100 Notable alumni of Illinois Institute of Technology

Bernard S. Baker is an American electrochemist who was a pioneer in the field of electrochemistry. He was a founder and served as president, chief executive officer and chairman of Energy Research Corporation (now called FuelCell Energy, Inc., in Danbury, Connecticut), developer and manufacturer of direct fuel cells (MCFC) used to generate electric power. Power plants based on his concepts...

John Michael Carmody was an American administrator, noted as editor of Factory and Industrial Management, and as administrator of the Rural Electrification Administration and the Federal Works Agency in the 1930s.

Howard Paul Savage was an American businessman who served as the National Commander of The American Legion from 1926 to 1927.

Alice Sarah Tyler was an American librarian and advocate.

Jan Lorenc is a Polish-American designer and author. Born in Jaśliska, Poland in 1954, he immigrated to the United States at the age of 8. He formed Lorenc Design in 1978 in Chicago, and later moved it to Atlanta in 1981.

David Allen Lucht is an American engineer and fire safety expert. His career was devoted to public service in government, academia and the nonprofit sector. He served as the Ohio State Fire Marshal; the first presidential appointee to serve in the United States Fire Administration and the inaugural head of the graduate degree fire protection engineering program at Worcester Polytechnic...

Carter Hugh Manny Jr. was an American architect and foundation administrator who studied architecture under Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe and spent his career in Chicago. His work helped shape the Chicago O'Hare International Airport, the FBI Building in Washington, D.C., the First National Bank of Chicago, and the addition to the Chicago Board of Trade.

Mary Eileen Ahern was an American librarian, a leader of the modern library movement, and an early organizer of libraries in the United States. Throughout her career as a state librarian, journal editor, public speaker, and organizer, Ahern crusaded for the value of public libraries in educating the public. Ahern was inducted in the Library Hall of Fame in 1951,...

General Thomas Patrick Gerrity was a United States Air Force general and was commander of the Air Force Logistics Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.

Thomas Roszak, FAIA is an American architect, real estate developer, business executive, author, and academic.

Richard Eugene Neapolitan was an American scientist. Neapolitan is most well-known for his role in establishing the use of probability theory in artificial intelligence and in the development of the field Bayesian networks.

Carl Spetzler is an American businessman, author, and academic. He is known for his research, publications, and expertise in the fields of decision quality and decision theory.

Margaret Mann was a noted librarian and teacher who influenced the field of cataloging for almost fifty years. The bulk of her career was spent as a professor at the University of Michigan. She was hired as one of the first three full-time faculty members in the department of library science at Michigan in 1926 and retired in 1938. In...

Fred Ernst Busbey was a U.S. representative from Illinois.

Cheryl L. Hyman is the director of the Gates Foundation Pathways Strategy and the former vice provost for academic alliances at Arizona State University and former chancellor of City Colleges of Chicago. During her tenure at City Colleges of Chicago, she launched the Reinvention of City Colleges program in 2010, and the City Colleges' College to Careers program in 2011....

Jeff Essmann is an American politician and a Republican former member of the Montana Senate. Essmann was appointed to the Montana Senate in 2005 to represent Senate District 28. He was subsequently elected in 2006, and reelected in 2010. Essmann served as the president of the Montana Senate from 2013 to 2015.

Matthew Woll was president of the International Photo-Engravers Union of North America from 1906 to 1929, an American Federation of Labor (AFL) vice president from 1919 to 1955 and an AFL-CIO vice president from 1955 to 1956.

Charles Nelson Pray was an American lawyer, jurist, and politician who served as a United States representative from Montana and a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Montana.

Chauncey William Reed was an American World War I veteran, lawyer, and politician who served eleven terms as a U.S. representative from Illinois from 1935 until his death in 1956.

George James Eade was a four star general in the United States Air Force who served as Deputy Commander in Chief, United States European Command from 1973 to 1975.

Melissa Conyears-Ervin is an American politician and the current Chicago City Treasurer. She was previously a Democratic member of the Illinois House of Representatives, representing the 10th District since 2017. The 10th district includes all or parts of West Garfield Park, East Garfield Park, United Center, Ukrainian Village, River West, Goose Island, Wicker Park and Lincoln Park in Chicago.

Yosef Rom was an Israeli engineer and politician who served as a member of the Knesset for Likud between 1977 and 1984.

