fine, professor of history at Michigan
• Lewis Ransom Fiske, second president of the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan 1859–1862; president of Albion College 1877–1898
• Neil Foley, historian, Guggenheim award winner
• Joseph S. Freedman, Professor of Education at Alabama State University
• David Friday, president of the U.S. state of Michigan's Michigan Agricultural College, 1922–1923; graduate of the University of Michigan
• Helen Beulah Thompson Gaige, herpetologist, curator of Reptiles and Amphibians for the Museum of Zoology at the University of Michigan and specialist in neotropical frogs
• Edwin Francis Gay, first Dean of Harvard Business School, 1908–1919
• C. Lee Giles, David Reese Professor of Information Sciences and Technology, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Professor of Supply Chain and Information Systems, Pennsylvania State University; Fellow of the ACM, IEEE and INNS
• Domenico Grasso, Sixth Chancellor of University of Michigan-Dearborn
• Roy Grow, Kellogg Professor of International Relations, director of the International Relations program at Carleton College; his specialty is the political economy of East Asia, specifically China and Southeast Asia
• Jack Guttenberg, professor of law at Capital University Law School
• William W. Hagerty, former president of Drexel University
• Alice Hamilton, toxicologist; scientist; first female faculty member at Harvard Medical School
• Elaine Catherine Hatfield, Professor of Psychology at the University of Hawaii; earned Ph.D. at Stanford; scholar who pioneered the scientific study of passionate love and sexual desire
• Shelley Haley, Professor of Classics and Africana Studies at Hamilton College
• Jessica Hellmann, Professor of Ecology at the University of Minnesota
• Clark Leonard Hull, psychologist
• Harry Burns Hutchins; fourth president of the University of Michigan ; organized and led the law department at Cornell University from 1887 to 1894
• Lyman T. Johnson, the grandson of slaves; successfully sued to integrate the University of Kentucky, opening that state's colleges and universities to African-Americans five years before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling
• Michael P. Johnson, emeritus professor of sociology, Pennsylvania State University
• Rosabeth Moss Kanter, first tenured female professor at Harvard Business School
• Roberta Karmel, Centennial Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, and first female Commissioner of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
• Mark Kilstofte, composer; professor at Furman University, Greenville, South Carolina; Guggenheim award winner
• George Kish, cartographer
• John E. Laird, computer scientist
• Thomas A. LaVeist, Dean at Tulane University School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine
• Stanley Lebergott, former government economist; Wesleyan University professor
• Jeffrey S. Lehman, 11th President of Cornell University
• Rensis Likert, founder of the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research and the director from its inception in 1946–1970
• Howard Markel, George E. Wantz Distinguished Professor of the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan, Guggenheim Fellow, Member of the National Academy of Medicine, author, pediatrician, medical journalist
• Nina McClelland, Dean Emeritus and former professor of chemistry at the University of Toledo. Fellow of the American Chemical Society
• Paul Robert Milgrom, economist
• Martha Minow, named Dean of Harvard Law School in 2009
• James Moeser, ninth chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000–present
• Mayo Moran, named Dean of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law in 2005
• Carroll Vincent Newsom, eleventh NYU President; President of Prentice Hall
• Marjorie Hope Nicolson, first female President of Phi Beta Kappa, Guggenheim award winner
• Eugene A. Nida, linguist, developer of the dynamic-equivalence Bible-translation theory
• Nicholas Nixon, photographer, known for portraiture and documentary photography, and for championing the use of the 8x10 inch view camera; Guggenheim award winner
• Mary Beth Norton, American historian; Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History, Department of History at Cornell University; Guggenheim award winner
• Norman Ornstein, Scholar: Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University.
• Scott E. Page, social scientist
• Alice Elvira Freeman Palmer, appointed head of the history department at Wellesley College in 1879; named the acting president of Wellesley in 1881; became its president in 1882
• Constantine Papadakis, Drexel University President 1995–2009
• Clara Claiborne Park, instructor at Williams College; author; raised awareness of autism
• Michael Posner, psychologist; winner of the National Medal of Science
• John Oren Reed, Ph.D. at Jena ; professor of physics
• Shai Reshef , Israeli businessman; educational entrepreneur; founder and president of University of the People, a non-profit, tuition-free, online academic institution dedicated to the democratization of higher education
• Henry Wade Rogers ; University of Michigan's Professor of Law 1883, Law School Dean 1885–1890; President of Northwestern University 1890–1900
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, President of Gratz College
• John Ruhl, Professor of Physics at UCSB and Case Western Reserve University; primary investigator of the ACBAR, Boomerang, South Pole Telescope, and Spider Telescope projects; author of Princeton Problems in Physics
• Lucy Maynard Salmon, American historian; Professor of History, Vassar College, 1889–1927; member of the American Historical Association's Committee of Seven
• Floyd VanNest Schultz, Educator and Electrical Engineering Scientist
• Robert Scott, Dean University of Virginia School of Law 1991–2000
• Wilfrid Sellars, philosopher and Rhodes Scholar
• Al Siebert, Menninger Fellow; Resiliency Center Director; author of The Resiliency Advantage: Master Change, Bounce Back from Setbacks, awarded the 2006 Independent Publishers' award for Best Self-Help Book
• Holly Martin Smith, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University
• William Spoelhof, President of Calvin College 1951–76; namesake of Asteroid 129099 Spoelhof
• Claude Steiner, founding member and teaching fellow of the International Transactional Analysis Association
• Clarence Stephens ; the teaching techniques he introduced at Potsdam, and earlier at Morgan State, have been adopted by many mathematics departments across the country
• George Sugihara, theoretical biologist; has worked across a wide variety of fields, including landscape ecology, algebraic topology, algal physiology and paleoecology, neurobiology, atmospheric science, fisheries science, and quantitative finance
• Leonard Suransky, winner of the Des Lee Visiting Lectureship in Global Awareness at Webster University
• Beverly Daniel Tatum, President of Spelman College ; clinical psychologist; author of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?; professor, chair of psychology department, Dean, acting President of Mount Holyoke College
• G. David Tilman, ecologist, Guggenheim award winner
• Amos Tversky, long-time collaborator with Daniel Kahneman; co-founder of prospect theory in economics; died of cancer before Kahneman received the Nobel prize and was featured prominently and fondly in his Nobel speech
• Zalman Usiskin, educator; Director of the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project
• Charles M. Vest, President of MIT 1990–2004; elected in 2007 to a six-year term as president of the National Academy of Engineering
• Robert W. Vishny, economist and the Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business; prominent representative of the school of behavioural finance; his research papers are among the most often cited recent research works in the field of economic sciences
• Robert M. Warner, Dean Emeritus, University of Michigan’s School of Information 1985–92; professor emeritus of the School of Information; appointed sixth archivist of the United States in July 1980 by President Jimmy Carter; continued to serve under President Ronald Reagan through April 15, 1985
• Albert H. Wheeler, life-sciences professor and politician in Ann Arbor; the city's first African-American mayor, 1975–1978; became assistant professor of microbiology and immunology at Michigan in 1952; eventually became the university's first tenured African-American professor
• David E. Weinstein, Carl Sumner Shoup Professor of the Japanese Economy at Columbia University; contributed to new understanding of variety gains from international trade; expert on the Japanese economy; Research Director of the Japan Project at the National Bureau of Economic Research; Member of the Council on Foreign Relations; Member of the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee
• B. Joseph White, 16th president of the University of Illinois
• Jerome Wiesner, MIT Provost 1968–1971; President of MIT 1971–1980
• Edwin Willits, the first Assistant U.S. Secretary of Agriculture under Norman Jay Coleman for Grover Cleveland's first administration; President of Michigan Agricultural College
• Phyllis Wise, University of Washington provost or Chief Academic officer; manages $3 billion annual budget
• Frank Wu, named Dean of Hastings Law School in 2009

