This list of University of Chicago alumni consists of notable people who graduated or attended the
University of Chicago. The alumni of the university include graduates and attendees. Graduates are defined as those who hold bachelor's, master's, or Ph.D. degrees from the university, while attendees are those who studied at the university but did not complete the program or obtain a degree. Honorary degree holders and auditors of the university are excluded. Summer session attendees are also excluded from the list since summer terms are not part of the university's formal academic years.
Troy Eid (J.D. 1991) – United States Attorney for the District of Colorado (2006–2009)
Harvey Feldman (A.B. ?, A.M. 1954) – drafter of the
Taiwan Relations Act, United States Ambassador to Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands (1979–1981)[8]
Jerome Frank (A.B. 1909, J.D. 1912) – legal philosopher, Judge of United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission
Stanton Friedman (B.S. 1955, M.S. 1956) – nuclear physicist, UFOlogist
John Grierson (A.M. 1927) – coined the word "documentary"; founder of the British documentary film movement; founded and headed Canada's
National Film Board during World War II; director of mass communications for
UNESCO, 1948–50
Anthony Tan (B.A. 2004) – co-founder and chief executive officer of
Grab, a Nasdaq-listed e-hailing turned superapp technology company and first unicorn in
Southeast Asia
Marion A. Trozzolo (PhB 1947, M.B.A. 1950) – first United States manufacturer to apply
teflon to cookware
Laird Bell (J.D.) – lawyer, Chairman of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Chairman of the University of Chicago Board of Trustees, and of Carleton College
Mary Elizabeth Downey – Director of the Chautauqua School for Librarians who established and promoted
library science education courses across the Western and Midwestern United States
Herman Dreer (Ph.D. 1955) academic administrator, educator, educational reformer and activist, author, editor, minister, and civil rights leader[26]
Benjamin E. Mays (A.M. 1925, Ph.D. 1935) – President of
Morehouse College (1940–1967); recipient of American Educator Award (1980); civil rights activist
Solange Ashby (PhD 2016), egyptologist and nubiologist
Allan Berube (X. 1968) – founder of the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian History Project, now the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society; author of Coming Out Under Fire (1990) [Lambda Literary Award];
MacArthur Fellow (1996)
Frances Gardiner Davenport (Ph.D. 1904) – editor of the series European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and its Dependencies[33]
Angie Debo (A.M. 1924, international relations) –
Oklahoma and
Native American history, author of And the Waters Still Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes (1940)
Nicholas Dirks (A.M. 1974, Ph.D. 1981) – Franz Boas Professor of History and Anthropology; Vice-President for Arts and Sciences at
Columbia University
Paul Finkelman (M.A. 1972, Ph.D. 1976) – President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus,
Albany Law School and President of
Gratz College; legal historian and author of Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation's Highest Court (2018)
James L. Fitzgerald (B.A. 1971, M.A. 1974, Ph.D. 1980) – Purandara Das Distinguished Professor of Sanskrit in the Department of Classics,
Brown University
Lawrence M. Friedman (A.B. 1948, J.D. 1951, LL.M. 1953) – Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor of Law at
Stanford Law School; legal historian and author of Crime and Punishment in American History
David Fromkin (A.B. 1950, J.D. 1953) – University Professor of International Relations, History, and Law at
Boston University
Raymond A. Joseph (M.A. 1963) — led a psychological campaign against the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti via Radio Vonvon (1965-69); author of For Whom the Dogs Spy: Haiti, From the Duvalier Dictatorships to the Earthquake, Four Presidents, and Beyond (2014)
Vijay Prashad (A.M. 1990, Ph.D. 1994) – George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies,
Trinity College; author of The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (2007)
Studs Terkel (Ph.B. 1932, J.D. 1934) – oral historian and radio host; Pulitzer Prize winner for the Good War: An Oral History of World War II (1985);
National Humanities Medal (1997)
Irene J. Winter (M.A. 1967) – Ancient Near East Art historian, professor at Harvard and chair of the department of Fine Arts from 1993 to 1996; MacArthur Fellow (1983), Radcliffe Fellow (2003–04), Mellon Lecturer (2005)
Carter G. Woodson (A.B. 1908, A.M. 1908) – historian and founder of Negro History Week (1926), which evolved into
Black History Month; civil rights activist
Journalism
Rick Atkinson (A.M. 1976) – reporter and author, four-time Pulitzer Prize winner
Nathan Hare (A.M. 1957, Ph.D. 1962) – author, activist, and sociologist; founding publisher of The Black Scholar, later cited as "the most important journal devoted to black issues since the Crisis" by The New York Times
Seymour Hersh (A.B. 1958) – Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author, most famous for exposing the
My Lai Massacre, which greatly changed public opinion of the
Vietnam War; frequent contributor to The New Yorker
Raymond A. Joseph (M.A. 1963, Social Anthropology) The Wall Street Journal (1971–1984), Co-founded in 1971 with his brother Leopold, the Haiti-Observateur, a trilingual weekly (French, Haitian Creole and English), for which he still writes, more than 50 years later.
