Category:Famous Duke Alumni
Richard Nixon arrived in Durham on a full scholarship to a law school that had existed in its modern form for only a few years, and graduated third in his class in 1937. This category collects biographical entries on people who studied at Duke University, and its membership is shaped by the two graduate schools that were built to make the university's national reputation quickly: the law school Nixon attended, and the school of medicine, which supplied both the category's Nobel-level research careers and, unusually, a father and son who each took an MD there and then went to Congress. Around them sits a corporate group holding the chief executive offices of Apple, McDonald's and General Motors.
Background
Duke traces its origins to a school founded in 1838 and took its present name and scale in 1924, when the Duke Endowment funded a rapid expansion around Trinity College in Durham, North Carolina. That timing matters for this roster. The law school was reorganized as a graduate professional school and the school of medicine opened in the same period, so the earliest members of this category were students at institutions that were themselves new, and scholarships like Nixon's were part of the recruiting effort.
The medical school became the more distinctive of the two. In the period when several members here passed through it, it admitted a small number of students who had not completed an undergraduate degree, which is how Rand Paul entered after leaving Baylor. The university's basketball program is the third institutional fact that recurs, and it appears in the entries directly: Rick Wagoner played on the varsity team in Durham before running General Motors.
The law school, the medical school and Congress
Richard Nixon is the category's most consequential legal graduate and the only president in it. David Rubenstein took his bachelor's degree at Duke, went to law school elsewhere, co-founded the Carlyle Group, and later chaired Duke's own board of trustees. Bruce Karsh followed the same undergraduate-then-law-elsewhere route into distressed debt investing at Oaktree.
The medical school produced the roster's most unusual pairing. Ron Paul took a bachelor's degree at Gettysburg College and then his Doctor of Medicine at Duke, practiced as an obstetrician-gynecologist in Texas from the 1960s through the 1980s, and represented the state in the House across three separate stints. His son Rand Paul was admitted to the same medical school without having completed his undergraduate degree at Baylor, practiced as an ophthalmologist, and has served as a senator from Kentucky since 2011. Two members of one family, the same degree from the same school, two medical practices and two independent congressional careers is the closest thing this category has to a signature.
Elected office fills out the rest. J.B. Pritzker took his BA at Duke before law school at Northwestern and the governorship of Illinois. Angela Alsobrooks took her BA at Duke, went to law school in Maryland, and became that state's first African-American senator. Eric Greitens graduated in 1996, went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, served as a Navy SEAL officer and then as Governor of Missouri. Shelley Moore Capito took a bachelor's degree in zoology at Duke before a career that led to the Senate from West Virginia. Susan Bysiewicz is Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut, and Mike Levin, Scott Peters and Mo Brooks have all represented House districts. Jeff Zients took his BA at Duke, built a management consulting career in Washington, and served as White House Chief of Staff.
Research careers
William Kaelin Jr. took both his bachelor's degree and his Doctor of Medicine at Duke before clinical training and a fellowship in medical oncology, and he shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Peter Ratcliffe and Gregg Semenza for discoveries about how cells sense and adapt to oxygen levels. Brian Kobilka is in this category by way of Durham rather than by way of a Duke degree: he joined Robert Lefkowitz's laboratory at Duke University Medical Center in the mid-1980s as a postdoctoral fellow, and the receptor work that began there led to a shared Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2012. Both careers point back at the same institutional strength, which is the medical center's basic-science research program rather than its teaching.
Chief executives
The corporate group is small and senior. Tim Cook took an industrial engineering degree at Auburn and then a Master of Business Administration at Duke's Fuqua School, joined Apple in 1998 after IBM and Compaq, and has run the company since 2011; he sits on the university's board of trustees. Chris Kempczinski took his BA at Duke before Harvard Business School and runs McDonald's. Rick Wagoner took his BA at Duke, played on the basketball team, and served as chairman and chief executive of General Motors from 2000 to 2009. Tricia Steele works the legal side of the same world, in international capital markets and cross-border transactions. The newest entries in the category, among them Alexander Schiff, George Lawrence and Ege Kaan Duman, are early-stage software founders rather than executives, which is the direction the roster is currently growing.
See also
This category currently contains no pages or media.