List of University of Michigan alumni

Academic unit key
Symbol Academic unit

ARCH Taubman College
BUS Ross School of Business
COE College of Engineering
DENT School of Dentistry
FLNT Flint Campus
GFSPP Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy
HHRS Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies
LAW Law School
LSA College of LS&A
MED Medical School
SMTD School of Music, Theatre and Dance
PHARM School of Pharmacy
SOE School of Education
SNRE School of Natural Resources
SOAD The Stamps School of Art & Design
SOI School of Information
SON School of Nursing
SOK School of Kinesiology
SOSW School of Social Work
SPH School of Public Health
TCAUP Architecture and Urban Planning
MDNG Matriculated, did not graduate

The following is a list of University of Michigan alumni.

There are more than 640,000 living alumni of the University of Michigan in 180 countries across the globe.[1] Notable alumni include computer scientist and entrepreneur Larry Page, actor James Earl Jones, and President of the United States Gerald Ford.

Alumni

Nobel laureates

Activists

AAAI, ACM, IEEE Fellows and awardees

As of 2021, more than 65 Michigan alumni have been named as Fellows. Of those alumni, four have been awarded the Eckert-Mauchly Award (out of the 42 total awards granted), the most prestigious award for contributions to computer architecture.

  • Gul Agha, IEEE ACM Fellow
  • Frances Allen, ACM Fellow; computer scientist and pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers; first woman to win the Turing Award; first woman to become an IBM Fellow[11]
  • Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, ACM Fellow; winner of the SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award
  • Farrokh Ayazi, named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2013 for contributions to micro-electro-mechanical resonators and resonant gyroscopes
  • Andrew Barto, IEEE Fellow; IEEE Neural Networks Society Pioneer Award
  • Paul R. Berger (BS Engin. Physics 1985, MS EE 1987, Ph.D. EE 1990), named an IEEE Fellow (2011), an Outstanding Engineering Educator for State of Ohio (2014) and a Fulbright-Nokia Distinguished Chair in Information and Communications Technologies (2020)
  • Randal Bryant, ACM Fellow; IEEE Fellow
  • Robert Cailliau, ACM Software System Award for co-development of the World Wide Web
  • Sunghyun Choi, named an IEEE Fellow in 2014
  • Edgar F. Codd, Turing Award winner, English computer scientist; while working for IBM, invented the relational model for database management, the theoretical basis for relational databases and relational database management systems; Turing Award Winner
  • Stephen Cook, ACM Fellow; OC, OOnt (born December 14, 1939), American-Canadian computer scientist and mathematician who has made major contributions to the fields of complexity theory and proof complexity as a Turing Award Winner
  • Edward S. Davidson, IEEE Fellow; 2000 IEEE/ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award "for his seminal contributions to the design, implementation, and performance evaluation of high performance pipelines and multiprocessor systems"
  • David DeWitt, ACM Fellow; Hreceived the ACM SIGMOD Innovations Award (now renamed SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award) in 1995 for his contributions to the database systems field
  • Alexandra Duel-Hallen, professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University known for her research in wireless networks; named an IEEE Fellow in 2011
  • George V. Eleftheriades, researcher in the field of metamaterials; fellow of the IEEE and the Royal Society of Canada
  • Usama Fayyad, holds over 30 patents; Fellow of both the AAAI (Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) and the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery)
  • Michael J. Fischer, ACM Fellow; computer scientist who works in the fields of distributed computing, parallel computing, cryptography, algorithms and data structures, and computational complexity; editor-in-chief of the Journal of the ACM 1982–1986
  • James D. Foley, ACM Fellow an IEEE Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering
  • Stephanie Forrest, ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award (2011)
  • Elmer G. Gilbert, IEEE Fellow; in control theory, he is well known for the "Gilbert realization"; member of the National Academy of Engineering; Fellow of IEEE and the American Association for the Advancement of Science
  • Lee Giles, ACM Fellow; IEEE Fellow; recipient of 2018 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Neural Networks Pioneer Award and the 2018 National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS) Miles Conrad Award
  • Adele Goldberg, president of the Association for computing Machinery (ACM), 1984–1986
  • Robert M. Graham, ACM Fellow, cybersecurity researcher computer scientist
  • Herb Grosch, ACM Fellow; received the Association for Computing Machinery Fellows Award in 1995; early computer scientist, perhaps best known for Grosch's law
  • Mark Guzdial, ACM Fellow, original developer of the CoWeb (or Swiki), one of the earliest wiki engines, which was implemented in Squeak and has been in use at institutions of higher education since 1998
  • Rick Hayes-Roth, AAAI Fellow
  • Mark D. Hill, named an Association for Computing Machinery Fellow in 2004 for "contributions to memory consistency models and memory system design"; ACM SIGARCH Alan D. Berenbaum Distinguished Service Award in 2009; in 2019, he received the 2019 ACM - IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award for "seminal contributions to the fields of cache memories, memory consistency models, transactional memory, and simulation"
  • Julia Hirschberg, IEEE Fellow, member of the National Academy of Engineering, ACM Fellow, AAAI Fellow
  • John M. Hollerbach, named IEEE Fellow in 1996
  • Tara Javidi, IEEE Fellow
  • Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems; in 1986, was awarded a Grace Murray Hopper Award by the ACM for his work on the Berkeley UNIX Operating System
  • Nam Sung Kim, IEEE Fellow
  • John D. Kraus, IEEE Fellow; winner of a IEEE Centennial Medal winner of the IEEE Heinrich Hertz Medal
  • David Kuck, fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; member of the National Academy of Engineering; won the Eckert-Mauchly Award from ACM/IEEE and the IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award
  • Cliff Lampe, executive vice president for ACM SIGCHI since 2018
  • John E. Laird, ACM Fellow; AAAI Fellow; AAAS member
  • Carl Landwehr, IEEE Fellow; winner of the ACM's SIGSAC's Outstanding Contribution Award (2013)
  • Peter Lee, ACM Fellow; longtime "Microsoft researcher" and became the organization's head in 2013
  • Chih-Jen Lin, ACM Fellow, AAAI Fellow, IEEE Fellow; a leading researcher in machine learning, optimization, and data mining
  • K. J. Ray Liu, IEEE Fellow; elected as 2021 IEEE President-elect, to serve as 2022 IEEE President and CEO
  • Patrick Drew McDaniel, ACM Fellow; IEEE Fellow
  • Olgica Milenkovic was named an IEEE Fellow "for contributions to genomic data compression"
  • Edmund Miller, named an IEEE Fellow "for contributions to computational electromagnetics"
  • David L. Mills, invented the Network Time Protocol (1981), the DEC LSI-11 based fuzzball router that was used for the 56 kbit/s NSFNET (1985), the Exterior Gateway Protocol (1984), inspired the author of ping for BSD (1983), and had the first FTP implementation; IEEE Fellow; winner of the IEEE Internet Award in 2013
  • Yi Murphey, IEEE Fellow
  • Shamkant Navathe, ACM Fellow; noted researcher in the field of databases with more than 150 publications on different topics in the area of databases
  • Judith S. Olson, ACM Fellow with over 110 published research articles
  • Kunle Olukotun, ACM Fellow; is known as the “father of the multi-core processor
  • Elliott Organick, founder of ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education, SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education (1985)
  • C. Raymond Perrault, named a founding member of AAAI in 1990 and a AAAS member in 2011
  • Raymond Reiter, Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), AAAI Fellow, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada
  • Paul Resnick, ACM Fellow as a result of his contributions to recommender systems, economics and computation, and online communities; winner of the 2010 ACM Software Systems Award
  • Jennifer Rexford, won the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award (the award goes to a computer professional who makes a single, significant technical or service contribution at or before age 35) in 2005, for her work on introducing network routing subject to the different business interests of the operators of different subnetworks into Border Gateway Protocol
  • Wally Rhines, named overall CEO of the Year by Portland Business Journal in 2012 and Oregon Technology Executive of the Year by the Technology Association of Oregon in 2003; named an IEEE Fellow in 2017.
  • Keith W. Ross, ACM Fellow; Dean of Engineering and Computer Science at NYU Shanghai and a computer science professor at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering.
  • Ronitt Rubinfeld, ACM Fellow as of 2017 for Association for Computing Machinery for contributions to delegated computation, sublinear time algorithms and property testing
  • Rob A. Rutenbar, ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow
  • Claude Shannon, IEEE Medal of Honor, National Medal of Science, Claude E. Shannon Award
  • Daniel Siewiorek, ACM, AAAS, IEEE Fellow; winner of the IEEE/ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award
  • David Slepian, IEEE Fellow; winner of a IEEE Centennial Medal
  • Anna Stefanopoulou, IEEE Fellow
  • Michael Stonebraker, Turing Award winner; founder of many database companies, including Ingres Corporation, Illustra, Paradigm4, StreamBase Systems, Tamr, Vertica and VoltDB; served as chief technical officer of Informix
  • James W. Thatcher, winner of ACM SIG Access Award (2008), for Outstanding Contributions to Computing and Accessibility for his contributions to digital accessibility
  • Eugene C. Whitney, IEEE Fellow and a member of the IEEE Rotating Machinery, Synchronous and the Power Generation Hydraulic subcommittees
  • Louise Trevillyan, 2012 ACM SIGDA Pioneering Achievement Award
  • W. Rae Young, named an IEEE Fellow in 1964 "for contributions to mobile radio and data communications systems"
  • Bernard P. Zeigler, IEEE Fellow in recognition of his contributions to the theory of discrete event simulation
  • Xi Zhang, IEEE Fellow

