Famous Chemical Engineers and Celebrities
Some of the folks here may not be Chemical Engineers, but
we say a brief encounter is close enough!
- Paul Berg
- Biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1980
(with Walter Gilbert and Frederick Sanger)
for their pioneering work that lauched the era of genetic engineering.
Berg started out as a Chemical Engineering student at New York City College,
but left because of the World War.
Later, he switched back to what interested him most and finished his
undergraduate education in Biochemistry at
Pennsylvania State University. He continued on to
get his Biochemistry Ph.D. from Case-Western Reserve University.
See the full story in his
autobiography from the Nobel Foundation.
- Charles (Garry) Betty
- President and CEO, EarthLink. B.S. Chemical Engineering from Georgia Tech.
Started his career at Procter & Gamble, moved onto IBM, and then as
CEO of Digital Communications before leading EarthLink to become a major ISP.
- Kevin Brown
- Major league pitcher. B.S. Chemical Engineering from Georgia Tech.
Won the World Series with the Marlins in 1997.
Then became one of the highest paid
pitchers with the Dodgers (via the Padres).
- Frank Capra
- Film director. Born in Sicily in 1897 and immigrated to Los Angeles
in 1903. Earned a degree in Chemical Engineering before went on to
the film business. Among films directed:
"It Happened One Night," "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,"
and "It's a Wonderful Life."
- Cindy Crawford
- Supermodel, not an engineer. She was valedictorian in her high school
and had a Chemical Engineering scholarship
at Northwestern University. Spent a semester there before leaving for
New York and a modeling career.
- John Fenn
- Chemist who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Koichi Tanaka
and Kurt Wüthrich for their development of methods to analyze large
biological molecules. Fenn received his B.S. from Berea College and Ph.D.
from Yale, all in Chemistry. But significanlty, the major work in
developing electrospray ionization, the basis of his award,
was carried out when he was a faculty
in the Chemical Engineering Department at Yale. See his
autobiography,
which just stopped short of his career phase at Yale, and the
news page
from Yale.
- Roberto Goizueta
- Former chairman and chief executive of Coca-Cola.
Chemical engineering degree from Yale.
- Bob Gore
- The inventor of Gore-Tex -- the lightweight,
waterproof, breathable polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) fabric.
He was a Chemical Engineering major at the University of Delaware when he
came up with the idea of using Teflon to insulate electrical wires back
in 1957. His dad started a business based on this idea.
Bob then discovered Gore-Tex in 1969 when he was trying to make better
cable insulation.
The lore was that he was trying to heat rods of the stuff to see if
they would stretch, and after days of gently tugging on the heated
rods only to have them break, a frustrated Gore violently yanked one.
To his surprise, the PTFE suddently stretched.
Soon Gore blended PTFE into fabric, and Ma and Pa Gore field tested
a Gore-Tex tent in Wyoming's Wind River Range.
Hail ripped the tent to shreds, soaking the couple.
"But the fabric," insisted Mom, "was a success."
Gore-Tex finally debuted as a product in 1976.
- Andrew Grove
- One of the founders of Intel.
B.S. Chemical Engineering from City College of New York (1960),
and Ph.D. Chemical Engineering from Berkeley (1963).
See the full story in his
biographical sketch posted on the Intel site.
- Bill Koch
- Industrialist. B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. Chemical Engineering from MIT and
part of the Koch industries family.
Bankrolled and won the 1992 America's Cup in the boat America3
and sponsored a women's team in 1995.
It started out as an all-female team. Then he put in a male
tactician when they started losing, and people dubbed his boat
Mighty Mary as Mostly Mary.
- Dolph Lundgren
- Actor who played Ivan Drago in Rocky IV. He graduated from
the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He then received a
master degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Sydney
and was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship.
He spent one year as a graduate student
in Chemical Engineering at MIT before he got into the movie business.
- Arthur D. Little
- Consultant and co-founder, with William Walker,
of "Arthur D. Little, Inc.," a major consulting firm.
He coined the term "unit operations" in 1915.
- Alex Lowe
- One of the world's best climbers. Had a Chemical
Engineering scholarhsip at Montana State University in Bozeman.
Spent two years there. He later got a degree in Applied Math.
Lowe was killed in an avalanche on Tibet's Shishipagma on October 5, 1999.
- Giulio Natta
- Chemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1963 (with Karl Ziegler)
for their pioneering work in polymer chemistry.
