100 Notable alumni of Reed College

Michael E. Levine was a "Distinguished Research Scholar" at the New York University School of Law. He made substantial contributions to the world of air transportation and its regulation as a senior airline executive, an academic and a government official. He retired from Northwest Airlines in 1999 to return to academic life.

Cathy Linh Che is a Vietnamese American poet from Los Angeles. She won the Kundiman Poetry prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies for her book Split.

Paul Shaw is an American designer, calligrapher, and historian of design who lives in New York City. He has written a book on the history of the design of the New York City Subway system, Helvetica and the New York Subway System: The True (Maybe) Story, on the work of William Addison Dwiggins, and for Print magazine. His book on...

Megan Prelinger is a cultural historian and archivist. She is the co-founder of the Prelinger Library in San Francisco and author of two books: Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957–1962 and Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age.

Lorne Whitney Craner was an American foreign policy expert, has served in key diplomatic and policymaking roles in three administrations and three times as president of major non-governmental organizations.

David L. Bragdon is an American politician and civic leader in the U.S. states of Oregon and New York. From 2003 to 2010, he was the elected president of the Metro Council, a regional government in the Portland metropolitan area. He served as Director of the Mayor's Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability in the administration of Mayor Michael R....

David Bryan Grusky is an American sociologist and academic renowned for his work on social inequality, economic stratification, and mobility. He is the Barbara Kimball Browning Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University and serves as the founding director of the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality. He formerly taught at Cornell University and the University...

Arthur Edward Ogus is an American mathematician. His research is in algebraic geometry; he has served as chair of the mathematics department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Christina Athena Aktipis is an associate professor in the department of psychology at Arizona State University. She is the director of the Interdisciplinary Cooperation Initiative and the co-director of the Human Generosity Project. She is also the director of the Cooperation and Conflict lab at Arizona State, vice president of the International Society for Evolution, Ecology and Cancer, and former...

Jonathan Grudin was a researcher at Microsoft from 1998 to 2022 and is affiliate professor at the University of Washington Information School working in the fields of human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work. Grudin is a pioneer of the field of computer-supported cooperative work and one of its most prolific contributors. His collaboration distance to other researchers of human-computer interactions...

Allen Eric Bergin was an American clinical psychologist known for his research on psychotherapy outcomes and on integrating psychotherapy and religion. His 1980 article on theistic values was groundbreaking in the field and elicited over 1,000 responses and requests for reprints, and including those from Carl Rogers and Albert Bandura. Bergin is also noted for his interchanges with probabilistic atheist...

John Graham Backus was a Lithuanian American physicist and acoustician.

Laleh Khadivi is an Iranian American novelist, and filmmaker.

Hans Arthur Linde was a German-born American legal scholar who served as a justice of the Oregon Supreme Court from 1977 to 1990.

Barbara Hayden, also known professionally as Pat Silver-Lasky, was an American actress and writer, mostly known for her collaborations with her second husband, Jesse L. Lasky Jr.

Sumner Stone is a typeface designer and graphic artist. He notably designed ITC Stone while working for Adobe. A specimen of ITC Stone is shown at his personal website.

Mark Bitterman is an American entrepreneur and food writer. He is the owner of The Meadow, a boutique that specializes in finishing salts, bean-to-bar chocolate, cocktail bitters, and other products. The Meadow was founded in Portland, Oregon, in 2006, and has expanded to include three locations in Portland, one in Nolita in New York City, and one in Shinjuku, Tokyo....

Sascha Altman DuBrul, a.k.a. Sascha DuBrul or Sascha Scatter, is an American activist, writer, farmer and punk rock musician known as the bass player of the 1990s ska-punk band Choking Victim.

Michael S. Teitelbaum is a demographer and the former Vice President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York City. He is Senior Research Associate at the Labor and Worklife Program, Harvard Law School.

Mark Galassi is a physicist, computer scientist, and contributor to the free and open-source software movement. He was born in Manhattan, grew up in France and Italy, and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Lee Oser is an American novelist, Christian humanist, and literary critic. He is a former president of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. He teaches religion and literature at the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Leslie Scalapino was an American poet, experimental prose writer, playwright, essayist, and editor, sometimes grouped in with the Language poets, though she felt closely tied to the Beat poets. A longtime resident of California's Bay Area, she earned an M.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. One of Scalapino's most critically well-received works is Way (North Point...