Aerospace

Art, architecture, and design

See List of University of Michigan arts alumni

Arts and entertainment

See List of University of Michigan arts alumni

Astronauts

  • Daniel T. Barry (medical internship), engineer, scientist, retired NASA astronaut
  • Andre Douglas, earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, a master's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan, a master's degree in naval architecture and marine engineering from the University of Michigan, a master's degree in electrical and computer engineering from Johns Hopkins University, and a doctorate in systems engineering from the George Washington. Named a NASA astronaut in 2021.
  • Theodore Freeman (COE: MSAE 1960), one of the third group of astronauts selected by NASA; died in T-38 crash at Ellington Air Force Base
  • Karl G. Henize (Ph.D. 1954), STS-51-F, 1985
  • James Irwin (COE: MSAE 1957), Apollo 15, 1971, one of twelve men to have walked on the Moon; one of six men to ride the Lunar Roving Vehicle on the Moon; co-founded alumni club of the Moon
  • Jack Lousma (COE: BSAE 1959), Skylab 3 1973; STS-3, 1982
  • James McDivitt (COE: BSE AA 1959, ScD hon. 1965), graduated first in his class; Command Pilot Gemini 4 part of an all UM crew, 1965; Commander Apollo 9; Program Manager for Apollo 1216; Brigadier general, U.S. Air Force; vice president (retired), Rockwell International Corporation
  • Donald Ray McMonagle (MBA 2003), retired USAF Colonel, USAF; became manager of launch integration at the Kennedy Space Center in 1997
  • David Scott (MDNG: 1949–1950; ScD hon. 1971), Apollo 15, 1971; one of twelve men to have walked on the Moon; first man to drive a lunar rover on the Moon; co-founded alumni club of the Moon
  • James M. Taylor (B.S. 1959), Air Force astronaut, test pilot
  • Ed White (COE: MSAE 1959, Hon. PhD Astronautics 1965), first American to walk in space (Gemini 4) part of an all UM crew, 1965; died in Apollo 1 test accident, 1967
  • Alfred Worden (COE: MSAE 1964, Scd hon. 1971), Apollo 15, 1971; co-founded alumni club of the Moon

A campus plaza was named for McDivitt and White in 1965 to honor their accomplishments on the Gemini IV spacewalk. (At the time of its dedication, the plaza was near the engineering program's facilities, but the College of Engineering has since been moved. The campus plaza honoring them remains.) Two NASA space flights have been crewed entirely by University of Michigan degree-holders: Gemini IV by James McDivitt and Ed White in 1965 and Apollo 15 by Alfred Worden, David Scott (honorary degree) and James Irwin in 1971. The Apollo 15 astronauts left a 45-word plaque on the Moon establishing its own chapter of the University of Michigan Alumni Association.[14] The Apollo 15 crew also named a crater on the Moon "Wolverine".

Belles lettres

See List of University of Michigan arts alumni

Business

See List of University of Michigan business alumni

Computers, engineering, and technology

Turing, Ada Lovelace Award, and Grace Murray Hopper Award winners

Criminals, murderers, and infamous newsmakers

  • Hawley Harvey Crippen (MED: 1882), infamous murderer; an American homeopath, ear and eye specialist and medicine dispenser. In 1910 he was hanged in Pentonville Prison in London, England, for the murder of his wife Cora Henrietta Crippen.
  • François Duvalier (Public Health, 1944–45), repressive dictator of Haiti, excommunication from the Catholic Church; estimates of those killed by his regime are as high as 30,000.
  • Theodore Kaczynski (M.A.; Ph.D. 1967), 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 (MED: MD Pathology 1952), guilty of second-degree homicide after committing voluntary euthanasia by administering a lethal injection to Thomas Youk; spent eight years in prison
  • John List, murderer and fugitive for eighteen years; caught after being featured in America's Most Wanted, died 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 (BA 1923), thrill killer of Leopold and Loeb, youngest graduate in the University of Michigan's history, murdered 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks
  • Larry Nassar (1985), US national team doctor who sexually assaulted approximately 250 people
  • Herman Webster Mudgett, a.k.a. H.H. Holmes (MED: MD 1884), 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 World's Columbian Exposition; his story was novelized by Erik Larson in his 2003 book The Devil in the White City[17]

"Father of..."

