Ricardo Ainslie (Ph.D.), native of Mexico City, Mexico; Guggenheim award winner
Santos Primo Amadeo (BA), 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
Octavia Williams Bates (BA 1877; LAW 1896), suffragist, clubwoman, author; focused on the political enfranchisement of women[2]
Jan BenDor (SOSW M.S.W.), women's rights activist, member of Michigan Women's Hall of Fame, 'founding mother of the Rape Crisis Center movement in Michigan,'[3] active in the Michigan Women's Task Force on Rape
George William Crockett (LAW: JD 1934), 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 (1939–1943)
Lyman T. Johnson (AM 1931), 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
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
Milo Radulovich, became a symbol of the excesses of anti-Communism when he challenged his removal from the Air Force Reserve (judged a security risk) 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
Eliza Read Sunderland (PH.B 1889; Ph.D. 1892), writer, educator, lecturer, women's rights advocate, first president of the Western Women's Conference
Jack Hood Vaughn (BA, MA), second director of the United States Peace Corps, succeeding Sargent Shriver
Raoul Wallenberg (ARCH: B.Arch. 1935), Swedish diplomat, rescued thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, primarily in Hungary
Jerry White (BUS: MBA 2005), co-founder and executive director of the Landmine Survivors Network
Hao Wu (BUS: MBA 2000), documentary filmmaker and blogger; controversially imprisoned by Chinese government for 5 months in 2006
Aerospace
Robert A. Fuhrman (BS AE), 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 (COE: 1909), early aviation industry executive; co-founder and first president of the Boeing Company; senior executive of several aircraft companies, including Fokker and Consolidated Aircraft
Edgar J. Lesher, aircraft designer; pilot; professor of aerospace engineering
Elizabeth Muriel Gregory "Elsie" MacGill (COE: MSE) OC, known as the "Queen of the Hurricanes"; first female aircraft designer, first woman to earn an aeronautical engineering degree, first woman in Canada to receive a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering[11]
Astronauts
Two NASA space flights have been crewed entirely by University of Michigan degree-holders.
Gemini IV's all-Michigan crew flew in 1965 and has a campus plaza named after them:
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 12–16; Brigadier general, U.S. Air Force; vice president (retired), Rockwell International Corporation
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
Apollo 15's all-Michigan crew left a plaque on the Moon establishing a lunar chapter of the University of Michigan Alumni Association in 1971:[12]
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
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
Jim Blinn, computer scientist who first became widely known for his work as a computer graphics expert at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
Scott J. Bolton (B.S.E.), principal investigator with NASA on various research programs since 1988; principal investigator of Juno, a New Frontiers program mission to Jupiter which began primary science in 2016
Beth A. Brown (Ph.D.), NASA astrophysicist with a research focus on X-ray observations of elliptical galaxies and black holes; earned a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Michigan in 1998, the first African-American woman to do so
Steve Chappell, aerospace engineer; Technical Lead & Research Specialist for Wyle Integrated Science & Engineering at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas
Jeff Dozier (Ph.D.), worked as a senior member of the technical staff and the Project Scientist for a potential spectroscopy space mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; worked 1990–1992 at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center as the Senior Project Scientist at the start of NASA's Earth Observing System
Dorothy McFadden Hoover (A.B.D.), physicist and mathematician; pioneer in the early days of NASA; hired at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, later NASA) in Langley in 1943 as a professional (P-1) mathematician
Usama Fayyad (Ph.D.), held a leadership role 1989–1996 at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where his work in the analysis and exploration of Big Data in scientific applications garnered him the Lew Allen Award for Excellence in Research, as well as a U.S. Government medal from NASA
Martin Harwit (M.S.), designed, built and launched the first rocket-powered liquid-helium-cooled telescopes in the late 1960s; carried out astronomical observations from high-altitude NASA aircraft
Richard C. Henry (M.S.), lieutenant general in the United States Air Force who served as commander of the Space Division, Air Force Systems Command, Los Angeles Air Force Station, CA