  University presidents

• Charles Kendall Adams, historian; second President of Cornell University ; President of the University of Wisconsin
• Charles E. Bayless, president of West Virginia University Institute of Technology
• Warren E. Bow, president of Wayne State University
• Detlev Bronk, scientist, educator, and administrator; credited with establishing biophysics as a recognized discipline; President of Johns
• Benjamin Cluff, first president of Brigham Young University; the school's third principal
• James Danko, appointed 21st president of Butler University in 2011
• Deborah Freund, president of Claremont Graduate University
• Allan Gilmour , inaugurated as 11th president of Wayne State University in 2011
• Thomas J. Haas, president, Grand Valley State University
• Eugene Habecker, 30th president of Taylor University
• Cindy Hill, Wyoming Superintendent of Public Instruction since 2011, received master's degree from the University of Michigan
• Raynard S. Kington, former deputy director of the National Institutes of Health; 13th president of Grinnell College; earned medical degree from the University of Michigan at age 21
• Kathy Krendl, president, Otterbein College
• John S. Kyser, president, Northwestern State University
• James Raymond Lawson, president, Fisk University
• Wallace D. Loh, president University of Maryland
• Maud Mandel, Professor of History and Judaic Studies and Dean of the College at Brown University; president-elect of Williams College in March 2018
• Moses Ochonu, professor of African History at Vanderbilt University
• William H. Payne, Chancellor of the University of Nashville and President of Peabody College, 1887–1901
• Scott Ransom, president, University of North Texas Health Science Center
• William Craig Rice, president, Shimer College
• Alexander Grant Ruthven ; president of the University of Michigan
• Austin Scott, tenth President of Rutgers College, 1891–1906
• Carl Strikwerda, William & Mary’s Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences; named 14th president of Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania in 2011
• Beverly Daniel Tatum, president, Spelman College
• Charles M. Vest, president, National Academy of Engineering; former president, MIT
• Richard F. Wilson, president, Illinois Wesleyan University

  Fiction, nonfiction

Fictional Wolverines

• In 24, Nadia Yassir has a B.A. in Languages from the university.
• In, 321 Days in Michigan, the story of Antonio Chico García, a young and successful executive, condemned to go to prison because of white collar crimes. In order to hide this fact, he pretends he is spending time at the University of Michigan working on a master's degree.
• In Ally McBeal, the character Billy, played by Gil Bellows, is a Michigan student.
• In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, Francie prepares to take classes at the University of Michigan.
• In Air Force One, U.S. President James Marshall, played by Harrison Ford, attended the University of Michigan.
• In The Americans, the character "Kimmy" is played as a Junior at Michigan
• In American Pie and other films in the series, Kevin Myers, played by Thomas Ian Nicholas, attends Michigan.
• In Answer This!, Christopher Gorham plays UM student Paul Tarson.
• In Bad Company, Laurence Fishburne plays a corrupt intelligence analyst who is a Michigan graduate.
• In Blindspot, Rob Brown plays an FBI agent and former Michigan student-athlete.
• In The Big Chill, Michael Gold, played by Jeff Goldblum, worked at The Michigan Daily.
• In The Company You Keep, Brit Marling plays a University of Michigan Law student.
• In Continental Divide, Allen Garfield plays the role of Max Bernbaum, an All-American football player from Michigan.
• In Entourage, Ari Gold, earned his J.D./M.B.A at the Ross School of Business.
• In The Five Year Engagement, Emily Blunt plays UM student Violet Barnes, a post-doctoral fellow in psychology.
• In Freaks and Geeks, Lindsay leaves for the academic summit at the University of Michigan.
• In Ghostbusters, Melissa McCarthy plays Abby Yates, a University of Michigan graduate.
• In The Good Place, one of the Eleanor Shellstrops, is a graduate of Michigan Law.
• In The Green Lantern, Guy Gardner, is a superhero alum who double majored in education and psychology. He played football with another superhero, Steel.
• In House, Dr. Gregory House earned his M.D. from Michigan's medical school. Lisa Cuddy, played by Lisa Edelstein, was in the pre-med program at Michigan.
• In Justified, Neal McDonough plays former UM MBA Robert Quarles, a violent sociopath.
• In Last Man Standing, Tim Allen plays Mike Baxter, a University of Michigan graduate and the highly opinionated marketing director for a chain of sporting goods stores.
• In Lost, the Dharma Initiative was founded in 1970 by two doctoral candidates, Gerald and Karen DeGroot, while studying at the university.
• In Love and Honor, Teresa Palmer plays an undergraduate caught up in the movement to end the war in Vietnam.
• In Mad Men, "Smitty" Smith tells one of his fellow characters that he is a graduate of the University of Michigan.
• In MacGyver, Levy Tran plays the latest addition to the Phoenix team
• In, The Millionaire, Barbara "Babs" Alden and William “Bill” Merrick meet at a University of Michigan dance and later in the film become involved.
• In No Strings Attached, Adam Franklin, played by Ashton Kutcher, and Emma Kurtzman, played by Natalie Portman, both attended the university.
• In Parks & Recreation, Chris Traeger, announces he and his partner Ann are moving to Ann Arbor because he has "a job lined up at the University of Michigan.
• In Perception, Kelly Rowan who plays the character Dr. Caroline Newsome/Natalie Vincent, a University of Michigan Medical school graduate.
• In Sister, Sister, Tia Landry, played by Tia Mowry, attends the University of Michigan.
• In Sleeping with Other People, Alison Brie plays a woman who becomes an aspiring medical student at the University of Michigan.
• In The Sopranos, Ronald Zellman, played by Peter Riegert, is a Michigan graduate.
• In The West Wing, Leo McGarry, played by John Spencer, attended the University of Michigan.
• In Shameless, Jimmy/Steve, played by Justin Chatwin, attended the University of Michigan.
• In True Believer, the character Roger Baron, played by Robert Downey Jr., is a Michigan Law graduate.
• In The Upside of Anger, Keri Russell plays Emily Wolfmeyer, an aspiring dancer.
• In Why Him?, Megan Mullally plays the Michigan-educated mother of the lead character.

