Category:Famous UPenn alumni
The University of Pennsylvania is an Ivy League university in West Philadelphia whose undergraduate business school, Wharton, was the first of its kind in the United States. That single school shapes this category more than the rest of the university combined: the largest identifiable group in the roster is finance, and it runs from the people who invented the modern buyout and hedge fund businesses to the people who now govern the school. Around it sit two smaller and quite different clusters, one made of Philadelphia city and state officeholders and one made of Nobel laureates in the sciences.
The Wharton bench
Elon Musk transferred from Queen's University and took a dual degree at Penn, a Bachelor of Arts in economics from Wharton alongside a Bachelor of Science in physics. Donald Trump transferred from Fordham to Wharton and has cited the degree throughout his public life. Steve Cohen graduated from Wharton in 1978 and went straight into options arbitrage on Wall Street. Marc Rowan took both a bachelor's degree and an MBA there, co-founded Apollo Global Management out of the network he built in the process, and later became chair of the Wharton Board of Advisors and one of its largest donors. Rob Kapito did his undergraduate work at Wharton and co-founded BlackRock. Peter Lynch took his MBA there before running the Fidelity Magellan Fund from 1977 to 1990 at an average annual return of 29.2 percent. The rest of the finance roster is the same industry seen from other seats: Cliff Asness at AQR Capital Management, Scott Shleifer at Tiger Global, Michael Arougheti at Ares Management, Jeff Blau at Related Companies, and Neel Kashkari as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
The school's reach is not confined to finance. Sundar Pichai arrived after IIT Kharagpur and Stanford and was named both a Siebel Scholar and a Palmer Scholar during his MBA. Safra Catz and Mike Sievert came out of Penn into the chief executive's office at Oracle and T-Mobile. The most unexpected member of the group is William J. Brennan Jr., who studied economics at Wharton before Harvard Law and, from 1956 to 1990, a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Philadelphia's own bench
Penn is the university that Philadelphia's political class passes through, and the category shows it. Ed Rendell took his undergraduate degree there, became the city's district attorney, then its mayor, then the 45th governor of Pennsylvania. Cherelle Parker did her graduate work at Penn and became the 100th mayor of Philadelphia and the first woman to hold the office. Larry Krasner has served as the city's district attorney since 2018 and Nikil Saval represents its first district in the Pennsylvania Senate. Brian Roberts runs Comcast from the city and Brian Tierney once owned and published its largest newspaper. David L. Cohen, long the second figure at Comcast, served as United States Ambassador to Canada. Madeleine Dean and Mary Gay Scanlon represent neighboring Pennsylvania districts in Congress.
Five Nobel laureates and two presidents
The scientific membership is small and heavily decorated. Ahmed Zewail enrolled at Penn in 1969 for his doctorate and went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for femtochemistry. Alan Heeger took his doctorate in physics at Penn and returned to the same faculty circle to do the work on conducting polymers, with Alan MacDiarmid of Penn and Hideki Shirakawa, that won the three of them the chemistry prize. Ei-ichi Negishi finished his doctoral studies at Penn in 1963 and later shared the chemistry prize for palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling. Stanley Prusiner took both his undergraduate degree and his medical degree at Penn before discovering prions. Gregg Semenza came from Harvard for a combined MD and PhD at Penn and shared the medicine prize for work on how cells sense oxygen.
Two heads of state sit in the same category by very different routes. William Henry Harrison transferred to Penn to study medicine under Benjamin Rush before abandoning it for the army and, eventually, the presidency. Alassane Ouattara took a doctorate in economics at Penn, which gave him credentials no other Ivorian politician could match, and has been President of Ivory Coast since 2010. Owen Josephus Roberts took his undergraduate degree and his law degree at Penn, taught on its law faculty, sat on the Supreme Court from 1930 to 1945, and then went back to serve as dean of the law school.
See also
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