100 Notable alumni of Pomona College

Franklin Lien Ho was a Chinese economist influential in the Republic of China. He was the director of the Political Department of the Cabinet and later the Vice Minister of Economic Affairs. He was also director general of the Agricultural Credit Administration. He founded the economics department at Nankai University and later served as the university's acting president in 1947...

Adam Zbar is an American entrepreneur and the CEO of Hamsa, a global clearing and settlement platform for central banks and financial institutions using Hamsa’s Unified Ledger. In 2025, Hamsa will clear $400B.

Michael "Mikey" Dickerson is an American software engineer, political advisor, and government executive. Dickerson was the first administrator of the United States Digital Service.

Marilyn Ramenofsky is an American former competition swimmer, Olympic medalist, and former world record-holder in the 400-meter swim. After 2008, she worked as a researcher at the University of California at Davis, studying the physiology and behavior of bird migration. She previously taught and performed research at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Joe Palca is an American correspondent for National Public Radio. He specializes in science, and is the backup host for Talk of the Nation Science Friday. Palca was also the president of the National Association of Science Writers from 1999 to 2000. He currently serves on Society for Science & the Public's board of trustees.

George Vernon Orr, Jr. was the 14th Secretary of the Air Force, appointed by President Ronald Reagan. From California, he was a businessman and educator who served in both state and national government positions.

Charles Sahag "Chip" Pashayan Jr. is an American lawyer and politician from California. He served as a Republican Congressman from the Fresno area in California's Central Valley from 1979 to 1991.

Clara Estelle Breed was an American librarian remembered chiefly for her support for Japanese American children during World War II. After the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, many residents of California who were of Japanese descent were moved to remote Japanese American internment camps where they stayed until the end of the war. Breed kept in communication...

Maya Horgan Famodu is a Nigerian-American entrepreneur, founder and partner at Ingressive, a firm that provides services for firms and businesses expanding into Africa. She also founded Ingressive Capital, a venture capital fund investing in Africa-based technology companies. She co-founded the High Growth Africa Summit, a conference on launching a successful business in Africa, and founded Tech Meets Entertainment Summit,...

Eric Friedl, also known by his stage name, Eric Oblivian, is a musician and the founder and owner of Goner Records, an independent music label and record store located in Memphis, Tennessee.

David Elliott Bell was a director of the United States' Office of Management and Budget from January 22, 1961, until December 20, 1962, under President John F. Kennedy. Kennedy named him administrator of the Agency for International Development in late 1962. He left government service in 1966 to become the Executive Vice President of the Ford Foundation.

Garrett Kaoru Hongo is a Yonsei, fourth-generation Japanese American academic and poet. His work draws on Japanese American history and his own experiences.

Robert Blalack was a Panama-born American mass-media visual artist, independent filmmaker, and producer. He is one of the founders of Industrial Light & Magic. Blalack received the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in 1978 for his work on the first Star Wars film. He also received the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Visual Effects in 1984 for his...

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is an American writer, educator, and artist from East Palo Alto, California. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts known for her work in installations, book arts, immersive text-based installations, large-scale public text pieces, publications, collage, and audio recordings. Rasheed's art explores memory, ritual, discursive regimes, historiography, and archival practices through the use of fragments...

Thomas E. Crow is an American art historian and art critic who is best known for his influential writing on the role of art in modern society and culture. Since 2007, Crow has served as the Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU.

Burton J. Smith was an American computer architect. He was a Technical Fellow at Microsoft.

Henry Lees "Harry" Kingman was a Chinese-born American first baseman in Major League Baseball. He played briefly for the New York Yankees in 1914. In later life, he worked against racial discrimination while working within institutions associated with the University of California, Berkeley and in retirement.

Robert Lawson Vaught was an American mathematical logician and one of the founders of model theory.

Andrew Palmer is an American racing driver from Chicago, Illinois. He is a former official Lamborghini GT3 Junior driver and is currently contracted to Bentley Team Absolute. He is most known for winning the inaugural Lamborghini World Championship in 2013. He is also the youngest ever winner in the Pirelli World-Challenge, class winner of the 2015 24 Hours of Daytona,...

Julian Nava was an American educator and diplomat. A member of the Democratic Party, Nava served as the United States Ambassador to Mexico from 1980 to 1981.

