Category:Famous UChicago Alumni
The University of Chicago is a private research university on the South Side of Chicago, founded in 1890. The people collected here reflect the two departments the university is most associated with, economics and law, in a proportion that is hard to miss: a long series of Nobel laureates in economics on one side, and on the other a run of United States Attorneys General, a Supreme Court Justice and a set of federal appellate judges. A third and smaller group sits underneath both, made up of physicists and chemists whose work turns up in batteries, quantum dots and protein structure prediction.
Background
Chicago was founded in 1890 with money from John D. Rockefeller and opened two years later. It organizes undergraduate study around a required Core curriculum and runs graduate divisions and professional schools on the same campus, among them the Law School, the Booth School of Business and the Pritzker School of Medicine. The economics department and the Law School developed a shared body of method in the middle of the twentieth century, applying price theory to questions that had been treated as legal or sociological, and the resulting overlap explains why several people in this category appear equally at home in both groups.
The Chicago school of economics
Milton Friedman received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for work on consumption analysis and monetary history, and became the public face of the department's argument for monetarism. Gary Becker was recognized in 1992 for extending economic analysis to discrimination, crime and family structure. Robert Lucas Jr. received the 1995 prize for the rational expectations hypothesis and the critique of policy evaluation that carries his name. Eugene Fama shared the 2013 prize for the empirical analysis of asset prices and the efficient-market hypothesis.
The finance line is separate and equally dense. Harry Markowitz received the 1990 prize for modern portfolio theory. Myron Scholes shared the 1997 prize for the option pricing model he developed with Fischer Black and Robert C. Merton. Claudia Goldin received the 2023 prize for research on women's labor market outcomes and the gender wage gap, and Paul Romer shared the 2018 prize for endogenous growth theory. Rudi Dornbusch built the overshooting model of exchange rates, and Robin Wells co-authored the introductory textbooks that carried much of this material into undergraduate teaching elsewhere.
Law, the bench and the Justice Department
Three United States Attorneys General appear in this category. Edward Levi served in the office from 1975 to 1977 after seven years as president of the university, appointed to rebuild the Justice Department's credibility after Watergate. Ramsey Clark held the office from 1967 to 1969 and spent the decades afterward in civil liberties litigation. John Ashcroft served from 2001 to 2005 and oversaw the drafting of the USA PATRIOT Act.
The judicial line runs alongside it. John Paul Stevens sat as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court from 1975 to 2010. Robert Bork served on the D.C. Circuit and became the subject of the 1987 confirmation fight that changed how judicial nominations are contested. Abner Mikva served in the House, on the D.C. Circuit and as White House Counsel, and mentored Barack Obama and Merrick Garland early in their careers. Thomas Rex Lee sat on the Utah Supreme Court and brought corpus linguistics into statutory interpretation. James Comey directed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Richard Cordray was the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and Larry Krasner and William Tong hold elected prosecutorial office in Philadelphia and Connecticut. Chicago's own civic government is represented by Lori Lightfoot and Toni Preckwinkle, and the congressional delegation by Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, Andy Kim, Mike Quigley and Liz Cheney.
Physics, chemistry and computation
Daniel Tsui shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics for the fractional quantum Hall effect. John B. Goodenough shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the cathode materials that made the lithium-ion battery practical, and remained in active research past his hundredth year. Moungi Bawendi shared the 2023 chemistry prize for the synthesis of quantum dots, Irwin Rose shared the 2004 prize for ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation, and Bruce Beutler shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the receptor that lets the innate immune system detect bacterial infection. John M. Jumper shared the 2024 chemistry prize for AlphaFold. Paul Cohen received the Fields Medal in 1966 for the forcing technique that settled the independence of the continuum hypothesis, and Paul Alivisatos returned to the university as its president after a career in nanocrystal chemistry.
Business leadership is a smaller but visible group: Satya Nadella at Microsoft, Brian Niccol at Starbucks, Vas Narasimhan at Novartis, Debra Crew at Diageo, David Rubenstein at Carlyle, Cliff Asness at AQR and Brady Dougan at Credit Suisse.
See also
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