  Finance

• Peter Borish, investor and trader

  [Foodie]s

• Rick Bayless, chef who specializes in traditional Mexican cuisine with modern interpretations; known for his PBS series
• Gael Greene, food critic, said to have created the coinage "foodie", as found in the Foodie article.
• Gabrielle Hamilton chef, author, winner of James Beard Award
• Stephanie Izard, is an American chef residing in Chicago, Illinois, best known as the first female chef to win Bravo's Top Chef
• Sara Moulton, executive chef of Gourmet magazine; former host of the Food Network shows Sara's Secrets and Cooking Live
• Joan Nathan, She was executive producer and host of Jewish Cooking in America with Joan Nathan
• Ruth Reichl food writer, chef, critic and winner of four James Beard Awards

  Journalism, publishing, and broadcasting

• Roz Abrams MA, news co-anchor for CBS; reporter and anchor for almost 30 years, including 18 years with WABC in New York
• Sam Apple, publisher and editor-in-chief of The Faster Times
• Dean Baker, blogger for The American Prospect
• Ray Stannard Baker, biographer of Woodrow Wilson
• Margaret Bourke-White, photographer and journalist
• Jon Chait, Senior Editor for The New Republic
• Jeff Cohen, founder of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting; left the group to produce Donahue on MSNBC
• Sarah Costello, Co-Host/Editor of the asexual and aromantic podcast Sounds Fake But Okay.
• Ann Coulter, conservative author and attorney
• Rich Eisen, host of sportstalk TV/radio show, The Rich Eisen Show, and journalist for NFL Network and CBS Sports; former ESPN anchor
• Larry Elder, talk radio show host, author, and TV show host
• Win Elliot, sports announcer and journalist
• John Fahey, President and CEO of the National Geographic Society; former chairman, president and CEO of Time Life, Inc.; one of Advertising Ages top 100 marketers
• Bill Flemming, television sports journalist
• Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, winner of the 2015 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
• James Russell Gaines, former managing editor of Time Magazine
• Arnold Gingrich, founder and publisher of Esquire
• Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism; social critic
• Wendell Goler, Fox News White House correspondent
• George Zhibin Gu, journalist and consultant
• Sanjay Gupta, CNN anchor, reporter and senior medical correspondent; Emmy winner
• Raelynn Hillhouse, national security expert and blogger ; novelist; political scientist
• Dana Jacobson, ESPN anchorwoman
• Alireza Jafarzadeh, senior Foreign Affairs Analyst for Fox News Television and other major TV networks; author of The Iran Threat: President Ahmadinejad and the Coming Nuclear Crisis
• Leon Jaroff, a mainstay for the Time Inc. family of publications since he joined as an editorial trainee for LIFE magazine in 1951; moved to Time in 1954, and became its chief science writer in 1966; named a senior editor in 1970, a post he kept until he semi-retired in 2000
• Paul Kangas, stockbroker for twelve years; host of Nightly Business Report since it was a local Florida program in 1979
• Kayla Kaszyca, Co-Host/Marketing Manager of the asexual and aromantic podcast Sounds Fake But Okay.
• William F. Kerby, chairman of Dow Jones and Company
• Laurence Kirshbaum, founder of LJK Literary Management; chairman of Time Warner Book Group
• Melvin J. Lasky, combat historian in France and Germany during WWII;assistant to the U.S. Military Governor of Berlin in early postwar years; founder and editor of the anti-Communist journal Encounter, which was in 1966 shown to be secretly financed by the CIA
• Daniel Levin, writer
• Ann Marie Lipinski, former editor of the Chicago Tribune; 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner
• Richard Lui, journalist; MSNBC news anchor; former news anchor for five years at CNN Worldwide
• Wednesday Martin, journalist, memoirist, anthropologist
• Robert McHenry, encyclopedist and author; editor-in-chief of the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Ari Melber, MSNBC news anchor; NBC News legal analyst
• John J. Miller, National Political Reporter for the National Review
• Paul Scott Mowrer, journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner
• Davi Napoleon, writes a monthly feature for Live Design; former columnist for TheaterWeek and InTheater
• Daniel Okrent, public editor of New York Times; editor-at-large of Time Inc.; Pulitzer Prize finalist in history ; founding father of Rotisserie League Baseball
• Marvin Olasky, conservative pundit
• Susan Orlean, staff writer for The New Yorker
• Norman Ornstein, American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow
• Phil Ponce, Chicago television journalist, host of Chicago Tonight on WTTW
• David Portnoy, founder of Barstool Sports
• William E. Quinby, owner of the Detroit Free Press and United States Ambassador to the Netherlands
• Evan Rosen, journalist, strategist, author of The Culture of Collaboration
• Adam Schefter, former Denver Post and Denver Broncos correspondent for 15 years; ESPN and NFL Network contributor
• John Schubeck, television reporter and anchor, one of the few to anchor newscasts on all three network owned-and-operated stations in one major market
• Samuel Spencer Scott, president of Harcourt, Brace & Company from 1948 until his retirement in 1954
• David Shuster, television journalist with Current TV; talk radio host; former anchor for MSNBC; has also worked for Fox News and CNN
• Rob Siegel, editor-in-chief of The Onion; screenplay writer for The Wrestler
• Carole Simpson, former ABC News correspondent; Emerson College professor
• Bert Randolph Sugar ; former editor at The Ring, Boxing Illustrated, and Fight Game magazines; wrote more than 80 books on boxing, baseball, horse racing, and sports trivia
• Amy Sullivan, contributing editor for Time magazine, covers religion and politics; also writes for the magazine's political blog, Swampland
• Jerald F. ter Horst , Gerald Ford's short-term press secretary
• Peter Turnley, photojournalist known for documenting the human condition and current events
• John Voelker, author of Anatomy of a Murder
• Mike Wallace, TV journalist, longtime host of 60 Minutes; winner of 20 Emmys and three Peabodys
• David Weir, editor and journalist, Editor in Chief at Keep Media as of 2007
• Margaret Wente, writer for The Globe and Mail, 2006 winner of the National Newspaper Award for column-writing; has edited leading business magazines Canadian Business and ROB
• David Westin, president of ABC News
• Roger Wilkins, journalist of the Washington Post; shared the Pulitzer Prize for his Watergate editorials
• Tracy Wolfson, reporter for CBS Sports
• Bob Woodruff, ABC Nightly News anchor, replaced Peter Jennings
• Robin Wright, author, Washington Post
• Eric Zorn, columnist and blogger for the Chicago Tribune
• Daniel Zwerdling, investigative radio journalist for NPR News
• Svida Alisjahbana, CEO of Femina Indonesia, Indonesia's leading women's magazine