Yoram Keyes Bauman is an American economist and stand-up comedian.

Lawrence N. Shaw was an American physicist, curator, and artist. Shaw worked at the Exploratorium, a San Francisco science museum, for 33 years, performing most functions for the museum. He was a key member of the arts and technology community in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Sarah Eugenie Dougher /ˈduːɡər/ is an American singer-songwriter, author, and teacher.

Rob Heinsoo is an American tabletop game designer. He has been designing and contributing to professional role-playing games, card games, and board games since 1994. Heinsoo was the lead designer on the 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons (2008), and is co-designer of the 13th Age roleplaying game along with Jonathan Tweet. He has also designed and contributed to role...

Elizabeth Warnock Fernea was an influential writer and filmmaker who spent much of her life in the field producing numerous ethnographies and films that capture the struggles and turmoil of African and Middle Eastern cultures. Her husband, the anthropologist Robert A. Fernea, was a large influence in her life. Fernea is commonly regarded as a pioneer for women in the...

Christopher L. Garrett is a justice of the Oregon Supreme Court since January 1, 2019. Previously, he served on the Oregon Court of Appeals from 2013 to 2019, and was a member of the Oregon House of Representatives from 2008 to 2012.

Tom Crosshill is a Latvian author of speculative and literary fiction, active since 2010. His work has appeared in publications in Chinese, Spanish, English, Finnish, Latvian and Polish. Crosshill has been nominated for several Nebula Awards and won the European Science Fiction Society Award for Best Author in 2016.

Max Gordon was an American jazz promoter and founder of the Village Vanguard jazz club in New York City.

Louis Sanford Goodman was an American pharmacologist. He is best known for his collaborations with Alfred Gilman, Sr., with whom he authored the popular textbook The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics in 1941 and pioneered the first chemotherapy trials using nitrogen mustard.

Walter Fred Berns Jr. was an American constitutional law and political philosophy professor. He was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor emeritus at Georgetown University.

Richard Louis Hanna was an American politician who served as a U.S. Representative from New York from 2011 to 2017. A member of the Republican Party, his district was numbered the 24th during his first term in Congress; from 2013 to 2017, it was numbered as the 22nd district.

Mary Rosenblum was an American science fiction and mystery author.

Howard Eliot Wolpe was an American politician who served as a seven-term U.S. Representative from Michigan and Presidential Special Envoy to the African Great Lakes Region in the Clinton Administration, where he led the United States delegation to the Arusha and Lusaka peace talks, which aimed to end civil wars in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He...

Sacvan Bercovitch was a Canadian literary and cultural critic who spent most of his life teaching and writing in the United States. During an academic career spanning five decades, he was considered to be one of the most influential and controversial figures of his generation in the emerging field of American studies.

Cecilia D'Anastasio is an American journalist who primarily covers the video game industry. From 2016 to 2020, D'Anastasio wrote for Kotaku, and she was recognized for a 2018 article reporting allegations of sexual harassment and gender discrimination at Riot Games. Subsequently, she wrote for Wired magazine and joined Bloomberg News in 2022 to cover the video game industry. While at...

Jessica Litman is a leading intellectual property scholar. She has been ranked as one of the most-cited U.S. law professors in the field of intellectual property/cyberlaw.

Pamela Christine Ronald is an American plant pathologist and geneticist. She is a professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and conducts research at the Genome Center at the University of California, Davis and a member of the Innovative Genomics Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. She also serves as Director of Grass Genetics at the Joint BioEnergy Institute...

Vanessa Veselka is an American writer best known for her 2020 novel The Great Offshore Grounds, which won the Oregon Book Award and was longlisted for the U.S. National Book Award. She is also known for her first novel, Zazen.

Maurice Isserman is an American historian who is Professor of History at Hamilton College. He has written about the Communist Party USA during the Popular Front period of the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the emergence of the New Left and the 1960s. He co-authored a biography with Dorothy Ray Healey and authored a biography of Michael Harrington, both...

