- James D. Watson
James Dewey Watson born April 6, 1928) is an American molecular biologist, best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule. Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material".
- Jared Diamond
Jared Mason Diamond (b. 10 September, 1937) is an American evolutionary biologist, physiologist, biogeographer and nonfiction author. Diamond works as a professor of geography at UCLA. He is best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" (1997). He also received the National Medal of Science in 1999
- Morris Cohen
Morris Cohen (November 27, 1911 - May 27, 2005). Born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, Cohen spent his entire career affiliated with MIT. He graduated from his undergraduate degree in 1933, receiving his doctorate three years later, and was appointed assistant professor of metallurgy in 1937. He was appointed Professor of Physical Metallurgy in 1946, and an Institute Professor in 1975. He took emeritus status in 1982.
- Norman Hackerman
Norman Hackerman was an American chemist, internationally known as an expert in metal corrosion, and a former president of both the University of Texas at Austin (1967 – 1970) and Rice University (1970 – 1985). Born in Baltimore, Maryland, he was the only son of Jacob and Ann Raffel Hackerman, immigrants from regions of the Russian Empire that later became Estonia and Latvia, respectively.
- Stanley Cohen
Stanley Cohen (born November 17, 1922) is an American biochemist and Nobel Prize Laureate in Physiology and Medicine (1986). He is a distinguished researcher and academic, associated with Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville. He received his bachelor's degree in 1943 from Brooklyn College, where he had double-majored in chemistry and zoology. After working as a bacteriologist at a milk processing plant to earn money, …
- Arthur Kornberg
Arthur Kornberg (born March 3, 1918) is an American biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1959 for his discovery of "the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)" together with Dr. Severo Ochoa of New York University. He has also been awarded the Paul-Lewis Laboratories Award in Enzyme Chemistry from the American Chemical Society in 1951, L.H.D. degree from Yeshiva University in 1962, …
- John Backus
John Warner Backus was an American computer scientist. He led the team that invented the first widely used high-level programming language (FORTRAN) and was the inventor of the Backus-Naur form (BNF), the almost universally used notation to define formal language syntax. He also did research in function-level programming and helped to popularize it. The IEEE awarded Backus the W.W. McDowell Award in 1967 for the development of FORTRAN.
- Bruce Ames
Bruce Ames (born December 16, 1928), is a professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior scientist at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute (CHORI). He is the inventor of the Ames test, a system for easily and cheaply testing the mutagenicity of compounds. His research focuses on cancer and aging and he has authored over 500 scientific publications.
- J. Michael Bishop
John Michael Bishop (born February 22, 1936) is an American immunologist and microbiologist who won the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He currently serves as an active faculty member and chancellor at the University of California, San Francisco. Bishop was born in Pennsylvania. He attended Gettysburg College as an undergraduate, then earned an MD from Harvard University in 1962.
- Leon M. Lederman
Leon Max Lederman (born July 15, 1922 in New York) is an American experimental physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988 for his work on neutrinos. He is Director Emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, in Aurora, Illinois in 1986, and has served in the capacity of Resident Scholar since 1998.
- Roger Guillemin
Roger Guillemin received the National Medal of Science in 1976, and Nobel prize for medicine in 1977 for his work on neurohormones. Completing his undergraduate work at the University of Burgundy, Guillemin received his M.D. degree from the Medical Faculty at Lyon in 1949, and went to Montréal, Québec, Canada to work with Hans Selye at the Institute of Experimental Medicine and Surgery at the Université de Montréal where he received a Ph.D. in 1953.
- Ronald Breslow
Ronald C. D. Breslow (born 14 March 1931, Rahway, New Jersey) is a U.S. chemist. He is currently University Professor at Columbia University, where he is based in the Department of Chemistry and affiliated with the Departments of Biological Sciences and Pharmacology; he has also been on the faculty of its Department of Chemical Engineering. He has taught at Columbia since 1956 and is a former chair of the university's chemistry department.
- Wernher von Braun
Dr. Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun (March 23 1912 - June 16 1977) was one of the leading figures in the development of rocket technology in Germany and the United States. The German scientist, who led Germany's rocket development program (V-2) before and during World War II, entered the United States at the end of the war through the then-secret Operation Paperclip.
- Peter Lax
Peter David Lax (born May 1, 1926, Budapest, Hungary) is a highly-respected mathematician working in the areas of pure and applied mathematics. He has made important contributions to integrable systems, fluid dynamics and shock waves, solitonic physics, hyperbolic conservation laws, and mathematical and scientific computing, among other fields. Lax was born in Budapest, Hungary, and moved with his parents (Klara Kornfield and Henry Lax) to the United States in 1941.
