100 Notable alumni of University of Geneva

Hartley William Shawcross, Baron Shawcross, GBE, PC, QC, known from 1945 to 1959 as Sir Hartley Shawcross, was an English barrister and Labour politician who served as the lead British prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes tribunal. He also served as Britain's principal delegate to the United Nations immediately after the Second World War and as Attorney General for England.

Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt was a French scholar, and the most prolific contributor to the Encyclopédie. Voluntarily writing some 17,000 articles in all, his contributions amounted to around 25% of the entire work. His subjects included physiology, chemistry, botany, pathology, and political history.

Garegin or Karekin Pastermadjian, better known by his nom de guerre Armen Garo or Armen Karo (Արմէն Գարօ; 9 February 1872 – 23 March 1923) was an Armenian activist and politician. Armen Karo was a leading member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation for more than two decades. He was one of the masterminds of the 1896 occupation of the Ottoman...

Emilia Beatriz María Ferreiro Schiavi was an Argentine psychologist, writer, and educator, based in Mexico, with a doctorate from the University of Geneva, under the guidance of Jean Piaget. She was recognized for her contributions to understanding the evolutionary process of written language acquisition.

Edmond Henri Fischer was a Swiss-American biochemist. He and his collaborator Edwin G. Krebs were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1992 for describing how reversible phosphorylation works as a switch to activate proteins and regulate various cellular processes. From 2007 until 2014, he was the Honorary President of the World Cultural Council. At the time of...

Constanze Stelzenmüller is a German international relations analyst, policy and law scholar, and journalist. She is an expert in German, European, and transatlantic foreign policy and global affairs. She writes academic and journalistic analyses in English and German media about international relations in general, and German–American relations in particular, as well as questions in the politics of Germany and the...

Abdol Hossein Sardari was an Iranian diplomat. He is credited with saving thousands of Jews in Europe, issuing to Iranian Jews in France new passports that did not state their religion as well as issuing hundreds of Iranian passports for non-Iranian Jews. He has since been known as "The Iranian Schindler" or "The Schindler of Iran".

David A. Marcus is a French-born American entrepreneur. He was the co-creator of Diem, a cryptocurrency project initiated by Facebook. He is the former president of PayPal and Vice President of Messaging Products at Facebook where he ran the Facebook Messenger unit from 2014 until 2018. In December 2017, Marcus was appointed to the Coinbase Board of Directors, from which...

Mikhail Semyonovich Tsvet, also spelt Tsvett, Tswett, Tswet, Zwet, and Cvet was a Russian-Italian botanist who invented chromatography. His last name is Russian for "colour" and is also the root word of "flower."

Augustin Pyramus de Candolle was a Swiss botanist. René Louiche Desfontaines launched de Candolle's botanical career by recommending him at a herbarium. Within a couple of years de Candolle had established a new genus, and he went on to document hundreds of plant families and create a new natural plant classification system. Although de Candolle's main focus was botany, he...

Ehsān Narāghi was an Iranian sociologist, writer and Farah Pahlavi adviser

Daniel Bovet ForMemRS was a Swiss-born Italian pharmacologist who won the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of drugs that block the actions of specific neurotransmitters. He is best known for his discovery in 1937 of antihistamines, which block the neurotransmitter histamine and are used in allergy medication. His other research included work on chemotherapy, sulfa...

Hans-Gert Pöttering is a German lawyer, historian and conservative politician (CDU, European People's Party), who served as President of the European Parliament from January 2007 to July 2009 and as Chairman of the CDU-affiliated Konrad Adenauer Foundation from 2010 to 2017.

Rüdiger "Rudi" Dornbusch was a German economist who worked in the United States for most of his career.

Jean Starobinski was a Swiss literary critic.

Édouard Claparède was a Swiss neurologist, child psychologist, and educator.

Vyacheslav Kazymyrovych Lypynsky (5 April 1882 — 14 June 1931) was a Ukrainian historian, social and political activist, an ideologue of Ukrainian conservatism. He was also the founder of the Ukrainian Democratic–Agrarian Party. Under the government of Hetmanate, he served as the Ukrainian ambassador to Austria.

Alain Tanner was a Swiss film director.

Andon Zako Çajupi was an Albanian lawyer, playwright, poet and rilindas.

Vasil Petrov Kolarov was a Bulgarian communist political leader and leading functionary in the Communist International (Comintern).

