100 Notable alumni of Technical University of Berlin

Franz Grashof was a German engineer. He was a professor of Applied Mechanics at the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe.

Hans Ludwig Neuhoff is a German cultural sociologist, musicologist and politician (AfD). He has been professor for sociology and musical psychology at the Cologne University of Music since 2004. Neuhoff was elected to the European Parliament in the 2024 European Parliament election.

Ursula Wyss is a Swiss politician, economist and urban planner. She represented the Canton of Bern in the Swiss National Council as member of the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland (SP) from 6 December 1999 to 3 March 2013. From January 2013 to December 2020 she was an executive member (Gemeinderätin) of the city of Bern.

Matthias Kollatz is a German politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) who served as State Minister of Finance in the government of Mayor Michael Müller of Berlin from 2014 to 2021.

Harald Friedrich Hans Volker Sigmar Uhlig is a German macroeconomist and the Bruce Allen and Barbara Ritzenthaler Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, where he was the chairman of the Department of Economics from 2009 to 2012.

Jakub Karol Parnas, also known as Yakov Oskarovich Parnas was a prominent Polish–Soviet biochemist who contributed to the discovery of the Embden–Meyerhof–Parnas pathway, together with Otto Fritz Meyerhof and Gustav Embden. He became a Soviet activist after the annexation of Western Ukraine in 1939. He was arrested during the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee affair in 1949 and died in the prison,...

George Edward Kessler was an American pioneer city planner and landscape architect.

Adolf Martens was a German metallurgist and the namesake of the steel structure martensite and the martensitic transformation, a type of diffusionless phase transition in the solid state. He also made significant contributions to the field of tribology. The functional relationship between the coefficient of friction and the product of sliding speed and viscosity divided by the normal load (well...

Carl Hellmuth Hertz was a German physicist known primarily for being involved in the development of inkjet technology and ultrasound technology. He was the son of Gustav Ludwig Hertz and great nephew of Heinrich Hertz.

Albert Betz was a German physicist and a pioneer of wind turbine technology.

James Friedrich Ludolf Hobrecht was a Prussian director for urban planning. His development plan of 1862 for a million-sized Berlin was soon to be simply called the Hobrecht-Plan. His main focus was on modern sewer systems for which he was well known in the late 19th century.

Krafft Arnold Ehricke was a German rocket-propulsion engineer and advocate for space colonization. Ehricke is a co-designer of the first Centaur liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen upper stage.

Klaus Riedel was a German rocket pioneer. He was involved in many early liquid-fuelled rocket experiments, and eventually worked on the V-2 missile programme at Peenemünde Army Research Center. A lunar crater is named after him in recognition of his contributions to rocket research.

Ludwig Christian Alexander Karl Martens was a Russian Marxist revolutionary, Soviet diplomat, and engineer.

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung is a contemporary art curator and writer. He lives in Berlin.

Horst Zuse is a German computer scientist.

Alfred Frederik Elias Grenander was a Swedish architect, who became one of the most prominent engineers during the first building period of the Berlin U-Bahn network in the early twentieth century.

Nasrollah Entezam was a diplomat, politician, and minister, as well as Iranian Ambassador to the United States and France. He was the first Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations from 1947 to 1950 and President of the UN General Assembly during its fifth session in 1950.

Özcan Mutlu is a Turkish-German former politician from the Green Party. In January 2025, he left the party because of "toxic power structures" in the Berlin regional association of the Greens.

Sabina Jeschke is a German university professor for information sciences in mechanical engineering at the RWTH Aachen University. As of 10 November 2017, she was named member of the management board of Deutschen Bahn AG for digitalization and technology. She is also the director of the Cybernetics Lab IMA/ZLW & IfU. In the summer semester of 2017, she is on...

Georg Wilhelm Alexander Hans Graf von Arco was a German physicist, radio pioneer, and one of the joint founders of the "Society for Wireless Telegraphy" which became the Telefunken company. He was an engineer and the technical director of Telefunken. He was crucial in the development of wireless technology in Europe.

Małgorzata Omilanowska is a Polish art historian and politician. She served as Poland's Minister of Culture and National Heritage from July 2014 to November 2015.

Anupama Kundoo is an Indian architect and a descendant of Kashmiri Zamindari of Dar, Hatkhola and Manikganj royal family.

