100 Notable alumni of Swarthmore College

Helen Magill White was an American classicist and academic. She was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in the United States.

Robert Duncan MacPherson is an American mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Armond D. Budish is an American politician, lawyer, and television host who served as Cuyahoga County Executive for two terms from 2015 to 2022. A member of the Democratic Party, he was a four-term Ohio State Representative from the 8th district, and served as Speaker of the House from 2009 to 2011. He was the first Jewish representative to hold...

David Hugh Malone is a British independent filmmaker, Green Party politician, and author of The Debt Generation. He has directed television documentaries on philosophy, science and religion, originally broadcast in the United Kingdom by the BBC and Channel 4.

Damon Duell McMahon is an American indie rock musician and the primary member of the musical project Amen Dunes. Originally from Philadelphia, he is currently based in New York City.

Michael S. Schudson is professor of journalism in the graduate school of journalism of Columbia University and adjunct professor in the department of sociology. He is professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He is an expert in the fields such as journalism history, media sociology, political communication, and public culture.

Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez was an American Chicana feminist and a long-time community organizer, activist, author, and educator. She wrote numerous books and articles on different topics relating to social movements in the Americas. Her best-known work is the bilingual 500 years of Chicano History in Pictures, which later formed the basis for the educational video ¡Viva la Causa! 500 Years...

Norman Rush is an American writer most of whose introspective novels and short stories are set in Botswana in the 1980s. He won the U.S. National Book Award and the 1992 Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize for his novel Mating.

Heidi Irmgard Victoria Hartmann is an American feminist economist who is founder and president emerita of the Washington-based Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR), a research organization created to conduct women-centered, public policy research. She retired from her position as President and CEO in 2019.

A. Elizabeth Jones is an American diplomat and government official who served as the United States Ambassador to Kazakhstan from 1995 to 1998 and Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs from 2001 to 2005. She was promoted to the rank of Career Ambassador in 2004. Jones served as Chargé d'Affaires to India from 2022 to 2023. She...

Charles Frederick Carson Ruff was a prominent American lawyer based in Washington, D.C., and was best known as the White House Counsel who defended President Bill Clinton during his impeachment trial in 1999.

Elizabeth C. Economy is an American political scientist, foreign policy analyst, and expert on China's politics and foreign policy. She is the Hargrove Senior Fellow and co-chair of the Program on the US, China, and the World at the Hoover Institution. From 2021 to 2023, she served as the senior advisor for China in the Department of Commerce. Economy was...

Paul Joseph DiMaggio is an American educator, and professor of sociology at New York University since 2015. Previously, he was a professor of sociology at Princeton University.

Mary Murphy Schroeder is an American attorney and jurist serving as a senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Arnold Kling is an American economist, scholar, and blogger known for his writings on EconLog, an economics blog, along with Bryan Caplan and David R. Henderson. Kling also has his own blog, askblog, which carries the motto: "taking the most charitable views of those who disagree." The "ask" in askblog stands for "Arnold S. Kling." He is an Adjunct Scholar...

Arianna Julia Freeman is an American lawyer from Pennsylvania who serves as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Peter Jay Weinberger is a computer scientist best known for his early work at Bell Labs. He now works at Google.

Howard Chandler Robbins Landon was an American musicologist, journalist, historian and broadcaster, best known for his work in rediscovering the huge body of neglected music by Haydn and in correcting misunderstandings about Mozart.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth is an American economist who is adjunct professor of economics at George Washington University and a columnist. She served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology at the United States Department of Transportation during the first Trump administration. She previously served as Acting Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

Roman Wladimir Jackiw was a Polish-born American theoretical physicist and Dirac Medallist.

Thomas Bayard McCabe was an American businessman who served as the 8th chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1948 to 1951. McCabe also served as president and CEO of Scott Paper Company for 39 years.

Adam Haslett is an American fiction writer and journalist. His debut short story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here, and his second novel, Imagine Me Gone, were both finalists for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy...

