100 Notable alumni of Case Western Reserve University

Charles Burleigh Purvis was an African-American physician who resided in Washington, D.C. Among the founders of the medical school at Howard University, he was the first African-American physician to attend a sitting president of the United States when he attended to President James Garfield after he was shot. Purvis was also the first black physician to head a hospital under...

Kathleen McDonald "Kate" O'Malley is a former United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. She is currently of counsel at Sullivan & Cromwell.

William Burnham Woods was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. An appointee of President Rutherford B. Hayes, he served from 1881 until 1887. He wrote the majority opinion in United States v. Harris, involving the constitutionality of the Ku Klux Klan Act, and Presser v. Illinois, involving the application...

Henry Harmon Spalding and his wife Eliza Hart Spalding (1807–1851) were prominent Presbyterian missionaries and educators working primarily with the Nez Perce in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. The Spaldings and their fellow missionaries were among the earliest Americans to travel across the western plains, through the Rocky Mountains and into the lands of the Pacific Northwest to their religious missions...

Edward Porter Williams was an American businessman who co-founded the Sherwin-Williams Company with Henry Sherwin.

Hamid-Reza Katouzian, also known as Hamid Katoozian, born on 23 October 1959 in Tehran, Iran is an Iranian politician and academic. He was a member of the Parliament of Iran; during his two terms, he served as the vice-chairman of the Industry Committee, and chairman of the Energy Committee.

Nancy Lee Caroline was an American physician and writer who worked in emergency medical services (EMS). She was medical director of Freedom House, an emergency ambulance service that assisted underserved populations in Pittsburgh in the 1960s and 1970s. She was also the first medical director of Magen David Adom, Israel's Red Cross Society, and was later called "Israel's Mother Teresa"...

James Thomas Lynn was an American government official who served as the 4th secretary of housing and urban development from 1973 until 1975 and as the 22nd director of the Office of Management and Budget from 1975 until 1977.

James Stewart Polshek was an American architect based in New York City. He was the founder of Polshek Partnership, the firm at which he was the principal design partner for more than four decades. He worked as design counsel to the legacy firm Ennead Architects, as well as being actively engaged as design lead on multiple projects.

Siegfried S. Hecker is an American metallurgist and nuclear scientist. He served as Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1986 to 1997 and is now affiliated with Stanford University, where he is research professor emeritus in the Department of Management Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering, and senior fellow emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for...

Ann McKee is a neurologist and neuropathologist and expert in neurodegenerative disease at the VA Boston Veterans Affairs Medical Center and is a Warren Distinguished Professor of Neurology and Pathology at Boston University School of Medicine. She is director of the Boston University Alzheimer's Disease Research Center and Boston University CTE Center. She is particularly known for her work studying...

Irving "Al" Gross was a pioneer in mobile wireless communication. He created and patented many communications devices, specifically in relation to an early version of the walkie-talkie, Citizens' Band radio, the telephone pager and the cordless telephone.

Donald Alan Thomas is an American engineer and a former NASA astronaut.

Capricia Penavic Marshall served as Chief of Protocol of the United States from 2009 to August 2013.

Anu Garg is an American author and speaker. He is the founder of Wordsmith.org, an online community comprising aficionados of the English language from across 170 countries. His books explore the joy of words. He has authored several books about language-related issues and written for magazines and newspapers. He was a columnist for MSN Encarta and Kahani magazine.

John Hessin Clarke was an American lawyer and judge who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1916 to 1922.

Morton Leon Mandel was an American business magnate, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. Along with his two brothers, Jack and Joe, he founded the Premier Automotive Supply Company in 1940, which later became one of the world's leading industrial parts and electronic components distributors. His philanthropic activities in Cleveland, and in Jewish and Israeli institutions, were via the Mandel Foundation.

Lynn Hershman Leeson is an American multimedia artist and filmmaker. Her work with technology and in media-based practices is credited with helping to legitimize digital art forms. Her interests include feminism, race, surveillance, and artificial intelligence and identity theft through algorithms and data tracking.

Kelly Louise Morrison is an American physician and politician who has served as the U.S. representative for Minnesota's 3rd congressional district since 2025. Morrison was a member of the Minnesota Senate from 2023 to 2024. A member of the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party, she represented District 45 in the western Twin Cities metropolitan area, which includes the cities of Minnetonka, Mound,...

Frederick Chapman Robbins was an American pediatrician and virologist. He was born in Auburn, Alabama, and grew up in Columbia, Missouri, attending David H. Hickman High School.