  • John Jacob Abel (PHARM: Ph.D. 1883), North American "father of pharmacology"
  • Leon Jacob Cole (June 1, 1877 – February 17, 1948), geneticist and ornithologist; "father of American bird banding"
  • George Dantzig (MA Math 1937), "father of linear programming"; studied at UM under T.H. Hildebrandt, R.L. Wilder, and G.Y. Rainich
  • Tony Fadell (COE: BSE CompE 1991), "father of the Apple iPod"; created all five generations of the iPod and the Apple iSight camera
  • Moses Gomberg (February 8, 1866 – February 12, 1947), chemistry professor at the University of Michigan; "father of radical chemistry"
  • Saul Hertz, M.D. (April 20, 1905 – July 28, 1950), physician who devised the medical uses of radioactive iodine; pioneered the first targeted cancer therapies; "father of the field of theranostics", combining diagnostic imaging with therapy in a single chemical substance
  • Ellis R. Kerley (September 1, 1924 – September 3, 1998), anthropologist, and pioneer in the field of forensic anthropology
  • Samuel Kirk (1904–1996), psychologist and educator recognized for his accomplishments in the field of special education; "father of special education”
  • Chris Langton (Ph.D.), computer science; "father of artificial life"; founder of the Swarm Corporation; distinguished expellee of the Santa Fe Institute
  • Theodore C. Lyster, M.D. (10 July 1875 – 5 August 1933), United States Army physician and aviation medicine pioneer; "father of aviation medicine"
  • Li Shouheng (Chinese: 李寿恒; pinyin: Lǐ Shòuhéng; 1898–1995), also known as S. H. Li, Chinese educator, chemist and chemical engineer; founded the first chemical engineering department in China; "father of modern Chinese chemical cngineering"
  • Sid Meier, "father of computer gaming"; created games Civilization, Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon, SimGolf
  • Daniel Okrent (BA 1969), public editor of New York Times; editor-at-large of Time Inc.; Pulitzer Prize finalist in history (Great Fortune, 2004); founding father of Rotisserie League Baseball
  • Oyekunle Ayinde "Kunle" Olukotun, Cadence Design Systems Professor in the Stanford School of Engineering, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Pervasive Parallelism Lab; "father of the multi-core processor"
  • Robert E. Park acknowledged as "father of human ecology" by Emory S. Bogardus: "Not only did he coin the name but he laid out the patterns, offered the earliest exhibit of ecological concepts, defined the major ecological processes and stimulated more advanced students to cultivate the fields of research in ecology than most other sociologists combined."
  • Raymond Pearl, biologist, one of the founders of biogerontology
  • John Clark Salyer II, attended the University of Michigan where he received his MS in 1930; for his efforts as head of the Division of Wildlife Refuges, has become known as "father of the National Wildlife Refuge System"
  • Claude Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001), mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer; "father of information theory" and "father of digital circuit design theory"
  • Richard Errett Smalley (June 6, 1943 – October 28, 2005), Gene and Norman Hackerman Professor of Chemistry and a professor of Physics and Astronomy at Rice University; upon his death, the US Senate passed a resolution to honor Smalley, crediting him as the "father of nanotechnology"
  • William A. Starrett, Jr. (June 14, 1877 – March 25, 1932), builder and architect of skyscrapers; best known as the builder of the Empire State Building in New York City; "father of the skyscraper"
  • Larry Teal (March 26, 1905 - July 11, 1984), considered by many to be the father of American orchestral saxophone
  • Olke Uhlenbeck, biochemist, known for his work in RNA biochemistry and RNA catalysis; completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1964; "father of RNA"
  • Mark Weiser (July 23, 1952 – April 27, 1999), computer scientist and chief technology officer (CTO) at Xerox PARC; "father of ubiquitous computing"
  • Wu Ta-You (simplified Chinese: 吴大猷; traditional Chinese: 吳大猷; pinyin: Wú Dàyóu) (September 27, 1907 – March 4, 2000), Chinese physicist and writer who worked in the United States, Canada, mainland China and Taiwan; "father of Chinese physics"

Founders and co-founders

Educators

University presidents

Fiction, nonfiction

See List of University of Michigan arts alumni.

Finance

Foodies

Guggenheim fellows

As of 2021, Michigan alumni include over 145 Guggenheim Fellows.