- Baruj Benacerraf
Baruj Benacerraf (born 29 October, 1920) is a Venezuelan-American immunologist who shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the "discovery of the Major histocompatibility complex genes which encode cell surface molecules important for the immune system's distinction between self and non-self". His brother is well-known philosopher Paul Benacerraf. Born in Caracas, his parents were Sephardic Jews from Morocco. Dr.
- Herbert Simon
Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 - February 9, 2001) was an American political scientist whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, computer science, public administration, economics, management, and philosophy of science and a professor, most notably, at Carnegie Mellon University. With almost a thousand, often very highly cited publications, he is one of the most influential social scientists of the 20th century.
- Daniel Nathans
Daniel Nathans (October 30, 1928 - November 16, 1999) was an American microbiologist. He was born in Wilmington, Delaware, the last of nine children born to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. During the Great Depression his father lost his small business and was unemployed for a long period of time. Nathans went to public schools and then to the University of Delaware, where he studied chemistry, philosophy, and literature.
- Edward B. Lewis
Edward B. Lewis (May 20, 1918 - July 21, 2004) was an American geneticist, the winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Lewis was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and graduated from E.L. Meyers High School. He received a B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1938, where he worked on "Drosophila melanogaster" in the lab of C.P. Oliver. In 1942 Lewis received a Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology (Caltech), …
- Herbert Boyer
Herbert W. Boyer (b. 1936) is a recipient of the 1990 National Medal of Science, and co-recipient of the 1996 Lemelson-MIT Prize and a co-founder of Genentech. Boyer received his bachelor's degree in biology and chemistry from Saint Vincent College in the Pittsburgh suburb of Latrobe, Pennsylvania in 1958. He married his wife Grace the following year. He received his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh in 1963 and participated as an activist in the civil rights movement.
- R. Duncan Luce
R. Duncan Luce is the Distinguished Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, Irvine. He was awarded a PhD in Mathematics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1950. He received the 2003 National Medal of Science in behavioral and social science for his contributions to the field of mathematical psychology.
- Thomas Eisner
Thomas Eisner is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Chemical Ecology at Cornell University, and Director of the Cornell Institute for Research in Chemical Ecology (CIRCE). He is a world authority on animal behavior, ecology, and evolution, and is one of the pioneers of chemical ecology, the discipline dealing with the chemical interactions of organisms. He is author or co-author of some 400 scientific articles and 7 books.
- Peter H. Raven
Peter Hamilton Raven (b. June 13, 1936) is a botanist and environmentalist, notable as the longtime director of the Missouri Botanical Garden. Raven was born in China to American parents. An uncle of his father's was, for a time, one of the wealthiest Americans in China, but was later jailed in a banking scandal. That incident and Japanese aggression in China led the Raven family to return to San Francisco in the late 1930s.
- Mildred Dresselhaus
Mildred S. Dresselhaus (born Mildred Spiewak on November 11 1930 in The Bronx, New York) is an Institute Professor and Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dresselhaus received her undergraduate degree at Hunter College in New York, and carried out postgraduate study at the University of Cambridge on a Fulbright Fellowship and Harvard University.
- Leonid Hurwicz
Leonid Hurwicz is Regents’ Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Minnesota. Internationally renowned for his pioneering research on economic theory, particularly in the areas of mechanism and institutional design and mathematical economics, …
- Robert Weinberg
Robert Allan Weinberg is a Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research at MIT and American Cancer Society Research Professor; his research is in the area of oncogenes and the genetic basis of human cancer. Weinberg is also affiliated with the Broad Institute and is a founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He co-teaches 7.012 (introductory biology) with Eric Lander.
- George Dantzig
George Bernard Dantzig (8 November 1914 - 13 May 2005) was an American mathematician who introduced the simplex algorithm and is considered the "father of linear programming". He was the recipient of many honors, including the National Medal of Science in 1975, and the John von Neumann Theory Prize in 1974. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
- Rita R. Colwell
Rita R. Colwell (born 1934) is an environmental microbiologist and scientific administrator. She became 11th Director of the United States National Science Foundation on August 4, 1998. Dr. Colwell has an undergraduate degree in bacteriology and an M.S. in genetics from Purdue University, and a Ph.D. in oceanography from the University of Washington. In 2004, she received an honorary Sc.D. from Bates College.