Robert McClory was an American politician and member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois.

Louis Bernard Anderson was an American politician who served as alderman of Chicago's 2nd ward from 1917 to 1933. A Republican, he served most of the Douglas community area, including much of the African-American neighborhood of Bronzeville. He was a prominent ally of mayor William Hale Thompson, and served as his floor leader throughout the 1920s.

Barratt O'Hara of Chicago was an American Democratic politician serving as a U.S. Congressman from Illinois and lieutenant governor of Illinois. He was the last Spanish–American War veteran to serve in Congress.

Conrad Roland was a German architect and pioneer of the construction of space nets (tensile structures), which primarily are to be found as rope climbing frames on playgrounds. In 1978 he designed and constructed the biggest spacenet of the world until today, the Super Four Mast Spacenet, for the Federal Horticultural Show (BUGA).

Ronald George Douglas was an American mathematician, best known for his work on operator theory and operator algebras.

Francis Gladheim Pease was an American astronomer.

Mathai Varghese is a mathematician at the University of Adelaide. His first most influential contribution is the Mathai–Quillen formalism, which he formulated together with Daniel Quillen, and which has since found applications in index theory and topological quantum field theory. He was appointed a full professor in 2006. He was appointed Director of the Institute for Geometry and its Applications...

Albert Wahl Hawkes was an American businessman and Republican Party politician who represented New Jersey in the United States Senate from 1943 to 1949. During and after his term in office, he was a leading figure in the conservative wing of the New Jersey Republican Party. He dropped out of his race for re-election after facing a primary challenge from...

Georges C. Benjamin is an American public health official who has served as Executive Director of the American Public Health Association since 2002, and previously as Secretary of the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in the Cabinet of Governor Parris Glendening from 1999 to 2002. He is a member of the National Infrastructure Advisory Council and a fellow...

Jacob Matijevic, also known as "Jake" Matijevic, (3 November 1947 – 20 August 2012) was an American NASA engineer of Croatian origin who worked on Mars Exploration Rovers. Dr. Matijevic was involved in developing the "Sojourner", "Spirit", "Opportunity" and "Curiosity" rovers. For his contributions to the rover projects, NASA named several landmarks on the planet Mars (including "Matijevic Hill" and...

John Henry Waddell was an American sculptor, painter and educator. He had a long career in art education and has many sculptures on public display, but he may be best known for That Which Might Have Been—his memorial to the four girls killed in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

J. Herbert Burke was a Republican U.S. Representative from Florida who served from 1967 to 1979.

Carl William Buehner was a German-American politician who was general authority of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) from 1952 to 1961 and was the Republican Party candidate for governor of Utah in the 1968 election.

Vice Admiral Diego E. Hernandez was a United States Navy officer who was the first Hispanic American to be named Vice Commander, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).

Weymouth Kirkland was a Chicago lawyer and one of the name partners of the Chicago law firm of Kirkland & Ellis.

Wallace "Wally" Feurzeig was an American computer scientist who was co-inventor, with Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon, of the programming language Logo, and a well-known researcher in artificial intelligence (AI).

Scott Waguespack is a member of the Chicago City Council, representing the 32nd ward since May 2007. The current 32nd ward includes parts of the neighborhoods of Wicker Park, Bucktown, Goose Island, Hamlin Park, Lakeview, Lincoln Park, and Roscoe Village.

General Charles Lawrence Bolte was a senior United States Army officer who fought in both World War I and World War II. In World War II he distinguished himself as commander of the 34th Infantry Division during the Italian Campaign, for which he was twice awarded the Army Distinguished Service Medal. Later promoted to four-star general officer rank, his final...

James Gerard Roche is an American politician. He served as the 20th Secretary of the Air Force, serving from January 20, 2001 to January 20, 2005. Prior to serving as secretary, Roche served in the United States Navy for 23 years, and as an executive with Northrop Grumman.

Martin Charles Jischke is an American higher-education administrator and advocate who was the tenth president of Purdue University.

Arthur Bernard Krock was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist. He became known as the "Dean of Washington newsmen" in a career that spanned the tenure of 11 United States presidents.

Frank J. Corr was an American politician. Corr served as the 45th mayor of Chicago, Illinois. Corr's term was as acting mayor from March 15, 1933, following the assassination of Anton Cermak until April 8, 1933. Corr was a member of the Democratic Party.