Ludwig Bölkow was a German aeronautical engineer.

Professor He Zehui or Ho Zah-wei was a Chinese nuclear physicist who worked with Walther Bothe in Nazi Germany during World War II and with Irène Joliot-Curie in Paris, and later helped develop the Chinese nuclear programme. She is credited with discovering the phenomenon of elastic collision between positrons and electrons by 1945, and – jointly with her husband Qian...

Diana Hertha Golze is a German politician from Die Linke. She was a Member of the Bundestag from 2005 to 2014.

Ernst Frederick Werner Alexanderson was a Swedish-American electrical engineer and inventor who was a pioneer in radio development. He invented the Alexanderson alternator, an early radio transmitter used between 1906 and the 1930s for longwave long distance radio transmission. Alexanderson also created the amplidyne, a direct current amplifier used during the Second World War for controlling anti-aircraft guns.

Friedrich Georg "Fritz" Houtermans was a Dutch-Austrian-German atomic and nuclear physicist and Communist born in Zoppot (now Sopot) near Danzig (now Gdańsk), West Prussia to a Dutch father, who was a wealthy banker. He was brought up in Vienna, where he was educated, and moved to Göttingen when he was 18 to study. It was in Göttingen where he obtained...

Otto Bartning was a Modernist German architect, architectural theorist and teacher. In his early career he developed plans with Walter Gropius for the establishment of the Bauhaus. He was a member of Der Ring. In 1951, he was elected president of the Federation of German Architects.

Tadeusz "Tadek" Marek was a Polish automobile engineer, known for his Aston Martin engines.

Zhu Jiahua or Chu Chia-hua was a Chinese geologist, educator, and Kuomintang politician in the Republic of China. He served as Ministry of Education (1931–1933, 1944–1948), Minister of Transportation and Communications (1932–1935), Secretary-General of the Kuomintang (1938–1939), head of Central Bureau of Investigation and Statistics (1938–1944), Head of Organization Department (1939–1944), President of the Academia Sinica (1940–1959) and Vice Premier...

Tania Singer is a German psychologist and social neuroscientist and the scientific director of the Max Planck Society's Social Neuroscience Lab in Berlin, Germany. Between 2007 and 2010, she became the inaugural chair of social neuroscience and neuroeconomics at the University of Zurich and was the co-director of the Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research in Zurich. Her research...

Ku Cheng-kang or Gu Zhenggang was a Chinese politician, scholar and ranking member of the Kuomintang in service to the Republic of China. He was the co-founder of both Chinese Association for Relief and Ensuing Services and World League for Freedom and Democracy and widely regarded as the "Father of Disaster Relief in the Republic of China", "Social Welfare Advocate"...

Günter Matthias Ziegler is a German mathematician who has been working as president of the Free University of Berlin since 2018. Ziegler is known for his research in discrete mathematics and geometry, and particularly on the combinatorics of polytopes.

Ion Gigurtu was a Romanian far-right politician, Land Forces officer, engineer and industrialist who served a brief term as Prime Minister from 4 July to 4 September 1940, under the personal regime of King Carol II. A specialist in mining and veteran of both the Second Balkan War and World War I, he made a fortune in interwar Greater Romania....

Karl Heinrich Emil Becker was a German weapons engineer and artillery general. He advocated and implemented close ties of the military to science for purposes of advanced weapons development. He was the head of the Army Ordnance Office, Senator of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, first president of the Reich Research Council, the first general officer to be a member of...

Max Berg was a German architect and urban planner.

Ernst Emil Herzfeld was a German archaeologist and Iranologist.

Hans-Jörg Königsmann is a German aerospace engineer who was Vice President of Flight Reliability for SpaceX until his retirement in 2021.

Paul Felix Neményi was a Hungarian mathematician and physicist who specialized in continuum mechanics. He was known for using what he called the inverse or semi-inverse approach, which applied vector field analysis, to obtain numerous exact solutions of the nonlinear equations of gas dynamics, many of them representing rotational flows of nonuniform total energy. His work applied geometrical solutions to...

Fritz Sennheiser was a German inventor and entrepreneur who founded and served as chairman of Sennheiser Electronic, a manufacturer of audio equipment.

Philipp Lengsfeld is a German politician, formerly of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

Hans-Christoph Seebohm was a German politician of the national conservative German Party (Deutsche Partei, DP) and after 1960 the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He was the minister of Transport for 17 years and the vice chancellor of West Germany in 1966.