Marie Magdalena Františka "Meda" Mládková was a Czech art collector. Her husband, Jan Viktor Mládek (1911–1989), was an economist and a governor of the IMF. Having spent several years in exile, she returned to Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution of 1989.

Derenik Karapeti Demirchian was a Soviet and Armenian writer, novelist, poet, translator and playwright. He began his career as a poet, but later transitioned into prose writing. He was a prolific writer whose works deal with a wide variety of subjects. He is perhaps best known for his historical novel Vardanank (1943), which is a dramatization of the 5th-century Armenian...

Nazim al-Qudsi, was a Syrian politician who served as the president of Syria from 14 December 1961 to 8 March 1963.

Shahzada Freydoun Mirza Qajar was a son of Ahmad Shah Qajar, the last shah of the Qajar dynasty.

Slobodan Jovanović was a Serbian and Yugoslav writer, historian, lawyer, philosopher, literary critic, diplomat, politician and one of the most prominent intellectuals of his time. He was the professor at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law (1897–1940), Rector of the University of Belgrade (1913–14 and 1920–21), and the President of the Serbian Royal Academy (1928–1931). He took part at...

Frank Dikötter is a Dutch historian who specialises in modern China. Dikötter is the author of The People's Trilogy, which consists of Mao's Great Famine (2010), The Tragedy of Liberation (2013), and The Cultural Revolution (2016), which aim to provide a description of Communist-led China.

Reuven Feuerstein was a Romanian-born Israeli clinical, developmental, and cognitive psychologist, known for his theory of intelligence. Feuerstein is recognized for his work in developing the theories and applied systems of structural cognitive modifiability, mediated learning experience, cognitive map, deficient cognitive functions, learning propensity assessment device, instrumental enrichment programs, and shaping modifying environments. These interlocked practices provide educators with the...

Heinrich Greinacher was a Swiss physicist. He is regarded as an original experimenter and is the developer of the magnetron and the Greinacher multiplier.

Ruth Dreifuss is a Swiss economist, unionist and politician who served as a member of the Federal Council from 1993 to 2002. She served as Vice President of Switzerland in 1998 and as President of Switzerland in 1999 for the Social Democratic Party.

Sir Ralph Norman Angell was a lecturer, journalist, author and Member of Parliament for the Labour Party. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to promote peace, particularly through writings that argued that modern economic interdependence made war irrational and self-defeating.

Gabriel Cramer was a Genevan mathematician.

Nicolas Bouvier was a 20th-century Swiss traveller, writer, picture editor and photographer. He studied in Geneva in the 1950s and lived there later between his travels.

Gisèle Littman, better known by her pen name Bat Ye'or (Hebrew: בת יאור, Daughter of the Nile), is an Egyptian-born, British-Swiss author, known for her promulgation of the Eurabia conspiracy theory. She claims that Islam, and its perceived anti-Americanism, anti-Christian sentiment and antisemitism hold sway over European culture and politics.

Didier Patrick Queloz FRS is a Swiss astronomer. He is the Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, where he is also a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, as well as a professor of physics at ETH Zurich. Together with Michel Mayor in 1995, he discovered 51 Pegasi b, the first extrasolar planet orbiting a Sun-like star,...

Sir Martin Hairer is an Austrian-British mathematician working in the field of stochastic analysis, in particular stochastic partial differential equations. He is Professor of Mathematics at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) and at Imperial College London. He previously held appointments at the University of Warwick and the Courant Institute of New York University. In 2014 he was awarded the...

Alexander Lowen was an American physician and psychotherapist.

Théodore-Agrippa d'Aubigné was a French poet, soldier, propagandist and chronicler. His epic poem Les Tragiques (1616) is widely regarded as his masterpiece. In a book about his Catholic contemporary Jean de La Ceppède, the English poet Keith Bosley called d'Aubigné "the epic poet of the Protestant cause," during the French Wars of Religion. Bosley added, however, that after d'Aubigné's death,...

Baron Edmond Adolphe Maurice Jules Jacques de Rothschild or Baron Edmond de Rothschild was a French-Swiss banker, the founder of the Edmond de Rothschild Group in 1953. His investments extended to vineyards, yacht racing, farming and hospitality.

Zhang Weiwei is a Chinese professor of international relations at Fudan University and the director of its China Institute. Zhang is also an Internet celebrity, spreading his political ideas through online video platforms such as Xigua Video, Bilibili, TikTok and YouTube.

Nasser Al-Mohammed Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah is a Kuwaiti politician who served as Prime Minister of Kuwait from 7 February 2006 until resigning on 28 November 2011.

