University of Michigan - Notable People and Alumni

Notable People and Alumni

In addition to the late U.S. president Gerald Ford, the university has produced twenty-six Rhodes Scholars, numerous Marshall Scholars, seven Nobel Prize winners, 116 Olympic medalists, 17 MacArthur Foundation award winners, 18 Pulitzer Prize winners including Ann Marie Lapinski who was named Pulitzer board co-chair in 2011, and Fields Medal winner Stephen Smale. More than 250 Michigan graduates have served as legislators as either United States Senator (40 graduates) or as a Congressional representative (over 200 graduates). In the late 1990s and early 2000s (decade), the university routinely has led in the number of Fulbright Scholars including a nation-leading 40 scholars in the 2010/2011 academic year. U-M's contributions to aeronautics include aircraft designer Clarence "Kelly" Johnson of Lockheed Skunk Works fame, Lockheed president Willis Hawkins, and several astronauts including the all-U-M crew of Gemini 4 and the all-Michigan crew of Apollo 15. U-M counts among its matriculants nineteen billionaires and prominent company founders and co-founders including Google co-founder Larry Page and Dr. J. Robert Beyster who founded Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) in 1969.

Notable writers who attended U-M include playwright Arthur Miller, essayists Susan Orlean and Sven Birkerts, journalists and editors Mike Wallace, Jonathan Chait of The New Republic, Daniel Okrent, and Sandra Steingraber, food critics Ruth Reichl and Gael Greene, novelists Brett Ellen Block, Elizabeth Kostova, Marge Piercy, Brad Meltzer, Betty Smith, and Charles Major, screenwriter Judith Guest, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Theodore Roethke, National Book Award winners Keith Waldrop and Jesmyn Ward, composer/author/puppeteer Forman Brown, and Middle East analyst, author, and TV commentator Alireza Jafarzadeh.

In Hollywood, famous alumni include actors James Earl Jones, David Alan Grier actresses Lucy Liu and Selma Blair, and filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan. Many Broadway and musical theatre actors, including Gavin Creel, Chelsea Krombach, Andrew Keenan-Bolger, and his sister Celia Keenan-Bolger attended U-M for musical theatre. The creators of A Very Potter Musical, known as StarKid Productions, also graduated from the University of Michigan. A member of Starkid, actor and singer Darren Criss, is a series regular on the television series Glee.

Musical graduates include operatic soprano Jessye Norman, singer Joe Dassin, jazz guitarist Randy Napoleon, and Mannheim Steamroller founder Chip Davis. Classical composer Frank Ticheli and Broadway composer Andrew Lippa attended. Pop Superstar Madonna and rock legend Iggy Pop attended but did not graduate.

Other U-M graduates include Claude Shannon who made major contributions to the mathematics of information theory, Turing award winners Stephen Cook and Frances E. Allen who made fundamental contributions to computer science, current Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System Donald Kohn, Temel Kotil who is the president and CEO of Turkish Airlines, current Dean of Harvard Law School Martha Minow, former House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, US Representative Justin Amash, who represents Michigan's Third Congressional District, assisted-suicide advocate Dr. Jack Kevorkian, Weather Underground radical activist Bill Ayers, activist Tom Hayden, architect Charles Moore, Rensis Likert, a sociologist that specialized in management styles, and developed the Likert scale, Ryan Drummond who was the voice of Sonic the Hedgehog in the series of video games from 1999–2004, the Swedish Holocaust hero Raoul Wallenberg, and Benjamin D. Pritchard, the Civil War general who captured Jefferson Davis. Neurosurgeon and CNN chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta attended both college and medical school at U-M. Conservative pundit Ann Coulter attended law school at U-M, as did Clarence Darrow at a time when many lawyers did not receive any formal education. Vaughn R. Walker, who is a Federal District Judge in California and overturned the controversial California Proposition 8 in 2010 and ruled it unconstitutional, received his undergraduate degree from U-M in 1966.

Some more notorious graduates of the University are 1910 convicted murderer (though perhaps wrongfully so) Dr. Harvey Crippen, late 19th-century American serial killer Herman Mudgett, and "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski.

U-M athletes have starred in Major League Baseball, the National Football League and National Basketball Association as well as other professional sports. Notable among recent players is Tom Brady of the New England Patriots. Three players have won college football's Heisman Trophy, awarded to the player considered the best in the nation: Tom Harmon (1940), Desmond Howard (1991) and Charles Woodson (1997). Professional golfer John Schroeder and Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps also attended the University of Michigan, with the latter studying Sports Marketing and Management. Phelps also swam competitively for Club Wolverine, a swimming club associated with the university. NHL players Marty Turco, Chris Summers, Max Pacioretty, Carl Hagelin, Brendan Morrison, Jack Johnson, and Michael Cammalleri all played for U-M's ice hockey team. Barry Larkin of the Cincinnati Reds played baseball at the university. Derek Jeter received a baseball scholarship to U-M, but was signed and called up by the New York Yankees before he could play there. In 2011, Meryl Davis and Charlie White won the first gold medal awarded to the United States in ice dancing in the world championship.

The university claims the only alumni association with a chapter on the moon, established in 1971 when the crew of Apollo 15 placed a charter plaque for a new U-M Alumni Association on the lunar surface. The plaque reads: "The Alumni Association of The University of Michigan. Charter Number One. This is to certify that The University of Michigan Club of The Moon is a duly constituted unit of the Alumni Association and entitled to all the rights and privileges under the Association’s Constitution." According to the Apollo 15 astronauts, several small U-M flags were brought on the mission. The presence of a U-M flag on the moon is a long-held campus myth.