100 Notable alumni of Haverford College

William Warder Cadbury was an American physician, professor, researcher, author, and medical missionary. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania's Medical School, he traveled to Canton (Guangzhou), China, where he eventually became the most well-known internal medicine doctor in the region during the time period of the Republic of China. At Canton Hospital, he served as a doctor, professor, writer,...

John Frederick Benton was an American medieval historian, the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology.

Arthur Rusmiselle Miller Spaid was an American educator, school administrator, lecturer, and writer. He served as principal of Alexis I. duPont High School (1894–1903) in Wilmington, Delaware, superintendent of New Castle County Public Schools (1903–1913) in Delaware, superintendent of Dorchester County Public Schools (1913–1917) in Maryland, and Delaware State commissioner of Education (1917–1921).

Douglas Waples was a pioneer of the University of Chicago Graduate Library School in the areas of print communication and reading behavior. Waples authored one of the first books on library research methodology, a work directed at students supervised through correspondence courses. Jesse Shera credits Waples’s scholarly research into the social effects of reading as the foundation for the approaches...

Temple Painter was an American harpsichordist and organist.

Joel Selanikio is an American physician, attending pediatrician, and assistant professor of pediatrics at Georgetown University Hospital.

Isabell Carmella Leshko is an American fine art photographer best known for her Elderly Animals series which focuses on animal rights, aging and mortality.

Louis Round Wilson was an important figure to the field of library science, and is listed in "100 of the most important leaders we had in the 20th century," an article in the December 1999 issue of American Libraries. The article lists what he did for the field of library science including dean at the University of Chicago Graduate Library...

Frank Folke Furstenberg Jr. is the Zellerbach Family Professor of Sociology, emeritus, at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the family in the context of disadvantaged urban neighborhoods and adolescent sexual behavior. Furstenberg has written on social change, transition to adulthood, divorce, remarriage and intergenerational relations. Furstenberg is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, American...

Harlan Marshall Jacobson is an American film critic and scholar.

Joseph Henry Scattergood was an American cricketer, active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Scattergood was one of the Philadelphian cricketers that played from the end of the 19th century through the early years of the next.

Stephen Klineberg is a demographics expert and sociologist in Houston, Texas. As a former professor at Rice University, Klineberg and his students began conducting an annual survey in 1982, now called the Kinder Houston Area Survey, that tracks the area's demographics and attitudes. Klineberg is also the founding director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research, a think tank affiliated...

Frank Eugene Lutz was an American entomologist.

Henry Burtt Richardson is an American sculptor. He works primarily in the medium of plate glass.

Terry Belanger is the founding director of Rare Book School, an institute concerned with education for the history of books and printing, and with rare books and special collections librarianship. He is University Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia (UVa), where RBS has its home base. Between 1972 and 1992, he devised and ran a master's program for the...

Richard W. Unger is an emeritus professor of Medieval History at the University of British Columbia and a specialist in European maritime history in the medieval period. He served as Second Vice-President of the Medieval Academy of America in 2011, First Vice-President in 2012, and President in 2013.

Brian C. Cronin served as Idaho State Representative for District 19's B seat from 2008 to 2012. District 19 includes downtown Boise, the North End, East End, Foothills, Warm Springs Mesa, Foothills and Highlands areas of Boise. In 2010, Cronin was chosen by fellow House Democrats as Minority Caucus Chairman.

Alexander Laszlo is a polycultural systems scientist, currently residing in Argentina.

Henry Sandwith Drinker was an American lawyer and amateur musicologist. In 1964, the American Bar Association gave Drinker the American Bar Association Medal, stating that Drinker's monumental work Legal Ethics (1953) was "recognized throughout the civilized world as the definitive treatise on this subject."

Thomas Jefferson "Tom" Barlow III, was an American politician who served as a member of the United States House of Representatives from Kentucky's 1st congressional district for one term.

David Scull Bispham was an American operatic baritone.

