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### 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.