Dawn Porter is an American documentary film director, producer, and founder of production company Trilogy Films. Her documentaries have screened at The Sundance Film Festival and other festivals as well as on HBO, CNN, Netflix, Hulu, PBS and elsewhere. She has made biographical documentaries about a number of historical figures including Robert F. Kennedy, Vernon Jordan, Nelson Mandela and John...

Daniel Friedberg, better known by the stage name Freebo, is an American musician, singer-songwriter and producer noted primarily for his fretless electric bass playing with Bonnie Raitt throughout the 1970s. He is also a session musician who has recorded and performed with Ringo Starr, John Mayall, John Hall, Aaron Neville, Dr. John, Willy DeVille, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Maria Muldaur,...

Maxine Frank Singer was an American molecular biologist and science administrator. She was known for her contributions to solving the genetic code, her role in the ethical and regulatory debates on recombinant DNA techniques (including the organization of the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA), and her leadership of Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Marshall Curry is an American documentary director, producer, cinematographer and editor. His films include Street Fight, Racing Dreams, If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, Point and Shoot, and A Night at the Garden. His first fiction film was the Academy Award-winning short film The Neighbors' Window (2019).

William Foote Whyte was an American sociologist chiefly known for his ethnographic study in urban sociology, Street Corner Society. A proponent of participant observation, he lived for four years in an Italian community in Boston while a Junior Fellow at Harvard researching social relations of street gangs in Boston's North End.

Cathlyn Platt Wilkerson, known as Cathy Wilkerson, is an American far-left radical who was a member of the 1970s radical group called the Weather Underground Organization (WUO). She came to the attention of the police when she was leaving the townhouse belonging to her father after it was destroyed by an explosion on March 6, 1970. Members of WUO had...

Justin Hall is an American journalist and entrepreneur, best known as a pioneer blogger.

Andries "Andy" van Dam is a Dutch-American professor of computer science and former vice-president for research at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Together with Ted Nelson he contributed to the first hypertext system, Hypertext Editing System (HES) in the late 1960s. He co-authored Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice along with J.D. Foley, S.K. Feiner, and John Hughes. He also...

Frank Hoover Easterbrook is an American lawyer and jurist who is a United States circuit judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He was appointed in 1985 by President Ronald Reagan, and he was the chief judge of the circuit from 2006 to 2013.

Martin Lawrence Weitzman was an American economist and a professor of economics at Harvard University. Weitzman joined the Yale University faculty, in 1967, before moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then the economics department at Harvard University in 1989, where he taught until his death in 2019. Weitzman was a leading economist whose research was focused largely on...

John Freeman is an American writer and a literary critic. He was the editor of the literary magazine Granta from 2009 until 2013, the former president of the National Book Critics Circle, and his writing has appeared in almost 200 English-language publications around the world, including The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and The...

Peter Russell Deutsch is an American politician from the U.S. state of Florida. Deutsch was a Democratic Representative from Florida's 20th congressional district from 1993 until 2005.

Marcella Nunez-Smith is an American physician-scientist. She is C.N.H Long Professor of medicine and epidemiology at the Yale School of Medicine, where she serves as the inaugural Associate Dean for Health Equity Research and founding director of the Equity Research and Innovation Center. She also holds joint appointments at the Yale School of Public Health and the Yale School of...

Leland Stanford MacPhail Jr. was an American front-office executive in Major League Baseball. MacPhail was a baseball executive for 45 years, serving as the director of player personnel for the New York Yankees, the president and general manager of the Baltimore Orioles, chief aide to Commissioner of Baseball William Eckert, executive vice president and general manager of the Yankees, and...

Ronald Grigor Suny is an American Armenian historian and political scientist. He is the William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Michigan and Emeritus Professor of history and political science at the University of Chicago. Suny served as director of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies from 2009 to 2012; the Charles Tilly...

Thomas Walter Laqueur is an American historian, sexologist and writer. He is the author of Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation and Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud as well as many articles and reviews. He is the winner of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's 2007 Distinguished Achievement Award, and is currently the Helen Fawcett...

Sandra Moore Faber is an American astrophysicist known for her research on the evolution of galaxies. She is the University Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and works at the Lick Observatory. She has made discoveries linking the brightness of galaxies to the speed of stars within them and was the co-discoverer of the...