Mark Ptashne is a molecular biologist. He is the Ludwig Chair of Molecular Biology at Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

Lisa Nakamura is an American professor of media and cinema studies, Asian American studies, and gender and women’s studies. She teaches at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she is also the Coordinator of Digital Studies and the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor in the Department of American Cultures.

Norman Harry Packard is a chaos theory physicist and one of the founders of the Prediction Company and ProtoLife. He is an alumnus of Reed College, with a PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Packard is known for his contributions to chaos theory, complex systems, and artificial life. He coined the phrase "the edge of chaos".

Jon Howard Appleton was an American composer, an educator and a pioneer in electro-acoustic music. His earliest compositions in the medium, e.g. "Chef d'Oeuvre" and "Newark Airport Rock" (1967) attracted attention because they established a new tradition some have called programmatic electronic music. In 1970, he won Guggenheim, Fulbright and American-Scandinavian Foundation fellowships. When he was twenty-eight years old, he...

William Sumio Naito was an American businessman, civic leader and philanthropist in Portland, Oregon, U.S. He was an enthusiastic advocate for investment in downtown Portland, both private and public, and is widely credited for helping to reverse a decline in the area in the 1970s through acquiring and renovating derelict or aging buildings and encouraging others to invest in downtown...

Kris Holmes is an American typeface designer, calligrapher, type design educator and animator. She, with Charles Bigelow, is the co-creator of the Lucida and Wingdings font families, among many other typeface designs. She is President and Co-Founder of Bigelow & Holmes Inc., a typeface design studio.

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is a contemporary poet. Winner of two American Book Awards, her work is often associated with the Language School, the poetry of the New York School, phenomenology, and visual art. She is married to the painter Richard Tuttle, with whom she has frequently collaborated.

Anne Washburn is an American playwright.

Charles A. Bigelow is an American type historian, professor, and designer. Bigelow grew up in the Detroit suburbs and attended the Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1982, the Frederic W. Goudy Award in 1987, Sloan Science and Film screenwriting awards in 2001 and 2002, and other honors. Along with Kris Holmes, he is the...

Igor Vamos is a member of The Yes Men (using the alias Michael "Mike" Bonanno), and an associate professor of media arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In 2000, he received the Creative Capital award in the discipline of Emerging Fields. He is also a co-founder of RTmark and the recipient of a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship, granted for a project that...

Ernest James Haycox was an American writer of Western fiction.

Richard Jeffrey Danzig is an American politician and lawyer who served as the 71st Secretary of the Navy under President Bill Clinton. He served as an advisor of the President Barack Obama during his presidential campaign and was later the chairman of the national security think-tank, the Center for a New American Security.

Richard Wolin is an American intellectual historian specialising in 20th-century European philosophy, particularly German philosopher Martin Heidegger and the group of thinkers known collectively as the Frankfurt School.

Margaret Elizabeth Thomas "Mardy" Murie was an American naturalist, writer, adventurer, and conservationist. Dubbed the "Grandmother of the Conservation Movement" by both the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society, she helped in the passage of the Wilderness Act, and was instrumental in creating the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. She was the recipient of the Audubon Medal, the John Muir Award,...

Arlene Blum is an American mountaineer, writer, and environmental health scientist. She is best known for leading the first successful American ascent of Annapurna (I), a climb that was also an all-woman ascent. She led the first all-woman ascent of Denali ("Denali Damsels" expedition), and was the first American woman to attempt Mount Everest. She is executive director of the...

Kristina "Tina" Satter is an American playwright and theater director based in New York City. She is the founder and artistic director of the theater company Half Straddle, which formed in 2008 and received an Obie Award grant in 2013. Satter won a Guggenheim in 2020. Satter was described by Ben Brantley of the New York Times as "a genre-and-gender-bending,...

Victor Jorgensen was a former Navy photo journalist who probably is most notable for taking an instantly iconic photograph of an impromptu scene in Manhattan on August 14, 1945, but from a different angle and in a less dramatic exposure than that of a photograph taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt. Both photographs were of the same V-J Day embrace of a...

Norman Solomon is an American journalist, media critic, left-leaning progressive activist, and former U.S. congressional candidate. Solomon is a longtime associate of the media watch group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR). In 1997 he founded the Institute for Public Accuracy, which works to provide alternative sources for journalists, and serves as its executive director.

