Category:Famous MIT Alumni

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, chartered in 1861 to teach applied science to a country that was industrializing faster than it could staff. The graduates collected here fall into three concentrations that do not obviously belong to the same school: a dense body of macroeconomists and central bankers, a run of Nobel laureates in physics and molecular biology, and the executives who run the companies that design and fabricate semiconductors. A fourth and much younger group sits alongside them, founders whose companies are two or three years old.

MIT organizes undergraduate study by numbered courses rather than named departments, and awards degrees at the bachelor's, master's and doctoral levels. The doctoral programs, not the undergraduate college, account for a large share of this category: many of the economists and physicists here took a first degree elsewhere and came to Cambridge for a PhD. The Sloan School of Management operates inside the same institution as the physics and biology faculties, which is part of why a single alumni roster reaches from monetary policy to gravitational wave detection to chip architecture without leaving one campus.

The economics concentration is the most pronounced pattern in this category, and it is a doctoral pattern rather than an undergraduate one. Ben Bernanke chaired the Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2014 and shared the 2022 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for work on banks in financial crises. Mario Draghi went from the same program to the presidency of the European Central Bank and then to the office of Prime Minister of Italy. Olivier Blanchard wrote his dissertation under Stanley Fischer and served as chief economist of the International Monetary Fund from 2008 to 2015, a post Simon Johnson had held before him.

The prize record in the field is unusually concentrated. Peter Diamond was recognized in 2010 for the analysis of search frictions in labor markets. Robert C. Merton shared the 1997 prize for the option pricing model that carries his name alongside Myron Scholes and Fischer Black. Esther Duflo shared the 2019 prize for the use of randomized controlled trials in development economics. Jean Tirole was recognized in 2014 for the analysis of market power and regulation, George Akerlof in 2001 for information asymmetry, Joseph Stiglitz in the same year, Robert Aumann in 2005 for game theory, William Nordhaus in 2018 for integrating climate change into macroeconomic modeling, Robert Mundell in 1999 for optimum currency areas, and Paul Krugman in 2008 for new trade theory. Robert J. Shiller, Kenneth Rogoff, N. Gregory Mankiw, Paul Romer and Oliver Williamson complete a group whose textbooks, indices and policy roles reach well past the academy.

Richard Feynman took his first degree at MIT before the work in quantum electrodynamics that brought him a share of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics. Rainer Weiss designed the laser interferometry behind LIGO and shared the 2017 prize for the first direct observation of gravitational waves. George Smoot shared the 2006 prize for measuring anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background, Carl Wieman the 2001 prize for producing a Bose-Einstein condensate, Robert Laughlin the 1998 prize for the fractional quantum Hall effect, and William Daniel Phillips the 1997 prize for laser cooling. Adam Riess shared the 2011 prize for the evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

The biology group is equally dense. H. Robert Horvitz shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the genetics of programmed cell death in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Andrew Fire shared the 2006 prize for RNA interference, Michael Rosbash the 2017 prize for the molecular clock underlying circadian rhythms, David Julius the 2021 prize for the receptors that register pain and temperature, and Victor Ambros the 2024 prize for the discovery of microRNA. Paul L. Modrich shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for DNA mismatch repair, and Elias Corey received the 1990 chemistry prize for retrosynthetic analysis.

The semiconductor line runs from Robert Noyce, co-inventor of the integrated circuit and co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, through to a current generation of chief executives: Lisa Su at Advanced Micro Devices, Lip-Bu Tan at Intel, and Hock Tan at Broadcom. Alan Mulally took a master's in aeronautics and astronautics before running Boeing Commercial Airplanes and then Ford. Noubar Afeyan founded Flagship Pioneering and co-founded Moderna. Whitfield Diffie co-authored the key exchange that made public-key cryptography practical, and Jim Simons left differential geometry for Renaissance Technologies.

Software founders in the category include Drew Houston of Dropbox, Patrick Collison of Stripe, Greg Brockman of OpenAI, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot, and Alexandr Wang of Scale AI. Engineering degrees also turn up repeatedly in elected office: Alex Padilla and Thomas Massie both trained as engineers before Congress, as did Chrissy Houlahan, Jake Auchincloss, John Sununu and Chris Sununu. George Shultz held four Cabinet posts, Les Aspin served as Secretary of Defense, Kofi Annan became Secretary-General of the United Nations, and David Scott commanded Apollo 15 and walked on the Moon.

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