Neil Adam Gershenfeld is an American scientist. He is a professor in the MIT Program in Media Arts and Sciences and the director of the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms. He works mainly on interdisciplinary topics in physics and computer science, such as quantum computing, nanotechnology, and personal fabrication.

Gilbert Harman was an American philosopher, who taught at Princeton University from 1963 until his retirement in 2017. He published widely in philosophy of language, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, ethics, moral psychology, epistemology, statistical learning theory, and metaphysics. He and George Miller co-directed the Princeton University Cognitive Science Laboratory. Harman taught or co-taught courses in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science,...

Dean Baker is an American macroeconomist who co-founded the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) with Mark Weisbrot. Baker has been credited as one of the first economists to have identified the 2007–08 United States housing bubble.

William Saletan is an American writer for The Bulwark. He previously wrote for Slate from 1996 until 2022.

David Dana "Dave" Clark is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer who has been involved with Internet developments since the mid-1970s. He currently works as a senior research scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

Kenneth William Hechler was an American politician. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented West Virginia's 4th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1959 to 1977 and was West Virginia Secretary of State from 1985 to 2001.

Detlev Wulf Bronk was a prominent American scientist, educator, and administrator. He is credited with establishing biophysics as a recognized discipline. Bronk served as president of Johns Hopkins University from 1949 to 1953 and as president of The Rockefeller University from 1953 to 1968. Bronk also held the presidency of the National Academy of Sciences between 1950 and 1962.

Kenneth Turan is an American retired film critic, author, and lecturer in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California. He was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 1991 until 2020 and was described by The Hollywood Reporter as "arguably the most widely read film critic in the town most associated with the...

Clark Kerr was an American economist and academic administrator. He was the first chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, and twelfth president of the University of California.

Iqbal Quadir is a Bangladeshi-American entrepreneur and academic, known for founding the telecommunications company Grameenphone and for his work on development-oriented technology initiatives.

Elizabeth Secor Anderson is an American philosopher who is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan and specializes in political philosophy, ethics, and feminist philosophy.

Eben Moglen is an American legal scholar and historian who is a professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, and is the founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of Software Freedom Law Center.

Philip Jacob Weiser is an American lawyer and politician who has served as the 39th Attorney General of Colorado since 2019. He is the Hatfield Professor of Law and Telecommunications, executive director and Founder of the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship, and Dean Emeritus at the University of Colorado Law School. He previously served in the Obama...

David G. Bradley is a partner in The Atlantic and Atlantic Media, and the owner of the National Journal Group. Before his career as a publisher, Bradley founded the Advisory Board Company and Corporate Executive Board, two consulting companies based in Washington, D.C.

Christina Hull Paxson is an American economist who has been serving as the 19th president of Brown University since July 2012. She previously served as dean of the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

Ralph Linton was an American anthropologist of the mid-20th century, particularly remembered for his texts The Study of Man (1936) and The Tree of Culture (1955). One of Linton's major contributions to anthropology was defining a distinction between status and role.

Anne Schuchat is an American medical doctor. She is a former rear admiral and assistant surgeon general in the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. She also served as the principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In May 2021, Schuchat stepped down from her post.

Howard Martin Temin was an American geneticist and virologist. He discovered reverse transcriptase in the 1970s at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, for which he shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Renato Dulbecco and David Baltimore.

David L. Cohen is an American businessman, attorney, lobbyist, and diplomat who served as United States ambassador to Canada from 2021 to 2025. He previously served as the senior advisor to the CEO of Comcast Corporation. Until January 1, 2020, he was senior executive vice president and chief lobbyist for Comcast. He also served as chairman of the board of...

Lucy Lang is an American attorney, author, and the 11th Inspector General of New York.

Christian Boehmer Anfinsen Jr. was an American biochemist. He shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Stanford Moore and William Howard Stein for work on ribonuclease, especially concerning the connection between the amino acid sequence and the biologically active conformation (see Anfinsen's dogma).