- Paul Cohen
Paul Joseph Cohen (April 2, 1934 - March 23, 2007) was an American mathematician. He was born in Long Branch, New Jersey into a Jewish family and graduated in 1950 from Stuyvesant High School in New York City. He then studied at Brooklyn College from 1950 to 1953 but left before receiving a bachelor's degree when he learned he could pursue graduate studies in Chicago with just two years of college under his belt.
- Bradley Efron
Bradley Efron is a statistician best known for proposing the bootstrap resampling technique, which has had a major impact in the field of Statistics and virtually every area of statistical application. The bootstrap was one of the first computer-intensive statistical techniques, replacing traditional algebraic derivations with data-based computer simulations. On May 29th 2007, he was awarded the National Medal of Science, the highest scientific honor by the United States, …
- Maurice Goldhaber
Maurice Goldhaber (born April 18, 1911 in Lemberg, Austria) is an American physicist, who in 1957 (with Lee Grodzins and Andrew Sunyar) established that neutrinos have negative helicity. In 1934, working at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England he and James Chadwick, through what they called the nuclear photo-electric effect, established that the neutron is heavier enough than the proton to decay.
- Solomon H. Snyder
Dr. Solomon H. Snyder (born December 26, 1938) is an American neuroscientist. Snyder graduated from Georgetown University in 1958 and Georgetown Medical School in 1962. At a very early age he published his research on ornithine decarboxylase and RNA synthesis which opened up countless vistas in the neurosciences. After a two-year fellowship at the NIH, Snyder moved to Johns Hopkins Medical School to complete his residency in psychiatry.
- C. R. Rao
Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao (born September 10, 1920) is a famous Indian statistician and currently professor emeritus at Penn State University. He was born in Hadagali, Karnataka state, India. He received an M.S. in mathematics from Andhra University and an M.S. in Statistics from Calcutta University in 1943.
- Kenneth Arrow
Kenneth Arrow is the Joan Kenney Professor of Economics and Professor of Operations Research, emeritus; a CHP/PCOR fellow; and an FSI senior fellow by courtesy. He is a Nobel Prize-winning economist whose work has been primarily in economic theory and operations, focusing on areas including social choice theory, risk bearing, medical economics, general equilibrium analysis, inventory theory, and the economics of information and innovation.
- Henry Eyring
Henry Eyring (February 20, 1901 - December 26, 1981) was a Mexican-American theoretical chemist whose primary contribution was in the study of chemical reaction rates and intermediates. A prolific writer, he authored more than 600 scientific articles, 10 scientific books, and a few books on the subject of science and religion. He was also a recipient of the National Medal of Science in 1966 for developing the Absolute Rate Theory of chemical reactions.
- George Stigler
George Joseph Stigler (January 17, 1911 - December 1, 1991) was a U.S. economist. He won the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 1982, and was a key leader of the Chicago School of Economics, along with his close friend Milton Friedman. Stephen Stigler is his son. While at Chicago, he was greatly influenced by Frank Knight, his dissertation supervisor. Milton Friedman, a friend for over sixty years, …
- Charles Yanofsky
Charles Yanofsky (born April 17, 1925) is a leading American geneticist. Born in New York, Yanofsky studied at the City College of New York and at Yale University. In 1964, Yanofsky and colleagues established that gene sequences and protein sequences are colinear: changes in DNA sequence can produce changes in protein sequence at corresponding positions.
- Gabor A. Somorjai
Gabor A. Somorjai (born May 4, 1935 in Budapest, Hungary) is currently a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and is a leading researcher in the field of surface chemistry. Somorjai won the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 1998 for his contributions to the field and was awarded a National Medal of Science in 2002. He is also the 2008 winner of the Priestley Medal.
- John Cocke
John Cocke was an American computer scientist recognised for his large contribution to computer architecture and optimizing compiler design. He is considered by many to be "the father of RISC architecture." He attended Duke University, where he received his Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1946 and his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1953. Cocke spent his entire career as an industrial researcher for IBM, from 1956 to 1992.
- Ruth Patrick
Dr. Ruth Myrtle Patrick (born November 26, 1907, in Topeka, Kansas) is a botanist and limnologist specializing in diatoms and freshwater ecology, who developed ways to measure the health of freshwater ecosystems and established a number of research facilities. She attended the Sunset Hill School in Kansas City, Missouri, graduating in 1925. She earned her PhD at the University of Virginia in 1934.
- James E. Darnell
James E. Darnell Jr. is an American biologist who made significant contributions to RNA processing and cytokine signaling and is author of the cell biology textbook "Molecular Cell Biology". In 2002 he received the National Medal of Science and the Albert Lasker Special Achievement Award for his extensive contributions to cell biology.