John T. Howe (B.S.E.), during his 35 years with NASA, he served as senior staff scientist, head of aerothermodynamics, assistant chief for the physics branch, and branch chief for fluid dynamics
Hyuck Kwon (Ph.D.), with the Lockheed Engineering and Sciences Company, Houston, Texas, 1989–1993, as a principal engineer, working for NASA Space Shuttle and Space Station satellite communication systems
Stephen P. Maran (Ph.D.), astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, 1969–2004; served as a staff scientist, project scientist, and principal investigator, and was involved in research on a number of missions, including the Hubble Space Telescope
Rob Meyerson (B.S.), aerospace engineer at NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC), 1985–1997, working on human spaceflight systems, including the aerodynamic design of the Space Shuttle orbiter drag parachute; former president of Blue Origin
Elisa Quintana (Ph.D.), member of the NASA Kepler Mission Team at NASA Ames Research Center 2006–2017; scientific programmer developing the Kepler pipeline, for which she was awarded NASA Software of the Year in 2010
Judith Racusin (B.S.), astrophysicist;research aerospace technologist in fields and particles at Goddard Space Flight Center
William H. Robbins (B.S.), engineer for NASA; worked on the NERVA nuclear rocket engine, NASA wind turbines, communication satellites, and the Shuttle-Centaur program
James Russell III (Ph.D.), atmospheric scientist; served as the developer of instrumentation for several NASA probes
Kamal Sarabandi (Ph.D.), member of Science Team for NASA Soil Moisture Active and Passive (SMAP)
Roy Spencer, meteorologist, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA's Aqua satellite
Vaino Jack Vehko (B.S.), in 1960, director of engineering on the Saturn S-I and S-IB booster rockets, the forerunners of the Saturn V that launched the NASA Apollo Moon missions
Kevin J. Zahnle (Ph.D.), planetary scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center; Fellow of the American Geophysical Union; studies impact processes, atmospheric escape processes, geochemical modelling of atmophiles, and photochemical modelling
Noel Zamot (M.S.); member of the NASA Astronaut Training Group 16; semifinalist NASA astronaut candidate
Arden L. Bement Jr. (Ph.D. 1963), engineer and scientist; elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to the understanding of irradiation effects in nuclear materials and development of advanced materials concepts for defense applications; director of the National Science Foundation; awarded the ANSI's Chairman's award in 2005
James Blinn (BS Physics and Communications Science 1970, MS Information and Control Engineering, 1972), elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to the technology of educational use of computer graphics and for expository articles; 1991 MacArthur Fellowship
Lee Boysel (BSE EE 1962, MSE EE 1963), developor of four-phase logic; creator of the first integrated circuit with over 100 logic gates, the Fairchild 3800 / 3804 8-bit ALUs, and the Four-Phase Systems AL1
Edward S. Davidson, developer of the reservation table approach to optimum design and cyclic scheduling of pipelines; designer of an eight-node symmetric multiprocessor system; winner of the 2000 IEEE/ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award "for his seminal contributions to the design, implementation, and performance evaluation of high performance pipelines and multiprocessor systems"
Stephanie Forrest (Ph.D.), known for her work in adaptive systems, including genetic algorithms, computational immunology, biological modeling, automated software repair, and computer security; recipient of ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award 2011
David Kuck (BS), developer of the Parafrase compiler system, which was the first testbed for the development of automatic vectorization and related program transformations; led the construction of the CEDAR project, a hierarchical shared-memory 32-processor SMP supercomputer completed in 1988 at the University of Illinois; IEEE award winner
Niels Provos (Ph.D.), developer of the bcrypt adaptive cryptographic hash function for the OpenBSD operating system; author of numerous software packages, including the libevent event driven programming system, the Systrace access control system, the honeyd honeypot system, the StegDetect steganography detector, and the Bcrypt password encryption technique
Avi Rubin (Ph.D.), expert in systems and networking security; led the research team that successfully cracked the security code of Texas Instruments' RFID chip; holds eight patents for computer security-related inventions
Dorothy E. Denning, ACM Fellow; the 2001 Augusta Ada Lovelace Award from the Assoc. for Women in Computing acknowledged "her outstanding in computer security and cryptography as well as her extraordinary contributions to national policy debates on cyber terrorism and information warfare
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.