Abraham Alfonse Albert Gallatin was a Genevan-American politician, diplomat, ethnologist, and linguist. Often described as "America's Swiss Founding Father", he was a leading figure in the early years of the United States, helping shape the new republic's financial system and foreign policy. Gallatin was a prominent member of the Democratic-Republican Party, represented Pennsylvania in both chambers of Congress, and held...

Henri Frédéric Amiel was a Swiss moral philosopher, poet, and critic.

Pyotr Lazarevich Voykov was a Ukrainian Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet diplomat known as one of the participants in the decision to murder the former Russian Emperor Nicholas II and his family members.

Jovan Dučić was a Bosnian Serb poet-diplomat and academic.

Ayşe Afet İnan was a Turkish historian and sociologist. She was one of the eight adopted daughters of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. She was known to be involved in the practice of physical anthropology, as she measured over sixty thousand skulls in Anatolia, which was aimed to support the Turkish History Thesis.

Ferenc Molnár, often anglicized as Franz Molnar, was a Hungarian-born author, stage director, dramatist, and poet. He is widely regarded as Hungary's most celebrated and controversial playwright.

Princess Maria Gabriella of Savoy is the middle daughter of Italy's last king, Umberto II, and Marie-José of Belgium, the "May Queen". She is a historical writer.

Hernando de Soto Polar is a Peruvian economist known for his work on the informal economy and on the importance of business and property rights. He is the current president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD), a think tank devoted to promoting economic development in developing countries located in Lima, Peru.

François Pierre Guillaume Guizot was a French historian, orator and statesman. Guizot was a dominant figure in French politics between the Revolution of 1830 and the Revolution of 1848.

Davoud Rashidi was an Iranian actor. Rashidi, along with Ali Nasirian, Ezatollah Entezami, Jamshid Mashayekhi and Mohammad Ali Keshavarz is known as one of "the five most important actors in the history of Iranian cinema" due to their significant influence. His daughter, Leili Rashidi, is also an actress.

Darius Rochebin is a Swiss journalist of Iranian origin currently active in France. From 1998 to 2020, he presented the newscast of the Swiss public broadcaster Radio Télévision Suisse (RTS) as well as the RTS programme Pardonnez-moi, for which he interviewed Swiss and international personalities. In August 2020, he left RTS and joined the French channel LCI to host a...

Princess Astrid of Belgium, Archduchess of Austria-Este, is the second child and first daughter of King Albert II and Queen Paola, and the younger sister to the current Belgian monarch, King Philippe. She is married to Prince Lorenz of Belgium, head of the Austria-Este branch of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, and is fifth in line of succession to the Belgian...

Princess Joséphine-Charlotte of Belgium was Grand Duchess of Luxembourg as the wife of Grand Duke Jean. She was the first child of King Leopold III of Belgium, and sister of the late King Baudouin and former King Albert II and aunt of King Philippe. She was also the maternal first cousin of King Harald V of Norway, maternal second cousin...

Henri is a member of the grand ducal family of Luxembourg who reigned as Grand Duke of Luxembourg from 2000 until his abdication in 2025.

Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy, Prince of Venice is a member of the House of Savoy. He is the son of Vittorio Emanuele of Savoy and male-line grandson of Umberto II, the last King of Italy. In 2024, Emanuele Filiberto became one of two claimants to the headship of the House of Savoy after the death of his father.

Joël Dicker is a Swiss novelist.

Diane von Fürstenberg is a Belgian fashion designer best known for her wrap dress. She initially rose to prominence in 1969 when she married into the German princely House of Fürstenberg, as the wife of Prince Egon von Fürstenberg. Following their separation in 1972 and divorce in 1983, she has continued to use his family name.

Fuad II, or alternatively Ahmed Fuad II (Arabic: أحمد فؤاد الثاني), is a member of the Egyptian Muhammad Ali dynasty. As an infant, he formally reigned as the last King of Egypt and the Sudan from July 1952 to June 1953, when he was deposed.

Maria Teresa is a member of the grand ducal family of Luxembourg. She was Grand Duchess of Luxembourg as the wife of Grand Duke Henri from 2000 until her husband's abdication in 2025.

Manuel "Manolo" Blahnik Rodríguez is a Spanish fashion designer and founder of the eponymous high-end shoe brand.

