Faculty and staff ,
Edwin McMillan, and
Luis Alvarez are shown, in addition to
J. Robert Oppenheimer and
Robert R. Wilson. •
Shiing-Shen Chern, a leading geometer of the 20th century, co-founded the
Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and served as its founding director until 1984. • Physicist
J. Robert Oppenheimer was scientific director of the
Manhattan Project and was the founder of the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics. • Faculty member
Edward Teller was (together with
Stanislaw Ulam) the "father of the
hydrogen bomb", who laid important foundations for the establishment of
Space Sciences Laboratory at Berkeley. •
Ernest Lawrence, a Nobel laureate in physics who invented the
cyclotron at Berkeley, founded the Radiation Laboratory on campus, which later became the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. •
Gilbert N. Lewis, former dean of the College of Chemistry, was nominated 41 times for the
Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He mentored and influenced numerous Berkeley Nobel laureates, including
Harold Urey (1934 Nobel Prize),
William F. Giauque (1949 Nobel Prize),
Glenn T. Seaborg (1951 Nobel Prize),
Willard Libby (1960 Nobel Prize), and
Melvin Calvin (1961 Nobel Prize). •
Glenn T. Seaborg, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, discovered or co-discovered ten chemical elements at Berkeley and served as chancellor from 1958 to 1961. •
Hans Albert Einstein, the first son of
Albert Einstein and a world's leading scholar in
hydraulic engineering, was a long-time faculty member at Berkeley. •
Steven Chu (PhD 1976), the 12th
United States Secretary of Energy and Nobel laureate in physics, was director of
Berkeley Lab from 2004 to 2009. •
Janet Yellen, 78th
United States Secretary of Treasury and the 15th
chair of the Federal Reserve, is a professor emeritus at Berkeley
Haas School of Business and the Department of Economics.
Alumni Alumni have included 260
American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellows, 34
Pulitzer Prize winners, 25
living billionaire alumni, 22
cabinet members, 68 recipients of the
National Medal of Science, 190 recipients of the
MacArthur Fellowship, 144 members of the
National Academy of Sciences, 139
Guggenheim Fellows, and 125
Sloan Fellows, and 75 members of the
National Academy of Engineering.
Government , BA 1912, LLB 1914, 14th
chief justice of the United States, 30th
governor of California|thumb|upright=0.6 , BA 1878,
president of Colombia 1922–1926|thumb|upright=0.6 Berkeley alumni have served in a range of prominent government offices, both domestic and foreign, including
Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court (
Earl Warren, BA, JD);
United States Attorney General (
Edwin Meese III, JD);
United States Secretary of State (
Dean Rusk, LLB);
United States Secretary of the Treasury (
W. Michael Blumenthal, BA, and
G. William Miller, JD);
United States Secretary of Defense (
Robert McNamara, BS);
United States Secretary of the Interior (
Franklin Knight Lane, 1887);
United States Secretary of Transportation and
United States Secretary of Commerce (
Norman Mineta, BS);
United States Secretary of Agriculture (
Ann Veneman, MPP);
National Security Advisor (
Robert C. O'Brien, JD); scores of federal judges and members of the
United States Congress (
10 currently serving) and
United States Foreign Service; governors of California (
George C. Pardee;
Hiram W. Johnson;
Earl Warren, BA and LLB;
Jerry Brown, BA; and
Pete Wilson, JD), Michigan (
Jennifer Granholm, BA), and the United States Virgin Islands (
Walter A. Gordon, BA); Lieutenant General of the United States Army (
Jimmy Doolittle, BA); Major General of the United States Marine Corps (
Oliver Prince Smith); Brigadier General of the United States Marine Corps (
Bertram A. Bone, BS);
Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (
John A. McCone, BS); chair and members of the
Council of Economic Advisers (
Michael Boskin, BA, PhD.; Sandra Black, BA; Jesse Rothstein, PhD; Robert Seamans, PhD; Jay Shambaugh, PhD; James Stock, MA, PhD); Governor of the Federal Reserve System (
H. Robert Heller, PhD) and President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (
William C. Dudley, PhD); Commissioners of the
SEC (
Troy A. Paredes, BA) and the
FCC (Rachelle Chong, BA); and
United States Surgeon General (
Kenneth P. Moritsugu, MPH). Foreign alumni include the
president of Colombia 1922–1926 (
Pedro Nel Ospina Vázquez, BA); the
president of Mexico (
Francisco I. Madero, attended 1892–93); the president and prime minister of Pakistan (
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto); the premier of the Republic of China (
Sun Fo, BA); the president of Costa Rica (Miguel Angel Rodriguez, MA, PhD); and members of parliament of the United Kingdom (
House of Lords,
Lydia Dunn, Baroness Dunn, BS), India (
Rajya Sabha, the upper house,
Prithviraj Chavan, MS); Iran (
Mohammad Javad Larijani, PhD); Nigerian Minister of Science and Technology and first executive governor of Abia State (
Ogbonnaya Onu, PhD); Barbados' ambassador to Brazil (
Tonika Sealy-Thompson, PhD). Alumni have also served in many supranational posts, notable among which are president of the
World Bank (
Robert McNamara, BS); Deputy Prime Minister of Spain and managing director of the
International Monetary Fund (
Rodrigo Rato, MBA); executive director of
UNICEF (
Ann Veneman, MPP); member of the
European Parliament (
Bruno Megret, MS); and judge of the
World Court (
Joan Donoghue, JD).