  Law, government, and public policy

[MacArthur Foundation] award winners

• James Blinn
• Caroline Walker Bynum, Medieval scholar; MacArthur Fellow
• Eric Charnov, evolutionary ecologist
• William A. Christian, religious studies scholar
• Shannon Lee Dawdy, 2010 fellowship winner; assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago
• Philip DeVries, biologist
• William H. Durham, anthropologist
• Andrea Dutton is an Associate Professor of Geology at the University of Florida
• Aaron Dworkin, Fellow, founder, and president of Detroit-based Sphinx Organization, which strives to increase the number of African-Americans and Latinos having careers in classical music
• Steven Goodman, adjunct research investigator in the U-M Museum of Zoology's bird division; conservation biologist in the Department of Zoology at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History
• David Green, Executive Director of Project Impact
• Ann Ellis Hanson, visiting associate professor of Greek and Latin
• John Henry Holland, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, College of Engineering; professor of psychology, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
• Vonnie McLoyd, developmental psychologist
• Denny Moore, linguist, anthropologist
• Nancy A. Moran, evolutionary biologist; Yale professor; co-founder of the Yale Microbial Diversity Institute
• Dominique Morisseau is an American playwright and actor from Detroit, Michigan
• Cecilia Muñoz, Senior Vice President for the Office of Research, Advocacy and Legislation at the National Council of La Raza, White House Director of Intergovernmental Affairs
• Dimitri Nakassis, a 2015 MacArthur Fellow; joined the faculty of the University of Toronto in 2008; currently an associate professor in the Department of Classics
• Richard Prum, William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology; Head Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University
• Mary Tinetti, physician; Gladys Phillips Crofoot Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale University; Director of the Yale Program on Aging
• Amos Tversky, psychologist
• Karen K. Uhlenbeck, mathematician
• Jesmyn Ward, writer of fiction
• Julia Wolfe, classical composer
• Henry Tutwiler Wright, Albert Clanton Spaulding Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology; Curator of Near Eastern Archaeology in the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Michigan; 1993 MacArthur Fellows Program
• Tara Zahra ; fellow with the Harvard Society of Fellows prior to joining the faculty of the University of Chicago; 2014 MacArthur Fellow
• George Zweig, physicist who conceptualized quarks