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[15]
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
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)
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"
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
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
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
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
Olgica Milenkovic, 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
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
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
Hawley Harvey Crippen (MED: 1882), infamous murderer; homeopath, ear and eye specialist and medicine dispenser;hanged in 1910 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, excommunicated from the Catholic Church; estimates of those killed by his regime are as high as 30,000
H. H. Holmes (MED: MD 1884), born Herman Webster Mudgett, 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[16]
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
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
"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
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"
On Apollo 15, the all-Michigan crew of Alfred Worden, David Scott (attended two years and later received honorary degree), and James Irwin left a 45-word plaque on the moon in 1971, founding its own chapter of the University of Michigan Alumni Association on the moon.
A co-founder and first president of the Boeing Company, Edgar Nathaniel Gott (May 2, 1887 – July 17, 1947) was an early American aviation industry executive and a senior executive of several aircraft companies, including Fokker and Consolidated Aircraft.
Borders was co-founded by Louis Borders (BA 1969) and his brother Tom Borders (MA 1966).
The Buffalo Bills, a team in the National Football League (NFL), were founded by Ralph Wilson (LAW: attended).
Haworth, Inc., a manufacturer of office environments, grew from a garage-shop venture in 1948 to a $1.4 billion global corporation and was co-founded by Gerrard Wendell "(G.W.)" Haworth.
LexION Capital Management was co-founded by Elle Kaplan (BA), CEO.
The National Baseball Seminar was founded by Bill Gamson. When he moved to the University of Michigan in 1962, he recruited about 25 people to his game, including Robert Sklar, a history professor. In 1968, Professor Sklar mentioned it to Daniel Okrent, a student he was advising. A decade later, Okrent invented the more complex Rotisserie League Baseball, which lets its "owners" make in-season trades; it is considered the closest ancestor to today's billion-dollar fantasy sports industry.
Redbox was founded by Gregg Kaplan, who is also the founder of Modjule LLC, and the former president and COO of Coinstar.
Edgardo J. Angara (LAW: LLM 1964), Secretary of Agriculture (emeritus) and former Executive Secretary of the Philippines
W. Brian Arthur (MA 1969), Lagrange Prize in Complexity Science 2008; Schumpeter Prize in Economics 1990; Guggenheim Fellow 1987–88; Fellow of the Econometric Society
June Rose Colby (Ph.D. 1886), professor of literature 1892–1931; first woman at the University of Michigan to receive a Ph.D. by examination
Katharine Coman (AB 1880), 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 (BA 1887; Ph.D. 1894), 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
Bueno de Mesquita (Ph.D. 1971), political scientist and game theoretician
Paul Dressel (Ph.D.), founding director of Michigan State University's Counseling Center[18]
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 (A.B. 1997, M.M. 1998), 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 (M.A.), author, journalist, professor, public speaker, business executive, Guggenheim award winner
Helen Beulah Thompson Gaige (1890–1976), herpetologist, curator of Reptiles and Amphibians for the Museum of Zoology at the University of Michigan and specialist in neotropical frogs
Edwin Francis Gay (AB 1890), first Dean of Harvard Business School, 1908–1919
C. Lee Giles (M.S.), 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
Shelley Haley, Professor of Classics and Africana Studies at Hamilton College
Alice Hamilton (MED: MD 1893), toxicologist; scientist; first female faculty member at Harvard Medical School
Ann Tukey Harrison (BA 1957, PhD 1962), professor of French language and literature and Michigan State University
Elaine Catherine Hatfield (BA), 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