David E. Reed (A.B. 1946) – roving editor, Reader's Digest; author, 111 Days in Stanleyville (1965); Up Front in Vietnam (1967); Save the Hostages (1988)
Emmett Rensin – contributor to the Los Angeles Times' "Opinion Blog", USA Today, Salon, New Republic, and the Los Angeles Review of Books
Brent Staples (A.M. 1976, Ph.D. 1982) – editorial writer for The New York Times (1990–present); winner of the
Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for his memoir Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White (1994)
Janet Rowley (Ph.B. 1944, S.B. 1946, M.D. 1948) – discovered translocation on chromosome 9 resulted in the
Philadelphia chromosome, and had implications for specific types of leukemia; her work has influenced further research into cancer genetics
Raymond A. Joseph (M.A. 1963) – first translation of the New Testament and Psalms of the Bible into Haitian Creole under the auspices of the American Bible Society (1960)
David Novak (A.B. 1961) – Jewish legal theorist at the
University of Toronto; a founder of the Institute of Traditional Judaism; author of Covenantal Rights
Dallin H. Oaks (J.D. 1957) – Apostle; member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church)
Marvin Chirelstein (J.D. 1953) – Professor at Columbia Law School and Yale Law School
Gregory Chow (A.M. 1952, Ph.D. 1955) – Professor of Economics, Emeritus, and Class of 1913 Professor of Political Economy, Emeritus, at
Princeton University
Werner J. Dannhauser (Ph.D. 1971) – Professor of Government at Cornell University and Michigan State University, expert on Nietzsche and on Judaism and politics
Eugene Fama (Ph.D. 1964) – father of efficient market theory. Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago
Roland G. Fryer Jr. – Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University
Marc Galanter (J.D.) – Professor Emeritus at University of Wisconsin School of Law
Alexander L. George (A.M. 1941, Ph.D. 1958) – MacArthur Fellow (1983); Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, Emeritus,
Stanford University; pioneering scholar in political psychology and foreign policy
Robert Kates (A.M. 1960, Ph.D. 1962) – MacArthur Fellow (1981); Professor Emeritus of Geography and Director Emeritus of the World Hunger Program at
Brown University
Vytautas Kavolis – sociologist, literary critic, and cultural historian
Frances Kellor – social reformer and sociologist, specializing in immigrants' rights
Rose Hum Lee (Ph.D. 1947) – first woman and first Chinese American to head a US university sociology department, appointed such at
Roosevelt University, 1956
Anne Norton (A.B. 1977, A.M. 1979, Ph.D. 1982) – Alfred L. Cass Term Chair and Professor of Political Science,
University of Pennsylvania; author of Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (2004)
George L. Priest (J.D.) – John M. Olin Professor of Law and Economics and Director of the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Public Policy at Yale Law School
James M. Redfield (A.B. 1954, Ph.D. 1961) – Edward Olson Distinguished Service Professor and Professor of the Committee on Social Thought at the
University of Chicago (1976–present)
John N. Bahcall (S.M. 1957) – known for contributions to solar neutrino problem and development of the Hubble Space Telescope, and development of
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton
Asish Basu (M.Sc. 1969) – geologist, Professor Emeritus of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Texas at Arlington
J Harlen Bretz (Ph.D. 1913) – geologist, Penrose Medal 1979
Savas Dimopoulos (Ph.D. 1978) – theoretical physicist at
Stanford; with Howard Georgi, he formulated the supersymmetric extension to the Standard Model, the leading theory for particle physics beyond the Standard Model
Mack Gipson Jr. (S.M. 1961, Ph.D. 1963) – first African-American to obtain a Ph.D. in Geology; founding advisor of the
NABGG in 1981; consultant to NASA[11]
Edwin Hubble (S.B. 1910, Ph.D. 1917) – astronomer who found the first evidence for the
Big Bang theory
Christina Hulbe (Ph.D. 1998) – Antarctic researcher, geophysicist, glaciologist
J. Allen Hynek (B.S. 1931, Ph.D. 1935) – astronomer, professor, and ufologist known for developing the
close encounter classification system of UFO experiences
Deborah S. Jin (Ph.D. 1995) – physicist; MacArthur Fellow in 2003
Donald Johanson (A.M. 1970, Ph.D. 1974) – paleoanthropologist who discovered "
Lucy", a link between primates and humans
Robert Kowalski – computer scientist in field of logic programming
Martin Kruskal (S.B. 1945) – Professor Emeritus at
Princeton University, started the soliton revolution in mathematics; advances included Kruskal-Shafranov Instability, Bernstein-Greene-Kruskal (BGK) Modes and the MHD Energy Principle, which laid theoretical foundations of controlled nuclear fusion, and Kruskal coordinates in theory of relativity
