List of City College of New York alumni

Notable alumni

Nobel laureates

• Julius Axelrod 1933 – Nobel laureate in Medicine, 1970
• Kenneth Arrow 1940 – Nobel laureate in Economics, 1972
• Herbert Hauptman 1937 – Nobel laureate in Chemistry, 1985
• Robert Hofstadter 1935 – Nobel laureate in Physics, 1961
• Jerome Karle 1937 – Nobel laureate in Chemistry, 1985
• Arthur Kornberg 1937 – Nobel laureate in Medicine, 1959
• Leon M. Lederman 1943 – Nobel laureate in Physics, 1988
• Arno Penzias 1954 – Nobel laureate in Physics, 1978
• Robert J. Aumann 1950 – Nobel laureate in Economics, 2005
• John O'Keefe, 1963 – Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 2014

  Rhodes Scholars

• James T. Molloy 1939

  Chancellors

• Matthew Goldstein – former chancellor of the City University of New York.

  Politics, government and sociology

• Herman Badillo 1951 – former Congressman and Chairman of CUNY's Board of Trustees, an architect of the University's academic rebirth
• Bernard M. Baruch 1889 – Wall Street financier; adviser to American Presidents for 40 years, from Woodrow Wilson to John F. Kennedy
• Abraham D. Beame 1928 – mayor of New York City, 1974 to 1977
• Daniel Bell – sociologist, professor at Harvard University
• Stephen Bronner – political theorist, Marxist, professor at Rutgers University
• Upendra J. Chivukula – first Asian American elected to the New Jersey General Assembly
• Henry Cohen 1943 – Director of Föhrenwald DP Camp; founding dean of the Milano School for Management and Urban Policy at The New School
• Benjamin B. Ferencz 1920 – international jurist
• Abraham Foxman – National Director of the Anti-Defamation League
• Felix Frankfurter 1902 – justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, 1939-1962
• George Friedman – founder of Stratfor, author, professor of political science, security and defense analyst
• Nathan Glazer – sociologist and professor at Harvard University
• Irving Howe – coined the phrase "New York Jewish Intellectual"
• Robert T. Johnson 1972 – Bronx District Attorney
• Henry Kissinger – Nobel Peace Prize and Secretary of State, National Security Advisor
• Ed Koch 1945 – mayor of New York City, 1978-1989
• Irving Kristol 1940 – neoconservative pundit
• Melvin J. Lasky 1938 – anti-communist; editor of Encounter 1958-1991
• Guillermo Linares 1975 – first Dominican-American New York City Council member
• Colin Powell – United States Secretary of State ; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and U.S. Army General; National Security Advisor
• Sal Restivo 1965 – pioneer ethnographer of science; one of the founders of the sociology of mathematics; founding member and former president of the Society for Social Studies of Science
• Julius Rosenberg – infamous convicted spy during the Cold War
• Robert F. Wagner Sr. – United States Senator from New York, 1927-1949
• Michele Wallace 1975 – major figure in African-American studies, feminist studies and cultural studies
• Stephen Samuel Wise 1891 – Reform rabbi, early Zionist and social justice activist

  The arts

• Maurice Ashley 1993 – first African-American International Chess Grandmaster
• Paddy Chayefsky – playwright and screenwriter; wrote Marty, Hospital and Altered States
• Carl Dreher 1917 – sound engineer, nominated for Sound Recording Academy Awards for the films The Gay Divorcee and I Dream Too Much
• Ira Gershwin 1918 – lyricist, collaborator with, and brother of George Gershwin
• Marv Goldberg 1964 – music historian in the field of rhythm & blues
• Hazelle Goodman 1986 – stage, screen and TV actress; first African-American to hold a leading role in a Woody Allen film, Deconstructing Harry
• Arthur Guiterman – humorous poet
• Luis Guzmán – actor
• E.Y. "Yip" Harburg 1918 – lyricist
• Judd Hirsch 1960 – actor
• Ernest Lehman 1937 – screenwriter
• David Margulies – actor
• Jackie Mason – comedian and actor
• Sterling Morrison 1970 – musician, co-founder of The Velvet Underground
• Zero Mostel 1935 – actor
• Faith Ringgold 1959 – artist and children's book author and illustrator
• Edward G. Robinson 1914 – actor
• Richard Schiff 1983 – Emmy Award-winning actor; star of The West Wing
• Ben Shahn – artist
• Gabourey Sidibe – actress
• Alfred Stieglitz 1884 – photographer
• Eli Wallach 1938 MA – actor