  • Richard Newbold Adams (August 4, 1924 – September 11, 2018), anthropologist
  • Thomas R. Adams (May 22, 1921 – December 1, 2008), librarian of the John Carter Brown Library and John Hay Professor of Bibliography and University Bibliographer at Brown University
  • Ricardo Ainslie, Mexican-American documentary filmmaker
  • John Richard Alden (23 January 1908, Grand Rapids, Michigan – 14 August 1991, Clearwater, Florida), American historian and author of a number of books on the era of the American Revolutionary War
  • W. Brian Arthur (born 31 July 1945), economist credited with developing the modern approach to increasing returns
  • John William Atkinson (December 31, 1923 – October 27, 2003), also known as Jack Atkinson, psychologist who pioneered the scientific study of human motivation, achievement and behavior
  • Dean Bakopoulos, writer, born in Dearborn Heights, Michigan in 1975; two-time National Endowment for the Arts fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and writer-in-residence at Grinnell College
  • John Bargh (born 1955), social psychologist currently working at Yale University
  • Leslie Bassett, composer of classical music
  • Richard Bauman, folklorist and anthropologist, now retired from Indiana University Bloomington; distinguished professor emeritus of folklore, of anthropology, and of communication and culture
  • Warren Benson (January 26, 1924 – October 6, 2005), composer, mostly of music for wind instruments and percussion.
  • Theodore H. Berlin (8 May 1917, New York City – 16 November 1962, Baltimore), theoretical physicist
  • Derek Bermel (born 1967, in New York City), composer, clarinetist and conductor
  • Robert Berner (November 25, 1935 – January 10, 2015), scientist known for his contributions to the modeling of the carbon cycle
  • Sara Berry (born 1940), scholar of contemporary African political economies, professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, co-founder of the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins
  • Lawrence D. Bobo, W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences and the Dean of Social Science at Harvard University.
  • Kevin Boyle (born 7 October 1960), author and the William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University
  • Bertrand Harris Bronson (June 22, 1902 – March 14, 1986), academic and professor in the English department at the University of California, Berkeley
  • Clair Alan Brown (born August 16, 1903; died 1982), botanist
  • Roger Brown (April 14, 1925 – December 11, 1997), psychologist, known for his work in social psychology and in children's language development
  • Eugene Burnstein, social psychologist and professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
  • John W. Cahn, scientist, recipient of the 1998 National Medal of Science
  • David George Campbell (born January 28, 1949, in Decatur, Illinois, United States), educator, ecologist, environmentalist, and award-winning author of non-fiction
  • Victoria Chang, poet and children's writer
  • Patricia Cheng (born 1952), Chinese-American psychologist
  • Laura Clayton (born December 8, 1943), pianist and composer
  • Allan M. Collins, cognitive scientist, professor emeritus of Learning Sciences at Northwestern University's School of Education and Social Policy
  • Philip Converse (November 17, 1928 – December 30, 2014), political scientist
  • Richard M. Cook, academic who specializes in American literature
  • Harold Courlander (September 18, 1908 – March 15, 1996), novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist and expert in the study of Haitian life
  • Olena Kalytiak Davis (born September 16, 1963), poet
  • Philip James DeVries (born March 7, 1952), tropical biologist whose research focuses on insect ecology and evolution, especially butterflies
  • Charles L. Dolph (August 27, 1918 – June 1, 1994), professor of mathematics, known for research in applied mathematics and engineering
  • William Doppmann (Springfield, Massachusetts, October 10, 1934 — Honokaa, Hawaii, January 27, 2013), concert pianist and composer
  • William H. Durham, biological anthropologist and evolutionary biologist; Bing Professor Emeritus in Human Biology at Stanford University
  • W. Ralph Eubanks (born June 25, 1957), author, journalist, professor, public speaker, and business executive
  • Avard Fairbanks (March 2, 1897 – January 1, 1987), 20th-century sculptor
  • Ada Ferrer, Cuban-American historian; Julius Silver Professor of History and Latin American Studies at New York University; Pulitzer Price for History award recipient
  • Sidney Fine (October 11, 1920 – March 31, 2009), professor of history at the University of Michigan
  • Neil Foley, historian
  • Gabriela Lena Frank (born Berkeley, California, United States, September 1972), pianist and composer of contemporary classical music
  • Steven Frank (born 1957), professor of biology at the University of California, Irvine.
  • William Frankena (June 21, 1908 – October 22, 1994), moral philosopher
  • Ronald Freedman, international demographer and founder of the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan
  • Douglas J. Futuyma (born 24 April 1942), evolutionary biologist
  • Neal Gabler (born 1950), journalist, writer and film critic
  • Mary Gaitskill (born November 11, 1954), novelist, essayist, and short story writer
  • David Gale, American mathematician and economist
  • William A. Gamson, professor of sociology at Boston College, where he was also the co-director of the Media Research and Action Project
  • Seymour Ginsburg (December 12, 1927 – December 5, 2004), pioneer of automata theory, formal language theory, and database theory, and computer science
  • Charles R. Goldman (born 9 November 1930 in Urbana, Illinois), limnologist and ecologist
  • Francisco Goldman (born 1954), novelist, journalist, and Allen K. Smith Professor of Literature and Creative Writing, Trinity College
  • Leslie D. Gottlieb (1936–2012), biologist described by the Botanical Society of America as "one of the most influential plant evolutionary biologists over the past several decades"
  • Josh Greenfeld, author and screenwriter mostly known for his screenplay for the 1974 film Harry and Tonto along with Paul Mazursky
  • Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (born June 27, 1929), historian, focuses on the history of slavery in the Caribbean, Latin America, Louisiana, Africa, and the African diaspora in the Americas
  • Amy Harmon, journalist
  • Joel F. Harrington (born August 25, 1959), historian of pre-modern Germany; Centennial Professor of History at Vanderbilt University
  • Donald Harris (April 7, 1931, in St. Paul, Minnesota – March 29, 2016, in Columbus, Ohio), composer, taught music at the Ohio State University for 22 years, Dean of the College of the Arts 1988–1997
  • Garrett Hongo (born May 30, 1951, Volcano, Hawai'i), Yonsei, fourth-generation Japanese American academic and poet
  • Joseph Hickey (16 April 1907 - 31 August 1993) was an American ornithologist who wrote the landmark Guide to Bird Watching
  • Isabel V. Hull (born 1949) is John Stambaugh Professor Emerita of History and the former chair of the history department at Cornell University.
  • Philip Strong Humphrey (26 February 1926, Hibbing, Minnesota – 13 November 2009, Lawrence, Kansas), ornithologist, museum curator, and professor of zoology
  • M. Kent Jennings (born 1934), political scientist best known for his path-breaking work on the patterns and development of political preferences and behaviors among young Americans
  • Lawrence Joseph (born 1948 in Detroit, Michigan), poet, writer, essayist, critic, lawyer, and professor of law
  • James B. Kaler (born December 29, 1938, in Albany, New York), astronomer and science writer
  • Rosabeth Moss Kanter (born March 15, 1943), Ernest L. Arbuckle professor of business at Harvard Business School
  • Laura Kasischke (born 1961), fiction writer and poet; best known for the novels Suspicious River, The Life Before Her Eyes and White Bird in a Blizzard
  • Mike Kelley (October 27, 1954 – c. January 31, 2012), artist
  • Aviva Kempner (born December 23, 1946), filmmaker
  • James Stark Koehler (10 November 1914 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin – 19 June 2006 in Urbana, Illinois), physicist, specializing in metal defects and their interactions; known for the eponymous Peach-Koehler stress formula
  • Timothy Kramer (born 1959), composer whose music has earned him a Fulbright Scholarship, an NEA grant, and a Guggenheim Fellowship
  • Edward Kravitz (born December 19, 1932), George Packer Berry Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School
  • Armin Landeck (1905–1984), printmaker and educator
  • Chihchun Chi-sun Lee (Chinese: 李志純; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Lí Chì-sûn; Pinyin: Li Zhìchún, born 1970), composer of contemporary classical music
  • Otis Hamilton Lee (28 September 1902, Montevideo, Minnesota – 17 September 1948, Vermont), philosopher; Guggenheim Fellow
  • Normand Lockwood (March 19, 1906, New York, New York – March 9, 2002), composer
  • Alvin D. Loving Jr. (September 19, 1935 – June 21, 2005), better known as Al Loving, abstract expressionist painter
  • Mary Lum (born 1951), visual artist
  • Suzanne McClelland, New York-based artist known for abstract work based in language, speech, and sound
  • Jay Meek (1937 – November 3, 2007, St. Paul), poet, and director of the Creative Writing program at the University of North Dakota
  • Jonathan Metzl (born December 12, 1964), psychiatrist and author
  • Nancy Milford (born March 26, 1938), biographer
  • Harvey Alfred Miller (October 19, 1928, Sturgis, Michigan – January 7, 2020, Palm Bay, Florida), botanist, specializing in Pacific Islands bryophytes
  • Susan Montgomery (born 2 April 1943, Lansing, Michigan), mathematician whose current research interests concern noncommutative algebras
  • Howard Markel (born April 23, 1960), physician and medical historian
  • George H. Miley (born 1933), professor emeritus of physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
  • Christine Montross (born 1973), medical doctor and writer
  • Paul M. Naghdi (March 29, 1924 – July 9, 1994), professor of mechanical engineering at University of California, Berkeley
  • Homer Neal (June 13, 1942 – May 23, 2018), particle physicist and a distinguished professor at the University of Michigan
  • Marjorie Hope Nicolson, literary scholar
  • Harald Herborg Nielsen (January 25, 1903 – January 8, 1973), physicist
  • Nicholas Nixon (born October 27, 1947), photographer, known for his work in portraiture and documentary photography
  • Richard Nonas (January 3, 1936 – May 11, 2021), anthropologist and post-minimalist sculptor
  • Mary Beth Norton (born 1943), American historian, specializing in American colonial history and well known for her work on women's history and the Salem witch trials
  • Pat Oleszko, visual and performing artist
  • Susan Orlean (born October 31, 1955), journalist and bestselling author of The Orchid Thief and The Library Book
  • Peter Orner, author of two novels, two story collections, and a book of essays
  • Scott E. Page, social scientist and John Seely Brown Distinguished University Professor of Complexity, Social Science, and Management at the University of Michigan
  • Douglass Parker (May 27, 1927 – February 8, 2011), classicist, academic, and translator
  • Doug Peacock, naturalist, outdoorsman, and author
  • Vivian Perlis (April 26, 1928 – July 4, 2019), musicologist; founder and former director of Yale University's Oral History of American Music
  • Elizabeth J. Perry, scholar of Chinese politics and history at Harvard University, where she is the Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government and director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute.
  • Alvin Plantinga (born November 15, 1932), analytic philosopher who works primarily in the fields of philosophy of religion, epistemology (particularly on issues involving epistemic justification), and logic
  • Michael Posner, psychologist, researcher in the field of attention, and the editor of numerous cognitive and neuroscience compilations
  • Richard Prum (born 1961), William Robertson Coe Professor of ornithology; head curator of vertebrate zoology at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University
  • Rayna Rapp (pen name Rayna R. Reiter), professor and associate chair of anthropology at New York University, specializing in gender and health
  • Bertram Raven (September 26, 1926 – February 26, 2020), academic; member of the faculty of the psychology department at UCLA from 1956 until his death.
  • Roger Reynolds (born July 18, 1934), Pulitzer prize-winning composer
  • Roxana Robinson (born 30 November 1946), novelist and biographer
  • David Rosenberg (born August 1, 1943, in Detroit, Michigan), poet, biblical translator, editor, and educator
  • Norman Rosten (January 1, 1913 – March 7, 1995), poet, playwright, and novelist
  • Elizabeth S. Russell (May 1, 1913 – May 28, 2001), also known as "Tibby" Russellz, biologist in the field of mammalian developmental genetics
  • Stanley Schachter (April 15, 1922 – June 7, 1997), social psychologist
  • Betsy Schneider, photographer who lives and works in the Boston Area
  • Edwin William Schultz (1888 Wisconsin – 1971), pathologist
  • Paul Schupp (born March 12, 1937), professor emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
  • Kathryn Kish Sklar (born December 1939), American historian, author, and professor
  • Paul Slud (31 March 1918, New York City – 20 February 2006, Catlett, Virginia), ornithologist and tropical ecologist
  • Joel Sobel (born 24 March 1954), economist; professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego
  • Frank Spedding (22 October 1902 – 15 December 1984), Canadian-American chemist; expert on rare earth elements, and on extraction of metals from minerals
  • Edward A. Spiegel (1931 — January 2, 2020), professor of astronomy at Columbia University
  • Duncan G. Steel (born 1951), experimental physicist, researcher and professor in quantum optics in condensed matter physics
  • Alexander Stephan (August 16, 1946 – May 29, 2009), specialist in German literature and area studies
  • James W. Stigler, psychologist, researcher, entrepreneur and author
  • Joan E. Strassmann, evolutionary biologist and the Charles Rebstock Professor of Biology at the Washington University in St. Louis
  • Larissa Szporluk, poet and professor
  • G. David Tilman (born 22 July 1949), ForMemRS, ecologist
  • Richard Toensing (March 11, 1940 - July 2, 2014), composer and music educator
  • David Treuer (born 1970) (Ojibwe), writer, critic and academic
  • Susan M. Ervin-Tripp (1927–2018), linguist whose specialities were psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research
  • Karen Uhlenbeck (born August 24, 1942), mathematician and a founder of modern geometric analysis
  • Sim Van der Ryn, architect, researcher, educator
  • Henry Van Dyke, Jr. (1928 – December 22, 2011), novelist, editor, teacher and musician
  • Andrew G. Walder (born 1953), political sociologist specializing in the study of Chinese society
  • William Shi-Yuan Wang (Chinese: 王士元; born 1933), linguist, with expertise in phonology, the history of Chinese language and culture, historical linguistics, and the evolution of language in humans
  • Michael Watts (born 1951 in England), emeritus Class of 1963 Professor of Geography and Development Studies at the University of California, Berkeley
  • Grady Webster (1927–2005), plant systematist and taxonomist; recipient of a number of awards and appointed to fellowships of botanical institutions
  • Joan Weiner, philosopher and professor emerita of philosophy at Indiana University Bloomington, known for books on Gottlob Frege
  • Morris Weitz (July 24, 1916 – February 1, 1981), philosopher of aesthetics who focused primarily on ontology, interpretation, and literary criticism
  • Edmund White (born January 13, 1940), novelist, memoirist, and an essayist on literary and social topics
  • Michael Stewart Witherell (born 22 September 1949), physicist and laboratory director. He is currently the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
  • Jorge Eduardo Wright (20 April 1922 – 2005), Argentinian mycologist
  • X. J. Kennedy (born Joseph Charles Kennedy on August 21, 1929, in Dover, New Jersey), poet, translator, anthologist, editor, and author of children's literature and textbooks on English literature and poetry
  • Al Young (May 31, 1939 – April 17, 2021), poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and professor