David Prescott Barrows was an American anthropologist, explorer, military officer, and educator. Born in Chicago in 1874, his family moved to California. He showed a keen interest in the life and customs of Native Americans, and was said to have "spent almost every summer during the period 1890–1899 in research work among the tribes of southern California and in the...

Aaron Becker is an American writer and illustrator of children's books. He is best known for his wordless children's book Journey, which received positive reviews in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and a Caldecott Honor in 2014.

Sandra Diane Knapp OBE FLS FRS is an American-born botanist. She is a merit researcher of the Plants Division of the Natural History Museum, London and from 2018 was the president of the Linnean Society of London. While working at the Natural History Museum, London she has overseen the Flora Mesoamericana inventory of Central American plants. She has published several...

Christina Ann Snyder is a senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Central District of California.

Einar Fredrik Åke Tinius Nagell-Erichsen was a Norwegian publisher, noted for his leadership of the Schibsted media conglomerate which includes the broadsheet newspaper Aftenposten and the tabloid Verdens gang.

Brenda Hillman is an American poet and translator. She is the author of ten collections of poetry: White Dress, Fortress, Death Tractates, Bright Existence, Loose Sugar, Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water, for which she won the LA Times Book Award for Poetry, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, which received the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize and...

Hugh Simons Gibson was an American diplomat. He was actively involved in disarmament talks from 1925 to 1932. Throughout his career, he remained a leading proponent in the drive to establish a professional Foreign Service based on merit rather than personal wealth or political influence.

Betty Ellen Fussell is an American writer and is the author of 12 books, ranging from biography to cookbooks, food history and memoir. Over the last 50 years, her essays on food, travel and the arts have appeared in scholarly journals, popular magazines and newspapers as varied as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Saveur, Vogue,...

Ray Stanton Avery was an American inventor, most known for creating self-adhesive labels (modern stickers). Using a $100 loan from his then-fiancé Dorothy Durfee and combining used machine parts with a saber saw, he created and patented the world's first self-adhesive (also called pressure sensitive) die-cut labeling machine. In 1935, he founded what is now the Avery Dennison Corporation.

Melissa Jo Peltier is a New York-based American producer and author. She produced, wrote and directed the 1994 A&E documentary mini-series Titanic: Death of a Dream and Titanic: The Legend Lives On, the show Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan. She has also co-authored five books with Millan on the subject of raising and training dogs. In 2013, she published her...

Richard Gary Taranto is a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Kimberly Jo Mueller is an American jurist who is a retired United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California. She was the first female district judge to serve in the Eastern District.

Will Leer is an American mid-distance runner. He graduated from Pomona College in Claremont, California in May 2007. Leer has represented the United States in international competition.

Esther Diane Brimmer is an American foreign policy expert and former Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs. In June 2013, she left her post as Assistant Secretary and returned to academia.

Edwin Charles Krupp is an American astronomer, researcher, author, and popularizer of science. He is an internationally recognized expert in the field of archaeoastronomy, the study of how ancient cultures viewed the sky and how those views affected their cultures. He has taught at the college level, as a planetarium lecturer, and in various documentary films. He has been the...

Halim Dhanidina is an American lawyer and former judge from California. As of April 1, 2022, he is a partner at the criminal defense firm of Werksman Jackson & Quinn LLP in Los Angeles. He was a justice of the California Court of Appeal for the Second District. Appointed to the Los Angeles Superior Court bench by Governor Jerry Brown...

Don Daglow is an American video game designer, programmer, and producer. He is best known for his role in the early history of video games, and is credited with many innovations in the field. This includes the first baseball game (Baseball, (1971), one of the first role-playing games (Dungeon, 1975), the first RTS or sim game (Utopia, 1981), and the...

John Coleman Burroughs was an American illustrator known for his illustrations of the works of his father, Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Jane Marie Chen is an American businesswoman. She is the co-founder of Embrace, a social enterprise that invented and distributes a low-cost infant warmer, that gives premature and low-birth-weight infants a better chance at survival. Chen served as the first CEO of Embrace, the non-profit arm of the organization, before becoming the chief executive officer of Embrace Innovations, the for-profit...

Linda Alvarado is President and Chief Executive Officer of Alvarado Construction, Inc., a large commercial and industrial general contracting/site management and design/build firm in Denver, Colorado. She is also President of Palo Alto, Inc. (a restaurant company), co-owner of the Colorado Rockies baseball team, and currently a member of the board of 3M.