Kristin Brinker is a German politician. A member of the Alternative for Germany (AFD) party, Brinker has been a member of the Berlin House of Representatives since 2016. Brinker has been state chair of the Berlin AfD since March 2021.

István Friedrich was a Hungarian politician, footballer and factory owner who served as prime minister of Hungary for three months between August and November in 1919. His tenure coincided with a period of political instability in Hungary immediately after World War I, during which several successive governments ruled the country.

Hellmuth Walter was a German engineer who pioneered research into rocket engines and gas turbines. His most noteworthy contributions were rocket motors for the Messerschmitt Me 163 and Bachem Ba 349 interceptor aircraft, so-called Starthilfe jettisonable rocket propulsion units used for a variety of Luftwaffe aircraft during World War II, and a revolutionary new propulsion system for submarines known as...

Cansel Kiziltepe is a German economist and politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) who has been serving as State Minister (Senator) for Labour, Social Affairs, Equality, Integration, Diversity and Anti-Discrimination in the government of Governing Mayor Kai Wegner since 2023.

Heinz Heinrich Nordhoff was a German engineer who led the rebuilding of Volkswagen (VW) after World War II. He was featured on the cover of Time magazine on Feb. 15, 1954.

Peter Paul Freiherr von Eltz-Rübenach was Reich Postal Minister (Reichspostminister) and Reich Minister of Transport (Reichsminister für Verkehr) of Germany between 1932 and 1937.

Johann-Dietrich "Jan" Wörner is a German civil engineer, university professor and former president of Technische Universität Darmstadt. He served as chairman of the executive board of the German Aerospace Center DLR from 1 March 2007 to 30 June 2015. On 1 July 2015, he succeeded Jean-Jacques Dordain as Director General of the European Space Agency.

Ida Noddack, née Tacke, was a German chemist and physicist. In 1934 she was the first to mention the idea later named nuclear fission. With her husband Walter Noddack, and Otto Berg, she discovered element 75, rhenium. She was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Michael Grätzel is a professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne where he directs the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces. He pioneered research on energy and electron transfer reactions in mesoscopic-materials and their optoelectronic applications. He co-invented with Brian O'Regan the Grätzel cell in 1988. Grätzel has been called the "father of artificial photosynthesis".

Ursula Martius Franklin CC OOnt FRSC was a Canadian metallurgist, activist, research physicist, author, and educator who taught at the University of Toronto for more than 40 years. Franklin is best known for her writings on the political and social effects of technology. She was the author of The Real World of Technology, which is based on her 1989 Massey...

Helmut Gröttrup was a German engineer, rocket scientist and inventor of the smart card. During World War II, he worked in the German V-2 rocket program under Wernher von Braun. From 1946 to 1950 he headed a group of 170 German scientists who were forced to work for the Soviet rocketry program under Sergei Korolev. After returning to West Germany...

Hans Poelzig was a German architect, painter and set designer.

Ahmed Kemaleddin, widely known as Mimar Kemaleddin (Architect Kemaleddin) was a Turkish architect, and one of the leading figures of the First National architectural movement, alongside Vedat Tek.

Constantinos A. Doxiadis, often cited as C. A. Doxiadis, was a Greek architect and urban planner. During the 1960s, he was the lead architect and planner of Islamabad, which was to serve as the new capital city of Pakistan. He was later known as the father of ekistics, which concerns the multi-aspectual science of human settlements.

Dilek Kalayci is a Turkish-German politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) who served as State Minister for Health, Care and Equality (2016–2021) and as Deputy Governing Mayor of Berlin and State Minister for Labour, Integration and Women (2014–2016) in the government of Mayor Michael Müller.

Taqi Arani, was a professor of chemistry, left-wing Iranian political activist and theorist as well as the founder and editor of the Marxist magazine Donya (The World). The magazine's main aim was to introduce Marxism to Iranians and to provide a basis for a prospective Marxist group.

Werner Julius March was a German architect, son of Otto March (1845–1913), and brother of Walter March, both also well-known German architects. Werner March designed Germany's 1936 Olympic stadium. Werner March was born in Charlottenburg and died in Berlin.