Dom Duarte Pio, Duke of Braganza, commonly known simply as Dom Duarte, is the current Duke of Braganza and a claimant to the defunct Portuguese throne, as the head of the House of Braganza. The Miguelist Braganzas, to whom Duarte Pio belongs as great-grandson of King Miguel I, is a cadet branch of the House of Braganza. With the extinction...

Jean Ziegler is a Swiss former professor of sociology at the University of Geneva and the Sorbonne, Paris, and former vice-president of the Advisory Committee to the United Nations Human Rights Council. He was previously Member of the Swiss Parliament for the Social Democrats from 1981 to 1999. He has also held several positions with the United Nations, especially as...

Carla Del Ponte is a Swiss former Chief Prosecutor of two United Nations international criminal law tribunals. A former Swiss attorney general, she was appointed prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in August 1999, replacing Louise Arbour.

Werner Arber is a Swiss microbiologist and geneticist. Along with American researchers Hamilton Smith and Daniel Nathans, Werner Arber shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of restriction endonucleases. Their work would lead to the development of recombinant DNA technology.

Jacques Dubochet is a retired Swiss biophysicist. He is a former researcher at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, and an honorary professor of biophysics at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.

Claude Nicollier is the first astronaut from Switzerland. He has flown on four Space Shuttle missions. His first spaceflight (STS-46) was in 1992, and his final spaceflight (STS-103) was in 1999. He took part in two servicing missions to the Hubble Space Telescope (called STS-61 and STS-103). During his final spaceflight he participated in a spacewalk, becoming the first European...

Michel Gustave Édouard Mayor is a Swiss astrophysicist and professor emeritus at the University of Geneva's Department of Astronomy. He formally retired in 2007, but remains active as a researcher at the Observatory of Geneva. He is co-laureate of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Jim Peebles and Didier Queloz, and the winner of the 2010 Viktor Ambartsumian...

Princess Norberta of Liechtenstein, Marchioness of Mariño, popularly known as Princess Nora, is a member of Liechtenstein princely family. She is the fourth child and only daughter of Franz Joseph II, Prince of Liechtenstein and his wife Georgina von Wilczek, and the younger sister of Hans-Adam II, Prince of Liechtenstein.

Ricardo Bofill Leví was a Spanish architect from Barcelona. He founded the Taller de Arquitectura in 1963 and developed it into a leading international architectural and urban design practice. According to architectural historian Andrew Ayers, his creations rank "among the most impressive buildings of the 20th century."

Marek Kamiński is a Polish innovator, philosopher and an explorer. He is the first person to have reached both the North and the South Pole in one year without outside assistance (the North Pole on 23 May 1995; the South Pole on 27 December 1995).

Teodor Viorel Meleșcanu is a Romanian politician, diplomat, and jurist. He served as Director of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Romania (SIE) between 2012 and 2014. He was a three times senator on behalf of the National Liberal Party (PNL), Minister of Defense between 2007 and 2008, and Minister of Foreign Affairs between 1992 and 1996, in November 2014 and...

José Manuel Durão Barroso is a Portuguese politician and law professor. He served as the prime minister of Portugal from 2002 to 2004 and as the president of the European Commission from 2004 to 2014.

Shane Peter Nathaniel Ross is an Irish former Independent politician who served as Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport from May 2016 to June 2020. He was a Teachta Dála (TD) for the Dublin Rathdown constituency from 2016 to 2020, and previously from 2011 to 2016 for the Dublin South constituency. He was a member of Seanad Éireann for the...

Andreas Embirikos was a Greek surrealist poet, writer, photographer, and one of the first Greek psychoanalysts. As a writer, he emerged from the Generation of the '30s and is considered one of the most important representatives of Greek surrealism. He studied psychoanalysis in France and was the first to practice it as a profession in Greece in the years 1935–1951....

Karl Korsch was a German Marxist theoretician and political philosopher. He is recognized as one of the "dissidents" that challenged the Marxism of the Second International of Karl Kautsky, Georgi Plekhanov and Lenin. Along with György Lukács, Korsch is considered to be one of the major figures responsible for laying the groundwork for Western Marxism in the 1920s.

Hans Luther was a German politician and Chancellor of Germany for 482 days in 1925 to 1926. As Minister of Finance he helped stabilize the Mark during the hyperinflation of 1923. From 1930 to 1933, Luther was head of the Reichsbank and from 1933 to 1937 he served as German Ambassador to the United States.

Ferdinand Mongin de Saussure was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major founders (together with Charles Sanders Peirce) of semiotics, or semiology, as Saussure called it.