Science , PhD 1923,
Nobel laureate and discoverer of
deuterium |alt=Harold Urey, PhD 1923, Nobel laureate and discoverer of deuterium|thumb|upright=0.6
Nobel laureate
William F. Giauque (BS 1920, PhD 1922) investigated
chemical thermodynamics, Nobel laureate
Willard Libby (BS 1931, PhD 1933) pioneered
radiocarbon dating, Nobel laureate
Willis Lamb (BS 1934, PhD 1938) examined the
hydrogen spectrum, Nobel laureate
Hamilton O. Smith (BA 1952) applied
restriction enzymes to
molecular genetics, Nobel laureate
Robert Laughlin (BA 1972) explored the
fractional quantum Hall effect, and Nobel laureate
Andrew Fire (BA 1978) helped to discover
RNA interference-
gene silencing by double-stranded
RNA. Nobel laureate
Glenn T. Seaborg (PhD 1937) collaborated with
Albert Ghiorso (BS 1913) to discover twelve chemical elements, such as
americium,
berkelium, and
californium.
David Bohm (PhD 1943) discovered
Bohm diffusion. Nobel laureate
Yuan T. Lee (PhD 1965) developed the
crossed molecular beam technique for studying chemical reactions.
Carol Greider (PhD 1987) was awarded the 2009
Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering a key mechanism in the genetic operations of cells.
Harvey Itano (BS 1942) conducted breakthrough work on
sickle cell anemia that marked the first time a disease was linked to a molecular origin.
Narendra Karmarkar (PhD 1983) is known for the interior point method, a polynomial algorithm for linear programming known as
Karmarkar's algorithm.
National Medal of Science laureate
Chien-Shiung Wu (PhD 1940), often known as the "Chinese Madame Curie", disproved the Law of Conservation of
Parity for which she was awarded the inaugural
Wolf Prize in Physics.
Kary Mullis (PhD 1973) was awarded the 1993
Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his role in developing the
polymerase chain reaction, a method for amplifying
DNA sequences.
Christine Essenberg was one of the first women to earn a PhD in zoology (MA1914, PhD 1917) known for her expertise in
polychaetes and
plankton studies.
Olga Hartman (MA 1933, PhD 1936) was a zoologist who described hundreds of species of
polychaete worms.
Edward P. Tryon (PhD 1967) is the physicist who first said our universe originated from a quantum fluctuation of the vacuum.
John N. Bahcall (BS 1956) worked on the
Standard Solar Model and the
Hubble Space Telescope, resulting in a
National Medal of Science. which physically confirmed the presence of water on the planet
Mars for the first time. Astronauts
James van Hoften (BS 1966),
Margaret Rhea Seddon (BA 1970),
Leroy Chiao (BS 1983), and
Rex Walheim (BS 1984) have orbited the Earth in NASA's fleet of
Space Shuttles.
Computers Berkeley alumni have developed a number of key technologies associated with the
personal computer and the Internet.