Lynn Margulis (A.B. 1957) – distinguished professor at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst; National Medal of Science 1999 for Endosymbiotic Hypothesis; developed Gaia theory with James Lovelock
Stanley Miller (Ph.D. 1954) – performed classic Miller–Urey experiment on origin of life in collaboration with Harold Urey in 1953
J. Howard Moore (A.B. 1898) – zoologist, philosopher, educator and socialist who was an early advocate for
animal rights based on
Darwinian principles of shared evolutionary kinship
William Wilson Morgan (S.B. 1927, Ph.D. 1931) – astronomer who co-developed
MK system for classification of stars, as well as classification systems for galaxies and clusters; director of
Yerkes Observatory
Donald Osterbrock (A.B., Ph.D.) – astrophysicist known for his contributions to the body of knowledge on interstellar matter, gaseous nebulae, and the nuclei of active galaxies; President of American Astronomical Society; director of
Lick Observatory
Clair Cameron Patterson (Ph.D. 1951) – geochemist accurately determined the
age of the Earth and discovered significant lead contamination of the environment
Gerald J. Wasserburg (B.S. 1951, M.S. 1952, Ph.D. 1954) – John D. MacArthur Professor of Geology and Geophysics, Emeritus at California Institute of Technology
George Wetherill (Ph.B. 1948, S.M. 1949, S.M. 1951, Ph.D. 1953) – National Medal of Science winner, known for seminal work on formation of planets and solar system
J. Ernest Wilkins Jr. (B.S. 1940) – nuclear scientist, mechanical engineer, and mathematician known for contribution to the Manhattan Project
Erik Winfree (B.S.) – computer scientist, bioengineer, and professor at California Institute of Technology; MacArthur fellow in 2000
^Introduction to European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and its Dependencies, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 2010 edition), p. ii
This list of University of Chicago alumni consists of notable people who graduated or attended the
University of Chicago. The alumni of the university include graduates and attendees. Graduates are defined as those who hold bachelor's, master's, or Ph.D. degrees from the university, while attendees are those who studied at the university but did not complete the program or obtain a degree. Honorary degree holders and auditors of the university are excluded. Summer session attendees are also excluded from the list since summer terms are not part of the university's formal academic years.
Troy Eid (J.D. 1991) – United States Attorney for the District of Colorado (2006–2009)
Harvey Feldman (A.B. ?, A.M. 1954) – drafter of the
Taiwan Relations Act, United States Ambassador to Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands (1979–1981)[8]
Jerome Frank (A.B. 1909, J.D. 1912) – legal philosopher, Judge of United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission
Stanton Friedman (B.S. 1955, M.S. 1956) – nuclear physicist, UFOlogist
John Grierson (A.M. 1927) – coined the word "documentary"; founder of the British documentary film movement; founded and headed Canada's
National Film Board during World War II; director of mass communications for
UNESCO, 1948–50
Anthony Tan (B.A. 2004) – co-founder and chief executive officer of
Grab, a Nasdaq-listed e-hailing turned superapp technology company and first unicorn in
Southeast Asia
Marion A. Trozzolo (PhB 1947, M.B.A. 1950) – first United States manufacturer to apply
teflon to cookware
Laird Bell (J.D.) – lawyer, Chairman of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Chairman of the University of Chicago Board of Trustees, and of Carleton College
Mary Elizabeth Downey – Director of the Chautauqua School for Librarians who established and promoted
library science education courses across the Western and Midwestern United States
Herman Dreer (Ph.D. 1955) academic administrator, educator, educational reformer and activist, author, editor, minister, and civil rights leader[26]
Benjamin E. Mays (A.M. 1925, Ph.D. 1935) – President of
Morehouse College (1940–1967); recipient of American Educator Award (1980); civil rights activist
Solange Ashby (PhD 2016), egyptologist and nubiologist
Allan Berube (X. 1968) – founder of the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian History Project, now the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society; author of Coming Out Under Fire (1990) [Lambda Literary Award];
MacArthur Fellow (1996)
Frances Gardiner Davenport (Ph.D. 1904) – editor of the series European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and its Dependencies[33]
Angie Debo (A.M. 1924, international relations) –
Oklahoma and