Rebecca Frank Dallet is an American lawyer and a justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Prior to her 2018 election, she served ten years as a Wisconsin Circuit Court Judge in Milwaukee County. Earlier in her career she worked as a prosecutor and appointed court official.

Muriel Faye Siebert was an American businesswoman who was the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), and the first woman to head one of the NYSE's member firms. She joined the 1,365 male members of the exchange on December 28, 1967. Siebert is sometimes known as the "first woman of finance", despite being...

Hester Maria Peirce is an American lawyer who serves as a Commissioner on the Securities and Exchange Commission. She previously served as the director of the Financial Markets Working Group at George Mason University's Mercatus Center.

Martin James Gruenberg is an American attorney who served as chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) from 2023 to 2025; 2012 to 2018; as well as on an acting basis from 2005 to 2006 and 2011 to 2012.

Emily Blackwell was an American physician and women's rights activist. She was the second woman to earn a medical degree at what is now Case Western Reserve University, after Nancy Talbot Clark. She made major advancements in the medical scene, assisting in the start of the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children and creating the Women's Central Association...

Raymond Herman Geist was the American Consul and First Secretary of the United States embassy in Berlin from 1929 to 1939. Geist has been recognized as Diplomat Savior by the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, which advocates for the recognition of Holocaust rescuers. However, one academic researcher has asserted that Geist largely acted to block the granting of visas to Jewish...

Margaret Myrtle "Mitzi" Hoag was an American actress. Over the course of her career, she appeared in more than 73 different TV shows and movies. Notable among these are recurring roles in We'll Get By, Bonanza, Here Come the Brides, and The Partridge Family.

Michael D. Rectenwald is an American author and former professor. A member of the Mises Caucus of the Libertarian Party, he has written about 19th-century British secularism and is a critic of the contemporary social justice movement.

Eric A. Meyer is an American web design consultant and author. He is best known for his advocacy work on behalf of web standards, most notably CSS, a technique for managing how HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is displayed. Meyer has written a number of books and articles on CSS and given many presentations promoting its use.

John D. Mayer is an American psychologist at the University of New Hampshire, specializing in emotional intelligence and personality psychology. He co-developed a popular model of emotional intelligence with Peter Salovey. He is one of the authors of the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test, and has developed a new, integrated framework for personality psychology, known as the Systems Framework for Personality...

Ronald Jason Klein is an American politician and lawyer who is a former member of the United States House of Representatives for Florida's 22nd congressional district. He is a member of the Democratic Party and chairs the Jewish Democratic Council of America. He previously served in the Florida House of Representatives and the Florida Senate. He is currently employed by...

Donald Arthur Glaser was an American physicist and biologist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1960 for his invention of the bubble chamber.

Milton Jerrold Shapp was an American businessman and politician who served as the 40th governor of Pennsylvania from 1971 to 1979 and the first Jewish governor of Pennsylvania. He was also the first governor of Pennsylvania to be eligible for, and re-elected to, consecutive four-year terms per the 1968 Pennsylvania Constitution.

Polykarp Kusch was a German-American physicist who shared the 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics with Willis Eugene Lamb for his accurate determination that the electron magnetic moment was greater than its theoretical value, thus leading to reconsideration of and innovations in quantum electrodynamics.

Edward Williams Morley was an American scientist known for his precise and accurate measurement of the atomic weight of oxygen, and for the Michelson–Morley experiment.

Robin Keith Annesley Ficker is an American political activist, real estate broker, former attorney (disbarred), former state legislator, infamous sports heckler, and perennial political candidate from Maryland.

Rupert Raleigh Hughes was an American novelist, film director, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, military officer, and music composer. He was the brother of Howard R. Hughes Sr. and uncle of billionaire Howard R. Hughes Jr. His three-volume scholarly biography of George Washington broke new ground in demythologizing Washington and was well received by historians. A staunch anti-Communist, in the 1940s he served...

Stephanie Tubbs Jones was an American politician who served as the U.S. representative for Ohio's 11th congressional district from 1999 until her death in 2008. A member of the Democratic Party, her district encompassed most of Downtown and Eastern Cleveland and many of the eastern suburbs in Cuyahoga County, including Euclid, Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights. She was the first...

Richard Lawrence Garwin was an American physicist and government advisor, best known as the author of the first hydrogen bomb design.

Peter Roger Breggin is an American psychiatrist and critic of shock treatment and psychiatric medication. In his books, he advocates replacing psychiatry's use of drugs and electroconvulsive therapy with psychotherapy, education, empathy, love, and broader human services.

Jason F. Brennan is an American philosopher and business professor. He is the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.

