100 Notable alumni of Mount Holyoke College

Christian Janet Kay was Emeritus Professor of English Language and Honorary Professorial Research Fellow in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Glasgow. She was an editor, with her mentor Michael Samuels, of the world's largest and first historical thesaurus, the Historical Thesaurus of English, first published in 2009 as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED),...

Grace H. Knapp was an American Christian missionary and teacher who served in the Ottoman Empire. During her time as a missionary, Knapp was a witness to the Armenian genocide. During the Armenian genocide, Knapp was stationed in Van and eventually described the events in the region in two published books describing her experiences. The first book, The Mission at...

Clara Harrison Stranahan was an American author and the founder of Barnard College. Long identified with the higher education of women in the United States, she was at one time called "the best educated woman in the United States." She taught in Troy, Ohio and in Brooklyn, New York, and donated US$25,000 to University of Michigan as a memorial of...

Mildred Leonora Sanderson was an American mathematician, best known for her mathematical theorem concerning modular invariants.

Karen Middleton is an American politician who served as a member of the Colorado House of Representatives from 2004 to 2008 and 2008 to 2011.

Lucy Weston Pickett was a Mary Lyon Professor and Camille and Henry Dreyfus Chair in Chemistry at Mount Holyoke College.

Marie Mercury Roth was an American synthetic organic chemist. She was the first female Ph.D. candidate at the chemistry department of University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she worked with William Summer Johnson. She received her Doctorate of Philosophy in 1951 for the Application of the Favorskii rearrangement to the problem of angular methylation.

Katheryn Curi is an American former professional racing cyclist who rode for the Webcor Builders Women's Professional Cycling Team, until the sponsor discontinued it before the 2011 season. She won the United States National Road Race Championships in Park City, Utah, in June 2005. In February 2008 she won the Geelong World Cup thereby claiming the UCI World Cup leader's...

Vera Katherine Charles was an American mycologist. She was one of the first women to be appointed to professional positions within the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Charles coauthored several articles on mushrooms while working for the USDA.

Alice Miles Woodruff, born Alice Lincoln Miles, was an American virologist. She developed a method for growing fowlpox outside of a live chicken alongside Ernest William Goodpasture. Her research greatly facilitated the rapid advancement in the study of viruses.

Susan Mohl Powers, born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, was a contemporary artist who sculpted in polygon and planar metal as well as sewn fabric, blending art and science to design sculptures and fabric-on-canvas paintings. The owner of Sailshade Studios in Fall River, Massachusetts, she also designed, trademarked and fabricated an energy-efficient window shade.

Linda J. Melconian is a former American state legislator who served as the first woman Majority Leader in the history of the Massachusetts Senate. A member of the Democratic Party, she represented the greater Springfield area as its State Senator from 1983-2005. In 2017 Melconian was invited by the U. S. House of Representatives Historian’s Office to participate in an...

Marcia Clare Hofmann is an American attorney and US-UK Fulbright Scholar. Hofmann is known for her work as an advocate of electronic privacy and free expression, including defending individuals charged with high-profile computer crimes, such as Marcus Hutchins and Weev.

Clare M. Waterman is a cell biologist who has worked on understanding the role of the cytoskeleton in cell migration. Waterman is a Distinguished Investigator, Chief of the Laboratory of Cell and Tissue Morphodynamics, and Director of the Cell and Developmental Biology Center at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda...

Ada Lydia Howard was the first president of Wellesley College.

Frances Wheeler Sayler was an American civil rights and labor activist. She worked in the La Follette Committee and for the United States Women's Bureau, before became an organizer in the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America union. She was active in the early civil rights movement, fighting to desegregate facilities and abolish the poll tax.

Susan Tolman Mills was the co-founder of Mills College (formerly the Young Ladies Seminary at Benicia, California).

Anne Wetzell Armstrong was an American novelist and businesswoman, active primarily in the first half of the 20th century. She is best known for her novel, This Day and Time, an account of life in a rural Appalachian community. She was also a pioneering woman in business management, and was the first woman to lecture before the Harvard School of...

Alice Gordon Gulick was an American missionary teacher in Spain.

Constance Winsor Green, best known as Constance McLaughlin Green, was an American historian. She who won the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for History for Washington, Village and Capital, 1800–1878 (1962).