Lyman T. Johnson (AM 1931), 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
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[22]
Stanley Lebergott (BA, MA), former government economist; Wesleyan University professor
Lynda Lisabeth, professor in the school of Public Health of Michigan University
Howard Markel (A.B., English Literature, 1982; M.D., 1986), 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
Nicholas Nixon (BA 1969), photographer, known for portraiture and documentary photography, and for championing the use of the 8x10 inch view camera; Guggenheim award winner
Mary Beth Norton (BA 1964), American historian; Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History, Department of History at Cornell University; Guggenheim award winner
Norman Ornstein (MA Political Science, PhD 1974 Political Science), scholar at Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University
John Ruhl (BS Physics 1987), 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
Al Siebert (M.A., Ph.D. 1965), 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
Clarence Stephens (Pd.D.); the teaching techniques he introduced at Potsdam, and earlier at Morgan State, have been adopted by many mathematics departments across the country
G. David Tilman (Ph.D. 1976), ecologist, Guggenheim award winner
Elsie Toles (B.A.), Arizona's superintendent of public instruction, professor, and author
Amos Tversky (Ph.D. 1965), 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
Robert W. Vishny (AB, highest distinction, 1981), 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 (many written jointly with Andrei Shleifer, Rafael LaPorta and Josef Lakonishok) are among the most often cited recent research works in the field of economic sciences
Duncan Waite, professor of education and community leadership
Robert M. Warner (MA 1953, Ph.D.), dean emeritus, University of Michigan's School of Information (the former School of Library Science) 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 (SPH: Ph.D.), 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
Detlev Bronk (Ph.D. 1926), scientist, educator, and administrator; credited with establishing biophysics as a recognized discipline; president of Johns Hopkins; president of the Rockefeller University 1953–1968
David Friday, president of the U.S. state of Michigan's Michigan Agricultural College (now Michigan State University), 1922–1923; graduate of the University of Michigan
Harry Burns Hutchins; fourth president of the University of Michigan (1909–1920); organized and led the law department at Cornell University 1887–1894
Mark Kennedy, businessman, politician, and administrator currently serving as the president of the University of Colorado (CU) system; served as 12th president of the University of North Dakota
Raynard S. Kington (MED), 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
Bradford Knapp, president of the Alabama Polytechnic Institute, now known as Auburn University, 1928–1933
Maud Mandel, Professor of History and Judaic Studies and Dean of the college at Brown University; president of Williams College
Harriet Nembhard (COE: Ph.D.), Dean of the University of Iowa College of Engineering and the Roy J. Carver Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering; president of Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California
Alice Elvira Freeman Palmer (A.B. 1876, Ph.D. Hon 1882), appointed head of the history department at Wellesley College in 1879; named the acting president of Wellesley in 1881; became its president in 1882
Rudolf Steinberg, president of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, 2000–2008
Carl Strikwerda (Ph.D.), William & Mary's Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences; named 14th president of Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania in 2011
Jerome Wiesner (COE: BS 1937, MS 1938, Ph.D. 1950), MIT Provost 1968–1971; president of MIT, 1971–1980
Edwin Willits (A.B. 1855), the first Assistant U.S. Secretary of Agriculture under Norman Jay Coleman for Grover Cleveland's first administration; 4th president of Michigan Agricultural College
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
John Richard Alden (23 January 1908 – 14 August 1991), 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
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 – 16 November 1962), theoretical physicist
Derek Bermel (born 1967), 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