Xiaoguang Yan was a Chinese petrochemist known for his research on catalysts used in petroleum processing.

John Stephens is an American television producer, screenwriter and director best known for his work on The O.C., Gilmore Girls and Gotham.

Christian Alexander Maria Graf Strachwitz von Groß-Zauche und Camminetz was a German-born American record label executive and record producer. He was the founder and president of Arhoolie Records, which he established in 1960 and which became one of the leading labels recording and issuing blues, Cajun, norteño, and other forms of roots music from the United States and elsewhere in...

Joel Fagliano is an American puzzle creator. He is known for his work at The New York Times, where he writes the paper's Mini Crossword. From March 14 to December 29, 2024, Fagliano became the interim editor of The New York Times Crossword due to editor Will Shortz being on medical leave.

Chris Cain is an American blues musician.

George Howping Wu is an American senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Central District of California.

Michelle Moran is an American novelist known for her historical fiction writing.

James Blake Rogers, commonly known as Jimmy (also spelled Jimmie), was an American actor, horse rancher, polo player, and newspaperman. The son of humorist and social commentator Will Rogers, he was the family representative on the Will Rogers Memorial Commission, and worked with the staff at the Will Rogers State Historic Park.

Jennifer Phang is an American filmmaker (writer, director, producer), most known for her feature films Advantageous (2015) and Half-Life (2008). Advantageous premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, winning a Special Jury Award for Collaborative Vision, and was based on her award-winning short film of the same name. Half-Life premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and won "Best Film"...

Daniel Ziblatt is an American political scientist who has been Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University since 2018.

Jay Bernstein was an American producer and manager to actors, such as Sammy Davis Jr. and Michael Landon, and to actresses, such as Farrah Fawcett and Suzanne Somers.

William Irwin Thompson was an American social philosopher, cultural critic, and poet. He received the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award in 1986. He described his writing and speaking style as "mind-jazz on ancient texts". He was the founder of the Lindisfarne Association, which proposed the study and realization of a new planetary culture.

Judd Legum is an American journalist, lawyer, and political staffer. He is the founder and former editor of the progressive website ThinkProgress, and author of the political newsletter Popular Information.

David Ossman is an American writer and comedian, best known as a member of the Firesign Theatre and screenwriter of such films as Zachariah.

Mac Barnett is an American children's book writer best known for his advocacy of the picture book. He has published over seventy works since 2009, consisting of over fifty picture books, graphic novels, essays, and short stories. He currently serves as the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature.

Cristina Garcia is an American educator and politician who served in the California State Assembly. She is a Democrat who represented the 58th Assembly District, which encompassed parts of southeastern Los Angeles County, including her home city of Bell Gardens. She had served in the Assembly since 2012.

Darlene Ruth Hard was an American professional tennis player, known for her aggressive volleying ability and strong serves. She captured singles titles at the French Championships in 1960 and the U.S. Championships in 1960 and 1961. With eight different partners, she won a total of 13 women's doubles titles and, with another three partners, she won 5 mixed doubles titles...

Bill Keller is an American journalist. He was the founding editor-in-chief of The Marshall Project, a nonprofit that reports on criminal justice in the United States. Previously, he was a columnist for The New York Times, and served as the paper's executive editor from July 2003 until September 2011. On June 2, 2011, he announced that he would step down...

Virginia Charles Prince was an American transgender woman and transgender activist. She published Transvestia magazine, and started Full Personality Expression, which later became Tri-Ess, for male heterosexual cross-dressers.

Phyllis Fong is an American attorney who served as the inspector general of the United States Department of Agriculture from 2002 until her removal in 2025. Fong was nominated to the position in 2002 by President George W. Bush. She was removed from her position in 2025 by the Trump administration.

Stephen Roy Reinhardt was a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, with chambers in Los Angeles, California. He was the last federal appeals court judge in active service to have been appointed to his position by President Jimmy Carter.

Laszlo Bock is a Romanian-born Hungarian American businessman, who is co-founder and former CEO of Humu. He was formerly the Senior Vice President of People Operations at Google, Inc.