Wolfgang Friedrich Ischinger is a German diplomat who served as chairman of the Munich Security Conference from 2008 to 2022.

Paul Friedrich ruled as Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin from 1837 to 1842.

Birgit Breuel is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) who served as president of the Treuhand Agency and as Commissioner General of Expo 2000 in Hannover. She later worked in several honorary positions.

Kurt Tucholsky was a German journalist, satirist, and writer. He also wrote under the pseudonyms Kaspar Hauser (after the historical figure), Peter Panter, Theobald Tiger and Ignaz Wrobel.

Ian Lancaster Fleming was a British writer, best known for his postwar James Bond series of spy novels. Fleming came from a wealthy family connected to the merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co., and his father was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Henley from 1910 until his death on the Western Front in 1917. Educated at Eton, Sandhurst, and,...

Martin Selmayr is a European civil servant from Germany who was Secretary-General of the European Commission from 2018 to 2019 and chief of staff to Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker from 2014 to 2018. During his time in the Juncker Commission, Selmayr was widely described as one of the most influential figures within the European Union. After taking office as secretary-general,...

Karl Anton, Prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was the last reigning prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen before the territory was annexed by the Kingdom of Prussia in 1849. Afterwards, he continued to be titular prince of his house and – with the death of the last prince of Hohenzollern-Hechingen in 1869 – of the entire Swabian branch of the House of Hohenzollern. He served...

Albrecht Freiherr von Boeselager is a German lawyer and forester, and was formerly a member of the Sovereign Council of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. He served as Grand Hospitaller from 1989 to 2014, and from 2014 until 3 September 2022 as its grand chancellor. Boeselager was at the centre of a leadership controversy within the Order of Malta...

Friedrich Wilhelm Ferdinand Joseph Maria Manuel Georg Meinrad Fidelis Benedikt Michael Hubert Fürst von Hohenzollern was the head of the Swabian branch of the House of Hohenzollern for over 45 years.

Stamen Gigov Grigorov was a prominent Bulgarian physician and microbiologist. He discovered the Lactobacillus bulgaricus bacillus, used in the making of yogurt.

Théophile Obenga is professor emeritus in the Africana Studies Center at San Francisco State University. He is a politically active proponent of Pan-Africanism. Obenga is an Egyptologist, linguist, and historian.

Hugo Duminil-Copin is a French mathematician specializing in probability theory. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2022.

Albert Cohen was an Israeli actor, voice actor, theatre director, singer and accordionist.

Stefania "Stefa" Wilczyńska was a Polish educator who was murdered in the Holocaust.

Karl Landsteiner ForMemRS was an Austrian-American biologist, physician, and immunologist. He emigrated with his family to New York in 1923 at the age of 55 for professional opportunities, working for the Rockefeller Institute.

Rafael Mariano Grossi is an Argentine diplomat. He has been serving as Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) since 3 December 2019. He was formerly the Argentine ambassador to Austria, concurrent with Slovenia, Slovakia and International Organisations based in Vienna (2013–2019).

Seymour Aubrey Papert was a South African-born American mathematician, computer scientist, and educator, who spent most of his career teaching and researching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, and of the constructionist movement in education. He was co-inventor, with Wally Feurzeig and Cynthia Solomon, of the Logo programming language.

Teresa Heinz, also known as Teresa Heinz Kerry, is a Portuguese-American businesswoman and philanthropist. Heinz is the widow of former U.S. Senator John Heinz and the current wife of former United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, longtime U.S. Senator, and 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. Heinz has served as chair of the Heinz Endowments and the Heinz Family...

Abdellah Taïa is a Moroccan writer and filmmaker who writes in the French language and has been based in Paris since 1999. He has published nine novels, many of them heavily autobiographical. His books have been translated into Arabic and many European languages.

Kofi Atta Annan was a Ghanaian diplomat and statesman who served as the seventh secretary-general of the United Nations from 1997 to 2006. Annan and the UN were the co-recipients of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize. He was the founder and chairman of the Kofi Annan Foundation, as well as chairman of The Elders, an international organisation founded by Nelson...

Rania Al Abdullah is Queen of Jordan as the wife of King Abdullah II.

Tariq Ramadan is a Swiss Muslim academic, philosopher and writer. He was a professor of contemporary Islamic studies at St Antony's College, Oxford and the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford. He is a senior research fellow at Doshisha University in Japan and a visiting professor at the Université Mundiapolis in Morocco. He was a visiting professor at...