Sandy Rosenthal is an American civic activist and founder of Levees.Org, an organization created in October 2005 to educate the American public about the cause of the levee failures and catastrophic flooding in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.

Yoshi Kajiro was a Japanese educator, the longtime principal of the Sanyō Girls' High School in Okayama.

Louise Freeland Jenkins was an American astronomer who compiled a valuable catalogue of stars within 10 parsecs of the sun, as well as editing the 3rd edition of the Yale Bright Star Catalogue.

Jemila Wumpini Abdulai is a Ghanaian blogger, writer and digital marketer. In 2007, she founded Circumspecte.com, a lifestyle blog dedicated to Africans. Her blog was a recipient of the African Blogger Awards in 2016.

Barbara Ketcham Wheaton is an American writer and food historian. Since 1990, she has been honorary curator of the culinary collection at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, one of the largest collections in the United States of books and manuscripts relating to cooking and the social history of food.

Emma Perry Carr was an American spectroscopist and chemical educator. Her work on unsaturated hydrocarbons and absorption spectra earned her the inaugural Francis P. Garvan Medal (now the Garvan–Olin Medal) from the American Chemical Society in 1937.

Edna Dean Proctor was an American writer and poet. Although she occasionally wrote short sketches and stories, poetry was her field. Proctor was characterized as a master of pathos. Early in life, Proctor was a writer of poetry, but not until the Civil War —which aroused the patriotic element within her— were her verses known around the country when her...

Catherine McArdle Kelleher was an American political scientist involved in national and international security policy. She was Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and College Park Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. Kelleher was the Director of the Aspen Institute in Berlin from 1998 to 2001 when she was appointed Professor...

Alice McLellan Birney was an American educator who co-founded the National Parent-Teacher Association in 1897.

Sarah-Ann Lynch is an American diplomat who served as United States ambassador to Guyana from 2019 to 2023. She was nominated by President Donald Trump on September 13, 2018, and presented her credentials on March 13, 2019, to President David Granger. Lynch was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on January 2, and was sworn in on January 11, 2019.

Libby Garvey is an American politician who served as a member of the Arlington County Board from 2012 to 2024. She has previously served as the board's chair.

Laura Briggs is a feminist critic and historian of reproductive politics and US empire. She works on transnational and transracial adoption and the relationship between race, sex, gender, and US imperialism. Her 2012 book Somebody's Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption won the James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians for best book on the...

Mildred Trotter was an American pioneer as a forensic historian and forensic anthropologist.

Minerva Josephine Chapman was an American painter. She was known for her work in miniature portraiture, landscape, and still life.

Anna Adams Gordon was an American social reformer, songwriter, and, as national president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union when the Eighteenth Amendment was adopted, a major figure in the Temperance movement.

Lynn C. Pasquerella is an American academic and the 14th president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. Before she assumed this position, she was the 18th president of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, serving from 2010 to 2016. She was a professor of philosophy at the University of Rhode Island for 22 years before becoming URI's...

Janet MacArthur Bond Arterton is an inactive senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut.

Susan L. Shirk is an American political scientist and China specialist currently serving as a research professor at University of California, San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy. She was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs at the U.S. State Department from 1997 to 2000 during the Clinton administration.

Leocadia Irine Zak serves as the ninth president of Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. Prior to that, Zak served as director of the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, where she led an agency dedicated to encouraging economic growth in emerging markets and the export of U.S. goods and services to those markets. After being nominated by President Barack Obama...

Margaret Morse Nice was an American ornithologist, ethologist, and child psychologist who made an extensive study of the life history of the song sparrow and was author of Studies in the Life History of the Song Sparrow (1937). She observed and recorded hierarchies in chicken about three decades ahead of Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe who coined the term "pecking order". After her...

Tami L. Gouveia is social worker and a former Massachusetts politician. She served as State Representative and then ran for Lieutenant Governor.

Cornelia Maria Clapp was an American educator and zoologist, specializing in marine biology. She earned the first Ph.D. in biology awarded to a woman in the United States from Syracuse University in 1889, and she would earn a second doctoral degree from the University of Chicago in 1896. Clapp was the first female researcher employed at the Marine Biological Laboratory,...