Yes, Ziegler-Natta catalysis and (vinyl) polymerization were named after them.
Natta graduated in Chemical Engineering at the Polytechnic of Milan before
he moved onto Chemistry for his graduate work and academic career.
See the full story in his
biography.
- Kevin Olmstead
- World-record game show payoff winner, in 2001, with $2,180,000
from "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?"
After acquiring B.S. and M.S. Chemical Engineering degrees from
Case Western Reserve University and MIT, earned a Ph.D.
in Environmental Engineering from the University of Michigan.
(He held the record until 2004, when Ken Jennings broke it on Jeopardy.)
- Lars Onsager
- Chemist who won the Chemistry Nobel Prize in 1968 for his work in developing
irreversible thermodynamics.
Now you know where those Onsager reciprocal relations came from.
Onsager received his undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering from
the Norwegian Institute of Technology (Norges Tekniske Höiskole) before
he moved on to get his Chemistry Ph.D. from Yale.
See the full story in his
biography,
and a
biographical
sketch from NTNU.
- Adam Osborne
- Received M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from University of Delaware.
Credited with introducing the first ever portable computer in 1981, the same year
IBM launched the PC. His Osborne 1 weighed in at 24 pounds with a 5-inch display,
64K RAM, and a Zilog Z80 CPU running at 4 MHz.
It also came with the CP/M operating system, Wordstar, and SuperCalc.
He passed away in 2003 after a lingering brain disease.
- Mario Molina
- Nobel laureate in Chemistry, 1995, with Sherwood Rowland and
Paul Crutzen,
for their work in elucidating the threat of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)
to the stratospheric ozone layer.
Molina had a B.S. in Chemical Engineering
from the Universidad Autónoma de México before he got his Ph.D. in
Physical Chemistry at U.C. Berkeley.
See the full story in his
autobiography.
- John von Neumann
- This renowned mathematician and pioneer of computer science
started studying chemistry at the University of Berlin but finished with a
a diploma in Chemical Engineering from the
Technische Hochschule (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in Zurich.
(Einstein went here only after failing the entrance exam the first time around!)
He later earned a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Budapest
and a doctorate in Chemistry from the University of Zurich.
Even at the young age of 6 years old, he could divide two eight digit numbers in
his head. Now how many of you can do that at any age?
Together with Einstein, von Neumann was among the first six faculty at the
Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. His work during the second World
War laid the foundation for modern computers as we are still using today.
All and all this guy was pretty smart to say the least;
it just turned out that he was a mathematician at heart
(so much for his Ph.D. in Chemistry!).
- Linus Pauling
- Chemist who won two Nobel prizes -- one in Chemistry and one
in Peace. He was a Chemical Engineering undergraduate at Oregon State
University (when it was still the Oregon Agricultural College).
Then he got his Ph.D. in Chemistry at Caltech.
See the full story in his biography from
1954,
and
1962.
- Martin Perl
- Physicist, professor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC).
Won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics (with Federick Reines) for their
discovery of the tau lepton. But he graduated summa cum lauda in
Chemical Engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn
(now Polytechnic University) and worked at General Electric briefly.
Then he went back to school and got his Ph.D. in Physics from
Columbia University.
See the full story in his
autobiography.
- Jack Steinberger
- Another physicist and Nobel laureate with a brief encounter with
Chemical Engineering.
Steinberger won the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics
(with Leon Lederman and Melvin Schwartz) for their work with neutrinos.
He started out as a Chemical Engineering student at the
Armour Institute of Technology (now the Illinois Institute of Technology),
but had to leave in the hard times of the Great Depression.
He later finished his degree in Chemistry at the University of Chicago, where
he also did a good part of his graduate work.
See the full story in hi
autobiography.
- Sharon Stone
- Actress. No, not an engineer by any stretch of your imagination.
But in an interview with Playboy magazine (which we
read), Stone responded to her being bright,
"I had a high IQ and was predisposed to do technical things:
science, engineering, math. I'm sure a career as a chemical
engineer would have been appropriate for me, though my personality
is more fitting for a lawyer."
- John (Jack) Welch, Jr.
- Former Chairman & CEO, General Electric.
(The eighth Chairman and CEO in the Company's history.)
B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts (1957)
and M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the
University of Illinois.
If you discover more
famous Chemical Engineers, please send them to the
Webmaster (listed under the Officers page) and we'll add them to
the list. Thanks for the suggestions in advance.