Worcester Polytechnic Institute - Alumni

Alumni

• Elwood Haynes (Class of 1881) was an early alumnus, prominent chemist and inventor and credited for aiding in the development of the automobile and the creation of stainless steel.
• William Hobbs (Class of 1883) was a noted 19th century geologist
• Kotaro Shimomura (Class of 1888) was a chemical engineer. After graduating, he became president of Doshisha University and Osaka Gas Co., Ltd in Japan.
• Atwater Kent (dropped out in 1895 and 1896) went on to found the Atwater Kent Manufacturing Company which was the world's leading producer of radios in the late 1920s (there is now a building on campus called the Atwater Kent Laboratories).
• John Woodman Higgins (Class of 1896) was the founder of Worcester Pressed Steel Company and of the Higgins Armory Museum
• Robert H. Goddard (Class of 1908) is WPI's best-known alumnus, and is widely regarded as the Father of Modern Rocketry.
• Gilbert Vernam (Class of 1914) is credited with the dawn of modern cryptography
• William Stevens Lawton (transferred out in 1918) was a United States Army Lieutenant General, who attended from 1917 to 1918 and then transferred to the United States Military Academy. Lawton served in World War II and the Korean War and was the Army's Comptroller
• Burton Marsh, (Class of 1920) is credited with being America's first traffic engineer. The Institute of Transportation Engineers highest award is the Burton W. Marsh Award.
• Harold Stephen Black (Class of 1921) revolutionized electronics by inventing the negative feedback amplifier in 1927.
• Richard T. Whitcomb (Class of 1943) was aeronautical engineer responsible for the "area rule" of high-speed aircraft design, the supercritical airfoil, and winglets
• Robert Stempel (Class of 1955) was the inventor of the catalytic converter and former Chairman and CEO of General Motors
• Paul Allaire (Class of 1960) was the previous CEO of Xerox.
• Curtis Carlson (Class of 1967) is a famous researcher into imaging systems and current president and CEO of SRI International.
• Daniel Robbins (dropped out) is the founder and former chief architect of the Gentoo Linux project.
• Todd Akin (Class of 1970) Member U.S. House of Representatives representing Missouri's 2nd District.
• Michael J. Dolan (Class of 1975) is the current vice president of ExxonMobil Corporation and president of the ExxonMobil Chemical Company.
• Dean Kamen (dropped out in 1976) left the school without finishing his degree, invented the first portable insulin pump and started the company that invented the Segway Human Transporter
• Dan Itse (Class of 1980, 1986) engineer, inventor, member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives
• David Gewirtz (Class of 1982) is a CNN columnist, cyberterrorism advisor, and leading presidential scholar. He was also a candidate for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Letters.
• Nancy Pimental (Class of 1987) earned a Chemical Engineering degree, is one of the writers of South Park and the movie The Sweetest Thing. She also replaced Jimmy Kimmel as co-host of Win Ben Stein's Money. She is an alumna of Phi Sigma Sigma.
• Dr. Anup K. Ghosh (Class of 1991) is an electrical engineer and computer scientist who was awarded the National Security Agency's Frank Byron Rowlett Award in 2005.
• Andy Ross (Mass Academy Class of 1997) guitarist, keyboardist and vocalist for the rock band OK Go since 2005 spent a year at WPI as part of the Mass Academy program.
• Naveen Selvadurai (Class of 2002) is the co-founder of Foursquare
• John W. Geils Jr. (dropped out in 1967) founded The J. Geils Band and played lead guitar. Bandmates Danny Klein and Richard "Magic Dick" Salwitz also left WPI.