Ada Ferrer, Cuban-American historian; Julius Silver Professor of History and Latin American Studies at New York University; Pulitzer Prize for History award recipient
Sidney Fine (October 11, 1920 – March 31, 2009), professor of history at the University of Michigan
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
Joel F. Harrington (born August 25, 1959), historian of pre-modern Germany; Centennial Professor of History at Vanderbilt University
Donald Harris (April 7, 1931 – March 29, 2016), 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), Yonsei, fourth-generation Japanese American academic and poet
Joseph Hickey (16 April 1907 - 31 August 1993), ornithologist who wrote the landmark Guide to Bird Watching
Isabel V. Hull (born 1949), John Stambaugh Professor Emerita of History and the former chair of the history department at Cornell University
Philip Strong Humphrey (26 February 1926 – 13 November 2009), 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), poet, writer, essayist, critic, lawyer, and professor of law
James B. Kaler (born December 29, 1938), 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
X. J. Kennedy (born Joseph Charles Kennedy on August 21, 1929), poet, translator, anthologist, editor, and author of children's literature and textbooks on English literature and poetry
James Stark Koehler (10 November 1914 – 19 June 2006), 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
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
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
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), 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
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 – 20 February 2006), 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
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; the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
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[citation needed]
Leon Jaroff (COE: BSE EE, BS EM 1950), 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
Laurence Kirshbaum (AB 1966), founder of LJK Literary Management; chairman of Time Warner Book Group
Melvin J. Lasky (MA History), 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
Carole Simpson (BA 1962), former ABC News correspondent; Emerson College professor
Noah Smith (Ph.D. 2012, Economics), former Bloomberg columnist; blogger and commentator on economics and current events
Bert Randolph Sugar (LAW: JD 1961); 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 (also known as Jerald Franklin ter Horst) (BA 1947), Gerald Ford's short-term press secretary
Margaret Wente (BA), 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 (BA, with honors and distinction; LAW: JD summa cum laude 1977), president of ABC News
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 Fields Medal winner. Solved various famous unsolved problems in the field of combinatorics, and considered the main contributor to the creation of Combinatorial Hodge Theory.
Vonnie McLoyd (MA 1973, Ph.D. (1975), developmental psychologist
Natalia Molina, professor; received her Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Michigan
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
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)
June Huh (Ph.D. 2014), Fields Medal winner; proved the Heron-Rota-Welsh conjecture with algebraic geometrical method, among other conjectures; known for his authorship of Combinatorial Hodge Theory and other research in algebraic combinatorics
Meyer Jerison (Ph.D. 1950), 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
Leonard Jimmie Savage (BS 1938, Ph.D. 1941), author of The Foundations of Statistics (1954); rediscovered Bachelier and introduced his theories to Paul Samuelson, who corrected Bachelier and used his thesis on randomness to advance derivative pricing theory
Frank Spitzer (BA, Ph.D.), 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
D.J. Lewis (Ph.D. 1950), educator and mathematician; specializing in number theory; chaired the Department of Mathematics at the University of Michigan (1984–1994); director of the Division of Mathematical Sciences at the National Science Foundation
Clarence F. Stephens (Ph.D. 1944) was chair of the SUNY Potsdam mathematics department and was the ninth African American to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics
As of 2021, UM numbers among its alumni 29 Fellows of the American Mathematical Society.
