Category:Famous Berkeley Alumni
The University of California, Berkeley is the founding campus of the California public university system, and its roster here reads differently from the private universities in this wiki. Two blocks dominate it: laureates of the Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry and physiology or medicine, and the people who built the Santa Clara Valley semiconductor industry, including Gordon Moore and Andy Grove of Intel and Steve Wozniak of Apple. Running underneath both is a third strand that no private campus supplies at this density: the elected and appointed officials of the state of California itself.
Background
Berkeley opened in 1868 as the first campus of the University of California. It is a public land-grant institution, which shapes who ends up in this category. Its undergraduate intake has always been weighted toward California residents, its graduate programs toward research training, and the result is a membership that clusters around laboratory science, engineering and California public life rather than around law and finance.
The campus also sits across the bay from San Francisco and roughly an hour from the semiconductor corridor that grew up in the Santa Clara Valley after the Second World War. Proximity shows in the roster. So does the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory connection that runs through much of the physics membership.
The Nobel bench
The science membership spans every experimental discipline, and the laureates cluster in chemistry and physics rather than in economics or medicine. In chemistry, Kary Mullis invented the polymerase chain reaction and shared the 1993 prize, Mario Molina established how chlorofluorocarbons destroy stratospheric ozone, Carolyn Bertozzi coined the term bioorthogonal chemistry for reactions that run inside living systems without disrupting them, Frances Arnold developed directed evolution to engineer enzymes, and Alan J. Heeger and Robert Curl complete the group.
In physics the roster holds Steven Chu, who shared the 1997 prize for cooling and trapping atoms with laser light and later served as Secretary of Energy, Saul Perlmutter, who works on the accelerating expansion of the universe and still teaches at Berkeley, Barry Barish, David Gross, David Wineland, Robert Laughlin and John Mather of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The biological sciences contribute Carol Greider on telomerase, Andrew Fire on RNA interference in C. elegans, Gary Ruvkun on the discovery of microRNA regulation, and David Julius on the receptors for temperature and touch. David Baker extends the line into computational protein design.
Economics and psychology sit alongside them. Daniel Kahneman reshaped the study of judgment and decision-making, Douglass North put institutions at the centre of economic history, and Thomas Sargent and Thomas Schelling appear here as well. The mathematics membership includes Shing-Tung Yau, William Thurston and Jim Simons, who took his doctorate at Berkeley before founding Renaissance Technologies.
Intel, Apple and the founders
Berkeley's technology membership is unusual because it is concentrated at the hardware end. Gordon Moore co-founded Intel and wrote the 1965 paper behind Moore's Law. Andy Grove, born András István Gróf in Hungary, ran Intel from 1987 to 1998 and turned it from a memory business into a microprocessor business. Paul Otellini joined Intel in 1974, spent his entire career there, and became its fifth chief executive. Three generations of one company's leadership sit in the same category.
Around them are Steve Wozniak, who designed and hand-built the Apple I and Apple II, Eric Schmidt, Shantanu Narayen of Adobe, Tony Xu of DoorDash, Jed McCaleb, who created the eDonkey network before moving into cryptocurrency and payments, David Friedberg and Masayoshi Son of SoftBank. Erika Cheung belongs to the same technology story from the other side: she was one of the laboratory employees who reported Theranos to federal regulators and later testified for the government at the criminal fraud trial. A recent cohort of Y Combinator founders including Bronte Kolar, Jannik Grothusen, Luofei Chen and Sohil Kshirsagar extends the pattern into the present.
California public life
The state-government membership is what most distinguishes this roster from a private university's. Earl Warren was Governor of California from 1943 to 1953 and then Chief Justice of the United States for sixteen years. Jerry Brown served two separate stretches as governor across five decades of public life. Ed Lee was Mayor of San Francisco from 2011 until his death in 2017, Sheng Thao and Barbara Lee have both led Oakland, and Eleni Kounalakis has been Lieutenant Governor since 2019. The California congressional delegation contributes Doris Matsui, John Garamendi, Linda Sanchez, Colin Allred, Kim Schrier and Peter Welch.
Federal service reaches beyond the state. Robert McNamara was Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, Dean Rusk Secretary of State over the same years, and Edwin Meese Attorney General under Reagan. Alicia Garza took a master's degree in public policy at Berkeley after Spelman College and co-founded Black Lives Matter in 2013 with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi.
See also
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