James Howell Howard was a general in the United States Air Force and one of just two fighter pilots in the European Theater of Operations in World War II to receive the Medal of Honor—the United States military's highest decoration. Howard was an ace in two operational theaters during World War II, with six kills over Asia with the Flying...

Elva Ruby Miller known professionally as Mrs. Miller, was an American singer who became a novelty figure in the 1960s for her unconventional interpretations of contemporary pop songs. An untrained mezzo-soprano, she performed with a pronounced vibrato and frequently deviated from standard pitch and tempo.

Mary GrandPré is an American illustrator best known for her cover and chapter illustrations of the Harry Potter books in their U.S. editions published by Scholastic. She received a Caldecott Honor in 2015 for illustrating Barb Rosenstock's The Noisy Paint Box: The Colors and Sounds of Kandinsky's Abstract Art. GrandPré, who creates her artwork with paint and pastels, has illustrated...

Ashlee Vance is an American reporter, writer, and filmmaker. He is known for his 2015 biography of Elon Musk, titled Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.

Sylvain White is a French film director and screenwriter.

Norris Edwin Bradbury was an American physicist who served as director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory for 25 years from 1945 to 1970. He succeeded Robert Oppenheimer, who personally chose Bradbury for the position of director after working closely with him on the Manhattan Project during World War II. Bradbury was in charge of the final assembly of "the...

Bernard Charnwut Chan GBM GBS JP, is a Hong Kong politician and businessman. He served as Non-official Convenor of the Executive Council from 2017 to 2022.

David Schad Ward is an American screenwriter and film director. He was nominated for two Academy Awards for his screenplays for the films The Sting (1973) and Sleepless in Seattle (1993), winning for the former. He was also nominated for a British Academy Film Award, a Golden Globe Award, and two Writers Guild of America Awards.

Paul Fussell Jr. was an American cultural and literary historian, author and university professor. His writings cover a variety of topics, from scholarly works on eighteenth-century English literature to commentary on America's class system. Fussell served in the 103rd Infantry Division during World War II and was wounded in fighting in France. Returning to the US, Fussell wrote extensively and...

Frederick Woodruff "Ted" Field is an American media mogul, record executive, entrepreneur and film producer.

George Costello Wolfe is an American stage and screen director, playwright and producer. His accolades include two Tony Awards for directing the play Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and the musical Bring in 'da Noise/Bring in 'da Funk. He served as Artistic Director of The Public Theater from 1993 until 2004.

Marshall Lowell Hutchason, known professionally as Will Hutchins, was an American actor most noted for playing the lead role of the young lawyer Tom Brewster, in the Western television series Sugarfoot, which aired on ABC from 1957 to 1961 for 69 episodes.

Douglas Jerome Preston is an American journalist and author. Although he is best known for his thrillers in collaboration with Lincoln Child (including the Agent Pendergast series and Gideon Crew series), he has also written six solo novels, including the Wyman Ford series and a novel entitled Jennie, which was made into a movie by Disney. He has authored a...

Robert Towne was an American screenwriter and director. He started writing films for Roger Corman, including The Tomb of Ligeia in 1964, and was later part of the New Hollywood wave of filmmaking.

Christine Fan Wei-chi, also known by her nickname FanFan, is an American singer and TV host based in Taiwan.

Brian Emanuel Schatz is an American politician serving since 2012 as a United States senator from Hawaii. A progressive Democrat, Schatz served in the Hawaii House of Representatives from 1998 to 2006, representing the 25th legislative district; as the chairman of the Democratic Party of Hawaii from 2008 to 2010; and as the 12th lieutenant governor of Hawaii from 2010...

Jennifer Anne Doudna ForMemRS is an American biochemist who has pioneered work in CRISPR gene editing, and made other fundamental contributions in biochemistry and genetics. She received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with Emmanuelle Charpentier, "for the development of a method for genome editing." She is the Li Ka Shing Chancellor's Chair Professor in the department of chemistry and...

Michael Vincent Budenholzer is an American professional basketball coach who most recently served as the head coach of the Phoenix Suns of the National Basketball Association (NBA).

Anthony Jared Zerbe is an American actor. After pursuing an interest in theater in his early years, including a stint at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York City, he enlisted in the Air Force and later embarked upon a career in television and film.