Journalism, publishing, and broadcasting

Law, government, and public policy

MacArthur Foundation award winners

As of 2020, 31 Michigan alumni — 17 undergraduate students and 14 graduate students — have been awarded a MacArthur fellowship.

  • James Blinn (BS Physics 1970; MSE 1972; Communications Science 1970; MS Information and Control Engineering 1972)
  • Caroline Walker Bynum (BA 1962), Medieval scholar; MacArthur Fellow
  • Eric Charnov (BS 1969), evolutionary ecologist
  • William A. Christian (Ph.D. 1971), religious studies scholar
  • Shannon Lee Dawdy (M.A. 2000, Ph.D. 2003), 2010 fellowship winner; assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago
  • Philip DeVries (B.S. 1975), biologist
  • William H. Durham (Ph.D. 1973), anthropologist
  • Andrea Dutton (MA, Ph.D.) is an associate professor of geology at the University of Florida
  • Aaron Dworkin (BA 1997, M.A. 1998), 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 (BS 1984), 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 (BA 1978; MPH 1982), executive director of Project Impact
  • Ann Ellis Hanson (BA 1957; MA 1963), visiting associate professor of Greek and Latin
  • John Henry Holland (MA 1954; Ph.D. 1959), professor of electrical engineering and computer science, College of Engineering; professor of psychology, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
  • June Huh (Ph.D.) a mathematician and a 2022 winner
  • Monica Kim (Ph.D.), University of Wisconsin-Madison historian and winner in 2022
  • Vonnie McLoyd (MA 1973, Ph.D. (1975), developmental psychologist
  • Natalia Molina, professor; received her Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Michigan
  • Denny Moore (BA), linguist, anthropologist
  • Nancy A. Moran (Ph.D. 1982), evolutionary biologist; Yale professor; co-founder of the Yale Microbial Diversity Institute
  • Dominique Morisseau (BFA 2000) is an American playwright and actor from Detroit, Michigan
  • Cecilia Muñoz (BA 2000), senior vice president for the Office of Research, Advocacy and Legislation at the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), White House Director of Intergovernmental Affairs
  • Dimitri Nakassis (BA 1997), 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 (Ph.D. 1989), William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology; Head Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University
  • Mary Tinetti (BA 1973; MD 1978), physician; Gladys Phillips Crofoot Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale University; Director of the Yale Program on Aging
  • Amos Tversky (Ph.D.. 1965), psychologist
  • Karen K. Uhlenbeck (BA 1964), mathematician
  • Jesmyn Ward (MFA 2005), writer of fiction
  • Julia Wolfe (BA 1980), classical composer
  • Henry Tutwiler Wright (BA 1964), 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 (MA 2002; Ph.D. 2005); fellow with the Harvard Society of Fellows (2005–2007) prior to joining the faculty of the University of Chicago; 2014 MacArthur Fellow
  • George Zweig (BA 1959), physicist who conceptualized quarks ("aces" in his nomenclature)

