Category:Famous UT Austin Alumni

Michael Dell started a computer company in a University of Texas at Austin dormitory room in 1984, dropped out, and returned in 2003 to give the commencement address. This category collects biographical entries on people who studied at the University of Texas at Austin, and the roster it produces is first a government roster and second a research one: the university's law school and its public affairs school feed a long line of Texas officeholders and federal appointees, while its science departments account for the laureates.

The university opened in Austin in 1883 and sits about a mile from the Texas Capitol, which is the geographic fact that explains most of this category. The School of Law is the through-line for the political entries. John B. Connally took a law degree there before the governorship and the Treasury Department; Lloyd Bentsen enrolled at the same law school before the Senate and his own term at Treasury; Tom C. Clark returned to Austin after the First World War for undergraduate and legal study before becoming Attorney General and then an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court; Lloyd Doggett took both a bachelor's degree and a Juris Doctor there before the Texas Senate, the Texas Supreme Court and Congress. James Baker enrolled at the University of Texas School of Law in Austin before serving as White House Chief of Staff, Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of State.

Several careers arrive at the university second rather than first. Stacey Abrams came to the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs after Spelman. Neil deGrasse Tyson came for graduate study in astronomy after Harvard. J.M. Coetzee came for a doctorate in English, linguistics and Germanic languages, writing his dissertation on the early fiction of Samuel Beckett. Raj Subramaniam and Bill Gurley both took MBAs at the McCombs School of Business, Subramaniam before running FedEx and Gurley before a career at Benchmark.

The largest single occupational block here is elected office, and most of it is Texan. Greg Abbott took a Bachelor of Business Administration at the university before the Texas Supreme Court, the attorney general's office and the governorship. In the House delegation, Chip Roy holds a law degree from the university, Jeb Hensarling took his Juris Doctor there before chairing the House Financial Services Committee, Pete Olson earned his law degree at the university's law school, Lance Gooden took both a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Business Administration, Craig Goldman took a Bachelor of Arts before the Texas House and then Congress, and Charlie Gonzalez took a Bachelor of Arts before succeeding his father in a San Antonio seat. Henry Cuellar holds both a Juris Doctor and a doctorate from the university. James Talarico read government there before Teach For America and the Texas House.

The category is not exclusively Texan or exclusively Democratic or Republican. James Lankford took his bachelor's degree at the university and represents Oklahoma in the Senate. Jeb Bush enrolled after Phillips Academy and later governed Florida. Mark Alford attended without completing a degree and represents a Missouri district. Darren Walker took a Bachelor of Arts, a Bachelor of Science and a Juris Doctor at the university before running the Ford Foundation.

The scientific entries are concentrated and specific. James P. Allison earned his Bachelor of Science in microbiology at the university and stayed for a doctorate in biological sciences, working on the T cells whose regulation became the basis of immune checkpoint therapy. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2018. E. Donnall Thomas took both a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts at the university before the bone marrow transplantation work that transformed the treatment of leukemia and other blood diseases, recognized with the same prize in 1990. Coetzee's Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in 2003, rests on a doctorate taken in Austin.

Engineering and business supply the rest. Rex Tillerson studied civil engineering at the Cockrell School, played in the Longhorn Band, and spent more than four decades at ExxonMobil before a year as Secretary of State. Lukas Lundin studied geological sciences before expanding his family's mining and resources group. Dell enrolled in 1983 as a pre-medical student at his parents' urging and left to build the company that carries his name.

Outside those tracks the category is thinner and more scattered. Bruce McGill earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in drama before Animal House and a long career in supporting roles. Sanya Richards-Ross competed in collegiate track and field at the university before four Olympic Games in the 400 meters. A recent group of founders came out of the computing and engineering programs: Aniruddh Sriram was a Turing Scholar who researched natural language processing and taught as an assistant before co-founding an AI infrastructure company, Denzell Ford took a computer science degree before co-founding a search and retrieval company later acquired by Mintlify, and Sriman Gaddam and Sukhjit Singh overlapped at the university between 2019 and 2023, in computational biology and chemical engineering respectively, before co-founding the same company.

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