Susan E. Lynch is an American pediatrician and the wife of John Lynch, the Democratic former governor of New Hampshire. Susan Lynch was the First Lady of New Hampshire from 2005 to 2013.

Charlotte Elizabeth Wilder was an American poet and academic who worked in the Federal Writers Project.

Vera Kistiakowsky was an American research physicist, teacher, and arms control activist. She was professor emerita at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the physics department and Laboratory for Nuclear Science, and was an activist for women's participation in the sciences. Kistiakowsky was an expert in experimental particle physics and observational astrophysics. Her hobbies included climbing mountains, and she liked to...

Sabina Murray is a Filipina-American screenwriter and novelist. She currently is a professor in the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Mary Mazzio is an American documentary filmmaker, attorney, and a rower for the United States in the 1992 Olympics. She founded the independent film company 50 Eggs.

Janet Celeste Hall is a senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut. She sits in New Haven.

Mallika Dutt leads Inter-Connected, a new initiative that uplifts the independent nature of self, community and planet to advance collective wellbeing. She brings together the power of ancient wisdom and spiritual practices with contemporary technologies and storytelling. Dutt is the founder of Breakthrough, a human rights organization dedicated to making violence against women unacceptable.

Mabel Harlakenden Grosvenor was a Canadian-born American pediatrician. She was a granddaughter and secretary to the scientist and telephone pioneer Alexander Graham Bell. She lived in both Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Scotia and Washington, D.C.

Suchi Saria is an Associate Professor of Machine Learning and Healthcare at Johns Hopkins University, where she uses big data to improve patient outcomes. She is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. From 2022 to 2023, she was an investment partner at AIX Ventures. AIX Ventures is a venture capital fund that invests in artificial intelligence startups.

Ayesha Harruna Attah is a Ghanaian-born fiction writer. She lives in Senegal.

Jean Ellen Taylor is an American mathematician who is a professor emerita at Rutgers University and visiting faculty at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University.

Sara Menker is an Ethiopian businesswoman and executive who served as the chief executive officer of Gro Intelligence from 2014 until its closure in 2024. She is a trustee of the Mandela Institute for Development Studies and was elected one of the World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders.

Karen Lewis was an American educator and labor leader who served as president of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), Chicago's division of the American Federation of Teachers, from 2010 to 2014. For nearly 20 years before becoming president of the teachers union, she was a high school chemistry teacher.

Rachel Fuller Brown was an American chemist best known for her long-distance collaboration with microbiologist Elizabeth Lee Hazen in developing the first useful antifungal antibiotic, nystatin, while doing research for the Division of Laboratories and Research of the New York State Department of Health. Brown received her BA from Mount Holyoke College and her PhD from the University of Chicago....

Ann M. O'Leary is an American political advisor, attorney, and nonprofit leader, who served as Chief of Staff to California Governor Gavin Newsom and as co-chair of the Governor's Task Force on Business and Jobs Recovery. Between 2021 and 2026, she was a partner at the international law firm Jenner & Block, before joining OpenAI as vice president of global...

Louisa Maria "Louise" Torrey was the second wife of Alphonso Taft, and the mother of U.S. President William Howard Taft.

Ruth Muskrat Bronson was a Cherokee Nation poet, educator and Indian rights activist. After completing her education, Bronson became the first Guidance and Placement Officer of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She served as executive secretary for the National Congress of American Indians, which was founded in 1944, and created their legislative news service.

Helen Battles Sawyer Hogg was an American-Canadian astronomer who pioneered research into globular clusters and variable stars. She was the first female president of several astronomical organizations and a scientist when many universities would not award scientific degrees to women. Her dedication to sharing astronomy with the wider public led to scientific advocacy and journalism, including columns in the Toronto...

Rabiya Javeri Agha is the Chairperson of the National Commission for Human Rights (NCHR) in Pakistan, and a retired civil servant officer who served in the Government of Pakistan in BPS-22 grade as Federal Secretary. She was the first unanimously elected female President of the Pakistan Administrative Service (PAS) Officers Association, and she has had an extensive career ranging from...

Yousef Munayyer is a Palestinian-American writer and political analyst based in Washington, D.C., United States. He was the executive director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Previously he directed The Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development and its educational program, the Palestine Center and was also a policy analyst with the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman was an American author. She is best known for her novel Pembroke, and also wrote a number of well-regarded ghost stories, which are still frequently anthologized.