Andrew Russell Pearson was an American columnist, noted for his syndicated newspaper column "Washington Merry-Go-Round". He also had a program on NBC Radio titled Drew Pearson Comments. He was known for his approach towards high-level politicians, such as senators, cabinet members, generals and American presidents.

Josef Joffe is a former publisher-editor of Die Zeit, a weekly German newspaper. Appointed Senior Fellow of Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies in 2007 (a faculty position), he is also the Marc and Anita Abramowitz Fellow in International Relations at the Hoover Institution and a courtesy professor of political science at Stanford University. Since 1999, he has been...

Rudolf von Bitter Rucker is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which (Software and Wetware) both won Philip K. Dick Awards. He edited the science fiction...

Edward Christian Prescott was an American economist. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2004, sharing the award with Finn E. Kydland, "for their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles". This research was primarily conducted while both Kydland and Prescott were affiliated with the Graduate School of...

Diane di Prima was an American poet, known for her association with the Beat movement. She was also an artist, prose writer, and teacher. Her magnum opus is widely considered to be Loba, a collection of poems first published in 1978 then extended in 1998.

Michael Hardt is an American political philosopher and literary theorist. Hardt is best known for his 2000 book Empire, which was co-written with Antonio Negri.

John Cromwell Mather is an American astrophysicist and cosmologist. He shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics with George Smoot for the "for their discovery of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation".

Nancy Grace Roman was an American astronomer who made important contributions to stellar classification and stellar motions. The first female executive at NASA, Roman served as NASA's first Chief of Astronomy throughout the 1960s and 1970s, establishing her as one of the "visionary founders of the US civilian space program".

Mark Vonnegut is an American pediatrician and author. He is the son of writer Kurt Vonnegut. He is the brother of Edith Vonnegut and Nanette Vonnegut. He described himself in the preface to his 1975 book as "a hippie, son of a counterculture hero, BA in religion, (with a) genetic disposition to schizophrenia."

David Gale was an American mathematician and economist. He was a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, affiliated with the departments of mathematics, economics, and industrial engineering and operations research. He has contributed to the fields of mathematical economics, game theory, and convex analysis.

Alexander Mitchell Palmer was an American attorney and politician who served as the 50th United States attorney general from 1919 to 1921. He is best known for overseeing the Palmer Raids during the Red Scare of 1919–20.

Malcolm Wilde Browne was an American journalist and photographer, best known for his award-winning photograph of the self-immolation of Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức in 1963.

Arthur Chu is an American columnist and former contestant on Jeopardy!, a syndicated U.S. game show. He first became known for the unusual style of play that he adopted during his 11-game winning streak on the show. When his appearances aired, Chu attracted criticism from many for jumping from category to category rather than selecting clues in sequential order, a...

Isabel Briggs Myers was an American writer who co-created the pseudoscientific personality test known as the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) with her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs. The MBTI is one of the most-often used personality tests worldwide; over two million people complete the questionnaire each year. Isabel Briggs Myers typed herself as an INFP (Mediator).

Robert Peter George is an American legal scholar, political philosopher, and public intellectual who is the sixth McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He lectures on constitutional interpretation, civil liberties, philosophy of law, and political philosophy.

Arlie Russell Hochschild is an American professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and writer. Hochschild has long focused on the human emotions that underlie moral beliefs, practices, and social life generally. She is the author of ten books, including Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right (The New Press, September 10, 2024), which...

Peter Schickele was an American composer, musical educator and parodist, best known for comedy albums featuring his music, which he presented as being composed by the fictional P. D. Q. Bach. He also hosted a long-running weekly radio program called Schickele Mix.

Michael Meeropol is an American economist, author, radio commentator, and retired professor of economics. He is professor emeritus of economics at Western New England University and has written extensively on United States economic policy, including the book Surrender: How the Clinton Administration Completed the Reagan Revolution and, with Howard J. Sherman, the textbook Principles of Macroeconomics: Activist vs. Austerity Policies....

Robert Bruce Zoellick is an American public official and lawyer who was the 11th president of the World Bank Group, a position he held from July 1, 2007 to June 30, 2012. He was previously chairman of international advisors at Goldman Sachs from 2006 to 2007, United States Deputy Secretary of State from 2005 to 2006, and U.S. Trade Representative...