Unix was created by alumnus
Ken Thompson (BS 1965, MS 1966) along with colleague
Dennis Ritchie. Alumni such as
L. Peter Deutsch (PhD 1973),
Butler Lampson (PhD 1967), and
Charles P. Thacker (BS 1967) worked with Ken Thompson on
Project Genie and then formed the ill-fated
US Department of Defense-funded Berkeley Computer Corporation (BCC), which was scattered throughout the Berkeley campus in non-descript offices to avoid anti-war protestors. After BCC failed, Deutsch, Lampson, and Thacker joined
Xerox PARC, where they developed a number of pioneering computer technologies, culminating in the
Xerox Alto that inspired the
Apple Macintosh. In particular, the Alto used a
computer mouse, which had been invented by
Doug Engelbart (BEng 1952, PhD 1955). Thompson, Lampson, Engelbart, and Thacker all later received a Turing Award. Also at Xerox PARC was Ronald Schmidt (BS 1966, MS 1968, PhD 1971), who became known as "the man who brought
Ethernet to the masses." Another Xerox PARC researcher,
Charles Simonyi (BS 1972), pioneered the first
WYSIWIG word processor program and was recruited personally by
Bill Gates to join the fledgling company known as
Microsoft to create
Microsoft Word. Simonyi later became the first repeat
space tourist, blasting off on Russian
Soyuz rockets to work at the
International Space Station orbiting the Earth. In 1977, a graduate student in the computer science department named Bill Joy (MS 1982) assembled the original
Berkeley Software Distribution, commonly known as
BSD Unix. Joy, who went on to co-found Sun Microsystems, also developed the original version of the
terminal console editor
vi, while
Ken Arnold (BA 1985) created
Curses, a terminal control
library for
Unix-like systems that enables the construction of
text user interface (TUI) applications. Working alongside Joy at Berkeley were undergraduates
William Jolitz (BS 1997) and his future wife
Lynne Jolitz (BA 1989), who together created
386BSD, a version of BSD Unix that runs on Intel CPUs and evolved into the
BSD family of free operating systems and the
Darwin operating system underlying Apple
Mac OS X.
Eric Allman (BS 1977, MS 1980) created
SendMail, a Unix
mail transfer agent that delivers about twelve percent of the
email in the world. The
XCF, an undergraduate research group located in
Soda Hall, has been responsible for a number of notable software projects, including
GTK+ (
Peter Mattis, BS 1997),
The GIMP (
Spencer Kimball, BS 1996), and the initial diagnosis of the
Morris worm. In 1992,
Pei-Yuan Wei (BS 1990) an undergraduate at the XCF, created
ViolaWWW, one of the first graphical web browsers. ViolaWWW was the first browser to have embedded scriptable objects, stylesheets, and tables. He donated the code to Sun Microsystems, inspiring
Java applets. ViolaWWW also inspired researchers at the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications to create the
Mosaic web browser, a pioneering
web browser that became Microsoft
Internet Explorer.
Billionaires Billionaire alumni include
Gordon Moore (Intel founder),
James Harris Simons (
Renaissance Technologies),
Masayoshi Son (SoftBank), Jon Stryker (Stryker Medical Equipment),
Eric Schmidt (former Google Chairman) and
Wendy Schmidt,
Michael Milken, Bassam Alghanim, Kutayba Alghanim,
Charles Simonyi (Microsoft),
Cher Wang (HTC),
Robert Haas (
Levi Strauss & Co.),
Carlos Rodríguez-Pastor (Interbank, Peru),
Fayez Sarofim,
Daniel S. Loeb,
Paul Merage,
David Hindawi,
Orion Hindawi,
Bill Joy (Sun Microsystems founder),
Victor Koo,
Tony Xu (DoorDash),
Lowell Milken,
Nathaniel Simons and Laura Baxter-Simons, Liong Tek Kwee and Liong Seen Kwee, Elizabeth Simons and Mark Heising,
Oleg Tinkov, and
Alice Schwartz.
Pulitzer Prize winners Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist
Marguerite Higgins (BA 1941) was a pioneering female war correspondent who covered World War II, the
Korean War, and the
Vietnam War. Novelist
Robert Penn Warren (MA 1927) won three Pulitzer Prizes, including one for his novel ''
All the King's Men, which was later made into an Academy Award-winning movie. Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Rube Goldberg (BS 1904) invented the comically complex—yet ultimately trivial—contraptions known as Rube Goldberg machines. Journalist Alexandra Berzon (MA 2006) won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009, and journalist Matt Richtel (BA 1989), who also coauthors the comic strip Rudy Park'' under the pen name Theron Heir, won the 2010
Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. Pulitzer Prize–winning historian
Leon Litwack (BA 1951, PhD 1958) taught as a professor at UC Berkeley for 43 years;
three other UC Berkeley professors have also received the Pulitzer Prize. Alumna and professor
Susan Rasky (BA 1974) won the
Polk Award for journalism in 1991. USC Professor and Berkeley alumnus
Viet Thanh Nguyen's (PhD 1997) first novel
The Sympathizer won the 2016
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Fiction and screenwriters Irving Stone (BA 1923) wrote the novel
Lust for Life, which was later made into an Academy Award-winning
film of the same name starring
Kirk Douglas as
Vincent van Gogh. Stone also wrote
The Agony and the Ecstasy, which was later made into a
film of the same name starring Oscar winner
Charlton Heston as
Michelangelo.