Charles Francis Brush was an American engineer, inventor, entrepreneur, and philanthropist.

Salvatore Cezar Pais is a Romanian-American aerospace engineer and inventor, currently working for the United States Space Force. He formerly worked at the Naval Air Station Patuxent River. His patent applications for the US Navy attracted attention for their potential energy-producing applications, but also doubt about their feasibility, and speculation that they may be scams, pseudoscience, or disinformation intended to...

Brian Gregory Keating is an American cosmologist. He works on observations of the cosmic microwave background, leading the POLARBEAR2 and Simons Array experiments. He also conceived the first BICEP experiment. He received his PhD in 2000, and is a distinguished professor of physics at University of California, San Diego, since 2019. He is the author of two books, Losing The...

David Satcher is an American physician, and public health administrator. He was a four-star admiral in the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and served as the 11th Assistant Secretary for Health, and the 16th Surgeon General of the United States.

Andrew Henry Vachss was an American crime fiction author, child protection consultant, and attorney exclusively representing children and youths.

Janis Carter was an American stage and film actress who performed throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s. During the mid-1950s, she began working regularly on television, co-hosting with Bud Collyer the NBC daytime game show Feather Your Nest.

Lincoln Rafael Díaz-Balart was a Cuban-American attorney and politician. A member of the Republican Party, he was the U.S. representative for Florida's 21st congressional district from 1993 to 2011. He previously served in the Florida House of Representatives and the Florida Senate. He retired from Congress in 2011 and his younger brother, Mario Díaz-Balart, who had previously represented Florida's 25th...

Justin Morris Bibb is an American politician and former non-profit leader serving as the 58th mayor of Cleveland, Ohio since January 2022. Prior to serving as mayor, Bibb worked with public officials, business leaders and community organizations across the country as the Chief Strategy Officer of Urbanova, a business that leads new initiatives to make cities safer, healthier and more...

Arun Srinivas Subramanian is an American lawyer from New York who serves as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Herbert Henry Dow was an American chemical industrialist who founded the American multinational conglomerate Dow Chemical. A graduate of the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio, he was a prolific inventor of chemical processes, compounds, and products, notably bromine extraction from brine water, and was a successful businessman.

Matthew John Dolan is an American politician and lawyer who most recently served in the Ohio Senate from 2017 to 2024, representing the state's 24th district. Prior, he served in the Ohio House of Representatives from 2005 to 2010.

David Henry Gorski is an American surgical oncologist and professor of surgery at Wayne State University School of Medicine. He specializes in breast cancer surgery at the Karmanos Cancer Institute. Gorski is an outspoken skeptic and critic of alternative medicine and the anti-vaccination movement. He writes as Orac at Respectful Insolence and as himself at Science-Based Medicine, where he is...

Mark A. Weinberger is an American businessman. He is the former global chairman and CEO of EY (formerly known as Ernst & Young). Weinberger currently sits on several boards of directors, including those of Metlife, Johnson & Johnson Saudi Aramco. and JPMorgan Chase. Earlier in his career he has also held several posts in the public sector in Washington, D.C.,...

William Glasser was an American psychiatrist. He was the developer of W. Edwards Deming's workplace ideas, reality therapy and choice theory. His innovations for individual counseling, work environments and school, highlight personal choice, personal responsibility and personal transformation. Glasser positioned himself in opposition to conventional mainstream psychiatrists, who focus instead on classifying psychiatric syndromes as "illnesses" and prescribe psychotropic medications...

Caldwell Blakeman Esselstyn Jr. is an American physician, author and former Olympic rowing champion.

Gregg Michael Gillis, known professionally as Girl Talk, is an American disc jockey who specializes in mash-ups and digital sampling. He blends elements from a vast array of pop, hip-hop, and electronic music, creating dense, danceable tracks. His live performances are known for their immersive, party-like atmosphere, often featuring crowdsourced dancers and a celebratory vibe. Gillis has released five LPs...

Marcus Alonzo Hanna was an American businessman and Republican politician who served as a United States Senator from Ohio as well as chairman of the Republican National Committee. A friend and political ally of President William McKinley, Hanna used his wealth and business skills to successfully manage McKinley's presidential campaigns in 1896 and in 1900.

Craig Alexander Newmark is an American internet entrepreneur and philanthropist best known as the founder of the classifieds website Craigslist. Before founding Craigslist, he worked as a computer programmer for IBM, Bank of America, and Charles Schwab. Newmark served as chief executive officer of Craigslist from its founding until 2000. He founded Craig Newmark Philanthropies in 2015.