Elizabeth Littleford is an American actress and comedian known as an original correspondent on Comedy Central's The Daily Show from 1996 to 2000. For performing on The Daily Show, she won a Peabody Award in 2015.

Carl Milton Levin was an American attorney and politician who served as a United States senator from Michigan from 1979 to 2015. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee from 2001 to 2003 and again from 2007 to 2015.

David Baltimore was an American biologist, university administrator, and 1975 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine. He was a professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he served as president from 1997 to 2006. He founded the Whitehead Institute and directed it from 1982 to 1990. In 2008, he served as president of the American Association...

Carol Gilligan is an American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist best known for her work on ethical community and ethical relationships.

Kevin Allen Hassett is an American economist who has been the director of the National Economic Council since 2025. He was the senior advisor and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2017 to 2019.

Christopher Van Hollen Jr. is an American attorney and politician serving as the senior United States senator from Maryland, a seat he has held since 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as the U.S. representative for Maryland's 8th congressional district from 2003 to 2017 and as a Maryland state senator from 1995 to 2003.

Joshua Booth Green is an American politician and physician serving since 2022 as the ninth governor of Hawaii. A member of the Democratic Party, he served from 2018 to 2022 as the 15th lieutenant governor of Hawaii. From 2004 to 2018, he was a member of the Hawaii State Legislature.

Robert David Putnam is an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Michael Stanley Dukakis is an American politician and lawyer who was governor of Massachusetts from 1975 to 1979 and from 1983 to 1991. He is the longest-serving governor in Massachusetts history and the second Greek-American governor in U.S. history, after Spiro Agnew. He was nominated by the Democratic Party for president in the 1988 election, losing to the Republican nominee,...

Alice Stokes Paul was an American Quaker, suffragette, suffragist, feminist, and women's rights activist, and one of the foremost leaders and strategists of the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which prohibits sex discrimination in the right to vote. Paul initiated, and along with Lucy Burns and others, strategized events such as the Woman Suffrage Procession...

Stephen Lang is an American stage and screen actor. He gained fame for his role as Colonel Miles Quaritch in James Cameron's Avatar (2009), for which he won the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor. Lang reprised the role in the sequels.

Alexandra Grant is an American visual artist who examines language and written texts through painting, drawing, sculpture, video, and other media. She uses language and exchanges with writers as a source for much of that work. Grant examines the process of writing and ideas based in linguistic theory as it connects to art and creates visual images inspired by text...

Njideka Akunyili Crosby // is a Nigerian-born visual artist working in Los Angeles, California. Through her art, Akunyili Crosby "negotiates the cultural terrain between her adopted home in America and her native Nigeria, creating collage and photo transfer-based paintings that expose the challenges of occupying these two worlds". In 2017, Akunyili Crosby was awarded the prestigious Genius Grant from the...

Theodor Holm Nelson is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher of computer science, and sociologist. He coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia in 1963 and published them in 1965. According to his profile published in Forbes in 1997, Nelson "sees himself as a literary romantic, like a Cyrano de Bergerac, or 'the Orson Welles of software'."

Miles Maochun Yu is an American historian and strategist who served as the principal China policy and planning adviser to former United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

James Albert Michener was an American writer. He wrote more than 40 books, most of which were long, fictional family sagas covering the lives of many generations, set in particular geographic locales and incorporating detailed history. Many of his works were bestsellers and were chosen by the Book of the Month Club. He was also known for the meticulous research...

Karen Christiana Figueres Olsen is a Costa Rican diplomat who has led national, international and multilateral policy negotiations. She was appointed Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in July 2010, six months after the failed COP15 in Copenhagen. During the next six years she worked to rebuild the global climate change negotiating process, leading to...

David Lewis is a French-born English neuropsychologist, author and lecturer.

Oleg Alexandrovich Troyanovsky was ambassador of the Soviet Union to Japan and China and was the Soviet Permanent Representative to the United Nations (from 1976 to 1986).

Jonathan Earl Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedom (2010) garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on...