Kenneth Appel (October 8, 1932 – April 19, 2013), 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
Susanne Brenner, mathematician whose research concerns the finite element method and related techniques for the numerical solution of differential equations
Ralph Louis Cohen (born 1952), mathematician specializing in algebraic topology and differential topology
Robert Connelly (born July 15, 1942), mathematician specializing in discrete geometry and rigidity theory
Brian Conrey (23 June 1955), mathematician, executive director of the American Institute of Mathematics
Ronald Getoor (9 February 1929 – 28 October 2017), mathematician
Tai-Ping Liu (Chinese: 劉太平; pinyin: Liú Tàipíng; born 18 November 1945), Taiwanese mathematician specializing in partial differential equations
Russell Lyons (6 September 1957), mathematician specializing in probability theory on graphs, combinatorics, statistical mechanics, ergodic theory and harmonic analysis
Gaven Martin FRSNZ FASL FAMS (born 8 October 1958), New Zealand mathematician
Susan Montgomery (born 2 April 1943), mathematician whose current research interests concern noncommutative algebras
Paul Muhly (born September 7, 1944), mathematician
James Munkres (born August 18, 1930), professor emeritus of mathematics at MIT
Zuhair Nashed (born May 14, 1936, in Aleppo, Syria), 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), mathematician, known for his research on topology, algebra, and combinatorics
Mihnea Popa (born 11 August 1973), Romanian-American mathematician at Harvard University, specializing in algebraic geometry; known for his work on complex birational geometry, Hodge theory, abelian varieties, and vector bundles
Jane Cronin Scanlon (July 17, 1922 – June 19, 2018), mathematician; emeritus professor of mathematics at Rutgers University
Maria E. Schonbek, Argentine-American mathematician at the University of California, Santa Cruz; research concerns fluid dynamics and associated partial differential equations such as the Navier–Stokes equations
Paul Schupp (born March 12, 1937), professor emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
George Roger Sell (February 7, 1937 – May 29, 2015), 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), mathematician best known for his work in group theory
Isadore Singer (May 3, 1924 – February 11, 2021), mathematician
Christopher Skinner (born June 4, 1972), mathematician working in number theory and arithmetic aspects of the Langlands program
Karen E. Smith (born 1965), mathematician specializing in commutative algebra and algebraic geometry
Kannan Soundararajan (born December 27, 1973), India-born American mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Stanford University
Irena Swanson, mathematician specializing in commutative algebra
Karen Uhlenbeck (born August 24, 1942), mathematician; a founder of modern geometric analysis
Judy L. Walker, mathematician; Aaron Douglas Professor of Mathematics at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where she chaired the mathematics department 2012–2016
John H. Walter (born 14 December 1927), mathematician known for proving the Walter theorem in the theory of finite groups
Charles Weibel (born October 28, 1950), mathematician working on algebraic K-theory, algebraic geometry and homological algebra
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.
Lawrence Bartell, before he had finished his studies, was invited by Glenn Seaborg to interview for a position working on the Manhattan Project; worked on methods for extracting plutonium from uranium
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, began 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; hired in 1945 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
James Stark Koehler, physicist, specializing in metal defects and their interactions; known for the eponymous Peach-Koehler stress formula
Emil 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
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 earn a postgraduate degree in physics[35]
Franklin E. Roach, involved in high explosives physics research connected with the Manhattan Project
Nathan Rosen, 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
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 (PHARM: Ph.D. 1883), 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 (1897), one of the first female physicians in Colorado[36]
William Henry Beierwaltes (BS 1938, MED: MD 1941), 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 (MD 1960), child and adolescent psychiatrist, forensic psychiatrist, adjunct clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan
John Caffey (BA 1916, MD 1919), pediatric radiologist
Alexa Canady (AB 1971, MED: MD 1975), 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
Ronald M. Davis (AB 1978), 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 (MED: MD 1888), physician, medical writer
Paul de Kruif (Ph.D. 1916), author of Microbe Hunters
Donna Farber (BS 1984), chief of surgical sciences at Columbia University and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Alice Hamilton (MED: MD 1893), 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 (MED: MD 1874), Civil War nurse and one of the first female doctors in the US[38]
Jerome P. Horwitz (Ph.D. 1950), synthesized AZT in 1964, a drug now used to treat AIDS
Joel Lamstein (BS 1965), co-founder and president of John Snow, Inc (JSI) and JSI Research & Training Institute, Inc., international public health research and consulting firms
Howard Markel (MED: MD 1986), 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
Jessica Rickert, first female American Indian dentist in America, which she became upon graduating from the University of Michigan School of Dentistry in 1975; member of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation; direct descendant of the Indian chief Wahbememe (Whitepigeon)[40]
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[41][42]
Eric B. Schoomaker (BS 1970, MED: MD 1975), 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 (MED: MD 1975), dean of the University of Nevada School of Medicine
