List of German Americans - Scientists/Researchers

Scientists/Researchers

• Reinhold Aman – chemical engineer and publisher of Maledicta
• Othmar Ammann – civil engineer
• Walter Baade – astronomer
• Max Bentele – pioneer in the field of jet aircraft turbines and mechanical engineering
• Hans Albrecht Bethe – nuclear physicist who won a Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the nuclear energy sources of stars (1967).
• Franz Boas – anthropologist and ethnologist best known for his work with the Kwakiutl Indians in British Columbia, Canada.
• Karl Brandt – economist
• Florian Cajori – mathematician
• Werner Dahm – NASA rocket scientist
• Hans Georg Dehmelt – physicist
• Max Delbrück – biophysicist
• Krafft Arnold Ehricke – rocket-propulsion engineer
• Ernst R. G. Eckert – scientist
• Otto Eckstein – economist
• Albert Einstein – theoretical physicist, philosopher and author.
• George Engelmann – botanist
• Katherine Esau – botanist
• Edmond H. Fischer – biochemist
• James Franck – physicist
• Frieda Fromm-Reichmann – psychoanalyst, founded William Alanson White Institute
• Ernst Geissler – NASA aerospace engineer
• William Paul Gerhard – sanitary engineer
• Heinrich Göbel – precision mechanic and inventor, who was long seen as an early pioneer who independently developed designs for an incandescent light bulb – but this claim is seen as very unlikely today
• Maria Goeppert-Mayer – Nobel Prize-winning physicist
• John P. Grotzinger – Fletcher Jones Professor of Geology at California Institute of Technology under the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences
• Martin Gruebele – Biophysicist and Computational biologist, currently associated with many departments at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Helmut Gröttrup – rocket scientist
• Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht – literary theorist and Professor at Stanford University
• Walter Haeussermann – NASA rocket scientist
• Michael Heidelberger – regarded as the father of modern immunology
• Augustin Herrman – surveyor, who made the first reliable maps of the colonies of Maryland and Virginia
• Herman Hollerith – statistician
• Karen Horney – psychoanalyst
• Edmund C. Jaeger – naturalist
• Donald J. Kessler – astrophysicist
• Wolfgang Köhler – psychologist
• Heinrich Klüver – psychologist, largely credited with introducing Gestalt psychology to the United States in the early 20th century
• Polykarp Kusch – physicist
• Willy Ley – science writer and space advocate who helped popularise rocketry and spaceflight
• Jacques Loeb – biologist, Nobel Prize candidate
• Leo Loeb – biologist, pathologist
• Hugo Münsterberg – psychologist, pioneered applied psychology
• Emmy Noether – mathematician
• Robert Oppenheimer – physicist and director of the Manhattan Project, also known as "The Father of the Atomic Bomb"
• Robert F. Overmyer – test pilot and USAF and NASA astronaut
• Charles Francis Richter – seismologist, inventor of the Richter magnitude scale
• David Rittenhouse – astronomer, inventor, mathematician, surveyor, scientific instrument craftsman, public official and first director of the United States Mint
• Eileen Rockefeller Growald – founder and former president of the Institute for the Advancement of Health
• Otto Schaden – Egyptologist
• Hermann Irving Schlesinger – inorganic chemist, working in boron chemistry, co-discovered sodium borohydride in 1940.

• Frank Schlesinger – astronomer
• Alfred Schütz – philosopher/sociologist
• Jonas Schütz – early mining expert
• Rusty Schweickart – astronaut
• Lewis David de Schweinitz – botanist and mycologist, "Father of American Mycology"
• Frederick Seitz – physicist, co-inventor of the Wigner-Seitz unit cell, which is an important concept in solid state physics
• Herbert A. Simon – political scientist
• Charles Proteus Steinmetz – electrical engineer, fostered development of alternating current
• Joseph Strauss – structural engineer and designer, chief engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge
• Otto Stern – physicist and Nobel laureate, known for his studies of molecular beams
• Frederick Traugott Pursh – botanist
• Magnus von Braun – chemical engineer, Luftwaffe aviator, and rocket scientist at Peenemünde, the Mittelwerk, and after emigrating to the United States via Operation Paperclip, at Fort Bliss. He was the brother of Wernher von Braun
• Wernher von Braun – rocket scientist, aerospace engineer, space architect
• George Waldbott – physician, allergy and fluoride specialist
• David Wechsler – psychologist
• Hellmuth Walter – engineer who pioneered research into rocket engines and gas turbines
• Victor Frederick Weisskopf – World War II physicist, working at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb, and later campaigned against the proliferation of nuclear weapons; medal received in 1979
• Caspar Wistar – physician and anatomist
• Albert Wohlstetter – nuclear scientist
• Max August Zorn – algebraist, group theorist, and numerical analyst