Mona Simpson (BA 1979) wrote the novel
Anywhere But Here, which was later made into a film of the same name starring Oscar-winning actress
Susan Sarandon.
Terry McMillan (BA 1986) wrote
How Stella Got Her Groove Back, which was later made into a film of the same name starring Oscar-nominated actress
Angela Bassett.
Randi Mayem Singer (BA 1979) wrote the screenplay for
Mrs. Doubtfire, which starred Oscar-winning actor
Robin Williams and Oscar-winning actress
Sally Field.
Audrey Wells (BA 1981) wrote the screenplay
The Truth About Cats & Dogs, which starred Oscar-nominated actress
Uma Thurman.
James Schamus (BA 1982, MA 1987, PhD 2003) collaborated on screenplays with Oscar-winning director
Ang Lee on the Academy Award-winning movies
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and
Brokeback Mountain.
Academy and Emmy Award winners , BA 1939,
Academy Award–winning actor|thumb|upright Berkeley alumni have won 22
Academy Awards and 25
Emmy Awards.
Gregory Peck (BA 1939), nominated for four Oscars during his career, won an Oscar for acting in
To Kill a Mockingbird.
Marc Norman (BA 1962, MA 1964) won two Oscars in 1999 for co-producing and co-writing the best picture winner
Shakespeare in Love.
Chris Innis (BA 1991) won the 2010 Oscar for film editing for her work on best picture winner,
The Hurt Locker.
Walter Plunkett (BA 1923) won an Oscar for costume design (for
An American in Paris).
Freida Lee Mock (BA 1961) and
Charles H. Ferguson (BA 1978) have each won an Oscar for documentary filmmaking. Mark Berger (BA 1964) has won four Oscars for sound mixing and is an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley.
Edith Head (BA 1918), who was nominated for 34 Oscars during her career, won eight Oscars for costume design.
Joe Letteri (BA 1981) has won four Oscars for Best Visual Effects in the
James Cameron film
Avatar and the
Peter Jackson films
King Kong,
The Two Towers, and
The Return of the King.
Emmy Award winners include Jon Else (BA 1968) for cinematography;
Andrew Schneider (BA 1973) for screenwriting; Linda Schacht (BA 1966, MA 1981), two for broadcast journalism; Christine Chen (dual-BA's 1990), two for broadcast journalism;
Kathy Baker (BA 1977), three for acting; Ken Milnes (BS 1977), four for broadcasting technology; and
Leroy Sievers (BA 1977), twelve for production.
Elisabeth Leamy (BA 1989) is the recipient of thirteen
Emmy awards.
Music and entertainment Former undergraduates have participated in the contemporary music industry, such as
Grateful Dead bass guitarist
Phil Lesh,
the Police drummer
Stewart Copeland,
Rolling Stone founder
Jann Wenner,
the Bangles lead singer
Susanna Hoffs (BA 1980),
Counting Crows lead singer
Adam Duritz, electronic music producer
Giraffage,
MTV correspondent
Suchin Pak (BA 1997),
AFI musicians
Davey Havok and
Jade Puget (BA 1996), and solo artist
Marié Digby ("
Say It Again").
Flautist and
musicologist Jane M. Bowers was a masters graduate (1962).
People Magazine included
Third Eye Blind lead singer and songwriter
Stephan Jenkins (BA 1987) in the magazine's list of
50 Most Beautiful People. Alumni have also acted in classic television series such as
Karen Grassle (BA 1965) who played
Caroline Ingalls in
Little House on the Prairie,
Jerry Mathers (BA 1974) who starred in
Leave it to Beaver, and
Roxann Dawson (BA 1980) who portrayed
B'Elanna Torres on
Star Trek: Voyager.
Sports , BA 2005, multiple gold medal-winning Olympic swimmer|thumb|upright=0.6 Sport alumni include tennis athlete
Helen Wills Moody (BA 1925) who won 31
Grand Slam titles, including eight singles titles at
Wimbledon.
Tarik Glenn (BA 1999) is a
Super Bowl XLI champion.
Michele Tafoya (BA 1988) is a sports television reporter for
ABC Sports and
ESPN.
Sports agent Leigh Steinberg (BA 1970, JD 1973) has represented professional athletes such as
Steve Young,
Troy Aikman, and
Oscar De La Hoya; Steinberg has been called the real-life inspiration for the title character in the Oscar-winning film
Jerry Maguire (portrayed by
Tom Cruise).
Matt Biondi (BA 1988) won eight Olympic gold medals during his swimming career, in which he participated in three different Olympics. At the
Beijing Olympics in 2008,
Natalie Coughlin (BA 2005) became the first American female athlete in modern Olympic history to win six medals in one Olympics. == See also ==