100 Notable alumni of Imperial College London

George Mercer Dawson CMG FRS FRSC was a Canadian geologist and surveyor. He performed many early explorations in western North America and compiled numerous records of the native peoples.

Sir Colin John Humphreys is a British physicist and a hobbyist Bible scholar. He is the Professor of Materials Science at Queen Mary University of London.

Dame Joan Mary Ruddock, DBE, PC is a British Labour Party politician who served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Lewisham Deptford from 1987 to 2015. Ruddock was Minister of State for Energy at the Department of Energy and Climate Change until 11 May 2010. She stood down at the 2015 general election.

Jonathan Felix Ashmore is a British physicist and Bernard Katz Professor of Biophysics at University College London.

Kenneth George "Ken" Binmore, CBE, FBA is an English mathematician, economist, and game theorist, a Professor Emeritus of Economics at University College London (UCL) and a Visiting Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Bristol. As a founder of modern economic theory of bargaining (with Nash and Rubinstein), he made important contributions to the foundations of game theory, experimental...

Wing Commander Alan Geoffrey Page, DSO, OBE, DFC & Bar, known as Geoffrey Page, was an officer in the Royal Air Force who served during the Second World War. He participated in the Battle of Britain, and was shot down. He was badly burned when his aircraft was destroyed, but survived. He underwent many surgeries on his way to recovery,...

Kunnath Puthiyaveettil Padmanabhan Nambiar DIC, FIEE (Lond), CEngg (Lond.), more popularly known as K.P.P. Nambiar (15 April 1929 – 30 June 2015), was an Indian industrialist and technocrat, known for his work in the field of industrial development and technology. He was awarded Padma Bhushan by Government of India for his contributions to the field of technology in 2006.

George Edward Davis was a chemist who is regarded as the founding father of the discipline of chemical engineering. He was also involved in microscopy.

Vice Admiral Sir Adrian James Johns, KCB, CBE, KStJ, DL is a former senior officer in the Royal Navy, serving as Second Sea Lord between 2005 and 2008. He was the Governor of Gibraltar between 2009 and 2013.

Mohammad Shamsuzzoha was a Bengali writer, professor and proctor at the University of Rajshahi. Shamsuzzoha was the first university teacher in erstwhile East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) who was killed by the Pakistani Military forces at the eve of 1969 revolution movement of East Pakistan, which ultimately became the Bangladesh Liberation War. In 2008, he was awarded the Independence Day Award.

Adrian Mark Greenwood was a British historian, biographer, author, and art dealer, with a particular interest in nineteenth-century British military history. As well as hundreds of articles on antiques and collecting, he wrote two books on military history.

Dame Susan Elizabeth Ion is a British engineer and an expert advisor on the nuclear power industry.

George Christopher Band OBE was an English mountaineer. He was the youngest climber on the 1953 British expedition to Mount Everest on which Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first to ascend the mountain. In 1955, he and Joe Brown were the first climbers to ascend Kangchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world.

David Edward Hugh Jones was a British chemist and writer, who - under the pen name Daedalus - was the fictional inventor for DREADCO. Jones' columns as Daedalus were published for 38 years, starting weekly in 1964 in New Scientist. He then moved to the journal Nature, and continued to publish until 2002. Columns from these magazines, along with additional...

William Gowland FRAI was an English mining engineer who carried out archaeological work at Stonehenge and in Japan. He has been called the "Father of Japanese Archaeology".

Ahmed bin Jassim Al Thani is a Qatari businessman, politician and a member of the royal family, Al Thani.

Air Marshal Sir Robert Victor Goddard, KCB, CBE, DL was a senior commander in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War.

Dame Angela Ruth McLean is professor of mathematical biology in the Department of Biology, University of Oxford, and Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government.

Aluf Dan Tolkowsky was an Israeli military officer who served as commander of the Israeli Air Force from 1953 to 1958. A noted investor, he helped start the first Israeli venture capital fund.

Conwy Lloyd Morgan, FRS was a British ethologist and psychologist. He is remembered for his theory of emergent evolution, and for the experimental approach to animal psychology now known as Morgan's Canon, a principle that played a major role in behaviourism, insisting that higher mental faculties should only be considered as explanations if lower faculties could not explain a behaviour.

Ajay Kumar Kakkar, Baron Kakkar is an emeritus professor of surgery at University College London and life peer.