  Mathematics

• Ralph H. Abraham, mathematician
• Kenneth Ira Appel, mathematician; in 1976, with colleague Wolfgang Haken at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, solved one of the most famous problems in mathematics, the four-color theorem
• Edward G. Begle, mathematician known for his role as the director of the School Mathematics Study Group, the primary group credited for developing what came to be known as New Math
• Marjorie Lee Brown, arguably the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics
• Harry C. Carver, mathematician and academic; a major influence in the development of mathematical statistics as an academic discipline
• Brian Conrey, mathematician; executive director of the American Institute of Mathematics
• George Dantzig, father of linear programming; studied at UM under T.H. Hildebrandt, R.L. Wilder, and G.Y. Rainer
• Carl de Boor, known for pioneering work on splines, National Medal of Science 2003; John von Neumann Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 1996
• Dorothy Elizabeth Denning, information security researcher; author of four books and 140 articles; at Georgetown University, she was the Patricia and Patrick Callahan Family Professor of computer science and director of the Georgetown Institute of Information Assurance; professor in the Department of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School
• Sister Mary Celine Fasenmyer, mathematician noted for her work on hypergeometric functions and linear algebra; published two papers which expanded on her doctorate work and would be further elaborated by Doron Zeilberger and Herbert Wilf into "WZ theory", which allowed computerized proof of many combinatorial identities
• Wade Ellis, mathematician and educator, Associate Dean of the Rockingham School of Graduate Mathematics, Dean Emeritus and Professor Emeritus
• Walter Feit, winner of the 7th Cole Prize in 1965; known for proving the Feit–Thompson theorem
• David Gale, mathematician and economist
• Frederick Gehring, T. H. Hildebrandt Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Mathematics; recipient of the 2006 AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement; taught at Michigan from 1955 until his retirement in 1996; invited three times to address the International Congress of Mathematicians; in 1989 elected to the National Academy of Sciences; in 1997, the Frederick and Lois Gehring Chair in Mathematics was endowed
• Seymour Ginsburg, pioneer of automata theory, formal language theory, database theory, and computer science; his work was influential in distinguishing theoretical computer science from the disciplines of mathematics and electrical engineering
• Thomas N.E. Greville, mathematician; specialized in statistical analysis as it concerned the experimental investigation of psi
• Earle Raymond Hedrick, mathematician; vice-president of the University of California
• Theophil Henry Hildebrandt, UM instructor of mathematics starting in 1909, where he spent most of his career; chairman of the department from 1934 until his retirement in 1957; received the second Chauvenet Prize of the Mathematical Association of America in 1929
• Meyer Jerison, mathematician known for his work in functional analysis and rings, especially for collaborating with Leonard Gillman on one of the standard texts in the field, Rings of Continuous Functions
• D.J. Lewis, mathematician specializing in number theory; chaired the Department of Mathematics at the University of Michigan ; director of the Division of Mathematical Sciences at the National Science Foundation
• James Raymond Munkres, Professor Emeritus of mathematics at MIT, author of classic textbook Topology
• Ralph S. Phillips, mathematician; academic; known for his contributions to functional analysis, scattering theory, and servomechanisms
• Leonard Jimmie Savage, author of The Foundations of Statistics ; rediscovered Bachelier and introduced his theories to Paul Samuelson, who corrected Bachelier and used his thesis on randomness to advance derivative pricing theory
• Joel Shapiro, mathematician; leading expert in the field of composition operators
• Isadore M. Singer, winner of the Abel Prize, the "Nobel of mathematics", and the Bôcher Memorial Prize
• Stephen Smale, Fields Medal winner; winner of the 2007 Wolf Prize in mathematics; 1965 Veblen Prize for Geometry, awarded every five years by the American Mathematical Society; 1988 Chauvenet Prize from the Mathematical Association of America; 1989 Von Neumann Award from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
• George W. Snedecor, mathematician and statistician
• Edwin Henry Spanier, mathematician at the University of California at Berkeley, working in algebraic topology
• Frank Spitzer, mathematician who made fundamental contributions to probability theory, including the theory of random walks, fluctuation theory, percolation theory, and especially the theory of interacting particle systems; his first academic appointments were at the California Institute of Technology ; most of his academic career was spent at Cornell University, with leaves at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Sweden
• Norman Steenrod, algebraic topologist, author of The Topology of Fiber Bundles; believed to have coined the phrase "abstract nonsense," used in category theory
• Clarence F. Stephens, ninth African American to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics; credited with inspiring students and faculty at SUNY Potsdam to form the most successful United States undergraduate mathematics degree programs in the past century
• Robert Simpson Woodward ; professor of mechanics, mathematical physics at Columbia ; President of the American Mathematical Society ; in 1904 became President of the newly formed Carnegie Institution
• Ted Kaczynski, Youngest Professor at the University of California, Berkeley later arrested for domestic terrorism also known as the Unabomber.

  [Manhattan project]

• Robert F. Bacher, Ph.D., member of the Manhattan Project; professor of physics at Caltech; president of the Universities Research Association
• Lawrence Bartell before he had finished his studies he was invited by Glenn Seaborg to interview for a position working on the Manhattan Project. He accepted the job and worked on methods for extracting plutonium from uranium.
• Lyman James Briggs was an American engineer, physicist and administrator.
• Donald L. Campbell was an American chemical engineer.
• Taylor Drysdale earned master's degrees in nuclear physics and mathematics from the University of Michigan, joined the U.S. military, worked on the Manhattan Project, and retired from the U.S. Air Force as a colonel.
• Arnold B. Grobman Grobman began his post-secondary education at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, earning his bachelor's degree in 1939. From 1944 to 1946, he was a Research Associate on the Manhattan Project, later publishing "Our Atomic Heritage" about his experiences.
• Herb Grosch received his B.S. and PhD in astronomy from the University of Michigan in 1942. In 1945, he was hired by IBM to do backup calculations for the Manhattan Project working at Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University.
• Ross Gunn was an American physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II.
• Isabella L. Karle, was x-ray crystallographer
• Jerome Karle was an American physical chemist.
• James Stark Koehler was an American physicist, specializing in metal defects and their interactions. He is known for the eponymous Peach-Koehler stress formula.
• Emil John Konopinski, patented a device that made the first hydrogen bomb with Dr. Edward Teller; member of the Manhattan Project
• John Henry Manley was an American physicist who worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeleybefore becoming a group leader during the Manhattan Project.
• Elliott Organick chemist, Manhattan Project, 1944-1945;
• Carolyn Parker was a physicist who worked from 1943 to 1947 on the Dayton Project, the plutonium research and development arm of the Manhattan Project.
• Franklin E. Roach was involved in high explosives physics research connected with the Manhattan Project
• Nathan Rosen was an American-Israeli physicist noted for his study on the structure of the hydrogen atom and his work with Albert Einstein and Boris Podolsky on entangled wave functions and the EPR paradox.
• Frank Spedding, chemist; developed an ion exchange procedure for separating rare earth elements, purifying uranium, and separating isotopes; Guggenheim award winner
• Arthur Widmer was attached on a three-year stint in 1943 as one of the Kodak researchers assigned to the Manhattan Project in Berkeley, California and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, as an analytical chemists developing methods of uranium analysis, which led to the development of the atomic bomb.