Kavita Nandini Ramdas is an American feminist and activist.

Dorothy Hansine Andersen was the American physician and researcher who first identified and named cystic fibrosis. During her almost thirty year tenure at Babies Hospital of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center (now Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital), Andersen not only identified CF and its inheritance through a recessive gene, she was also at the forefront of developing diagnostic tests and life-extending treatments for...

Mona K. Sutphen was the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2011. She is currently a Senior Partner and Head of Investment Strategies at The Vistria Group, a Chicago-based private equity firm founded by Marty Nesbitt and Kip Kirkpatrick. From 2013 to 2019, she was a partner in Macro Advisory Partners...

Melinda Mullins is an American former film, television and theatre actress.

Beth Karas is an American attorney and television commentator who worked as a Senior Reporter with truTV, providing commentary on a number of high-profile cases, including the rape trial of Kobe Bryant, the Martha Stewart trial, and the murder trials of Robert Blake, Scott Peterson, and Jodi Arias.

Joan Jonas is an American visual artist and a pioneer of video and performance art, "a central figure in the performance art movement of the late 1960s". Jonas' projects and experiments were influential in the creation of video performance art as a medium. Her influences also extended to conceptual art, theatre, performance art and other visual media. She lives and...

Ella Rosa Giovianna Oliva Grasso was an American politician and member of the Democratic Party who served as the 83rd governor of Connecticut from January 8, 1975, to December 31, 1980, after rejecting past offers of candidacies for Senate and governor. She was the first woman elected governor in Connecticut and the fourth woman to be elected governor of a...

Barbara Smith is an American lesbian feminist and socialist who has played a significant role in Black feminism in the United States. Since the early 1970s, she has been active as a scholar, activist, critic, lecturer, author, and publisher of Black feminist thought. She has also taught at numerous colleges and universities for 25 years. Smith's essays, reviews, articles, short...

Carol Higgins Clark was an American mystery author. She was the daughter of suspense writer Mary Higgins Clark, with whom she co-authored several Christmas novels, and the former sister-in-law of author Mary Jane Clark.

Suzan-Lori Parks is an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. Among her most popular plays are The America Play (1994), Venus (1996), In The Blood (1999), Fuckin A (2000), Topdog/Underdog (2001), and White Noise (2019). These works and others have been performed on and off Broadway and the West End.

Glenda A. Hatchett, known professionally as Judge Hatchett, is an American television personality, lawyer, and judge who is the star of the former court show, Judge Hatchett and current day The Verdict with Judge Hatchett, and founding partner at the national law firm, The Hatchett Firm.

Maya Christinah Xichavo Wegerif, known professionally as Sho Madjozi, is a South African rapper, singer, songwriter, and poet. Madjozi incorporates the Tsonga culture through her music and public image. In 2019, Madjozi was named as one of Forbes Africa's 30 Under 30 for her contribution in the music and entertainment sector.

Kathleen Anne Holland Hicks is a former American civil servant who served as the United States deputy secretary of defense from 2021 to 2025. She is the first Senate-confirmed woman in this role and is the highest-ranking woman to have served in the United States Department of Defense.

Nita Sue Lowey was an American politician who served as a U.S. representative from New York from 1989 until 2021. She was a member of the Democratic Party. Lowey also served as co-dean of the New York congressional delegation, along with former U.S. Representative Eliot Engel. Lowey's district was numbered as the 20th from 1989 to 1993, as the 18th...

Frances Perkins was an American workers-rights advocate who served as the fourth United States secretary of labor from 1933 to 1945, the longest serving in that position. A member of the Democratic Party, Perkins was the first woman ever to serve in a presidential cabinet. As a loyal supporter of her longtime friend, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, she helped make...

Michelle Hurst is an American actress. She played Miss Claudette Pelage in the first season of the streaming television series Orange Is the New Black.

Helen Pitts Douglass was an American suffragist, known for being the second wife of Frederick Douglass. She also created the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Historical Association, which became the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site.

Nancy Sharon Kissinger is an American philanthropist and Rockefeller political aide, and the widow of former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The couple married on March 30, 1974, in Arlington, Virginia.