Trygve Mikkjel Heyerdahl Reenskaug was a Norwegian computer scientist and professor emeritus of the University of Oslo. He formulated the model–view–controller (MVC) pattern for graphical user interface (GUI) software design in 1979 while visiting the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). His first major software project, "Autokon," produced a successful computer-aided design – computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) program which was first...

Elliot Haydn George Colburn is a British Conservative Party politician. He was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Carshalton and Wallington from the 2019 general election until he lost his seat in 2024. Colburn also served as councillor for the Cheam ward on Sutton Council from 2018 to 2022.

Roma Agrawal is an Indian-British chartered structural engineer based in London. She has worked on several major engineering projects, including the Shard. Agrawal is also an author and a diversity campaigner, championing women in engineering.

Fakhreddin Ahmadi-Danesh-Ashtiani is an Iranian politician and scholar and the former Minister of Education.

Sir Julius Vogel KCMG was the eighth premier of New Zealand. His administration is best remembered for the issuing of bonds to fund railway construction and other public works. He was the first Jewish prime minister of New Zealand. Historian Warwick R. Armstrong assesses Vogel's strengths and weaknesses:

Lancelot Lionel Ware OBE was an English barrister and biochemist. He co-founded Mensa, the international society for intellectually gifted people, with the Australian barrister Roland Berrill in 1946. It was originally called the "High IQ Club".

Lolwah Rashid Mohammed Al-Khater is the Qatari Minister of Education and Higher Education since 12 November 2024. She is a diplomat, who was the first Qatari woman to hold the position of Spokesperson for the Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Assistant Foreign Minister of Qatar. Between March 2023 and November 2024, she had served as Minister of State for...

Noel Ewart Odell FRSE FGS was an English geologist and mountaineer. In 1924 he was an oxygen officer on the Everest expedition in which George Mallory and Andrew Irvine famously perished during their summit attempt. Odell spent two weeks living above 23,000 feet (7,000 m), and twice climbed to 26,800 feet (8,200 m) and higher, all without supplemental oxygen. In...

Sir Derek Harold Richard Barton FRS FRSE was an English organic chemist and Nobel Prize laureate for 1969.

Ted Simon is a British travel writer noted for circumnavigating the world twice by motorcycle. He was raised in London by a German mother and a Romanian father.

Joseph Yuvaraj Pillay, also known as J. Y. Pillay DUNU DUT (with Distinction) (born 30 March 1934), is a Singaporean retired civil servant who served as the acting President of Singapore in September 2017.

Hussain Ibrahim Saleh al-Shahristani is an Iraqi politician who served in different cabinet posts, including as Iraq's Minister of Higher Education.

Sir John Alexander Manzoni KCB is a British senior civil servant and business executive, who served as chief executive of the civil service and the Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary from 2014 to 2020.

George C. McGavin FLS FRGS Hon. FRSB Hon. FRES is a British entomologist, author, academic, television presenter and explorer.

Haris Theoharis is a Greek politician, member of the Hellenic Parliament for New Democracy, and former head of the department of revenue during the Greek government-debt crisis. He previously served as Minister for Tourism in the Cabinet of Kyriakos Mitsotakis. He was first elected to parliament in January 2015 representing The River, but left the party in April 2016 and...

Michael Birch OBE is a British computer programmer and entrepreneur. Birch has helped co-found several startups including Blab, BirthdayAlarm.com, Ringo.com, and social networking site Bebo. Birch sold Bebo, his most lucrative business, which he started with his wife, Xochi Birch, was sold to AOL in March 2008 for $850 million. Later he purchased the company back for $1 million. Birch...

Lam Chiu-ying SBS, also known by the nickname 'Black Ying' (Chinese: 黑英; pinyin: Hēi Yīng), is a Hong Kong meteorologist, bird-watcher, conservationist and blogger. He was the director of the Hong Kong Observatory 2003 through 2009. He is also an honorary fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society, an honorary university fellow of the University of Hong Kong, as well as...

Thomas Martin Lowry CBE FRS was an English physical chemist who developed the Brønsted–Lowry acid–base theory simultaneously with and independently of Johannes Nicolaus Brønsted and was a founder-member and president (1928–1930) of the Faraday Society.

Thomas Anthony Brake is a British Liberal Democrat politician. He was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Carshalton and Wallington in London from 1997 to 2019.

Nick Lane is a British biochemist and writer. He is a professor in evolutionary biochemistry at University College London. His books have won several awards.

Zubaida Rahman is a Bangladeshi physician, and the wife of prime minister Tarique Rahman.

Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson FRS was a Nobel laureate English chemist who pioneered inorganic chemistry and homogeneous transition metal catalysis.

Jess Wade BEM is a British physicist in the Blackett Laboratory at Imperial College London, specialising in Raman spectroscopy. Her research investigates polymer-based organic light emitting diodes. Her public engagement work in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) advocates for women in physics as well as tackling systemic biases such as gender and racial bias on Wikipedia.

Feza Gürsey was a Turkish mathematician and physicist. Among his contributions to theoretical physics, his work on the chiral model and on SU(6) symmetry of the quark model are the most well-known.

Naomi Oreskes is an American historian of science. She became Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University in 2013, after 15 years as Professor of History and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego.

Arthur Holmes FRS FRSE was an English geologist who made two major contributions to the understanding of geology. He pioneered the use of radiometric dating of minerals, and was the first earth scientist to grasp the mechanical and thermal implications of mantle convection, which led eventually to the acceptance of plate tectonics.

Neil Geoffrey Turok OC HonFInstP is a South African physicist. He has held the Higgs Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Edinburgh since 2020, and has been director emeritus of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics since 2019. He specializes in mathematical physics and early-universe physics, including the cosmological constant and a cyclic model for the universe.

Baey Yam Keng is a Singaporean politician. A member of the governing People's Action Party (PAP), he has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for the Tampines Boulevard division of Tampines Group Representation Constituency (GRC) since 2025. He had previously represented the Queenstown division of Tanjong Pagar GRC from 2006 to 2011 and the Tampines North division of Tampines GRC...

Yuval Ne'eman was an Israeli theoretical physicist, military scientist, and politician. He was Minister of Science and Development in the 1980s and early 1990s. He was the President of Tel Aviv University from 1971 to 1977. He was awarded the Israel Prize in the field of exact sciences (which he returned in 1992 in protest of the award of the...

Andreas Enevold "Andy" Mogensen is a Danish engineer and ESA astronaut who is best known for being the first Dane to fly in space as part of the European Space Agency's Iriss program. Mogensen has also been involved in a number of other space-related projects throughout his career, including working as a test engineer for ESTEC and as a member...

Dame Karen Anne Bradley DBE is a British Conservative Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Staffordshire Moorlands since 2010 and the Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee since 2024. She served as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland from 2018 to 2019.

Peter Rawlinson is a British businessman and engineer based in California. He was the chief executive officer, chief technology officer, and former board member of Lucid Motors and is known for his work as Chief Vehicle Engineer of the Tesla Model S and the Lucid Air.

Mary Doreen Archer (formally Lady Archer of Weston-super-Mare, commonly Dame Mary Archer, DBE (née Weeden; born 22 December 1944), is a British scientist specialising in solar energy conversion.

Naci Görür is a Turkish seismologist, geologist, and a former professor at the Istanbul Technical University.

Sunetra Gupta is an Indian-born British infectious disease epidemiologist and a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford. She has performed research on the transmission dynamics of various infectious diseases, including malaria, influenza and COVID-19, and has received the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London and the Rosalind Franklin Award of the Royal...

Sir Mark Trevor Phillips OBE ARCS FIC is a British writer, broadcaster and former politician. He served as Chair of the London Assembly from 2000 to 2001 and from 2002 to 2003. Phillips was appointed head of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) by Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2003 and was the chairman of its successor, the Equality and...

Kavin Bharti Mittal is an Indian internet entrepreneur and the founder of Hike, a technology company that developed Hike Messenger and the Rush Gaming Universe, and operated from 2012 until its closure in 2025.

Teo Chee Hean PPA is a Singaporean former politician and two-star rear-admiral who served as Senior Minister of Singapore and Coordinating Minister for National Security from 2019 and 2015 respectively until 2025. He served as the Member of Parliament (MP) representing the Pasir Ris West division of Pasir Ris–Punggol Group Representation Constituency from 2001 to 2025.

Sir Patrick Geddes FRSE was a Scottish biologist, sociologist, Comtean positivist, geographer, philanthropist and pioneering town planner. He is known for his innovative thinking in the fields of urban planning and sociology. His works contain one of the earliest examples of the 'think globally, act locally' concept in social science.

Simon Lehna Singh, MBE is a British popular science author and theoretical and particle physicist. His written works include Fermat's Last Theorem (in the United States titled Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem), The Code Book (about cryptography and its history), Big Bang (about the Big Bang theory and the origins of the universe),...

