Australian National University - Notable Graduates and Faculty

Notable Graduates and Faculty

Academic leaders have included Professors Manning Clark, Bart Bok, Derek Freeman, and Hanna Neumann. Notable political alumni include former Prime Ministers of Australia, Bob Hawke and Kevin Rudd, current Premier of New South Wales Barry O'Farrell, Patricia Hewitt, and Kim Edward Beazley. Alumni in other fields include Supreme Court Judge Catherine Holmes, linguist Nicholas Evans and mathematician John H. Coates.

Nobel prize winners associated with the University include Lord Howard Florey, an early academic adviser to ANU and Chancellor from 1965–1968 and Professor John Eccles awarded in 1963 for Medicine – for his pioneering work on aspects of the mammalian central nervous system. Professor Eccles was founding Professor of Physiology at The John Curtin School of Medical Research. Professor John Harsanyi received the 1994 Nobel Prize for Economics for his work on game theory, providing a new tool for economic analysis. Professor Harsanyi taught economics at ANU from 1958 to 1961, completing some of his early research on game theory while at the University. Professor Rolf M. Zinkernagel and Professor Peter Doherty received the 1996 Nobel Prize for Medicine for their revolutionary work in immunology; Professors Doherty and Zinkernagel first met and worked together at The John Curtin School of Medical Research. In 2011, Brian P. Schmidt shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess for observations which provided evidence for the accelerating Universe.