Edward Lasker was a German-American chess and Go player. He was awarded the title of International Master of chess by FIDE. Lasker was an engineer by profession, and an author of books on Go, chess and checkers. Born in Prussia, he emigrated to the United States in 1914. He was distantly related to World Chess Champion Emanuel Lasker with whom...

Kenneth David Nichols CBE was an officer in the United States Army, and a civil engineer who worked on the secret Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb during World War II. He served as Deputy District Engineer to James C. Marshall, and from 13 August 1943 as the District Engineer of the Manhattan Engineer District. Nichols led both the...

Philipp Mißfelder was a German politician and a member of the German Bundestag. From January through March 2014, he served in the German government as the Coordinator for Transatlantic Cooperation in the Field of Intersocietal Relations, Cultural and Information Policy.

Bernhard Hans Henry Scharoun was a German architect best known for designing the Berliner Philharmonie (home to the Berlin Philharmonic) and the Schminke House in Löbau, Saxony. He was an important exponent of organic and expressionist architecture.

Jan Czochralski was a Polish chemist who invented the Czochralski method, which is used for growing single crystals and in the production of semiconductor wafers. It is still used in over 90 percent of all electronics in the world that use semiconductors. He is the most cited Polish scholar.

Hartmut Mehdorn is a German manager and mechanical engineer. Until May 2009 he was CEO of Deutsche Bahn, Germany's biggest railway company. He was CEO of Germany's second largest airline Air Berlin until he stepped down in January 2013. In March 2013 he assumed a CEO position at Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg GmbH (FBB), the owner and future operator of Berlin...

Constantin Carathéodory was a Greek mathematician who spent most of his professional career in Germany. He made significant contributions to real and complex analysis, the calculus of variations, and measure theory. He also created an axiomatic formulation of thermodynamics. Carathéodory is considered one of the greatest mathematicians of his era and the most renowned Greek mathematician since antiquity.

Hugo Adolf Eugen Victor Stinnes commonly known as Hugo Stinnes was a German industrialist and politician who served as a member of Reichstag from 1920 to 1924 (his death). During the late era of the German Empire and early Weimar Republic, he was considered to be one of the most influential entrepreneurs in Europe.

Diébédo Francis Kéré is a Burkinabé-German architect, recognized for creating innovative works that are often sustainable and collaborative in nature. In 2022, he became the first native African to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Educated at Technische Universität Berlin, he has lived in Berlin since 1985. Parallel to his studies, he established the Kéré Foundation (formerly Schulbausteine für Gando), and...

Eugene Paul Wigner was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who also contributed to mathematical physics. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles".

Kurt Waldemar Tank was a German aeronautical engineer and test pilot who led the design department at Focke-Wulf from 1931 to 1945. He was responsible for the creation of several important Luftwaffe aircraft of World War II, including the Fw 190 fighter aircraft, the Ta 152 fighter-interceptor and the Fw 200 Condor airliner. After the war, Tank spent two decades...

Lev Lvovich Sedov was a Russian writer and the first son of politician and revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his second wife, Natalia Sedova. Sedov was born when his father was in prison facing life imprisonment for participating in the Revolution of 1905.

Hugo Junkers was a German aircraft engineer and aircraft designer who pioneered the design of all-metal airplanes and flying wings. His company, Junkers Flugzeug- und Motorenwerke AG (Junkers Aircraft and Motor Works), was one of the mainstays of the German aircraft industry in the years between World War I and World War II. His multi-engined, all-metal passenger and freight planes...

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

Samih Onsi Sawiris is an Egyptian-Montenegrin businessman, investor and billionaire and the second of three sons of Onsi Sawiris, the other two being Naguib Sawiris and Nassef Sawiris. He is the former executive chairman of the board of directors and CEO of Orascom Development Holding AG.

Wojciech Korfanty was a Polish activist, journalist and politician, who served as a member of the German parliaments, the Reichstag and the Prussian Landtag, and later, in the Polish Sejm. Briefly, he also was a paramilitary leader, known for organizing the Polish Silesian Uprisings in Upper Silesia, which after World War I was contested by Germany and Poland. Korfanty fought...

Hamid Samandarian was an Iranian film and theater director and translator. He staged numerous dramas including No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre, Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen, The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams and Marriage of Mr. Mississippi by Friedrich Durrenmatt.

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austro-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language.