Clark Hulings was an American realist painter. He was born in Florida and raised in New Jersey. Clark also lived in Spain, New York, Louisiana, and throughout Europe before settling in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the early 1970s. The travels did much to influence his keen eye for people in the state of accomplishing daily tasks.

Sigmund Gottfried Spaeth was an American musicologist who sought to de-mystify classical music for the general public. His extensive knowledge of both the classical repertoire and popular song enabled him to trace the melodies of current hits back to earlier sources; this talent garnered him fame as the "Tune Detective," a role he played as an entertainer, educator, and as...

Iwao Frederick Ayusawa was a diplomat and international authority on social and labor issues.

William Draper Lewis was the first full-time dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School (1896–1914), and the founding director (1923–1947) of the American Law Institute.

Grayson Mallet-Prevost Murphy Sr. was an American military officer, banker and company director.

John Frederick Hawley was an American astrophysicist and a professor of astronomy at the University of Virginia. In 2013, he shared the Shaw Prize for Astronomy with Steven Balbus.

William Chace is an American literary scholar, Professor of English Emeritus at Emory University as well as Honorary Professor of English Emeritus at Stanford University. He specializes in the work of James Joyce in addition to the work of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Also the former president of Emory University, he lives in Palo Alto,...

Douglas E. Koshland is a professor of molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Ed Sikov is an American film scholar and author. His books include Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (published in 2002), On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder (published in 1998), and Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedies of the 1950s (published in 1994).

William H. Harris, is an American orthopaedic surgeon, Founder and Director Emeritus of the Massachusetts General Hospital Harris Orthopaedics Laboratory, and creator of the Advances in Arthroplasty course held annually since 1970.

Michael H. Freilich was an American oceanographer who served as director of the NASA Earth Science division from 2006–2019.

Jon Delano is an American journalist. He is the Money & Politics Editor for KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a position he began on a full-time basis in 2001 after joining the station in 1994 as its political analyst.

Mark Albert Robert Kleiman was an American professor, author, and blogger who dealt with issues of drug and criminal justice policy.

William Thornton Rickert Fox, generally known as William T. R. Fox (or occasionally W. T. R. Fox), was an American foreign policy professor and international relations theoretician at the Columbia University (1950–1980, emeritus 1980–1988). He is perhaps mostly known as the coiner of the term "superpower" in 1944. He wrote several books about the foreign policy of the United States...

Bruce Huntington Andrews is a former United States Deputy Secretary of Commerce.

Thomas A. "Tom" Farley is an American pediatrician who served as Commissioner of Health of the City of New York and Commissioner of the Philadelphia Department of Health.

Kari C. Nadeau is an American physician-scientist and academic specializing in allergy, asthma, immunology, and exposomics. She is the John Rock Professor of Extreme weather and Population Studies and serves as Chair of the Department of Environmental Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is also a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Physician...

Anjan Chatterjee is a professor of neurology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He is director of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics (PCfN) and a member of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. His research focuses on spatial cognition and its relationship to language. He also conducts neuroaesthetics research and writes about the ethical use of...

Howard Shelanski is an American attorney, economist, and legal scholar. He is a professor of law at Georgetown University, where he holds the Sheehy Chair in Antitrust Law and Trade Regulation, and a partner in the law firm of Davis, Polk & Wardwell. He served in the Obama administration as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA),...

Charles Terrance Canady is an American attorney and judge who served as a justice of the Supreme Court of Florida from 2008 to 2025. He previously served as Chief Justice from 2010 to 2012 and from 2018 to 2022.

David Steven Kris is an American lawyer. From 2009 to 2011, he served as the United States Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division of the United States Department of Justice. He also served as the Associate Deputy Attorney General for national security issues at the United States Department of Justice from 2000 to 2003.

Richard Gibson Andrews is a senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Delaware. He is a former Delaware state prosecutor and assistant United States attorney.