Malati Dasi is a senior spiritual leader of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). Born in Vallejo, California, she was part of the hippie movement before becoming an initiated disciple of A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada in 1967. In the same year, she and her husband, Shyamasundar Das, helped Mukunda Das organize the Mantra-Rock Dance, a countercultural musical event...

Simone Forti is an American postmodern artist, dancer, choreographer, and writer. Since the 1950s, she has exhibited, performed, and taught workshops all over the world. Her innovations in Postmodern dance, including her seminal 1961 body of work, Dance Constructions, along with her contribution to the early Fluxus movement, have influenced many notable dancers and artists. Forti first apprenticed with Anna...

Mir Tamim Ansary is an Afghan-American author and public speaker. He is the author of Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, West of Kabul, East of New York, and other books concerning Afghan and Muslim history. He was previously a columnist for the encyclopedia website Encarta.

John Elwood "Bud" Clark Jr. was an American businessman and politician who served as the 48th mayor of Portland, Oregon, from 1985 to 1992. A left-leaning populist with little political experience before his mayoral bid, he was one of Portland's most colorful political figures.

Steven Shapin is an American historian and sociologist of science. He is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Harvard University.

Greta Christina is an American atheist, blogger, speaker, and author.

Mukunda Goswami is a spiritual leader (guru) in the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (popularly known as ISKCON or the Hare Krishnas).

Eleanor Rosch is an American psychologist. She is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in cognitive psychology and primarily known for her work on categorization, in particular her prototype theory, which has profoundly influenced the field of cognitive psychology.

Anya Schiffrin is the co-director of the Technology Policy and Innovation (TPI) Concentration at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), and a senior lecturer at the School of International and Public Affairs. Previously, she served as the director of the Technology, Media, and Communications (TMaC) specialization at SIPA.

Sally Haslanger is an American philosopher and the Ford Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Eric Ellis Overmyer is an American writer and producer. He has written and/or produced numerous TV shows, including St. Elsewhere, Homicide: Life on the Street, Law & Order, The Wire, New Amsterdam, Bosch, Treme, and The Man in the High Castle.

Diane Silvers Ravitch is a historian of education, an educational policy analyst, and a research professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Previously, she was a U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education. In 2010, she became "an activist on behalf of public schools." Her blog at DianeRavitch.net has received more than 36 million page views...

Howard Rheingold is an American critic, writer, and teacher, known for his specialties on the cultural, social and political implications of modern communication media such as the Internet, mobile telephony and virtual communities.

Adrian Chen is an American blogger, and former staff writer at The New Yorker. Chen joined Gawker in November 2009 as a night shift editor, graduating from an internship position at Slate, and has written extensively on Internet culture, especially virtual communities such as 4chan and Reddit. Chen is the creator of The Pamphlette, a "humor publication" for Reed College...

Daryl J. Bem is a social psychologist and professor emeritus at Cornell University. He is the originator of the self-perception theory of attitude formation and change. He has also researched psi phenomena, group decision making, handwriting analysis, sexual orientation, and personality theory and assessment.

Johanna Rachel Fateman is an American writer, songwriter, musician, and record producer. She is a member of the electropunk band Le Tigre and founded the band MEN with Le Tigre bandmate JD Samson.

Robert Rae Cornthwaite was an American film and television character actor.

Katherine Karen Dunn was an American novelist, journalist, voice artist, radio personality, book reviewer, and poet from Portland, Oregon. She is best known for her novel Geek Love (1989). She was also a prolific writer on boxing.

Suzan Kay DelBene is an American politician and businesswoman who has been the United States representative for Washington's 1st congressional district since 2012.

Rose Director Friedman /dɪˈrɛktər ˈfriːdmən/; born Rose Director was a free-market economist and co-founder of the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation.

Steven Raichlen is an American culinary writer, TV host, and novelist.

Michael Ryan Davis was an American writer, political activist, urban theorist, and historian based in Southern California. He was best known for his investigations of power and social class in works such as City of Quartz and Late Victorian Holocausts. His last two non-fiction books were Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, co-authored by Jon Wiener, and...