John Clark Sheehan (MS 1938, Ph.D. 1941), chemist who pioneered the first synthetic penicillin breakthrough in 1957
Norman Shumway (MDNG), heart transplantation pioneer; entered the University of Michigan as a pre-law student, but was drafted into the Army in 1943
Parvinder Singh (PHARM: Ph.D. 1967), 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
Uwem Akpan (MFA 2007), Nigerian author; Jesuit priest; won Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book and the PEN/Beyond Margins Award for Say You're One of Them
W. Brian Arthur (MA 1969), Lagrange Prize in Complexity Science 2008; Schumpeter Prize in Economics 1990;
Carl de Boor (Ph.D. Mathematics 1966), 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
Chuck Coleman won two Collier Trophies for his involvement in the development of the McDonnel Douglas C-17 Globemaster (1994) and Scaled Composites’ SpaceShipOne (2004)
Frederick Gehring (AB 1946), T. H. Hildebrandt Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Mathematics; recipient of the 2006 AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement
Aaron Hamburger (BA 1995), writer; his short story collection The View from Stalin's Head (2004) was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome; his novel Faith for Beginners (2005) was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award
Alice Hamilton, pioneer in industrial health, honored with a 55 cent postage stamp in the Great Americans series; winner of the Lasker Award
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
Charles Willard Moore (ARCH: B.Arch 1947, Hon Arch D. 1992), designer of Lurie Tower on Michigan's North Campus; winner of the AIA Gold Medal in 1991
Patrick O'Keeffe (MFA), winner of the Hopwood Program's Chamberlain Award for Creative Writing for Above the Bar; instructor in U-M's Sweetland Writing Center; won the 2006 Story Prize for The Hill Road; won 2006 Whiting Writers Award
Stephen Smale (BS 1952, MS 1953, Ph.D. 1957), Fields Medal winner; winner of the 2007 Wolf Prize in mathematics; 1965 Veblen Prize for Geometry; 1988 Chauvenet Prize from the Mathematical Association of America; 1989 Von Neumann Award from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
Edmund White, Chevalier (and later Officier) de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France in 1993
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
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
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
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
Paul Kangas, 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 2009
Conrad Phillip Kottak, anthropologist; 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[22]
Alexander Leaf, physician and research scientist best known for his work linking diet and exercise to the prevention of heart disease
Samuel C. Lind, radiation chemist, referred to as "the father of modern radiation chemistry"
Joyce Marcus, Latin American archaeologist and professor in the Department of Anthropology, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; 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, 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, president of the American Association of Anatomists and the International Society for Experimental Cytology; held honorary memberships in the Royal Microscopical Society in London and Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome
Marshall Warren Nirenberg, biochemist and geneticist; shared a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968
Kenneth Olden, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and National Toxicology Program, being the first African-American to head an NIH institute, a position he held 1991–2005
Raymond Pearl, biologist, regarded as one of the founders of biogerontology
Samuel C. Phillips, United States Air Force general who served as director of NASA's Apollo program 1964–1969, seventh director of the NSA 1972–1973, and commander of Air Force Systems Command 1973–1975
John Porter, led efforts resulting in doubling funding for the NIH during his chairmanship
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, neuroscientist specializing in studies of how spontaneous neural activity organizes connections in the developing mammalian brain
Mary Jane West-Eberhard, theoretical biologist noted for arguing that phenotypic and developmental plasticity played a key role in shaping animal evolution and speciation
Henry T. 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
Robert Wurtz, neuroscientist working as a NIH Distinguished Scientist and chief of the section on visuomotor integration at the National Eye Institute
George Zweig, Russian-American physicist; trained as a particle physicist under Richard Feynman; introduced, independently of Murray Gell-Mann, the quark model (although he named the constituent components "aces")
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
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
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
Larry Brilliant (SPH: MPH 1977, Economic Development and Health Planning), head of Google Foundation (holds assets of $1Bn); 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
Stephen Goldsmith (LAW: JD), Marion County district attorney for 12 years; two-term mayor of Indianapolis (1992–1999); appointed senior fellow at the Milken Institute (economic think tank) in 2006; his work in Indianapolis has been cited as a national model
Lisa Hamilton (LAW: JD), named in 2007 president of the UPS Foundation; previously its program director
Bill Ivey (BA 1966), chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts 1998–2001, credited with restoring the agency's credibility with Congress; appointed by President Clinton
Michael D. Knox (MSW 1971, MA 1973, PhD psychology 1974), chair and CEO of the US Peace Memorial Foundation and distinguished professor, University of South Florida[48]
Rajiv Shah (AB), 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
Mark Weisbrot (Ph.D., economics), 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
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.
