List of Nobel laureates affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley
This list of Nobel laureates affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley comprehensively shows the alumni, faculty members as well as researchers of the University of California, Berkeley who were awarded the Nobel Prize or the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The Nobel Prizes, established by the 1895 will of Alfred Nobel, are awarded to individuals who make outstanding contributions in the fields of Chemistry, Literature, Peace, Physics, and Physiology or Medicine. An associated prize, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, was instituted by Sweden's central bank, Sveriges Riksbank, in 1968 and first awarded in 1969.
, 107 Nobel laureates have been affiliated with UC Berkeley, and 48 of them are officially listed as "Berkeley's Nobel Laureates" by UC Berkeley for being graduates, current faculty members, or deceased faculty who retired at Berkeley. Among the 107 laureates, 34 are Berkeley alumni, and 40 have been long-term academic members of the Berkeley faculty or Berkeley-affiliated research organizations. Subject-wise, 33 laureates have won the Nobel Prize in Physics, more than any other subject. In addition, Linus Pauling is the only UC Berkeley-affiliated Nobel laureate to win two Nobel prizes: he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962; since this is a list of laureates, not prizes, he is counted only once.
Inclusion criteria
General rules
The university affiliations in this list are all official academic affiliations such as degree programs and official academic employment. Non-academic affiliations such as advisory committee and administrative staff are generally excluded. The official academic affiliations fall into three categories: 1) Alumni Long-term Academic Staff, and 3) Short-term Academic Staff. Graduates are defined as those who hold Bachelor's, Master's, Doctorate, or equivalent degrees from Berkeley, while attendees are those who formally enrolled in a degree program at Berkeley but did not complete the program; thus, honorary degrees, posthumous degrees, summer attendees, exchange students, and auditing students are excluded. The category of "Long-term Academic Staff" consists of tenure/tenure-track and equivalent academic positions, while that of "Short-term Academic Staff" consists of lecturers, postdoctoral researchers, visiting professors/scholars, and equivalent academic positions. At Berkeley, the specific academic title solely determines the type of affiliation, regardless of the actual time the position was held by a laureate.Further explanations on "visitors" under "Short-term Academic Staff" are presented as follows. 1) All informal or personal visits are excluded from the list; 2) all employment-based visiting positions, which carry teaching/research duties, are included as affiliations in the list; 3) as for award/honor-based visiting positions, to minimize controversy this list takes a conservative view and includes the positions as affiliations only if the laureates were required to assume employment-level duty or the laureates specifically classified the visiting positions as "affiliation" or similar in reliable sources such as their curriculum vita. To be specific, some award/honor-based visiting positions such as the "Charles M. and Martha Hitchcock Lectureship" at UC Berkeley are awards/honors without employment-level duty. In particular, attending meetings and giving public lectures, talks or non-curricular seminars at UC Berkeley is not a form of employment-level duty. Finally, summer visitors are generally excluded from the list unless summer work yielded significant end products such as research publications and components of Nobel-winning work, since summer terms are not part of formal academic years; the same rule applies to UC Berkeley Extension.
| Name | Noble Prize | Year | Role in University of California, Berkeley |
| John Gurdon | Physiology or Medicine | 2012 | 2006 Hitchcock Lecturer |
| Irwin Rose | Chemistry | 2004 | Possible attendee and visitor |
| James Heckman | Economics | 2000 | 1974 Summer researcher |
| Hans Bethe | Physics | 1967 | 1942 Summer researcher |
| George Wald | Physiology or Medicine | 1967 | 1956 Summer researcher |
| Joshua Lederberg | Physiology or Medicine | 1958 | 1950 Summer researcher |
| Alexander R. Todd | Chemistry | 1957 | 1957 Hitchcock Lecturer |
| Peter Debye | Chemistry | 1936 | 1932 Hitchcock Lecturer |
| Irving Langmuir | Chemistry | 1932 | 1946 Hitchcock Lecturer |
| Ernest Rutherford | Chemistry | 1908 | 1901 Summer school lecturer |
| William Ramsay | Chemistry | 1904 | 1904 Summer school lecturer |
| Svante A. Arrhenius | Chemistry | 1903 | 1904 Summer school lecturer |
Affiliated organizations
Nobel laureates who were affiliates of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory before 1971 are included in the following list. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was established by Ernest Lawrence in 1931. It was called the "University of California Radiation Laboratory" in the beginning, and shortly after Ernest Lawrence passed away in 1958, the lab was renamed as the "Ernest O. Lawrence Radiation Laboratory". In 1952, Lawrence Radiation Lab established a branch in Livermore, California. The entire Lawrence Radiation Lab was widely regarded as a part of the University of California, Berkeley. In 1971, the Livermore branch became its own separate laboratory and was renamed "Lawrence Livermore Laboratory". At the same time, the original site in Berkeley was renamed "Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory". Both laboratories were regarded as a part of the University of California, and thus their affiliates are not included in this list. Finally, the Lawrence Livermore Lab becomes a national laboratory of the U.S Department of Energy in 1981 and was renamed "Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory", and in 1995 the Lawrence Berkeley Lab became a national laboratory of DOE and was renamed "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory".Nobel laureates who were affiliates of Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1947 to 1952 are included in the following list. Even though the laboratory was officially managed by the University of California, Berkeley after its establishment in 1943, the initial appointments in the lab were for secret military purposes only and were not academic appointments, and thus these war-time positions are excluded from this list. After the Manhattan Project the lab was renamed "Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory" on January 1, 1947, and in 1952 the lab became officially managed by the University of California when the latter was separated from UC Berkeley. In 1981, the lab was renamed "Los Alamos National Laboratory" as a national lab of U.S. Department of Energy.
Summary
In the following list, the number following a person's name is the year they received the prize; in particular, a number with asterisk means the person received the award while they were working at UC Berkeley. A name underlined implies that this person has already been listed in a previous category.| Alumni | Long-term academic staff | Short-term academic staff | |
| Physics |
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| Chemistry | |||
| Physiology or Medicine | |||
| Economics | |||
| Literature | |||
| Peace |