Mathematics

Mathematics educators

Fellows of the American Mathematical Society

As of 2021, UM numbers amongst its alumni 29 Fellows of the American Mathematical Society.

  • Kenneth Appel (October 8, 1932 – April 19, 2013) was an American mathematician who 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.
  • Susanne Brenner is an American mathematician, whose research concerns the finite element method and related techniques for the numerical solution of differential equations.
  • Ralph Louis Cohen (born 1952) is an American mathematician, specializing in algebraic topology and differential topology.
  • Robert Connelly (born July 15, 1942) is a mathematician specializing in discrete geometry and rigidity theory.
  • Brian Conrey (23 June 1955) is an American mathematician and the executive director of the American Institute of Mathematics.
  • Ronald Getoor (9 February 1929, Royal Oak, Michigan – 28 October 2017, La Jolla, San Diego, California) was an American mathematician.
  • Tai-Ping Liu (Chinese: 劉太平; pinyin: Liú Tàipíng; born 18 November 1945) is a Taiwanese mathematician, specializing in partial differential equations.
  • Russell Lyons (6 September 1957) is an American mathematician, specializing in probability theory on graphs, combinatorics, statistical mechanics, ergodic theory and harmonic analysis.
  • Gaven Martin FRSNZ FASL FAMS (born 8 October 1958) is a New Zealand mathematician.
  • Susan Montgomery (born 2 April 1943 in Lansing, MI) is a distinguished American mathematician whose current research interests concern noncommutative algebras
  • Paul Muhly (born September 7, 1944) is an American mathematician.
  • James Munkres (born August 18, 1930) is a professor emeritus of mathematics at MIT
  • Zuhair Nashed (born May 14, 1936, in Aleppo, Syria) is an American mathematician, working on integral and operator equations, inverse and ill-posed problems, numerical and nonlinear functional analysis, optimization and approximation theory, operator theory, optimal control theory, signal analysis, and signal processing.
  • Peter Orlik (born 12 November 1938, in Budapest) is an American mathematician, known for his research on topology, algebra, and combinatorics.
  • Mihnea Popa (born 11 August 1973) is a Romanian-American mathematician at Harvard University, specializing in algebraic geometry. He is known for his work on complex birational geometry, Hodge theory, abelian varieties, and vector bundles.
  • Jane Cronin Scanlon (July 17, 1922 – June 19, 2018) was an American mathematician and an emeritus professor of mathematics at Rutgers University.
  • Maria E. Schonbek is an Argentine-American mathematician at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research concerns fluid dynamics and associated partial differential equations such as the Navier–Stokes equations.
  • Paul Schupp (born March 12, 1937) is a professor emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
  • George Roger Sell (February 7, 1937 – May 29, 2015) was an American mathematician, specializing in differential equations, dynamical systems, and applications to fluid dynamics, climate modeling, control systems, and other subjects.
  • Charles Sims (April 14, 1937 – October 23, 2017) was an American mathematician best known for his work in group theory.
  • Isadore Singer (May 3, 1924 – February 11, 2021) was an American mathematician.
  • Christopher Skinner (born June 4, 1972) is an American mathematician working in number theory and arithmetic aspects of the Langlands program.
  • Karen E. Smith (born 1965 in Red Bank, New Jersey) is an American mathematician, specializing in commutative algebra and algebraic geometry.
  • Kannan Soundararajan (born December 27, 1973) is an India-born American mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Stanford University.
  • Irena Swanson is an American mathematician specializing in commutative algebra.
  • Karen Uhlenbeck (born August 24, 1942) is an American mathematician and a founder of modern geometric analysis.
  • Judy L. Walker is an American mathematician. She is the Aaron Douglas Professor of Mathematics at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where she chaired the mathematics department from 2012 through 2016
  • John H. Walter (born 14 December 1927, Los Angeles) is an American mathematician known for proving the Walter theorem in the theory of finite groups.
  • Charles Weibel (born October 28, 1950, in Terre Haute, Indiana) is an American mathematician working on algebraic K-theory, algebraic geometry and homological algebra.

Mathematicians: African American

African American pioneers in the field of Mathematics

Manhattan project

A number of Michigan graduates or fellows were involved with the Manhattan Project, chiefly with regard to the physical chemistry of the device.

  • 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, engineer, physicist and administrator
  • Donald L. Campbell, chemical engineer
  • Allen F. Donovan, worked for the Manhattan Project on the design of the shape of the Fat Man atomic bomb and its release mechanism
  • 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; research associate on the Manhattan Project 1944–1946, 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, physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II.
  • Isabella L. Karle, American chemist instrumental in developing techniques to extract plutonium chloride,[35] recipient of the Garvan-Olin Medal, Gregori Aminoff Prize, Bower Award, National Medal of Science, and the Navy Distinguished Civilian Service Award
  • 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 (1933, MA 1934, Ph.D. 1936), patented a device that made the first hydrogen bomb with Dr. Edward Teller; member of the Manhattan Project
  • John Henry Manley, physicist who worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley before becoming a group leader during the Manhattan Project.
  • Elliott Organick, chemist, Manhattan Project, 1944–1945
  • Carolyn Parker, physicist who worked 1943–1947 on the Dayton Project, the polonium research and development arm of the Manhattan Project; first African-American woman to have gained a postgraduate degree in physics[36]
  • 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 (1925), 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

Military

Miscellaneous honors

NASA

National Academy Members

As of 2021, dozens of Michigan graduates have been inducted into various National Academies (inter alia, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Science...).

