Category:Famous BYU Alumni
Brigham Young University is a private university in Provo, Utah, owned and operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Most of the graduates collected here hold or have held elected office, and the political geography is narrower than the school's national recruiting suggests: Utah and Idaho first, then Arizona, Oregon and Alaska. Running through that group is one family whose members have held the office of Solicitor General, a seat in the United States Senate, a seat on the Utah Supreme Court and the presidency of the university itself.
Background
Brigham Young University was founded in 1875 in Provo and is subsidized by its sponsoring church. Students sign an honor code governing conduct, dress and academic integrity, and a large share of the undergraduate body interrupts study for a two-year mission, which is why BYU degrees are often completed later than the American norm and why so many graduates in this category reach professional school with foreign language competence already in hand. The J. Reuben Clark Law School, whose founding dean appears below, supplies much of the legal training in the roster.
The Lee family
Rex E. Lee served as the 37th Solicitor General of the United States under President Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1985, having earlier been the founding dean of BYU's law school, and returned as the tenth president of the university until shortly before his death in 1996. His son Mike Lee has represented Utah in the United States Senate since 2011, after defeating a three-term incumbent in a Republican primary. A second son, Thomas Rex Lee, sat as an Associate Justice of the Utah Supreme Court from 2010 to 2022 and is associated with the use of corpus linguistics in statutory interpretation. The law school maintains an endowed chair and an advocacy award in Rex E. Lee's name, which is why the family recurs across the legal biographies in this category rather than appearing only in its own three entries.
The Intermountain West in Congress
Utah's federal delegation is heavily represented. Mitt Romney served as a United States Senator from Utah after a term as Governor of Massachusetts and the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. Orrin Hatch represented the state in the Senate from 1977 to 2019 and served as President pro tempore. John Curtis moved to the Senate in 2025 after founding the Conservative Climate Caucus in the House, and Celeste Maloy holds Utah's 2nd congressional district.
The pattern extends across state lines. Mike Crapo has represented Idaho in the Senate since 1999 and chairs the Senate Finance Committee. Andy Biggs represents Arizona's 5th district and chaired the House Freedom Caucus, and Kyrsten Sinema represented Arizona in the Senate from 2019 to 2025. Gordon H. Smith represented Oregon for two terms and afterward led the National Association of Broadcasters. Jason Chaffetz chaired the House Oversight Committee before leaving Congress for political commentary. State office is represented by Gary Herbert, governor of Utah from 2009 to 2021, Deidre Henderson, the state's lieutenant governor, Scott Bedke, lieutenant governor of Idaho, and Treg Taylor, attorney general of Alaska from 2021 to 2025.
Outside politics
Paul Boyer shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for explaining the enzymatic mechanism behind the synthesis of adenosine triphosphate. Aaron Eckhart built a film career running from In the Company of Men through Erin Brockovich, Thank You for Smoking and The Dark Knight. McKay Coppins reports on American politics and religion for The Atlantic and wrote Romney: A Reckoning. Heather Gay appears on The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. A much more recent group has moved from Provo into software: Blake Rouse and Dallin Bentley founded the analytics engineering company Buster, Brice Douglas founded the ecommerce email tool Zaymo, and Alexander Densley and Dylan Allen-Arnegård founded companies working on permitting review and search visibility.
See also
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