Category:Famous People from Philadelphia

Barry Sharpless was born in Philadelphia in 1941 and is one of only five people ever to win two Nobel Prizes, and he is not the only laureate the city sent to Stockholm: the category also holds Nobel work in medicine and in physics from people born or raised there. This category collects biographical entries on people from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and alongside the laboratory careers it holds two other concentrations: a legal and prosecutorial line running from a justice born in 1843 to the current district attorney, and the executive ranks of the large companies that still keep their headquarters in Center City. Benjamin Franklin sits at the front of it as the adopted Philadelphian, born in Boston and buried in the city, who founded its university, its library company and its first fire department.

Philadelphia was laid out by William Penn in 1682, served as the capital of the United States from 1790 to 1800, and spent the nineteenth century as an industrial and medical center rather than a financial one. That history is legible in this roster. The city's medical schools, its chemical and pharmaceutical industry and the University of Pennsylvania account for the scientific entries; its bar and its district attorney's office account for the legal ones; and its neighborhoods are named specifically in the biographies, from Germantown to South Philadelphia to Chestnut Hill.

One structural pattern is worth naming because it runs through the whole category. A large share of these people were born in Philadelphia and built their careers in other states. Ro Khanna represents California, Deborah Ross North Carolina, Keith Self Texas, Morgan Griffith Virginia, Lisa Blunt Rochester Delaware, and Bob McDonnell served as Governor of Virginia. Grace Kelly left for Hollywood and then Monaco. The people who stayed are mostly the ones who went into city government or into the companies headquartered downtown.

Barry Sharpless was born in Philadelphia in 1941 and grew up in the area. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2001 for chirally catalyzed oxidation reactions and again in 2022 for click chemistry, making him the fifth person to win two. Harvey Alter was born in the city in 1935 and spent most of his career at the National Institutes of Health, where his research on transfusion-associated hepatitis led to the identification of the hepatitis C virus and to the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Joseph Taylor Jr. was born in Philadelphia in 1941 and shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics with his former graduate student Russell Alan Hulse for their 1974 discovery of a binary pulsar. Saul Perlmutter moved to the city as a child and grew up in its intellectual milieu; he shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for the supernova observations that implied an accelerating universe.

The city's contribution to the social sciences and to writing about technology comes from the same neighborhoods. Robert Merton was born Meyer Robert Schkolnick in 1910 to Eastern European Jewish immigrant parents and grew up in a working-class South Philadelphia neighborhood before four decades as a sociologist at Columbia. Steven Levy was born in the city in 1951 and became one of the principal chroniclers of the personal computer industry. Richard Saul Wurman was born there in 1935, trained as an architect, and built a career around making complicated information legible. Questlove was born there in 1971 into a musical household and works as a drummer, producer, filmmaker and author. Charles Hallahan, born in 1943, came up through the city's amateur and lunchtime theater before a long screen career.

The Supreme Court appears twice, and both times through people born in the city. Joseph McKenna was born in Philadelphia in 1843 to Irish immigrant parents and served as an Associate Justice after holding office in all three branches of the federal government. Owen Roberts was born there in 1875, raised in Germantown, and sat on the Court from 1930 to 1945, taking the seat left vacant by the death of Edward Terry Sanford. Francis Biddle was born abroad but raised in Philadelphia society, clerked for Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., returned to practice in the city, and became Attorney General during the Second World War. Rod Rosenstein was born in Philadelphia in 1965 and served as Deputy Attorney General.

The district attorney's office is its own thread: R. Seth Williams held it from 2010 to 2017 as the first African American to do so in the Commonwealth, and Larry Krasner has held it since 2018. Cherelle Parker was born in the city in 1972 and became its first woman mayor in January 2024. Malcolm Kenyatta was born in North Philadelphia in 1990 and represents the 181st district in the state house. Nikil Saval was born in South Philadelphia in 1982 and represents the first senate district. Brendan Boyle was born in the city in 1977 to an Irish immigrant father and represents a Philadelphia-area district in Congress. Mike Fitzpatrick represented a neighboring one. Jeffrey Abramowitz practiced civil litigation in Center City for more than two decades before moving into reentry education work.

Philadelphia's corporate roster in this category is concentrated rather than broad, and most of it sits inside a few blocks. Brian Roberts was born in the city in 1959 into the family that had bought its first cable system, and runs Comcast; Michael Cavanagh is his co-chief executive and lives in Chestnut Hill. John Zillmer runs Aramark, headquartered in Center City. Richard Hayne opened his first apparel shop near the University of Pennsylvania campus in the mid-1970s with roughly four thousand dollars in capital and built it into Urban Outfitters. Carl Dranoff and Ori Feibush both develop property in the city. Josh Kopelman runs a seed-stage venture firm from Philadelphia rather than from Silicon Valley and chaired the board of the company that owns the city's daily newspapers.

Two members left and took the city's name with them. Stephen Schwarzman was born in Philadelphia in 1947, grew up in suburban Huntingdon Valley, and co-founded Blackstone in New York. Kenneth Frazier was born in the city in 1954 and became chief executive of Merck. Drew Chapin runs a discoverability practice from Philadelphia and volunteers at the city's animal welfare society. Darnell Ferguson was born in Philadelphia in 1987 and built his restaurant career in Louisville.

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• Category:Famous Penn Alumni
• Category:Famous People from Chicago
• Category:Famous People from Atlanta