Leslie Bassett (1956: DMA), won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Music, for Variations for Orchestra, premiered in Rome in 1963 by the RAI Symphony Orchestra under Feruccio Scaglia
Stephen Henderson (BA 1992), 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
Leonard Levy (BA), obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan and his Ph.D. from Columbia University; won a Pulitzer Prize for History in 1969 for his Origins of the Fifth Amendment in 1969
Eugene Robinson, Michigan Daily co-editor-in-chief in 1973–74; awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in April 2009 for his Washington Post commentaries on the 2008 presidential campaign
Frank Benford (1910), 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 (Ph.D. 1930), geneticist and cancer biologist, made contributions on the genetics of breast cancer
David Mathias Dennison, physicist who made contributions to quantum mechanics, spectroscopy, and the physics of molecular structure; Guggenheim award winner
William Gould Dow (COE: MSE 1929), pioneer in electrical engineering, space research, and nuclear engineering; former chairman of EECS Department
Douglas J. Futuyma (Ph.D.), 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
Billi Gordon, PhD (BGS 1997), 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;[50] included on list of "30 Most Influential Neuroscientists Alive Today"[51]
Martin Harwit (MS), 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
Armin O. Leuschner (BS Math 1888), 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
Jane Claire Marks, conservation ecologist and educator, Professor of Aquatic Ecology at Northern Arizona University, lead scientist in the PBS documentary A River Reborn: The Restoration of Fossil Creek
Donald Othmer (MSC 1925; Ph.D. 1927), co-founded and co-edited the 27-volume Kirk—Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology in 1947; chairman of Polytechnic University Chemical Engineering Department (1937–1961); invented the Othmer still, which concentrated the acetic acid needed to produce cellulose acetate for motion picture film; awarded 40 patents at Kodak
George Zweig (BS 1959), 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
Roger L. Easton (MDNG), physicist; principal inventor and designer of the Global Positioning System, along with Ivan A. Getting and Bradford Parkinson; awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2006
James Andreoni (born 1959), 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), New Zealand mathematician
George J. Minty Jr. (September 16, 1929 – August 6, 1986), 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), mathematician, specializing in commutative algebra and algebraic geometry
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
^"Paul Dressel and Family Collection". Michigan State University Archives and Historical Collections. Michigan State University. Archived from the original on January 11, 2017. Retrieved May 29, 2018.
^deGregory, Crystal A. "JAMES RAYMOND LAWSON (1915-1996)"(PDF). Profiles of African Americans in Tennessee. Tennessee State University. Archived(PDF) from the original on March 12, 2013. Retrieved December 9, 2017.
^"Editorial. Dr. Wm. H. Payne"(PDF). The Peabody Record. Vol. 3, no. 3. Nashville, Tennessee. December 1893. pp. 83–87. Archived from the original(PDF) on December 8, 2015. Retrieved November 28, 2015.
^Detroit Illustrated: The Commercial Metropolis of Michigan. Containing a Detailed Statement of Its Bracing Climate, Wonderful Resources and Capabilities. Its Origin and History, Interspersed with Illustrations of Its Fine Public and Private Buildings and Dwellings, Sketches and Portraits of Its Leading Citizens. H. H. Hook. 1891. pp. 130–131.
^Voight, Sandye (September 22, 2005). "Character reference; Costumed performers bring history forward at Linwood walk". Telegraph Herald.
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.