Raymond Merrill Smullyan was an American mathematician, magician, concert pianist, logician, Taoist, and philosopher.

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Seagraves is an American librarian, educator, historian, and editor. She is the eldest grandchild of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt. Her parents are Anna Roosevelt Dall and her first husband Curtis Bean Dall. She is usually known as "Sistie", "Ellie" or "Eleanor". She is currently the oldest living grandchild of a US President.

Alafair S. Burke is an American crime novelist, professor of law, and legal commentator. She is a New York Times bestselling author of fifteen crime novels, including The Ex, The Wife, The Better Sister, and The Note, and two series—one featuring NYPD Detective Ellie Hatcher; and the other featuring Portland, Oregon prosecutor Samantha Kincaid. She also co-authored eight novels with...

Barbara Ehrenreich was an American author and political activist. During the 1980s and early 1990s, she was a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America. She was a widely read and award-winning columnist and essayist and the author of 21 books. Ehrenreich was best known for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a...

Kristina Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is an American politician. A member of the Democratic Party, she has been the United States representative for Washington's 3rd congressional district since 2023. She is a co-chair of the Blue Dog Coalition.

Daniel Kottke is an American businessman known for having been a college friend of Steve Jobs and one of the first employees of Apple Inc. He met Jobs at Reed College in 1972, and they trekked together through India for spiritual enlightenment and to the All One Farm. In 1976, Kottke realized his interest in computers when Jobs hired him...

Gary Snyder is an American poet, essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. His early poetry has been associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance and he has been described as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology". Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the American Book Award. His work, in his various roles, reflects...

Emilio Pucci, Marchese di Barsento was an Italian aristocrat, fashion designer and politician. He and his eponymous company Pucci designed geometric prints in many colors.

Hope Elise Ross Lange was an American film, stage, and television actress. She was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Selena Cross in the 1957 film Peyton Place. In 1969 and 1970, she twice won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in...

Barret Eugene Hansen, also known professionally as Dr. Demento, is a retired American radio broadcaster and record collector specializing in novelty songs, comedy, and unusual recordings from the dawn of the phonograph to the present.

James Andrews Beard was an American chef, cookbook author, teacher and television personality. He pioneered television cooking shows, taught at The James Beard Cooking School in New York City and Seaside, Oregon, and lectured widely. He emphasized American cooking, prepared with fresh and wholesome American ingredients, to a country just becoming aware of its own culinary heritage. Beard taught and...

Lawrence Mark Sanger is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded Wikipedia, along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined the name Wikipedia and provided initial drafts for many of its early guidelines, including the "Neutral point of view" and "Ignore all rules" policies. Prior to Wikipedia, he was the editor-in-chief of Nupedia, another online encyclopedia and the predecessor of...

Christopher Michael Langan is an American horse rancher and former bar bouncer, known for scoring highly on an IQ test that gained him entry to a high-IQ society and for being formerly listed in the Guinness Book of Records high IQ section under the pseudonym of Eric Hart, alongside Marilyn vos Savant and Keith Raniere. The record was discontinued in...

Ryland Peter Cooder is an American musician, songwriter, film score composer, record producer, and writer. He is a multi-instrumentalist but is best known for his slide guitar work, his interest in traditional music, and his collaborations with traditional musicians from many countries.

Steven Paul Jobs was an American businessman, co-inventor, and investor. A pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, Jobs co-founded Apple Inc. (as Apple Computer Company) with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in 1976. After the company's board of directors fired him in 1985, he founded NeXT the same year and purchased Pixar in 1986, becoming...

Morgan Spector is an American actor. He first gained recognition for his appearances in the television series Homeland (2018) and The Plot Against America (2020) as well as the films Christine (2016), A Vigilante (2018), and Boston Strangler (2023). He has since starred in the HBO historical drama The Gilded Age (2022–present).

Dale Weldeau Jorgenson was an American economist who served as the Samuel W. Morris University Professor at Harvard University. An influential econometric scholar, he was famed for his work on the relationship between productivity and economic growth, the economics of climate change, and the intersection between economics and statistics. Described as a "master" of his field, he received the John...

Janet Margaret Mitchell is a Scottish Conservative Party politician. She was a Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for the Central Scotland region from 2003 to 2021.