Dame Margaret Ebunoluwa Aderin-Pocock DBE HonFREng is a British space scientist and science educator. She is an honorary research associate of University College London's Department of Physics and Astronomy, and has been the chancellor of the University of Leicester since 1 March 2023. Since February 2014, she has co-presented the long-running astronomy television programme The Sky at Night with Chris...

Chen Jining is a Chinese environmental scientist, academic administrator and politician who has been serving as Party Secretary of Shanghai and member of the 20th Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party since October 2022.

Sir William Crookes was an English chemist and physicist who attended the Royal College of Chemistry, now part of Imperial College London, and worked on spectroscopy. He was a pioneer of vacuum tubes, inventing the Crookes tube, which was made in 1875. Observing cathode rays generated in these tubes, Crookes posited that "radiant matter" was a unique fourth state of...

Conrad Kongkal Sangma is an Indian politician and Chief Minister of Meghalaya since 2018. He is the national president of the National People's Party. His father, P. A. Sangma, was former Chief Minister and former Speaker of the Lok Sabha. Conrad Sangma was also a Member of Parliament from Tura (2016–2018). He has been representing the South Tura constituency since...

Daniel Victor Snaith is a Canadian composer, musician, and recording artist. He has released 11 studio albums since 2000 and has recorded and performed under the stage names Caribou, Manitoba, and Daphni. His Caribou album Andorra (2008) was awarded the 2008 Polaris Music Prize, and his Caribou album Swim (2010) was a shortlisted nominee for the 2010 Polaris Music Prize...

Anna Mani was an Indian physicist and meteorologist. She retired as the deputy director general of the Indian Meteorological Department and also served as a visiting professor at the Raman Research Institute. Mani made contributions to the field of meteorological instrumentation, conducted research, and published numerous papers on solar radiation, ozone, and wind energy measurements.

Winston Wen-Yang Wong OBE is a Taiwanese chemical engineer, businessman, and philanthropist. He is the eldest son of Wang Yung-ching, chair of the Formosa Plastics Group (FPG), by his second wife.

Joseph Jean-Pierre Marc Garneau was a Canadian Armed Forces officer, astronaut and politician. Garneau served as a naval officer before being selected as an astronaut as part of the 1983 NRC Group. He became the first Canadian in space on October 5, 1984, and flew on three Space Shuttle missions. From 2001 to 2005, Garneau was president of the Canadian...

Rajiv Gandhi was an Indian politician and pilot who served as the prime minister of India from 1984 to 1989 for two terms. He took office after the assassination of his mother, then–prime minister Indira Gandhi, to become at the age of 40 the youngest Indian prime minister. He served until his defeat at the 1989 election, and then became...

Paul Antony Young is an English musician, singer and songwriter. Formerly the frontman of the short-lived bands Kat Kool & the Kool Cats, Streetband and Q-Tips, he became a teen idol with his solo success in the 1980s. His hit singles include "Love of the Common People", "Wherever I Lay My Hat", "Come Back and Stay", "Every Time You Go...

Jessica Hester Hsuan, also known as Suen Huen, is a Hong Kong actress.

Mohammad Abdus Salam was a Pakistani theoretical physicist. He shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow "for their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including, inter alia, the prediction of the weak neutral current". He was the first Pakistani, first Muslim scientist, and second person from...

Pallonji Shapoorji Mistry was an Indian-born Irish businessman. He was chairman of the Shapoorji Pallonji Group and a major shareholder of India's largest private conglomerate, Tata Group.

Sir Roger Gilbert Bannister was an English neurologist and middle-distance athlete who ran the first sub-4-minute mile.

Dame Chinyelu Susan "Chi" Onwurah is a British politician who has served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West since 2024, and previously for Newcastle upon Tyne Central from 2010 to 2024, when the constituency was abolished. She is a member of the Labour Party.

Frederick William Lanchester, was an English polymath and engineer who made important contributions to automotive engineering and to aerodynamics, and co-invented the topic of operations research.

Wu I-ding is a Taiwanese statistician and politician. She was a member of the Legislative Yuan from 2020 to 2024.

Leslie Gabriel Valiant FRS is a British American computer scientist and computational theorist. He was born to a chemical engineer father and a translator mother. He is currently the T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University. Valiant was awarded the Turing Award in 2010, having been described by the A.C.M. as a heroic figure...