Native American history, author of And the Waters Still Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes (1940)
Nicholas Dirks (A.M. 1974, Ph.D. 1981) – Franz Boas Professor of History and Anthropology; Vice-President for Arts and Sciences at
Columbia University
Paul Finkelman (M.A. 1972, Ph.D. 1976) – President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus,
Albany Law School and President of
Gratz College; legal historian and author of Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation's Highest Court (2018)
James L. Fitzgerald (B.A. 1971, M.A. 1974, Ph.D. 1980) – Purandara Das Distinguished Professor of Sanskrit in the Department of Classics,
Brown University
Lawrence M. Friedman (A.B. 1948, J.D. 1951, LL.M. 1953) – Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor of Law at
Stanford Law School; legal historian and author of Crime and Punishment in American History
David Fromkin (A.B. 1950, J.D. 1953) – University Professor of International Relations, History, and Law at
Boston University
Raymond A. Joseph (M.A. 1963) — led a psychological campaign against the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti via Radio Vonvon (1965-69); author of For Whom the Dogs Spy: Haiti, From the Duvalier Dictatorships to the Earthquake, Four Presidents, and Beyond (2014)
Vijay Prashad (A.M. 1990, Ph.D. 1994) – George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies,
Trinity College; author of The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (2007)
Studs Terkel (Ph.B. 1932, J.D. 1934) – oral historian and radio host; Pulitzer Prize winner for the Good War: An Oral History of World War II (1985);
National Humanities Medal (1997)
Irene J. Winter (M.A. 1967) – Ancient Near East Art historian, professor at Harvard and chair of the department of Fine Arts from 1993 to 1996; MacArthur Fellow (1983), Radcliffe Fellow (2003–04), Mellon Lecturer (2005)
Carter G. Woodson (A.B. 1908, A.M. 1908) – historian and founder of Negro History Week (1926), which evolved into
Black History Month; civil rights activist
Journalism
Rick Atkinson (A.M. 1976) – reporter and author, four-time Pulitzer Prize winner
Nathan Hare (A.M. 1957, Ph.D. 1962) – author, activist, and sociologist; founding publisher of The Black Scholar, later cited as "the most important journal devoted to black issues since the Crisis" by The New York Times
Seymour Hersh (A.B. 1958) – Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author, most famous for exposing the
My Lai Massacre, which greatly changed public opinion of the
Vietnam War; frequent contributor to The New Yorker
Raymond A. Joseph (M.A. 1963, Social Anthropology) The Wall Street Journal (1971–1984), Co-founded in 1971 with his brother Leopold, the Haiti-Observateur, a trilingual weekly (French, Haitian Creole and English), for which he still writes, more than 50 years later.
David E. Reed (A.B. 1946) – roving editor, Reader's Digest; author, 111 Days in Stanleyville (1965); Up Front in Vietnam (1967); Save the Hostages (1988)
Emmett Rensin – contributor to the Los Angeles Times' "Opinion Blog", USA Today, Salon, New Republic, and the Los Angeles Review of Books
Brent Staples (A.M. 1976, Ph.D. 1982) – editorial writer for The New York Times (1990–present); winner of the
Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for his memoir Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White (1994)
Janet Rowley (Ph.B. 1944, S.B. 1946, M.D. 1948) – discovered translocation on chromosome 9 resulted in the
Philadelphia chromosome, and had implications for specific types of leukemia; her work has influenced further research into cancer genetics
Raymond A. Joseph (M.A. 1963) – first translation of the New Testament and Psalms of the Bible into Haitian Creole under the auspices of the American Bible Society (1960)
David Novak (A.B. 1961) – Jewish legal theorist at the
University of Toronto; a founder of the Institute of Traditional Judaism; author of Covenantal Rights
Dallin H. Oaks (J.D. 1957) – Apostle; member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church)
Marvin Chirelstein (J.D. 1953) – Professor at Columbia Law School and Yale Law School
Gregory Chow (A.M. 1952, Ph.D. 1955) – Professor of Economics, Emeritus, and Class of 1913 Professor of Political Economy, Emeritus, at
Princeton University
Werner J. Dannhauser (Ph.D. 1971) – Professor of Government at Cornell University and Michigan State University, expert on Nietzsche and on Judaism and politics
Eugene Fama (Ph.D. 1964) – father of efficient market theory. Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago
Roland G. Fryer Jr. – Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University
Marc Galanter (J.D.) – Professor Emeritus at University of Wisconsin School of Law
Alexander L. George (A.M. 1941, Ph.D. 1958) – MacArthur Fellow (1983); Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, Emeritus,