Konrad Ernst Otto Zuse was a German civil engineer, pioneering computer scientist, inventor and businessman. His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional program-controlled Turing-complete Z3 became operational in May 1941. Thanks to this machine and its predecessors, Zuse is regarded by some as the inventor and father of the modern computer.

Leo Szilard was a Hungarian-born American physicist, biologist and inventor who made numerous important discoveries in nuclear physics and the biological sciences. He conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, and patented the idea in 1936. In late 1939 he wrote the letter for Albert Einstein's signature that resulted in the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb, and then...

Alfred Stieglitz HonFRPS was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his 50-year career in making photography an accepted art form. In addition to his photography, Stieglitz was known for the New York art galleries that he ran in the early part of the 20th century, where he introduced many avant-garde European artists to the U.S....

Wolfram Karl Ludwig Moritz Hermann Freiherr von Richthofen was a German World War I flying ace who rose to the rank of Generalfeldmarschall (Field Marshal) in the Luftwaffe during World War II.

Farrah El-Dibany is an Egyptian mezzo-soprano. She is the first Egyptian and African singer to join the Paris Opera Academy in 2016.

Sascha Lobo is a German blogger, writer, journalist, Audiobook-narrator and copywriter. Lobo's work is primarily concerned with the Internet and with the social effects of new technology.

Heinrich Georg Barkhausen was a German physicist who established an influential research laboratory in Dresden. The phenomenon by which ferromagnetic domains align during magnetization and produce discrete acoustic changes due to rotations of the Weiss domains is named after his observations as the magnetic Barkhausen effect. He is also remembered in the Barkhausen criteria for electrical oscillators.

Bruno Ahrends, born as Bruno Arons, was an internationally known German architect, who worked in Berlin, Germany. He was a representative of Berlin Modernism Housing Estates before World War I and during Weimar Republic (1910s to 1930s). Most of his creations today are under Cultural heritage management, some are part of a World Heritage Site.

Joachim Milberg is a German engineer and manager who was CEO of Bayerischen Motorenwerke AG (BMW). He was chairman of the Supervisory Board of BMW until July 2015.

Fritz Walther Meissner was a German physicist known for his work on superconductivity.

Wilhelm Kreis was a prominent German architect and professor of architecture, active through four political systems in German history: the Wilhelmine era, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the foundation of the Federal Republic.

Rudolf Ludwig Mössbauer was a German physicist who shared the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics with Robert Hofstadter for his discovery of the Mössbauer effect, which is the basis for Mössbauer spectroscopy.

Ernst August Friedrich Ruska was a German physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986 for his work in electron optics, including the design of the first electron microscope.

Erich Mendelsohn; 21 March 1887 – 15 September 1953) was a German-British architect, known for his expressionist architecture in the 1920s, as well as for developing a dynamic functionalism in his projects for department stores and cinemas. Mendelsohn was a pioneer of the Art Deco and Streamline Moderne architecture, notably with his 1921 Mossehaus design.

Carl Bosch was a German chemist and engineer and Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. He was a pioneer in the field of high-pressure industrial chemistry and founder of IG Farben, at one point the world's largest chemical company.

Fritz Jakob Haber was a German chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his invention of the Haber process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. This invention is important for the large-scale synthesis of fertilizers and explosives. It is estimated that a third of annual global food production...

George Charles de Hevesy was a Hungarian radiochemist and Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate, recognized in 1943 for his key role in the development of radioactive tracers to study chemical processes such as in the metabolism of animals. He also co-discovered the element hafnium.

Chaim Azriel Weizmann was a Russian-born Israeli statesman, biochemist, and Zionist leader who served as president of the Zionist Organization and later as the first president of Israel. He was elected on 16 February 1949, and served until his death in 1952. Weizmann was instrumental in obtaining the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and convincing the United States government to recognize...

Volker Quaschning is a German engineer and professor of renewable energy systems at the Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin, Germany.

Henri Marie Coandă was a Romanian inventor, aerodynamics pioneer, and builder of an experimental aircraft, the Coandă-1910, which never flew. He invented a great number of devices, designed a "flying saucer" and discovered the Coandă effect of fluid dynamics.

Jörg Guido Hülsmann is a German-born economist who studies issues related to money, banking, monetary policy, macroeconomics, and financial markets. Hülsmann is professor of economics at the University of Angers’ School of Law, Economics, and Management.