Wolfgang Rindler was an Austrian physicist studying general relativity. He is known for introducing the term "event horizon" for the boundary of a black hole, Rindler coordinates, and (in collaboration with Roger Penrose) for the use of spinors in general relativity. An honorary member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and foreign member of the Accademia delle Scienze di Torino,...

Amelia Helen Womack is a British Green Party of England and Wales politician. She served as the party's Deputy Leader from 2014 to 2022. She is a co-chair of the People's Assembly Against Austerity, and co-founded Another Europe Is Possible.

Matthew Graham George Thaddeus Taylor is a British astrophysicist employed by the European Space Agency. He is best known to the public for his involvement in the Rosetta mission, the first mission to make landfall on a comet. Taylor was the mission's project scientist.

Kamran Daneshjoo is an Iranian university professor who was Minister of Science from 2009 to 2013.

Kenan Malik is a British writer, lecturer and broadcaster, trained in neurobiology and the history of science. As an academic author, his focus is on the philosophy of biology, and contemporary theories of multiculturalism, pluralism, and race. These topics are core concerns in The Meaning of Race (1996), Man, Beast and Zombie (2000) and Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides Are...

David John Cawdell Irving is an English author who has written on the military and political history of the Second World War, especially Nazi Germany. He was found to be a Holocaust denier in a British court in 2000 as a result of a failed libel case.

Sir Brian Harold May is an English musician, animal welfare activist, and astrophysicist. He achieved global fame as the lead guitarist and backing vocalist of the rock band Queen, which he co-founded with singer Freddie Mercury and drummer Roger Taylor. His guitar work and songwriting contributions helped Queen become one of the most successful acts in music history.

Dzulkefly bin Ahmad is a Malaysian politician who has served as the Minister of Health for the second term in the Unity Government administration under Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim since December 2023 and the Member of Parliament (MP) for Kuala Selangor from March 2008 to May 2013 and again since May 2018. He served his first term as the Minister...

Layla Michelle Moran is a British Liberal Democrat politician. She has served as the Chair of the Health and Social Care Select Committee since September 2024, and has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Oxford West and Abingdon since 2017.

Kevin Warwick is an English engineer and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at Coventry University. He is known for his studies on direct interfaces between computer systems and the human nervous system, and has also done research concerning robotics.

Sir Alexander Fleming was a Scottish physician and microbiologist. He shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain "for the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect in various infectious diseases". This was the first antibiotic substance discovered. His discovery in 1928 of what was later named benzylpenicillin (or penicillin G) from the...

Thomas Kwok Ping-kwong is a Hong Kong billionaire, and the former joint chairman and managing director (with his brother Raymond Kwok) of Sun Hung Kai Properties, the largest property developer in Hong Kong. He received a five-year prison sentence for bribery in 2014.

Cyrus Pallonji Mistry was an Irish businessman. He was the chairman of the Tata Group, an Indian business conglomerate, from 2012 to 2016. He was the sixth chairman of the group, and only the second (after Nowroji Saklatwala) not to bear the surname Tata. In mid-2012, he was chosen by a selection panel to head the Tata Group and took...

Valentin Ceaușescu is a Romanian physicist. He is the eldest and only surviving child of former communist President Nicolae Ceaușescu and Elena Ceaușescu.

William George Penney, Baron Penney, OM, KBE, FRS, FRSE was an English mathematician and professor of mathematical physics at the Imperial College London and later the rector of Imperial College London. He had a leading role in the development of High Explosive Research, Britain's clandestine nuclear programme that started in 1942 during the Second World War which produced the first...

Dennis Gabor was a Hungarian-British physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971 for his invention of holography. He obtained British citizenship in 1946 and spent most of his life in England.

Hassan II was King of Morocco from 1961 until his death in 1999. A member of the Alawi dynasty, he was the eldest son of King Mohammed V, and his second wife Princess Abla bint Tahar.

Kit Armstrong is an American classical pianist, composer, organist, and former child prodigy of British-Taiwanese parentage.

Lewis Wolpert CBE FRS FRSL FMedSci was a South African-born British developmental biologist, author, and broadcaster. Wolpert popularized his French flag model of embryonic development, using the colours of the French flag as a visual aid to explain how embryonic cells interpret genetic code for expressing characteristics of living organisms and explaining how signalling between cells early in morphogenesis could...

David Ronald de Mey Warren AO was an Australian scientist, best known for inventing and developing the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder (also known as FDR, CVR and "the black box").