Stanford University; pioneering scholar in political psychology and foreign policy
Robert Kates (A.M. 1960, Ph.D. 1962) – MacArthur Fellow (1981); Professor Emeritus of Geography and Director Emeritus of the World Hunger Program at
Brown University
Vytautas Kavolis – sociologist, literary critic, and cultural historian
Frances Kellor – social reformer and sociologist, specializing in immigrants' rights
Rose Hum Lee (Ph.D. 1947) – first woman and first Chinese American to head a US university sociology department, appointed such at
Roosevelt University, 1956
Anne Norton (A.B. 1977, A.M. 1979, Ph.D. 1982) – Alfred L. Cass Term Chair and Professor of Political Science,
University of Pennsylvania; author of Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (2004)
George L. Priest (J.D.) – John M. Olin Professor of Law and Economics and Director of the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Public Policy at Yale Law School
James M. Redfield (A.B. 1954, Ph.D. 1961) – Edward Olson Distinguished Service Professor and Professor of the Committee on Social Thought at the
University of Chicago (1976–present)
John N. Bahcall (S.M. 1957) – known for contributions to solar neutrino problem and development of the Hubble Space Telescope, and development of
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton
Asish Basu (M.Sc. 1969) – geologist, Professor Emeritus of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Texas at Arlington
J Harlen Bretz (Ph.D. 1913) – geologist, Penrose Medal 1979
Savas Dimopoulos (Ph.D. 1978) – theoretical physicist at
Stanford; with Howard Georgi, he formulated the supersymmetric extension to the Standard Model, the leading theory for particle physics beyond the Standard Model
Mack Gipson Jr. (S.M. 1961, Ph.D. 1963) – first African-American to obtain a Ph.D. in Geology; founding advisor of the
NABGG in 1981; consultant to NASA[11]
Edwin Hubble (S.B. 1910, Ph.D. 1917) – astronomer who found the first evidence for the
Big Bang theory
Christina Hulbe (Ph.D. 1998) – Antarctic researcher, geophysicist, glaciologist
J. Allen Hynek (B.S. 1931, Ph.D. 1935) – astronomer, professor, and ufologist known for developing the
close encounter classification system of UFO experiences
Deborah S. Jin (Ph.D. 1995) – physicist; MacArthur Fellow in 2003
Donald Johanson (A.M. 1970, Ph.D. 1974) – paleoanthropologist who discovered "
Lucy", a link between primates and humans
Robert Kowalski – computer scientist in field of logic programming
Martin Kruskal (S.B. 1945) – Professor Emeritus at
Princeton University, started the soliton revolution in mathematics; advances included Kruskal-Shafranov Instability, Bernstein-Greene-Kruskal (BGK) Modes and the MHD Energy Principle, which laid theoretical foundations of controlled nuclear fusion, and Kruskal coordinates in theory of relativity
Lynn Margulis (A.B. 1957) – distinguished professor at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst; National Medal of Science 1999 for Endosymbiotic Hypothesis; developed Gaia theory with James Lovelock
Stanley Miller (Ph.D. 1954) – performed classic Miller–Urey experiment on origin of life in collaboration with Harold Urey in 1953
J. Howard Moore (A.B. 1898) – zoologist, philosopher, educator and socialist who was an early advocate for
animal rights based on
Darwinian principles of shared evolutionary kinship
William Wilson Morgan (S.B. 1927, Ph.D. 1931) – astronomer who co-developed
MK system for classification of stars, as well as classification systems for galaxies and clusters; director of
Yerkes Observatory
Donald Osterbrock (A.B., Ph.D.) – astrophysicist known for his contributions to the body of knowledge on interstellar matter, gaseous nebulae, and the nuclei of active galaxies; President of American Astronomical Society; director of
Lick Observatory
Clair Cameron Patterson (Ph.D. 1951) – geochemist accurately determined the
age of the Earth and discovered significant lead contamination of the environment
Gerald J. Wasserburg (B.S. 1951, M.S. 1952, Ph.D. 1954) – John D. MacArthur Professor of Geology and Geophysics, Emeritus at California Institute of Technology
George Wetherill (Ph.B. 1948, S.M. 1949, S.M. 1951, Ph.D. 1953) – National Medal of Science winner, known for seminal work on formation of planets and solar system
J. Ernest Wilkins Jr. (B.S. 1940) – nuclear scientist, mechanical engineer, and mathematician known for contribution to the Manhattan Project
Erik Winfree (B.S.) – computer scientist, bioengineer, and professor at California Institute of Technology; MacArthur fellow in 2000
^Introduction to European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and its Dependencies, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 2010 edition), p. ii