  Medicine and dentistry

• John Jacob Abel, North American "father of pharmacology"; discovered epinephrine; first crystallized insulin; founded the department of pharmacology at Michigan; in 1893 established the department of pharmacology at the newly founded Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; first full-time professor of pharmacology in the United States
• Susan Anderson, one of the first female physicians in Colorado
• Robert C. Atkins, developed the Atkins Diet
• John Auer, credited with the discovery of Auer rods
• William Henry Beierwaltes, champion of the use of radioiodine together with surgery in thyroid diagnosis and care; lead author of first book on nuclear medicine, 1957's Clinical Use of Radioisotopes
• Elissa P. Benedek, child and adolescent psychiatrist, forensic psychiatrist, adjunct clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan
• David Botstein ; leader in the Human Genome Project; director of Princeton's Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics
• Alexa Canady, became first African-American female neurosurgeon in the country when she was 30; chief of neurosurgery at Children's Hospital of Michigan in Detroit for almost 15 years
• Benjamin S. Carson, former director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital
• Arul Chinnaiyan, cancer researcher; recipient of the 28th annual American Association for Cancer Research Award for Outstanding Achievement
• Thomas Benton Cooley, pediatrician; hematologist; professor of hygiene and medicine at the University of Michigan; son of Thomas McIntyre Cooley, first Chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission
• Ronald M. Davis, 162nd President of the American Medical Association; Director of the Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention at the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit
• Mary Gage Day, physician, medical writer
• Paul de Kruif, author of Microbe Hunters
• Julio Frenk, Minister of Health for Mexico
• Seraph Frissell, physician, medical writer
• Raymond Gist, president of the American Dental Association
• Sanjay Gupta, CNN anchor, reporter and senior medical correspondent; former neurosurgeon
• Lucy M. Hall, first woman ever received at St Thomas' Hospital's bedside clinics
• Alice Hamilton, specialist in lead poisoning and industrial diseases; known as the "Mother of Industrial Health;" in 1919 became the first woman on the faculty at Harvard Medical School; the first woman to receive tenure there; honored with her picture on the 55-cent postage stamp; winner of the Lasker Award
• Nancy M. Hill, Civil War nurse and one of the first female doctors in the US
• Jerome P. Horwitz, synthesized AZT in 1964, a drug now used to treat AIDS
• Joel Lamstein, co-founder and president of John Snow, Inc. and JSI Research & Training Institute, Inc., international public health research and consulting firms
• Josiah K. Lilly Jr., Chairman and President of Eli Lilly
• Howard Markel, physician, medical historian, best-selling author, medical journalist, and member of the National Academy of Medicine, George E. Wantz Distinguished Professor of the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan, Guggenheim Fellow
• William James Mayo, co-founder of the Mayo Clinic
• Jessica Rickert, first female American Indian dentist in America, which she became upon graduating from the University of Michigan School of Dentistry in 1975. She was a member of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, and a direct descendant of the Indian chief Wahbememe.
• Ida Rollins, first African-American woman to earn a dental degree in the United States, which she earned from the University of Michigan in 1890
• Leonard Andrew Scheele, US Surgeon General 1948–1956
• Eric B. Schoomaker, Major General; Commander of the North Atlantic Regional Medical Command and Walter Reed Army Medical Center; former commanding general of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command at Fort Detrick
• Thomas L. Schwenk, dean of the University of Nevada School of Medicine
• John Clark Sheehan, chemist who pioneered the first synthetic penicillin breakthrough in 1957
• Norman Shumway, heart transplantation pioneer; entered the University of Michigan as a pre-law student, but was drafted into the Army in 1943
• Parvinder Singh, Chairman of Ranbaxy in 1993 until his death in 1999; the market capitalization of the Company went up from Rs.3.5 to over Rs. 7300 Crores during this period
• Siti Hasmah Mohamad Ali, one of the first female doctors in Malaysia, and later the wife of Malaysia's fourth Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad
• Dr. Homer Stryker, founder of Stryker Corporation
• Dr. William Erastus Upjohn, inventor of the first pill that dissolved easily in the human body
• Christine Iverson Bennett, medical missionary who worked in Arabia during WWI
• Larry Nassar, convicted serial child molester and a former USA Gymnastics national team doctor and osteopathic physician at Michigan State University
• Richard C. Vinci, retired United States Navy admiral and former commander of the United States Navy Dental Corps

  Military

• Samuel C. Phillips, director of the Apollo program from 1964 to 1969, director of the National Security Agency from 1972 to 1973, commander of Air Force Systems Command from 1973 to 1975.
• George H. Cannon, United States Marine Corps officer and World War II Medal of Honor recipient killed during the First Bombardment of Midway.
• Francis C. Flaherty, United States Navy officer and World War II Medal of Honor recipient killed during the Attack on Pearl Harbor.
• Richard C. Vinci, retired United States Navy admiral and former commander of the United States Navy Dental Corps

  Newsmakers

• Bill Ayers, co-founder of the radical Weathermen
• Benjamin Bolger, holds what is said to be the largest number of graduate degrees held by a living person
• Mamah Borthwick, mistress of architect Frank Lloyd Wright who was murdered at his studio, Taliesin
• Napoleon Chagnon, anthropologist, professor of anthropology
• Rima Fakih, 2010 Miss USA
• Geoffrey Fieger, attorney based in Southfield, Michigan
• Robert Groves, 2009 Presidential nominee to head the national census; nomination stalled by Republican opposition to use of "sampling" methodology, which Groves had already stated would not be used
• Janet Guthrie, inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 2006; first woman to race in the Indianapolis 500; still is the only woman to ever lead a Nextel Cup race; top rookie in five different races in 1977 including the Daytona 500 and at Talladega; author of autobiography Janet Guthrie: A Life at Full Throttle
• Alireza Jafarzadeh, whistle-blower of Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program when he exposed in August 2002 the nuclear sites in Natanz and Arak, and triggered the inspection of the Iranian nuclear sites by the UN for the first time; author of The Iran Threat: President Ahmadinejad and the Coming Nuclear Crisis
• Carol Jantsch, the sole female tuba player on staff with a major U.S. orchestra, believed to be the first in history; at 21, the youngest member of the Philadelphia Orchestra
• Morris Ketchum Jessup, author of ufological writings; played role in "uncovering" the so-called "Philadelphia Experiment"
• Adolph Mongo, political consultant
• Jerry Newport, author with Asperger syndrome whose life was the basis for the 2005 feature-length movie Mozart and the Whale; named "Most Versatile Calculator" in the 2010 World Calculation Cup
• Jane Scott, rock critic for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio; covered every major local rock concert; until her retirement in 2002 she was known as "The World’s Oldest Rock Critic;" influential in bringing the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to Cleveland
• Michael Sekora, founder and director of Project Socrates, the intelligence community's classified program that was tasked with determining the cause of America's economic decline
• Robert Shiller, economist; author of Irrational Exuberance
• Jerome Singleton, Paralympic athlete, competing mainly in category T44 sprint events
• Jerald F. ter Horst, briefly President Ford's press secretary