Peter Werner Schutz was the president and CEO of Porsche between 1981 and 1987, a time in which the company greatly expanded sales, primarily in the United States. He was a motivational speaker and co-founder of Harris and Schutz Inc., with his wife Sheila Harris-Schutz.

Lenore Tawney was an American artist working in fiber art, collage, assemblage, and drawing. She is considered to be a groundbreaking artist for the elevation of craft processes to fine art status, two communities which were previously mutually exclusive. Tawney was born and raised in an Irish-American family in Lorain, Ohio near Cleveland and later moved to Chicago to start...

Henry Horner was an American politician. Horner served as the 28th Governor of Illinois, serving from January 1933 until his death in October 1940. Horner was noted as the first Jewish governor of Illinois.

Amr Ahmed Samih Talaat is an Egyptian engineer, academic, and government official serving as the Minister of Communications and Information Technology of Egypt since June 14, 2018. Before his appointment as minister, he had a long career in the private sector, including a tenure at IBM Masr where he served as Country general manager. Talaat holds degrees in engineering and...

Taleb Rifai is a Jordanian businessman and politician, who was the Secretary-General of the United Nations' World Tourism Organization between 2010 and 2017. He was the first Jordanian to hold a UN agency Secretary General position.

Stanley Tigerman was an American architect, theorist and designer.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto was a Japanese-American photographer. His decades-long career explored expressions of modernist design in traditional architecture, the quiet anxieties of urban life in Tokyo and Chicago, and the camera's capacity to bring out the abstract in the everyday and seemingly concrete fixtures of the world around him.

Rex Ellingwood Beach was an American novelist, playwright, and Olympic water polo player.

Ethel Percy Andrus was a long-time educator and the first female high school principal in California. She was also an elder rights activist and the founder of AARP in 1958.

Joel Daly was an American news anchor, most known for serving as an anchor for WLS-TV (an ABC-affiliate) in Chicago, Illinois, for 38 years from 1967 to 2005. Daly served as co-anchor on the 4 pm news broadcast alongside Linda Yu from January 1985 until his retirement in May 2005. Daly was inducted into the Silver Circle, a group of...

Richard Buell Ogilvie was an American attorney and law enforcement officer who served as the 35th governor of Illinois from 1969 to 1973. A wounded combat veteran of World War II, he became known as the mafia-fighting sheriff of Cook County, Illinois, in the 1960s before becoming governor.

William Emmett Dever was an American politician. He was the mayor of Chicago from 1923 to 1927. He had previously served as a judge and before that an alderman. As an alderman and judge he would work to become the Democratic candidate for mayor for over two decades.

Susan Solomon is an American atmospheric chemist, working for most of her career at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In 2011, Solomon joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she serves as the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry & Climate Science. Solomon, with her colleagues, was the first to propose the chlorofluorocarbon free...

Grote Reber was an American pioneer of radio astronomy, which combined his interests in amateur radio and amateur astronomy. He was instrumental in investigating and extending Karl Jansky's pioneering work and conducted the first sky survey in the radio frequencies.

Ameya Pawar is an American politician who previously served on the Chicago City Council as the alderman for the 47th ward of the City of Chicago. He was first elected in the 2011 municipal elections, and was elected to a second term on February 24, 2015. Pawar's 2015 re-election was secured with over 82% of the vote, the largest margin...

Jamshyd Naoroji Godrej is an Indian industrialist and member of the Godrej family, currently serving as managing director and chairman of Godrej & Boyce, the holding company of the Godrej group. Godrej & Boyce is a diversified business with a presence across 10 industry sectors.

Gloria Cecelia Ray Karlmark is a member of the Little Rock Nine, the nine African-American students who desegregated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. One of the three children of Harvey C. and Julia Miller Ray, she was 15 when she attempted to enter Little Rock Central High School where she was barred from entering by the...

Anita M. Alvarez is the former State's Attorney for Cook County, Illinois, United States. Alvarez was the first Hispanic woman elected to this position, after being the first Latina to win the Democratic nomination for state's attorney of Cook County.

Sidney Richard Coleman was an American theoretical physicist noted for his research in high-energy physics.