  • John Jacob Abel, biochemist and pharmacologist, established the pharmacology department at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1893
  • Edward Charles Bassett (1921–1999), architect based in San Francisco; elected into the National Academy of Design as an associate member in 1970, and became a full member in 1990
  • Michael Bellavia, COO of Animax Entertainment
  • John Robert Beyster, founder of Science Applications International Corporation
  • Lyman James Briggs, nominated by US President Herbert C. Hoover as director of the National Bureau of Standards in 1932
  • James Brown, biologist and academic
  • John W. Cahn (January 9, 1928 – March 14, 2016), scientist and recipient of the 1998 National Medal of Science
  • Robert L. Carneiro, anthropologist and curator of the American Museum of Natural History
  • Rufus Cole, medical doctor, first director of the Rockefeller University Hospital
  • George Comstock. helped organize the American Astronomical Society in 1897, serving first as secretary and later as vice president; elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1899
  • Heber Doust Curtis, worked at Lick Observatory 1902–1920, continuing the survey of nebulae initiated by Keeler
  • David DeWitt, elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering (1998) for the theory and construction of database systems; Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery
  • Allen F. Donovan, aerospace engineer and systems engineer who was involved in the development of the Atlas and Titan rocket families
  • James R. Downing, pediatric oncologist and executive; president and chief executive officer of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
  • Harry George Drickamer (November 19, 1918 – May 6, 2002), born Harold George Weidenthal, pioneer experimentalist in high-pressure studies of condensed matter
  • John M. Eargle, Oscar- and Grammy-winning audio engineer; musician (piano and church and theater organ)
  • Kent Flannery, archaeologist who has conducted and published extensive research on the pre-Columbian cultures and civilizations of Mesoamerica, and in particular those of central and southern Mexico
  • Mars Guy Fontana, namesake of the university's Fontana Laboratories and a professorship
  • Donald S. Fredrickson, medical researcher, principally of the lipid and cholesterol metabolism; director of National Institutes of Health and subsequently the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
  • Robert A. Fuhrman, engineer responsible for the development of the Polaris Missile and Poseidon missile' president and chief operating officer of Lockheed Corporation; elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1976 "for contributions to the design and development of the Polaris and Poseidon underwater launch ballistic missile systems"
  • Stanley Marion Garn, human biologist and educator; professor of anthropology at the College for Literature, Science and Arts at the University of Michigan
  • Sam Granick, biochemist known for his studies of ferritin and iron metabolism, of chloroplast structure, and of the biosynthesis of heme and related molecules
  • Sonia Guillén Guillén, one of Peru's leading experts on mummies
  • George Edward Holbrook, chemical engineer and a founding member of the National Academy of Engineering
  • George W. Housner, professor of earthquake engineering at the California Institute of Technology and National Medal of Science laureate
  • Bill Ivey, folklorist and author; seventh chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts; a past chairman of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences
  • Kelly Johnson, contributed to a series of important aircraft designs, most notably the Lockheed U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird
  • Lewis Ralph Jones, botanist and agricultural biologist
  • Paul Kangas was the Miami-based co-anchor of the PBS television program Nightly Business Report, a role he held from 1979, when the show was a local PBS program in Miami, through December 31, 2009.
  • Paul J. Kern served as Commanding General of the United States Army Materiel Command 2001–2004.
  • Pete King He was elected president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in 1967.
  • Conrad Phillip Kottak is an American anthropologist. He did extensive research in Brazil and Madagascar, visiting societies there and writing books about them.
  • Thomas A. LaVeist (MA 1985, PhD 1988, PDF 1990), Dean and Weatherhead Presidential Chair in Health Equity at Tulane University School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine[23]
  • Alexander Leaf was a physician and research scientist best known for his work linking diet and exercise to the prevention of heart disease.
  • Samuel C. Lind was a radiation chemist, referred to as "the father of modern radiation chemistry".
  • Joyce Marcus is a Latin American archaeologist and professor in the Department of Anthropology, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She also holds the position of Curator of Latin American Archaeology, University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology.
  • Bill Joy (born November 8, 1954), co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982, served as its chief scientist and CTO until 2003
  • Isabella Karle was an American chemist who was instrumental in developing techniques to extract plutonium chloride from a mixture containing plutonium oxide.
  • James Nobel Landis, founding member of the National Academy of Engineering; president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers 1958–59
  • Warren Harmon Lewis He served as president of the American Association of Anatomists and the International Society for Experimental Cytology, and held honorary memberships in the Royal Microscopical Society in London and Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome.
  • Anne Harris She has served an elected term on the Board of Governors of the Chicago Chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.
  • Herbert Spencer Jennings was an American zoologist, geneticist, and eugenicist.
  • Digby McLaren he was the head of the palaeontology section of the GSC (the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC))
  • Marshall Warren Nirenberg, biochemist and geneticist; shared a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968
  • Kenneth Olden He was director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and National Toxicology Program, being the first African-American to head an NIH institute, a position he held from 1991 to 2005.
  • Raymond Pearl was an American biologist, regarded as one of the founders of biogerontology.
  • Samuel C. Phillips was a United States Air Force general who served as director of NASA's Apollo program from 1964 to 1969, the seventh director of the NSA from 1972 to 1973, and as commander of Air Force Systems Command from 1973 to 1975.
  • John Porter, led efforts resulting in doubling funding for the NIH during his chairmanship
  • Bonnie Rideout, member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), having served on the Board of Governors for the Washington, D.C., branch.
  • Eugene Roberts, neuroscientist. In 1950, he was the first to report on the discovery of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) in the brain, and his work was key in demonstrating GABA as the main inhibitory neurotransmitter in the mammalian central nervous system
  • Elizabeth S. Russell, biologist in the field of mammalian developmental genetics
  • Shirley E. Schwartz, inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 1996 for her accomplishments in the field of chemistry
  • Frank Spitzer, Austrian-born American mathematician who made fundamental contributions to probability theory, including the theory of random walks, fluctuation theory, percolation theory, the Wiener sausage, and especially the theory of interacting particle systems.
  • Michael Stryker an American neuroscientist specializing in studies of how spontaneous neural activity organizes connections in the developing mammalian brain
  • Kapila Vatsyayan was a leading scholar of Indian classical dance, art, architecture, and art history. She served as a member of parliament and as a bureaucrat in India, and also served as the founding director of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts.
  • Mary Jane West-Eberhard is an American theoretical biologist noted for arguing that phenotypic and developmental plasticity played a key role in shaping animal evolution and speciation.
  • Eugene C. Whitney was a celebrated power engineer who designed hydroelectric turbines and generators at Westinghouse Electric Company. The pinnacle of his career was the machinery for the expansion of the Grand Coulee Dam to add the #3 Powerhouse in 1966–74.
  • Henry T. Wright He serves as the Albert Clanton Spaulding Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, and Curator of Near Eastern Archaeology in the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.
  • Robert Wurtz is an American neuroscientist working as a NIH Distinguished Scientist and chief of the section on visuomotor integration at the National Eye Institute.
  • James Wyngaarden served as director of National Institutes of Health between 1982 and 1989.
  • Melinda A. Zeder is an American archaeologist and curator emeritus in the Department of Anthropology of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.
  • George Zweig is a Russian-American physicist. He was trained as a particle physicist under Richard Feynman. He introduced, independently of Murray Gell-Mann, the quark model (although he named the constituent components "aces").

