Category:Famous Carnegie Mellon alumni
Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh was formed when the Carnegie Institute of Technology, founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1900 as a technical school for the city's industrial workforce, merged with the Mellon Institute in 1967. This roster is smaller than those of the older private universities and considerably more concentrated: four of its members hold the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences or the Nobel Prize in Physics, and all four passed through the same two departments. Around that core sit two co-founders of the same computer company, the donor whose name the business school now carries, and a drama school that shows up in the roster as reliably as the engineering side.
The Pittsburgh economics school
The graduate business school, then the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, ran an economics doctoral program with an unusual commitment to quantitative method, and its output is the strongest cluster in this category. Dale Mortensen took his doctorate there and later shared the 2010 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for the analysis of markets with search frictions, the work that reconciled simultaneous unemployment and job vacancies. Finn Kydland came from Norway for doctoral work under Edward C. Prescott and shared the 2004 prize with him for research on dynamic macroeconomics. Oliver Williamson arrived with an MIT degree and a Stanford MBA, encountered Herbert Simon's work on bounded rationality while there, and took the 2009 prize for transaction cost economics.
John Nash belongs to the same building by a different route. He transferred to Carnegie Tech on a full scholarship, switched from chemical engineering to chemistry to mathematics, and had both a bachelor's and a master's degree by 1948, at nineteen; one of his graduate school recommendation letters consisted of a single sentence reading "This man is a genius." He took the 1994 economics prize for equilibria in non-cooperative games. Clifford Shull took his bachelor's degree at Carnegie Tech in his home city and shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physics for neutron scattering.
Sun Microsystems, and the school with a name on it
Two of the four co-founders of Sun Microsystems are in this category. Andy Bechtolsheim came from the Technical University of Munich for a master's degree at Carnegie Mellon before Stanford, where he designed the workstation that became the company's first product. Vinod Khosla took a master's in biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon before Stanford's business school, and co-founded the company with Bechtolsheim, Scott McNealy and Bill Joy in 1982.
David Tepper completed his MBA in the same industrial administration program in 1982, founded Appaloosa Management, and gave the school 55 million dollars in 2004 and a further 67 million in 2013; it now carries his name. Ted Decker came out of the same business school and chairs Home Depot. Charles Erwin Wilson took a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at Carnegie Tech in 1909 at nineteen, ran General Motors, and served as United States Secretary of Defense.
Drama, film and public office
The College of Fine Arts is the reason this category is not a purely technical list. Ted Danson left Stanford after two years, transferred into the drama program, took a Bachelor of Fine Arts, and was named a distinguished alumnus by the university in 2003. Greg Mottola directs film and television. In public office, Bill Peduto served as Pittsburgh's 60th mayor from 2014 to 2022, Susie Lee represents Nevada's 3rd district and Sydney Kamlager-Dove California's 37th.
The most recent members are almost all founders of accelerator-backed companies, among them Kevan Dodhia on access control for AI agents, Neha Suresh on voice assistants, Shivum Pandove on agent evaluation and Valentin Sulzer on battery simulation. The pattern that connects them to the older membership is the same one the Nobel cluster came out of: quantitative training applied outside the academy.
See also
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