Jerome Robert Corsi is an American conspiracy theorist and author. His two New York Times best-selling books, Unfit for Command (2004) and The Obama Nation (2008), attacked Democratic presidential candidates and have been criticized for inaccuracies.

Brett Giehl, better known by the ring name Dalton Castle, is an American professional wrestler. He is signed to All Elite Wrestling (AEW) and Ring of Honor (ROH), where he is a one-time ROH World Champion, a one-time ROH World Television Champion and a two-time ROH World Six-Man Tag Team Champion. He is also known for his tenure in Chikara,...

Harvey Lawrence Pekar was an American underground comic book writer, music critic, and media personality, best known for his autobiographical American Splendor comic series. In 2003, the series inspired a well-received film adaptation of the same name.

Margaret Bourke-White was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist. She was known as an architectural and commercial photographer for the first half of her career, representing corporate clients and highlighting the success of industrial capitalism with black and white images of steel factories and skyscrapers. In 1930, she became the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of the Soviet...

Benjamin Oliver Davis Jr. was a United States Air Force (USAF) general and commander of the World War II Tuskegee Airmen.

Richard Sommer is an American actor, best known for his portrayal of Harry Crane on the AMC drama series Mad Men (2007–2015) for which he earned two Screen Actors Guild Awards along with the ensemble cast. He is also known for his roles in the comedy-drama films The Devil Wears Prada (2006), Celeste and Jesse Forever (2012), The Giant Mechanical...

Donald Ervin Knuth is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer science. Knuth has been called the "father of the analysis of algorithms".

Richard H. Thaler is an American economist and the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. In 2015, Thaler was president of the American Economic Association.

Alan Rosenberg is an American actor best known for portraying the character Eli Levinson in both American legal drama series Civil Wars and L.A. Law; as well as, Ira Woodbine on the television sitcom Cybill, Stuart Brickman on Chicago Hope and Professor Youens on Shameless. He also appeared in the films The Wanderers (1979) and Robots (2005). From 2005 to...

Manute Bol was a Sudanese-American professional basketball player and political activist. Listed at 7 ft 6 in (2.29 m) or 7 ft 7 in (2.31 m) tall, Bol was one of the two tallest players in the history of the National Basketball Association (NBA).

Paul T. Buchheit is an American computer engineer and entrepreneur who created the email service Gmail. He developed the original prototype of Google AdSense as part of his work on Gmail. He also suggested Google's former company motto Don't be evil in a 2000 meeting on company values, after the motto was initially coined in 1999 by engineer Amit Patel.

Cinda Williams Chima is a New York Times bestselling author of young adult fantasy, best known for The Heir Chronicles, The Seven Realms and The Shattered Realm series.

Louis Stokes was an American attorney, civil rights pioneer and politician. He served 15 terms in the United States House of Representatives – representing the east side of Cleveland – and was the first African American congressman elected in the state of Ohio. He was one of the Cold War era chairmen of the United States House Permanent Select Committee...

Dennis John Kucinich is an American politician. Originally a Democrat, Kucinich served as U.S. Representative from Ohio's 10th congressional district from 1997 to 2013. From 1977 to 1979, he served a term as mayor of Cleveland, where he narrowly survived a recall election and successfully fought an effort to sell the municipal electric utility before losing his reelection contest to...

Wayne Bidwell Wheeler was an American attorney and longtime leader of the Anti-Saloon League. The leading advocate of the prohibitionist movement in the late 1800s and early 1900s, he played a major role in the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which outlawed the manufacture, distribution, and sale of alcoholic beverages.

Stephen Marvin Young was an American lawyer, World War I veteran, journalist and politician from the U.S. state of Ohio. A member of the Democratic Party, he served two terms as a United States senator from Ohio from 1959 until 1971.

Franklin Edward Cover was an American actor best known for his role in The Jeffersons, Tom Willis, half of one of the first interracial marriages to be seen on prime-time television.

Donald Francis Shula was an American football defensive back and coach who served as a head coach in the National Football League (NFL) from 1963 to 1995. The head coach of the Miami Dolphins for most of his career, Shula is the NFL's winningest head coach at 347 career victories and 328 regular season victories. He is regarded as one...

George Washington Crile was an American surgeon. Crile is now formally recognized as the first surgeon to have succeeded in a direct blood transfusion. He contributed to other procedures, such as neck dissection. Crile designed a small hemostatic forceps which bears his name; the Crile mosquito clamp. He also described a technique for using opioids, regional anesthesia and general anesthesia...