Peter James Roskam /ˈrɒskəm/ is an American politician and lobbyist who is the former U.S. representative for Illinois's 6th congressional district, serving six terms from 2007 to 2019. He is a member of the Republican Party and served as the chief deputy majority whip from 2011 to 2014, ranking fourth among House Republican leaders. Previously, he served in the Illinois...

Tamar Simon Hoffs is an American filmmaker, best known for directing the indie films Red Roses and Petrol (2003) and Pound of Flesh (2009), both starring Malcolm McDowell. She is the mother of Susanna Hoffs of The Bangles.

John Herman Cox is an American businessman, housing developer, political activist, and perennial candidate. A Republican, he was the party's nominee for Governor of California in 2018, as well as one of the party's replacement candidates in the state's 2021 recall election.

Jack Steinberger was a German-born American physicist noted for his work with neutrinos, the subatomic particles considered to be elementary constituents of matter. He was a recipient of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Leon M. Lederman and Melvin Schwartz, for the discovery of the muon neutrino. Through his career as an experimental particle physicist, he held positions...

Martin Cooper is an American engineer. He is a pioneer in the wireless communications industry, especially in radio spectrum management, with eleven patents in the field.

Nandamuri Kalyan Ram is an Indian actor and film producer who works in Telugu cinema. He is the son of actor-politician Nandamuri Harikrishna. Ram is best known for his roles in action films such as Athanokkade (2005), Hare Ram (2008), 118 (2019), and Bimbisara (2022). Ram is the chairperson of the production company N. T. R. Arts, named after his...

Kwame Raoul is an American lawyer and politician who has been the 42nd Attorney General of Illinois since 2019. He is a member of the Democratic Party.

Victor Paul Skrebneski was an American photographer born in Chicago to parents of Polish and Russian heritage. He was educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1943 and attended the Illinois Institute of Technology from 1947 to 1949. He set up his own studio in Chicago in 1952. The Art Institute of Chicago had an exhibit...

Jane Heap was an American publisher and a significant figure in the development and promotion of literary modernism. Together with Margaret Anderson, her friend and business partner (who for some years was also her lover), she edited the celebrated literary magazine The Little Review, which published an extraordinary collection of modern American, English and Irish writers between 1914 and 1929....

Carl Richard Chindblom was a U.S. Representative from Illinois.

Adolph Joachim Sabath was an American politician who served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Chicago, Illinois, from 1907 until his death in 1952. From 1934 onward, he served as the dean of the United States House of Representatives. At the time of his death, he had the longest uninterrupted service in the history of the...

Harris Walter Fawell was an American lawyer and politician from Illinois who served seven terms as a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from 1985 to 1999.

Dorothy Ann Rabb Brown Cook, also known as Dorothy Brown is an American lawyer and politician affiliated with the Democratic Party who served as the clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County from 2000 through 2020.

Roger Bruce Chaffee was an American naval officer, aviator and aeronautical engineer who was a NASA astronaut in the Apollo program.

David A. Edwards is an American biomedical engineer, and the founder of Sensory Cloud. He was the Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Biomedical Engineering at Harvard University.

Randall Mark Hultgren is an American politician who served as the U.S. representative for Illinois's 14th congressional district from 2011 to 2019. He is a member of the Republican Party.

Anthony J. Adducci was a pioneer of the medical device industry in Minnesota. He is best known for co-founding Cardiac Pacemakers, Inc., the company that manufactured the world's first lithium battery-powered artificial pacemaker. The lithium-iodide cell revolutionized the medical industry and is now the standard cell for pacemakers.

Jack Joseph Dongarra FRS is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is a University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Computer Science in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee. He holds the position Turing Fellowship in the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester, and is an adjunct professor and teacher in the Computer...

Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn is an American politician who serves as the Assembly Member for the 42nd District of the New York State Assembly. She is a Democrat. The district includes portions of East Flatbush, Flatbush, Ditmas Park, and Midwood, in Brooklyn.

Cyrus Chung-Ying Tang was a Chinese American industrialist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He founded and acquired companies across industries, including steel, metals, life sciences, and manufacturing, primarily through U.S.-based ventures such as Tang Industries and National Material Limited Partnership. Cyrus Tang was also recognized for his philanthropic work in cultural exchange, education, and healthcare, particularly through the Cyrus Tang Foundation, the...