James Powers Moody was an American economist and Democratic politician. He served five terms as the U.S. representative for Wisconsin's 5th congressional district (1983–1993). At the time, the 5th congressional district comprised the north half of Milwaukee County, including much of the city of Milwaukee. Earlier in his career, he represented downtown Milwaukee in the Wisconsin State Senate and Assembly.

Jesse Menachem Ehrenfeld is an American physician. Ehrenfeld was president of the American Medical Association from 2023 to 2024, and Professor of Anesthesiology at the Medical College of Wisconsin. He is also a former Speaker of the Massachusetts Medical Society, where he was the youngest officer in the 228-year history of the organization. He is also a former Vice-President of...

Benjamin Taylor is an American writer whose work has appeared in a number of publications including The Atlantic, Harper's, Esquire, Bookforum, BOMB, the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, The Georgia Review, Raritan Quarterly Review, Threepenny Review, Salmagundi, Provincetown Arts and The Reading Room. He is a founding member of the Graduate Writing Program faculty of The New School in New...

Mark J. Hulbert is an American finance analyst, journalist, and author with a focus on expectations of stock market investment newsletters, contrarian investing, and quantitive or technical analysis.

Samuel Studdiford Stratton was an American politician who was a member of the Democratic Party. He is notable for his service as mayor of Schenectady, and his 30-year career as a member of the United States House of Representatives from New York. He also served in the United States Navy during both World War II and the Korean War.

Kermit Victor Lipez is an American lawyer who serves as a senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Ken Stern is President of Palisades Media Ventures and the author of With Charity for All and Republican Like Me: How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right. He is a former chief executive officer of National Public Radio.

Andrew Lindsay Lewis Jr., generally known as Drew Lewis, was an American businessman and politician from the state of Pennsylvania. He was United States Secretary of Transportation in the first portion of the administration of U.S. President Ronald W. Reagan, and is best known for presiding over the firing of the striking U.S. air traffic controllers in 1981.

David Meyer Wessel is an American journalist and writer. He has shared two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism. He is director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal & Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution and a contributing correspondent to The Wall Street Journal, where he worked for 30 years. Wessel appears frequently on National Public Radio's Morning Edition.

Colin Harrison is an American novelist and editor. Harrison is the author of eight novels: Break and Enter (1990), Bodies Electric (1993), Manhattan Nocturne (1996), Afterburn (2000), The Havana Room (2004), The Finder (2008), Risk (2009), which was first published as a fifteen-part serial in The New York Times magazine in 2008, and You Belong to Me, published in June...

Stephen Thomas Ridings is an American former professional baseball pitcher. He played in Major League Baseball (MLB) for the New York Yankees in 2021.

Eric Nathan Turkheimer is an American psychologist and the Hugh Scott Hamilton Professor of psychology at the University of Virginia.

Frederic Prokosch was an American writer, known for his novels, poetry, memoirs and criticism. He was also a distinguished translator.

Stephen James Lippard is the Arthur Amos Noyes Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is considered one of the founders of bioinorganic chemistry, studying the interactions of nonliving substances such as metals with biological systems. He is also considered a founder of metalloneurochemistry, the study of metal ions and their effects in the brain and...

Robert Ruhl Simmons is an American politician and retired U.S. Army colonel who served as a member of the United States House of Representatives from 2001 to 2007, representing Connecticut's 2nd congressional district as a Republican.

Jack Norman Rakove is an American historian, author, and professor at Stanford University. He is a Pulitzer Prize winner.

William Henry Chamberlin was an American historian and journalist. He was the author of several books about the Cold War, communism, and foreign policy, including The Russian Revolution 1917-1921 (1935), which was written in Russia between 1922 and 1934 while he was the Moscow correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor.

Jane Silber is a board member of Canonical Ltd. and was its chief executive officer from 2010 to 2017. Silber is also the chair of the board of Diffblue.

Beth Cavener, also known as Beth Cavener Stichter, is an American artist based out of Montana. A classically trained sculptor, her process involves building complex metal armatures to support massive amounts of clay. Cavener is best known for her fantastical animal figures, which embody the complexity of human emotion and behavior.