Sarah Elizabeth Marston was an American attorney and psychologist. She is credited, with her husband William Moulton Marston, with the development of the systolic blood pressure measurement used to detect deception, the predecessor to the polygraph.

Deborah Harkness is an American scholar and novelist, best known as a historian and as the author of the All Souls Trilogy, which consists of The New York Times best-selling novel A Discovery of Witches and its sequels Shadow of Night and The Book of Life. Her latest book is The Black Bird Oracle, a sequel to the All Souls...

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Largely unpublished and unknown during her lifetime, her work is now widely regarded as canonical. Her poems have a unique style, piercing intelligence and wit.

Chloé Zhao is a Chinese filmmaker. She is known primarily for her work on independent films. For her film Nomadland (2020), Zhao became the second of three women to win the Academy Award for Best Director.

Mahua Moitra is an Indian politician and former investment banker. She is known for her controversial and fiery speeches in the parliament. She won the 2019 Indian general election as an Trinamool Congress (TMC) party candidate from Krishnanagar and served as a Member of Parliament, Lok Sabha from 2019 to 2023 until being expelled. She was re-elected to parliament in...

Elaine Lan Chao is a Taiwanese-American businesswoman and former government official who served as United States secretary of labor in the administration of George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009 and as United States secretary of transportation in the first administration of Donald Trump from 2017 to 2021. A member of the Republican Party, Chao was the first Asian American...

Maryanne Trump Barry was an American attorney and United States federal judge. She became an assistant United States attorney in 1974 and was first appointed to the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey by President Ronald Reagan in 1983. In 1999, she was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit by...

Jill W. Smith is a philanthropist with a longstanding interest in advancing women's and girls’ education. She is the former Chair of the Jewish Foundation for Education of Women (JFEW), a 130-year-old institution providing educational scholarships to women in need of all religions and ethnicities. Smith has held the position since 2010 and has served as an active board member...

Olympia Brown was an American minister and suffragist. She was the first woman to be ordained as clergy with the consent of her denomination. Brown was also an articulate advocate for women's rights and one of the few first generation suffragists who were able to vote with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Hannah Rosenthal is a former American government official and Jewish non-profit executive who served as the U.S. Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism from 2009 until 2012 during the Obama administration.

Lucy Stone was an American orator, abolitionist and suffragist who was a vocal advocate for and organizer of promoting rights for women. In 1847, Stone became the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree. She spoke out for women's rights and against slavery. Stone was known for using her birth name, after marriage, contrary to the custom of...

Caroline Ransom Williams was an Egyptologist and classical archaeologist. She was the first American woman to be professionally trained as an Egyptologist. She worked extensively with the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA) in New York and other major institutions with Egyptian collections, and published Studies in ancient furniture (1905), The Tomb of Perneb (1916), and The Decoration of the Tomb...

Adrienne Arsht is an American businesswoman and philanthropist.

Sharon E. Har is an American politician. She served as a member of the Hawaii House of Representatives for District 42 from January 16, 2013 to November 8, 2022 for the Democratic Party. She was succeeded by Diamond Garcia. Har served consecutively from January 2007 to January 2013 in the District 40 seat.

Mei Hong is a Chinese-American biophysical chemist and professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is known for her creative development and application of solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (ssNMR) spectroscopy to elucidate the structures and mechanisms of membrane proteins, plant cell walls, and amyloid proteins. She has received a number of recognitions for her work, including the...

Jane Susan Garvey is a British radio presenter, until recently of BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour, and co-founder of the weekly podcast series Fortunately (from March 2017 to November 2022). She now hosts a Times Radio show and the "Off Air" podcast with Fi Glover.

Tahmima Anam is a Bangladeshi-born British writer, novelist and columnist. Her first novel, A Golden Age (2007), was the Best First Book winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prizes. Her follow-up novel, The Good Muslim, was nominated for the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize. She is the granddaughter of Abul Mansur Ahmed and daughter of Mahfuz Anam.

Ellen K. Levy is an American multimedia artist, writer, curator, and educator whose interdisciplinary work explores the intersections of art, science, technology, and the environment. Since the early 1980s, she has investigated how scientific paradigms, including neuroscience, evolution, and complexity theory, inform visual culture and artistic practice. Levy has exhibited internationally and published widely on the role of visual art...