James Merrill Brickman is an American pop songwriter, pianist and radio host. Brickman has earned two Grammy nominations for his albums Peace (2003) for Best Instrumental, and Faith (2009) for Best New Age Album. He won a Canadian Country Music Award, a Dove Award presented by the Gospel Music Association, and was twice named Songwriter of the Year by SESAC....

Sanjiv Sidhu, who was born in June 1957 in Hyderabad, India, is an Indian-American software entrepreneur known for founding i2 Technologies, a supply chain management software company, and o9 Solutions, a Dallas, Texas-based company that offers a decision management platform for multinational corporations

Paul Berg was an American biochemist and professor at Stanford University.

Paul Christian Lauterbur was an American chemist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2003 with Peter Mansfield for his work which made the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) possible.

Edward Christian Prescott was an American economist. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2004, sharing the award with Finn E. Kydland, "for their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles". This research was primarily conducted while both Kydland and Prescott were affiliated with the Graduate School of...

Fred David Gray is an American civil rights attorney, preacher, activist, and state legislator from Alabama. He handled many prominent civil rights cases, such as Browder v. Gayle, and was elected to the Alabama House of Representatives in 1970, along with Thomas Reed, both from Tuskegee. They were the first black state legislators in Alabama in the 20th century. He...

Alfred Goodman Gilman was an American pharmacologist and biochemist. He and Martin Rodbell shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discovery of G-proteins and the role of these proteins in signal transduction in cells."

Ferid Murad was an American physician and pharmacologist, His research demonstrated that nitroglycerin relaxes smooth muscle by releasing nitric oxide into the body. This work led to him sharing the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Andrew R. Wheeler is an American attorney who served as the 15th administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from 2019 to 2021. He served as the deputy administrator from April to July 2018, and served as the acting administrator from July 2018 to February 2019. He has been a senior advisor to Governor of Virginia Glenn Youngkin since March...

Michael A. Turner, also known as Emtee, is an English-born Canadian musician and producer. He is best known as the former lead guitarist and founding member of the band Our Lady Peace and current member of alternative rock supergroup Crash Karma.

François-Philippe Champagne is a Canadian lawyer and politician who has been Minister of Finance and National Revenue since 2025. A member of the Liberal Party, he was elected to the House of Commons in the 2015 election, serving as the member of Parliament (MP) for Saint-Maurice—Champlain. Champagne joined Cabinet in 2017 and assumed his current roles as the minister of...

Wu Cherng-dean is a Taiwanese politician and chemist who is currently the chairman of the New Party.

Ou Chin-der is a Taiwanese civil engineer.

Xiong Xianghui was a Chinese Communist Party spy during the Chinese Civil War, and, after the establishment of the People's Republic of China, a high-ranking official in diplomacy and intelligence. He played a role in the victory of the Chinese Communist Party over the Kuomintang in the Chinese Civil War, in his capacity as private secretary and aide-de-camp to Hu...

Victor Ciorbea is a Romanian jurist, politician, and civil/public servant. He was the Mayor of Bucharest between 1996 and 1997 and, after his resignation from this public dignity/position, Prime Minister of Romania from 12 December 1996 to 30 March 1998. He had also served as the Ombudsman between 2014 and 2019.

Alistair Cockburn is an American computer scientist, known as one of the initiators of the agile movement in software development. He cosigned (with 16 others) the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

Gérard Pierre Huet is a French computer scientist, linguist and mathematician. He is senior research director at INRIA and mostly known for his major and seminal contributions to type theory, programming language theory, and to the theory of computation.

Luis Alfredo Palacio González was an Ecuadorian cardiologist and politician who was the 44th president of Ecuador from 2005 to 2007. He had been the 44th vice president under President Lucio Gutiérrez, until he was appointed to the presidency when the Ecuadorian Congress removed Gutiérrez from power following a week of growing unrest with his government. He previously served as...

Suzana Herculano-Houzel is a Brazilian neuroscientist. Her main field of work is comparative neuroanatomy; her findings include a method of counting neurons in human and other animals' brains and the relation between the cerebral cortex area and the thickness and number of cortical folds.

Tshilidzi Marwala is a South African artificial intelligence engineer, a computer scientist, a mechanical engineer and a university administrator. He is currently Rector of the United Nations University and UN Under-Secretary-General. In August 2023 Marwala was appointed to the United Nations scientific advisory council.

Mohamed Ibn Chambas is a Ghanaian lawyer, diplomat, politician and academic who has served as an international civil servant since 2006. He last served as the United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General for West Africa and the Sahel, and the former head of UNOWAS from April 2014 to April 2021. Previously, he served as the UN SRSG and Head...