Curtis Gove Callan Jr. is an American theoretical physicist and the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Physics at Princeton University. He has conducted research in gauge theory, string theory, instantons, black holes, strong interactions, and many other topics. He was awarded the Sakurai Prize in 2000 ("For his classic formulation of the renormalization group, his contributions to instanton...

Ronald Irvin Christie is an American government relations expert and Republican political strategist, who has also worked as a member of former Vice President Dick Cheney's staff. He is the author of two books, and an occasional guest on various cable news programs. He serves as an adjunct professor at Cornell University, Georgetown University, George Washington University, and Haverford College....

Stephon Haigh-Solomon Alexander is a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, professional jazz musician, and author.

Lloyd Logan Pearsall Smith was an American-born British essayist and critic. Harvard and Oxford educated, he was known for his aphorisms and epigrams, and was an expert on 17th century divines. His Words and Idioms made him an authority on correct English language usage. He wrote his autobiography, Unforgotten Years, in 1938.

Adi Ignatius is an American journalist. He previously served as the editor-in-chief of Harvard Business Review. He joined the magazine in January 2009.

Rufus Matthew Jones was an American religious leader, writer, magazine editor, philosopher, and college professor. He was instrumental in the establishment of the Haverford Emergency Unit (a precursor to the American Friends Service Committee). One of the most influential Quakers of the 20th century, he was a Quaker historian and theologian as well as a philosopher. He is the only...

Samuel Hill, was an American businessman, lawyer, railroad executive, and advocate of good roads. He substantially influenced the Pacific Northwest region's economic development in the early 20th century.

Ken Ludwig is an American playwright, author, screenwriter, and director whose work has been performed in more than 30 countries in over 20 languages. He has had eight productions in London's West End and six productions on Broadway, and his 34 plays and musicals have been staged throughout the United Kingdom and the United States. He has been nominated for...

Julius Katchen was an American concert pianist, possibly best known for his recordings of Johannes Brahms's solo piano works.

Ronald M. Shapiro is an American attorney, businessman, sports agent and author.

Charles McCurdy Mathias Jr. was an American politician and attorney from the U.S. state of Maryland. A member of the Republican Party, he served in both chambers of the United States Congress as a member of the United States House of Representatives from 1961 to 1969 and as a member of the United States Senate from 1969 to 1987. He...

Theodore William Richards was an American physical chemist and the first American scientist to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, earning the award "in recognition of his exact determinations of the atomic weights of a large number of the chemical elements."

James Clifford is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work combines perspectives from history, literature, history of science, and anthropology.

John Cunningham Whitehead was an American banker and civil servant, a board member of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation (WTC Memorial Foundation), and, until his resignation in May 2006, chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.

Kōichirō Matsuura is a Japanese diplomat. He is the former Director-General of UNESCO. He was first elected in 1999 to a six-year term and reelected on 12 October 2005 for four years, following a reform instituted by the 29th session of the General Conference. In November 2009, he was replaced by Irina Bokova.

Mark D. Levine is an American politician and educator serving as the Comptroller of New York City since 2026. He previously served as the 28th Borough President of Manhattan from 2022 to 2025 and as member of the New York City Council from 2014 to 2021, where he represented the 7th district covering Manhattan neighborhoods of Morningside Heights, West Harlem,...

George Pearson Smith is an American biologist and Nobel laureate. He is a Curators' Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, US.

Henry Herbert Goddard was an American psychologist, eugenicist, and segregationist during the early 20th century. He is known especially for his 1912 work The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness, which he himself came to regard as flawed for its ahistoric depiction of the titular family, and for translating the Binet-Simon Intelligence Test into English in 1908...

Christopher Darlington Morley was an American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet. He also produced stage productions for a few years and gave college lectures.

Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr. is an American astrophysicist. He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in physics with Russell Alan Hulse "for the discovery of a new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation". This was the first indirect detection of gravitational waves, later directly detected by Barry Barish, Kip Thorne and...

Kriyananda was an American Hindu religious leader, yoga guru, meditation teacher, musician, and author. He was a direct disciple of Paramahansa Yogananda and founder of the spiritual movement named "Ananda". He wrote numerous songs and dozens of books. According to the LA Times, the main themes of his work were compassion and humility, but he was a controversial figure. Kriyananda...

Andrew Scott Gavin is an American video game programmer, entrepreneur, and novelist. Gavin co-founded the video game company Naughty Dog with childhood friend Jason Rubin in 1986, which released games including Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter. Prior to founding Naughty Dog, Gavin worked in the LISP programming language at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Philip John Noel-Baker, Baron Noel-Baker, PC, was a British politician, diplomat, academic, athlete, and renowned campaigner for disarmament. He carried the British team flag and won a silver medal for the 1500m run at the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp, and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1959.

Nicholson Baker is an American novelist and essayist. His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in favor of careful description and characterization. His early novels such as The Mezzanine and Room Temperature were distinguished by their minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness. Out of a total of ten novels, three are erotica: Vox, The Fermata and House of...

Fredric Ruff Jameson was an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He was best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).

Takeo Arishima was a Japanese novelist, short-story writer and essayist during the late Meiji and Taishō periods. His two younger brothers, Ikuma Arishima (有島生馬) and Ton Satomi (里美弴), were also authors. His son was the internationally known film and stage actor, Masayuki Mori.

David McAlister Barry is an American author and columnist who wrote a nationally syndicated humor column for the Miami Herald from 1983 to 2005. He has written numerous books of humor and parody, as well as comic novels and children's novels. Barry's honors include the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary (1988) and the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism (2005).

Oscar Baylin Goodman is an American attorney and politician. A Democrat-turned-independent, Goodman was the mayor of Las Vegas, Nevada from 1999 to 2011. His wife, Carolyn Goodman, succeeded him as mayor in 2011.

Jon Kabat-Zinn is an American professor emeritus of medicine and the creator of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Kabat-Zinn was a student of Zen Buddhist teachers such as Philip Kapleau, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Seung Sahn, and a founding member of Cambridge Zen...

Juan Antonio Williams is a Panamanian-American journalist and political analyst for Fox News Channel. He writes for several newspapers, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, and has been published in magazines such as The Atlantic and Time. Williams has worked as an editorial writer, an op-ed columnist, a White House correspondent, and a...

Howard William Lutnick is an American businessman and government official who serves as the 41st United States secretary of commerce since 2025.

Cornelius Crane "Chevy" Chase is an American comedian, actor and writer.

Daniel Dae Kim is an American actor. He is known for his many roles in network television and theater. In 2025, Time magazine listed him as one of the world's 100 most influential people.

Judd Asher Nelson is an American actor. After a lead role in the film Making the Grade (1984), Nelson had his breakout with a starring role in the coming-of-age teen film The Breakfast Club (1985), which caused him to be associated with a group of actors known as the "Brat Pack."

George Segal Jr. was an American actor and musician. He became popular in the 1960s and 1970s for playing both dramatic and comedic roles. After first rising to prominence with roles in acclaimed films such as Ship of Fools (1965) and King Rat (1965), he co-starred in the drama Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966).

Maxfield Parrish was an American painter and illustrator active in the first half of the 20th century. His works featured distinctive saturated hues and idealized neo-classical imagery. The National Museum of American Illustration deemed his painting Daybreak (1922) to be the most successful art print of the 20th century.

Hafsat Olaronke Abiola-Costello, Listen in Lagos, is a Nigerian human rights, civil rights and democracy activist, founder of the Kudirat Initiative for Democracy (KIND), which seeks to strengthen civil society and promote democracy in Nigeria. She is President of Women in Africa Initiative (WIA), an international platform for the economic development and support of African women entrepreneurs. She is also...