London School of Economics - Notable People

Notable People

LSE has a long list of notable alumni and staff, spanning the fields of scholarship covered by the school. Among them are seventeen Nobel Prize winners in Economics, Peace and Literature. The school currently has over 50 fellows of the British Academy on its staff, while other notable former staff members include Anthony Giddens, Harold Laski, Ralph Miliband, Michael Oakeshott, A. W. Philips, Karl Popper, Lionel Robbins, Susan Strange and Charles Webster. Former British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee taught at the school from 1912 to 1923, while Ramsay MacDonald frequently gave lectures on behalf of the Fabian Society. Mervyn King, the current Governor of the Bank of England, is also a former professor of economics.

Many alumni of the school are notable figures, especially in the areas of politics, economics and finance. Indeed, with regards to the political arena, as of February 2009, around 45 past or present heads of state have studied or taught at LSE, and 28 members of the current British House of Commons and 46 members of the current House of Lords have either studied or taught at the school. In recent British politics, former LSE students include Virginia Bottomley, Yvette Cooper, Edwina Currie, Frank Dobson, Margaret Hodge and current UK Labour Party leader Ed Miliband. Internationally, John F Kennedy (former US President), Óscar Arias (Costa Rican President), Taro Aso (Prime Minister of Japan), Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, B. R. Ambedkar (Father of Indian Constitution) K. R. Narayanan (Ex-President of India) and Romano Prodi (Italian Prime Minister and President of the European Commission) all studied at LSE. As of August 2010, the present heads of government and/or state of seven countries studied at the School – Colombia, Denmark, Ghana, Greece, Kenya, Kiribati and Mauritius. Moreover, in President Barack Obama's administration, LSE has more former students than any other university outside the US, with the White House Chief of Staff, Deputy Chief of Staff, Budget Director, and Secretary for Homeland Security, all having studied at the school. In fact, LSE is more represented than Yale, Princeton, Stanford and MIT.

Successful businesspeople who studied at LSE include Tony Fernandes, Delphine Arnault, Stelios Haji-Ioannou, Spiros Latsis, David Rockefeller, Maurice Saatchi, George Soros and Michael S. Jeffries.