  Not-for-profit

• Larry Brilliant, head of Google Foundation ; co-founder of the Well; in 1979 he founded the Seva Foundation, which has given away more than $100 million; CEO of SoftNet Systems Inc., a global broadband Internet services company in San Francisco that at its peak had more than 500 employees and $600 million capitalization
• Mark Malloch Brown, Chef de Cabinet, no.2 rank in the United Nations system; Deputy Secretary-General
• John Melville Burgess, diocesan bishop of Massachusetts and the first African American to head an Episcopal diocese
• Stephen Goldsmith, Marion County district attorney for 12 years; two-term mayor of Indianapolis ; appointed senior fellow at the Milken Institute in 2006; his work in Indianapolis has been cited as a national model
• Lisa Hamilton, named in 2007 president of the UPS Foundation; previously its program director
• Bill Ivey, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts 1998–2001, credited with restoring the agency's credibility with Congress; appointed by President Clinton
• Bob King, President of the UAW
• Michael D. Knox, Chair and CEO of the US Peace Memorial Foundation and Distinguished Professor, University of South Florida
• Rajiv Shah, former director of agricultural development for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, nominated in 2009 as chief scientist at the United States Department of Agriculture and undersecretary of agriculture for research, education and economics; Administrator for the United States Agency for International Development
• Jack Vaughn, United States Peace Corps Director
• John George Vlazny, Roman Catholic prelate; Metropolitan Archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Portland
• Mark Weisbrot, economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C.; co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis

  Pulitzer Prize winners

• Natalie Angier, studied for two years at Michigan; nonfiction writer; science journalist for The New York Times; won 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting
• Ray Stannard Baker ; published 15 volumes about Wilson and internationalism, including an 8-volume biography, the last two volumes of which won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
• Leslie Bassett, winner of 1966 Pulitzer Prize in Music for Variations for Orchestra, premiered in Rome in 1963 by the RAI Symphony Orchestra under Feruccio Scaglia
• Howard W. Blakeslee, journalist; the Associated Press's first full-time science reporter; won the Pulitzer Prize for Reporting in 1937
• Edwin G. Burrows, won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for history for the
• John Ciardi, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, "Blue Skies"
• George Crumb, composer and 1968 Pulitzer Prize winner
• Sheri Fink, 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for The Deadly Choices at Memorial
• Robin Givhan, 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism
• Amy Harmon, 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for a series titled "The DNA Age"
• Stephen Henderson, former editorial page editor for The Michigan Daily, won Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2014; as Editorial Page Editor of the Detroit Free Press, he was honored for his reports on the bankruptcy of Detroit
• Charlie LeDuff, one of several reporters who worked on the New York Times series "How Race is Lived in America," which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001
• David Levering Lewis, historian; two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography
• Stanford Lipsey, publisher of The Sun Newspaper Group and The Buffalo News; Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Journalism 1972
• Ann Marie Lipinski, former editor of the Chicago Tribune; 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner
• Andrew C. McLaughlin ; author of A Constitutional History of the United States, winner of 1936 Pulitzer Prize for History
• William McPherson, Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism in 1977
• Arthur Miller, playwright; Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning author
• Howard Moss, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Selected Poems in 1971
• Edgar Ansel Mowrer, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author known for his writings on international events
• Paul Scott Mowrer, journalist; Pulitzer Prize winner in 1929
• Richard O. Prum, 2018 winner for "The Evolution of Beauty"
• Roger Reynolds, composer; his 25-minute-long piece for string orchestra, Whispers out of Time, won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for music
• Eugene Robinson, Michigan Daily Co-Editor-in-Chief in 1973–74; awarded a Pulitzer in April 2009 for his Washington Post commentaries on the 2008 presidential campaign
• Theodore Roethke, poet; winner of the 1954 Pulitzer Prize for his collection The Waking
• Heather Ann Thompson, historian, author, activist, and speaker
• David C. Turnley, photographer
• Claude H. Van Tyne, 1930 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book The War of Independence
• Michael Vitez, journalism fellow; Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist; author
• Josh White, journalist; worked with a team covering the Virginia Tech shooting massacre, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize
• Roger Wilkins, journalist of the Washington Post; shared the Pulitzer Prize for his Watergate editorials
• Julia Wolfe, composer; winner of a 2015 Pulitzer
• Taro Yamasaki, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer

  [Rhodes Scholars]

• James K. Watkins, 1911
• Brand Blanshard, 1913
• Albert C. Jacobs, 1921
• Bertrand Harris Bronson, 1922
• Allan Seager, 1930
• Samuel Beer, 1932
• Wilfred Sellars, 1934
• R. V. Roosa, 1939
• Abdul El-Sayed, 2009

