Swarthmore College - Alumni

Alumni

Swarthmore's alumni include five Nobel Prize winners (second highest number of Nobel Prize winners per graduate in the U.S.), including the 2006 Physics laureate John C. Mather (1968), the 2004 Economics laureate Edward Prescott (1962) and the 1972 Chemistry laureate Christian B. Anfinsen (1937). Swarthmore also has 8 MacArthur Foundation fellows and hundreds of prominent figures in law, art, science, business, politics, and other fields.

• Suffragist and National Women's Party founder, Alice Paul belonged to the class of 1905;
• Nancy Roman NASA's first Chief of Astronomy in the Office of Space Science, 'mother of the Hubble telescope'
• Michael Dukakis (1955) was the Democratic nominee in the 1988 presidential election
• Novelist James A. Michener (1929) left his entire $10 million estate (including the copyrights to his works) to Swarthmore.
• Robert Zoellick (1976), former president of the World Bank.
• John C. Mather (1968), American astrophysicist, cosmologist, and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his work on COBE with George Smoot.
• David K. Lewis (1962), ground-breaking philosopher known for his work in Analytic Metaphysics, rated by fellow academics as one of the fifteen most important philosophers in the past 200 years.

Other prominent alumni: Seventh Circuit Judge Frank Easterbrook (1970); Congressman Christopher Van Hollen (1983); Senator Carl Levin of Michigan (1956); Author Mark Vonnegut (1969); musical composer and satirist Peter Schickele (1957); astronomer Sandra M. Faber (1966); The Corrections and Freedom author Jonathan Franzen (1981); New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley; Long-time Variety editor, Peter Bart; Caltech president and Nobel laureate David Baltimore (1960); Former Georgetown University Law Center Dean T. Alexander Aleinikoff (1974); Berkeley Law Dean Christopher Edley, Jr.; philosopher and Nietzschean scholar Alexander Nehamas (1967); Justin Hall (1998), widely considered to be the first blogger; eminent Polish theatre director Michal Zadara (1999); Wall Street magnate and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. founder Jerome Kohlberg, Jr. (1946) who also founded the Philip Evans Scholarship Foundation in 1986 at Swarthmore; Jed Rakoff (1964) US District Judge for the Southern District of New York; Kenneth Turan (1967) film critic for the Los Angeles Times; Faux-Christian Music/Comedy duo God's Pottery Krister Johnson (1995) and Wilson Hall (1995); The Gregory Brothers, of internet series Auto-Tune the News fame, Evan Gregory (2001) and Andrew Gregory (2004); Author Kurt Eichenwald; Long-time editor of The Nation, Victor Navasky (1954); Eugene Lang (1938), founder of the I Have a Dream Foundation, who has endowed many buildings and programs on campus, including, as noted above, the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility; Eugene's son, film star Stephen Lang (actor) (1973); Cynthia Leive Glamour Magazine Editor-in-Chief;Patrick Awuah founder of Ashesi University; Lisa Albert Emmy Award winning writer and producer for AMC's Mad Men; Micah White one of the original creators of the Occupy Wall Street movement; Neil Gershenfeld head of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms; Social Entrepreneur Mark Hanis (2005) is the founder of United to End Genocide; Nick Martin (2004) founded TechChange, the institute for technology and social change.