Judith Joy Ross is an American portrait photographer. Her books include Contemporaries (1995), Portraits (1996), Portraits of the Hazleton Public Schools (2006) and Protest the War (2007), "exploring such themes as the innocence of youth, the faces of political power, and the emotional toll of war".

William Levi Dawson was an American politician and lawyer who represented a Chicago, Illinois district for more than 27 years in the United States House of Representatives, serving from 1943 to his death in office in 1970. In 1949, he became the first African American to chair a congressional committee.

Otis Frank Boykin was an American inventor and engineer. His inventions include electrical resistors used in computing, missile guidance, and pacemakers.

Virgil Abloh was an American fashion designer and entrepreneur. A trained architect, Abloh founded his own line of luxury streetwear clothing under the moniker Pyrex Vision in 2012, which he transformed into the Milan based fashion label Off-White in 2013. Abloh was appointed artistic director of Louis Vuitton's menswear collection beginning in 2018 and was given increased creative responsibilities across...

Mohsen Sazegara is an Iranian journalist and pro-democracy political activist. He was the founder of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. He held several offices in the government of Mir Hossein Mousavi. He applied to become a candidate for President of Iran in the 2001 election but was declined.

Satyanarayan Gangaram Pitroda, popularly known as Sam Pitroda, is an Indian official, telecommunications engineer, innovator, and entrepreneur. He was born in Titlagarh, in the eastern Indian state of Odisha, into a Gujarati family. He served as an advisor to Rajiv Gandhi and Manmohan Singh during their respective tenures as the Prime Minister of India, as well as to the United...

Rajeev Chandrasekhar Menon is an Indian entrepreneur, owner of Asianet News Online Pvt Ltd and politician currently serving as the state president of BJP Kerala. He is the son-in-law of T. P. Gopalan Nambiar, the founder of the BPL Group. He joined Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2018 a day after being made the party's Rajya Sabha candidate for the...

Rajinder Singh is the head of the international, non-profit organization Science of Spirituality (SOS), also known in India as the Sawan Kirpal Ruhani Mission. To his disciples he is known as Sant Rajinder Singh Ji Maharaj. Singh is known for his work toward promoting inner and outer peace through spirituality and meditation on the inner Light and Sound.

Ajit Singh was an Indian politician, farmer leader, and founder of the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), a regional political party rooted in Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, dedicated to advocating farmers’ rights and rural interests. Singh entered the Rajya Sabha in 1986 and later represented Baghpat in the Lok Sabha across seven terms between 1989 and 2014, navigating multiple party affiliations...

Abdul Jabbar Hassoon Jerri is an Iraqi American mathematician, most recognized for his contributions to Shannon Sampling Theory, Its Generalizations, Error Analysis, and Historical Reviews, and in particular his establishment in 2002 of the journal Sampling Theory in Signal and Image Processing (STSIP- ISSN 1530-6429) with over thirty top international experts as its editors, besides establishing its Sampling Publishing, also...

Aiham Alsammarae is a nationalistic, Sunni Muslim, Iraqi politician who served as Minister of Electricity from August 2003 until May 2005. He has been an active member of the Iraqi National List (headed by Iyad Allawi) and has fought hard for political reconciliation among Iraq's political parties as well as against the policy of de-Ba'athification, since his resignation as Minister...

James Young was a Scottish chemist best known for his method of distilling paraffin from coal and oil shales. He is often referred to as Paraffin Young.

Xavier Vilalta is a Spanish architect and professor. He studied architecture in Barcelona, London, and the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

Grete Prytz Kittelsen, was a Norwegian goldsmith, enamel artist, and designer. She is one of the most well-known Norwegians in the Scandinavian design movement, and has been referred to as the "Queen of Scandinavian Design". Through her work she contributed to internationalisation, innovation and scientific research. She was one of the few Norwegian practitioners who shaped the Scandinavian design style...

Eamonn Kevin Roche FAIA was an Irish-born American Pritzker Prize-winning architect. Kevin Roche was the archetypal modernist and "member of an elite group of third generation modernist architects — James Stirling, Jørn Utzon, and Robert Venturi — and is considered to be the most logical and systematic designer of the group. He and his partner John Dinkeloo of the firm...

Valdas Adamkus is a Lithuanian politician, diplomat and civil engineer who served as the fifth and seventh president of Lithuania from 1998 to 2003 and again from 2004 to 2009.