Newsmakers

  • Bill Ayers (BA 1968), co-founder of the radical Weathermen
  • Benjamin Bolger (BA 1994), holds what is said to be the largest number of graduate degrees held by a living person
  • Mamah Borthwick (BA 1892), mistress of architect Frank Lloyd Wright who was murdered at his studio, Taliesin
  • Napoleon Chagnon (Ph.D.), anthropologist, professor of anthropology
  • Rima Fakih (BA), 2010 Miss USA
  • Geoffrey Fieger (BA, MA), attorney based in Southfield, Michigan
  • Robert Groves (Ph.D. 1975), 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 (COE: BSc Physics 1960), 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
  • Jerald F. ter Horst (BA 1947), briefly President Ford's press secretary
  • 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 (BFA 2006), 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 (MS Astronomy), author of ufological writings; played role in "uncovering" the so-called "Philadelphia Experiment"
  • Adolph Mongo (BGS 1976), political consultant
  • Jerry Newport (BA Mathematics), 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[47]
  • Robert Shiller (BA 1967), economist; author of Irrational Exuberance
  • Jerome Singleton (COE: IEOR), Paralympic athlete, competing mainly in category T44 (single below knee amputation) sprint events
  • Madelon Stockwell (BA 1872), first woman to graduate from the University of Michigan

Not-for-profit

Pulitzer Prize winners

As of 2022, 35 of Michigan's matriculants have been awarded a Pulitzer Prize. By alumni count, Michigan ranks fifth (as of 2018) among all schools whose alumni have won Pulitzers.

Rhodes Scholars

As of 2021, Michigan had matriculated 30 Rhodes Scholars. Some notable winners are linked below.

Science

National Medal of Science Laureates/National Medal of Technology and Innovation

Sloan Research Fellows

  • James Andreoni (born 1959 in Beloit, Wisconsin), professor in the Economics Department of the University of California, San Diego, where he directs the EconLab
  • John Avise (born 1948), evolutionary geneticist, conservationist, ecologist and natural historian
  • Robert Berner (November 25, 1935 – January 10, 2015), scientist known for his contributions to the modeling of the carbon cycle
  • Allan M. Collins, cognitive scientist, professor emeritus of Learning Sciences at Northwestern University's School of Education and Social Policy
  • Ralph Louis Cohen (born 1952), mathematician, specializing in algebraic topology and differential topology
  • Michael D. Fried, mathematician working in the geometry and arithmetic of families of nonsingular projective curve covers
  • William L. Jungers (born November 17, 1948), anthropologist, distinguished teaching professor and the chair of the Department of Anatomical Sciences at State University of New York at Stony Brook on Long Island, New York
  • Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, economist specializing in information, incentive-centered design and public policy
  • Gaven Martin FRSNZ FASL FAMS (born 8 October 1958), Zealand mathematician
  • George J. Minty Jr. (September 16, 1929, Detroit – August 6, 1986, Bloomington, Indiana), mathematician, specializing in mathematical analysis and discrete mathematics; known for the Klee-Minty cube and the Browder-Minty theorem
  • Alison R. H. Narayan (born 1984), chemist; William R. Roush assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
  • Homer Neal (June 13, 1942 – May 23, 2018), particle physicist and a distinguished professor at the University of Michigan
  • Hugh David Politzer (born August 31, 1949), theoretical physicist and the Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology
  • Jessica Purcell, mathematician specializing in low-dimensional topology whose research topics have included hyperbolic Dehn surgery and the Jones polynomial.
  • Donald Sarason (January 26, 1933 – April 8, 2017), mathematician who made fundamental advances in the areas of Hardy space theory and VMO.
  • Stephen Smale (born July 15, 1930), mathematician, known for his research in topology, dynamical systems and mathematical economics
  • Richard Smalley (June 6, 1943 – October 28, 2005), Gene and Norman Hackerman Professor of Chemistry and a professor of Physics and Astronomy at Rice University.
  • Karen E. Smith (born 1965 in Red Bank, New Jersey), mathematician, specializing in commutative algebra and algebraic geometry
  • James Stasheff (born January 15, 1936, New York City), mathematician
  • Chelsea Walton, mathematician whose research interests include noncommutative algebra, noncommutative algebraic geometry, symmetry in quantum mechanics, Hopf algebras, and quantum groups
  • Zhouping Xin (Chinese: 辛周平; born 13 July 1959), Chinese mathematician and the William M.W. Mong Professor of Mathematics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; specializes in partial differential equations

Sports

See List of University of Michigan sporting alumni

References

  1. ^ "Honoring the Class of 2022 – Commencement" (PDF). University of Michigan Commencement. April 12, 2022. p. 142. Archived (PDF) from the original on December 23, 2022. Retrieved January 9, 2023.
  2. ^ "Octavia Williams Bates". The Law Student's Helper: A Monthly Magazine for the Student in and Out of Law School. 1895.
  3. ^ "Jan BenDor". Michigan Women Forward. Retrieved December 4, 2023.
  4. ^ "Maureen Greenwood-Basken | HuffPost". www.huffpost.com. Retrieved December 4, 2023.
  5. ^ Kauffman, Bill (May 19, 2008) When the Left Was Right Archived April 30, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, The American Conservative
  6. ^ "'Healthcare is at risk': The impact of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death on everyday Americans". MSNBC.com. Retrieved December 4, 2023.
  7. ^ Cancryn, Adam; Owermohle, Sarah (August 18, 2021). "What's driving Biden's booster plan". POLITICO. Retrieved December 4, 2023.
  8. ^ Carrns, Ann (February 5, 2021). "In 'Do-Over,' Enrollment in Affordable Care Act Health Insurance Reopens". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved December 4, 2023.
  9. ^ "Obit. Miss H. Anna Quinby. Died 28 Oct 1931, Wilmington, Ohio". The Newark Advocate. October 31, 1931. p. 12. Retrieved December 4, 2023.
  10. ^ ""100 Years of the Women's Vote" with Dr. Susan Lederman". Westfield, NJ Patch. February 20, 2020. Retrieved October 22, 2021.
  11. ^ "Frances Allen, Fran Allen". Frances Allen - A Pioneer in the World of Computing. September 22, 2020. Retrieved December 4, 2023.
  12. ^ "thebahamasweekly.com - Bahamian-American Engineer Receives Prestigious NASA Honor Award for Equal Employment Opportunity". www.thebahamasweekly.com. Retrieved December 4, 2023.
  13. ^ Mackie, John (October 1, 2020). "Queen of the Hurricanes Elsie MacGill has her heritage moment".
  14. ^ "Michigan Myth: Does the University's Alumni Association have a chapter on the moon? - the Michigan Daily". Archived from the original on August 23, 2012. Retrieved October 8, 2012.
  15. ^ Peter B. Lederman
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NOTE: The University of Michigan Alumni Directory is no longer printed, as of 2004. To find more recent information on an alumnus, one must log into the Alumni Association website to search their online directory.

External links

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  • Famous U-M alumni
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