  Literature and journalism

• Alan Abelson 1942 – columnist, former editor, Barron's
• Morris Raphael Cohen – philosopher, lawyer, and legal scholar
• Dan Daniel 1910 – Dean of American Sportswriters
• Davidson Garrett 1988- American poet
• Gary Gruber 1962 – best selling author, educator, physicist
• Oscar Hijuelos 1975 – won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
• Jack Kroll 1937 – culture editor, Newsweek
• Paul Levinson – author of The Plot to Save Socrates and The Silk Code; winner of Locus Award, 1999
• Bernard Malamud 1936 – author; won 1967 Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for his novel The Fixer, National Book Award for The Magic Barrel; also wrote The Natural
• Montrose Jonas Moses – author
• Walter Mosley 1991 MA – best-selling author whose novels about private eye Easy Rawlins have received Edgar and Golden Dagger Awards
• Michael Oreskes 1975 – Executive Editor of the International Herald Tribune
• Mario Puzo – bestselling novelist, screenwriter, The Godfather
• Selwyn Raab – investigative journalist for The New York Times
• Alexander Rosenberg 1967 – novelist and philosopher
• A.M. Rosenthal 1949 – won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. Was Executive Editor of The New York Times
• Henry Roth – novelist and author of Call It Sleep, a novel on the Jewish immigrant experience
• Robert Scheer – journalist and radio host
• Stephen Shepard 1961 – editor in chief, Business Week
• Anatole Shub – editor and journalist specializing in Eastern European matters
• Upton Sinclair 1897 BA – author of The Jungle
• Robert Sobel 1951 BSS, 1952 MA – best-selling author of business histories
• Gary Weiss 1975 – investigative journalist; author of Born to Steal and Wall Street Versus America

  Science and technology

• Solomon Asch – psychologist, known for the Asch conformity experiments
• Julius Blank – engineer, member of the "traitorous eight" who founded Silicon Valley
• Marvin Chester 1952 – physicist, quantum physics emeritus professor at UCLA
• Adin Falkoff – engineer, computer scientist, co-inventor of the APL language interactive system
• Richard D. Gitlin 1964 – engineer, co-invention of DSL Bell Labs
• George Washington Goethals 1887 – civil engineer, best known for his supervision of construction and the opening of the Panama Canal
• Dan Goldin 1962 – 9th and longest-tenured administrator of NASA
• Walter S. Graf – cardiologist, pioneer in creation of emergency paramedic care system
• Robert E. Kahn 1960 – Internet pioneer, co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol, co-recipient of the Turing Award in 2004
• Allen Kent – pioneer of information science, especially mechanized information retrieval
• Gary A. Klein 1964 – research psychologist, known for pioneering the field of naturalistic decision making
• Leonard Kleinrock 1957 – Internet pioneer
• Solomon Kullback – mathematician; NSA cryptology pioneer
• Lewis Mumford – historian of technology
• Charles Lane Poor – noted astronomer
• Mario Runco, Jr. 1974 – astronaut
• Jonas Salk 1934 – inventor of the Salk polio vaccine
• Philip H. Sechzer 1934 – anesthesiologist, pioneer in pain management; inventor of patient-controlled analgesia
• Abraham Sinkov – mathematician; NSA cryptology pioneer
• David B. Steinman 1906 – engineer; bridge designer
• Leonard Susskind 1962 – physicist, string theory
• Victor Twersky 1943 – physicist, scattering theory – physicist and IEEE Fellow renowned for his contributions to the multiple scattering theory; professor of applied mathematics in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science at University of Illinois at Chicago

  Business

• Andrew Grove 1960 – 4th employee of Intel, and eventually its president, CEO, and chairman; TIME magazine's Man of the Year in 1997; donated $26,000,000 to CCNY's Grove School of Engineering in 2006
• Melvin Simon 1949 – real estate developer, co-founder of Simon Property Group

  Sports

• Red Holzman 1942 – basketball coach for the New York Knicks
• Holcombe Rucker 1962 – organizer and namesake of the Rucker Tournament

  Fictional alumni

• Lennie Briscoe – character from the TV show Law & Order
• Don Draper – character on the TV show Mad Men
• Brian Flanagan – character from the 1988 film Cocktail
• Gordon Gekko – character from the 1987 film Wall Street
• Nancy – character from the 1971 film Bananas
• Toby Ziegler – character from the TV show The West Wing

  Footnotes