Rosalind Chao is an American actress. She appeared as Soon-Lee Klinger in the mid-1980s CBS show AfterMASH, Rose Hsu Jordan in the 1993 movie The Joy Luck Club, the recurring character Keiko O'Brien on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in the 1990s, and Dr. Kim on The O.C. in 2003. She also played Hua...

Joel Albert McCrea was an American actor whose career spanned a wide variety of genres over almost five decades, including comedy, drama, romance, thrillers, adventures, and Westerns, for which he became best known.

Jason Deneen Beghe is an American actor. Since 2014, he has starred in the NBC TV series Chicago P.D. as Sergeant Hank Voight. He is also known for starring in the 1988 George A. Romero film Monkey Shines, playing Demi Moore's love interest in G.I. Jane, appearing as a police officer in the film Thelma & Louise, starring opposite Moira...

Amanda Blake was an American actress best known for the role of the red-haired saloon proprietress "Miss Kitty Russell" on the Western television series Gunsmoke. Along with her fourth husband, Frank Gilbert, she ran one of the first successful programs for breeding cheetahs in captivity.

Roy Edward Disney KCSG was an American businessman, media executive, and filmmaker. He was best known for serving as a senior executive for the Walt Disney Company and the chairman of its animation division, both of which were founded by his uncle, Walt Disney, and his father, Roy O. Disney.

Marianne Deborah Williamson is an American author, speaker, and political activist. She began her professional career as a spiritual leader of the Church of Today, a Unity Church in Warren, Michigan. Williamson has written several self-help books, including A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles in 1992, which became a New York Times Best...

George Richard Chamberlain was an American actor and singer whose career on stage and in film and television spanned over 60 years. He was the recipient of many accolades, including three Golden Globe Awards (out of 6 total nominations), four Primetime Emmy Awards nominations, two Drama Desk Award nominations, and a Grammy Award nominations.

David West Keirsey was an American psychologist, a professor emeritus at California State University, Fullerton, and the author of several books. In his most popular publications, Please Understand Me (1978, co-authored by Marilyn Bates) and the revised and expanded second volume Please Understand Me II (1998), he laid out a self-assessed personality questionnaire, known as the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, which...

James Turrell is an American artist known for his work within the Light and Space movement. He is considered the "master of light" often creating art installations that mix natural light with artificial color through openings in ceilings thereby transforming internal spaces by ever shifting and changing color.

Hashim Sujono Djojohadikusumo is an Indonesian entrepreneur and politician who is the younger brother of Indonesian president Prabowo Subianto. In 2014, he was considered a billionaire. As of December 2020, Forbes estimates his net worth at $800 million.

James Alfred Miller, FSC, also known as Brother Leo William or Santiago, was an American Catholic member of the Brothers of the Christian Schools who served in Guatemala until his murder in 1982.

Myrlie Louise Evers-Williams is an American civil rights activist and journalist who worked for over three decades to seek justice for the 1963 murder of her husband Medgar Evers, another civil rights activist. She also served as chairwoman of the NAACP, and has published several books on topics related to civil rights and her husband's legacy. On January 21, 2013,...

Katie Beatrice Hall was an American educator in Gary, Indiana, and a politician who served as a U.S. Representative from Indiana from 1982 to 1985. When Hall was sworn into federal office on November 2, 1982, she became the first black woman from Indiana elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Hall represented Indiana's 1st Congressional District in the final...

Rick Strassman is an American clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. He has held a fellowship in clinical psychopharmacology research at the University of California San Diego and was Professor of Psychiatry for eleven years at the University of New Mexico. After 20 years of intermission, Strassman was the first person in...

Twyla Tharp is an American dancer, choreographer, and author who lives and works in New York City. In 1965 she formed the company Twyla Tharp Dance, which merged with American Ballet Theatre in 1988. She regrouped the company in 1991. Her work often uses classical, jazz, and contemporary pop music.

Robert Taylor was an American sprinter. He became Olympic champion in the 4 × 100 m relay at the 1972 Olympics and placed second in the 100 m final. He is the father of former NFL player Bobby Taylor.

Sir David Murray RA was a Scottish landscape painter.

Kristoffer Kristofferson was an American musician and actor. He was a pioneering figure in the outlaw country movement of the 1970s, moving away from the polished Nashville sound and toward a more raw, introspective style. Some of his most famous songs include "Me and Bobby McGee" (1970), "For the Good Times" (1968), "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down" (1969), and "Help Me...