  Science

• Isabella Abbott, ethnobotanist, specialized in algae; more than 200 algae owe their discovery and scientific names to her
• Werner Emmanuel Bachmann, chemist; pioneer in steroid synthesis; carried out the first total synthesis of a steroidal hormone, equilenin; winner of a Guggenheim award
• Frank Benford, an electrical engineer and physicist known for Benford’s Law, also devised in 1937 an instrument for measuring the refraction index of glass
• John Joseph Bittner, geneticist and cancer biologist, made contributions on the genetics of breast cancer
• John M. Carpenter, nuclear engineer, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
• Rajeshwari Chatterjee, pioneer in Indian microwave engineering
• Carol McDonald Connor, Educational Psychologist with contributions to early literacy and reading comprehension research
• Bernhard Dawson, U.S.-born Argentinian astronomer; namesake of Dawson crater
• David Mathias Dennison, physicist who made contributions to quantum mechanics, spectroscopy, and the physics of molecular structure; Guggenheim award winner
• Gerald R. Dickens, Professor of Earth Science at Rice University
• Charles Fremont Dight, medical professor; promoter of the human eugenics movement in Minnesota
• William Gould Dow, pioneer in electrical engineering, space research, and nuclear engineering; former chairman of EECS Department
• Douglas J. Futuyma, author of the widely used textbook Evolutionary Biology, and Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution, an introduction to the creation–evolution controversy; President of the Society for the Study of Evolution; President of the American Society of Naturalists; editor of Evolution and the Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics; received Sewall Wright Award from the American Society of Naturalists; Guggenheim Fellow; Fulbright Fellow; member of National Academy of Sciences
• Frank Gill, ornithologist; author of the standard textbook Ornithology; editor of the encyclopedic series Birds of North America; former president of the American Ornithologists' Union
• Moses Gomberg, U-M professor of chemistry; discovered organic free radicals in 1900
• Billi Gordon, PhD, works in functional neuroimaging and brain research at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA; investigates the pathophysiology of stress as antecedent to obesity-related diseases at the UCLA Gail and Gerald Oppenheimer Family Center for the Neurobiology of Stress; included on list of "30 Most Influential Neuroscientists Alive Today"
• Arnold B. Grobman, zoologist
• Martin Harwit, studied under Fred Hoyle; designed the first liquid-helium-cooled rockets for boosting telescopes into the atmosphere; investigated airborne infrared astronomy and infrared spectroscopy for NASA; Bruce Medal 2007; National Air and Space Museum Director 1987–95
• Clara H. Hasse, botanist
• Duff Holbrook, wildlife biologist and forester, reintroduced wild turkeys to much of South Carolina
• Jerome Horwitz, developed AZT, an antiviral compound used in the treatment of AIDS
• Edward Israel, astronomer and Arctic explorer
• Diane Larsen-Freeman, linguist
• Zachary J. Lemnios, Director of Defense Research and Engineering; former Chief Technology Officer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory
• Armin O. Leuschner, astronomer at Berkeley, first graduate student at Lick Observatory; devised a simplification of differential corrections; improved the methodology for determining the courses of planetoids and comets; oversaw a survey of all the known minor planets; founded the Astronomy Department at Berkeley and served as director of its student observatory for 40 years, which was renamed in his honor days after his death; James Craig Watson Medal 1916; Bruce Medal 1936; American Astronomical Society; namesake of Asteroid 1361 Leuschneria
• Yuei-An Liou, Distinguished Professor and Director at the Center for Space and Remote Sensing Research, National Central University, Taiwan
• Homer A. Neal, Director of the ATLAS Project; board member, Ford Motors ; Smithsonian Institution Board of Regents
• Harald Herborg Nielsen, physicist who performed pioneering research in molecular infrared spectra
• Antonia Novello, first female US Surgeon General
• James Arthur Oliver, herpetologist; director of the Bronx Zoo, the American Museum of Natural History and the New York Aquarium; the only person ever to have held the directorship at all three institutions
• Donald Othmer, co-founded and co-edited the 27-volume Kirk—Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology in 1947; chairman of Polytechnic University Chemical Engineering Department ; invented the Othmer still, which concentrated the acetic acid needed to produce cellulose acetate for motion picture film; awarded 40 patents at Kodak
• Raymond Pearl, one of the founders of biogerontology
• Henry Pollack, emeritus professor of geophysics at the University of Michigan
• Albert Benjamin Prescott, chemist; dean of the school of pharmacy in 1876; director of the chemical laboratory in 1884; president of the American Chemical Society in 1886; president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1891; president of the American Pharmaceutical Association in 1900
• Edwin William Schultz, pathologist; Guggenheim award winner
• Shirley E. Schwartz, chemist and research scientist at General Motors
• Homi Sethna, former Chairman of Atomic Energy Commission of India; in 1976 became the first chairman of Maharashtra Academy of Sciences in Pune, Maharashtra
• Joseph Beal Steere, ornithologist
• Marie Tharp, oceanographic cartographer whose work paved the way for the theories of plate tectonics and continental drift
• Juris Upatnieks, with Emmett Leith created the first working hologram in 1962
• Steven G. Vandenberg, behavior geneticist
• James McDonald Vicary, market researcher; pioneered the notion of subliminal advertising in 1957
• James Craig Watson, astronomer, established the James Craig Watson Medal
• John V. Wehausen, researcher in hydrodynamics
• Nancy Wexler, geneticist, Higgins Professor of Neuropsychology at Columbia University
• Terry Jean Wilson, Antarctic researcher
• Ta You Wu, "the father of Chinese physics"
• Zhu Guangya, nuclear physicist; academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences; vice chairman of 8th and 9th Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference; led the development of China's atomic and hydrogen bomb programs
• George Zweig, a graduate student when he published "the definitive compilation of elementary particles and their properties" in 1963, the work that led up to his theory about the existence of quarks in 1964; considered to have developed the theory of quarks independently of Murray Gell-Mann
• Kathleen Weston, world renowned toxicologist, worked on the Salk polio vaccine, taught from the Sunday school level to the medical school level for over 50 years

  National Medal of Science Laureates">List of National Medal of Science laureates">National Medal of Science Laureates/[National Medal of Technology and Innovation]

• Fay Ajzenberg-Selove, German-American nuclear physicist
• Detlev Wulf Bronk, credited with establishing biophysics as a recognized discipline
• John W. Cahn, scientist, winner of the 1998 National Medal of Science
• Stanley Cohen, biochemist; 1986 Nobel Prize Laureate in Physiology and Medicine
• Carl R. de Boor, German-American mathematician
• George Dantzig, mathematician called by some the "father of linear programming"
• Harry George Drickamer, born Harold George Weidenthal, pioneer experimentalist in high-pressure studies of condensed matter
• Donald N. Frey, Ford Motor Company product manager; National Medal of Technology winner
• Willis M. Hawkins, aeronautical engineer for Lockheed for over fifty years
• George W. Housner, authority on earthquake engineering; National Medal of Science laureate
• Clarence L. Johnson, system engineer, aeronautical innovator
• Isabella L. Karle, x-ray crystallographer
• Dr. Donald L. Katz, chemist, chemical engineer
• Marshall Warren Nirenberg, biochemist and geneticist
• Michael Posner, psychologist
• Claude E. Shannon, mathematician, electronic engineer, cryptographer; "the father of information theory"
• Isadore Singer, Institute Professor in the Department of Mathematics at MIT
• Stephen Smale, mathematician
• Karen K. Uhlenbeck, professor of mathematics
• Harold Horton Sheldon, professor of physics
• Donald Dexter Van Slyke, Dutch American biochemist

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