List of City College of New York alumni
# 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 (1999-2013).

### 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
* Suzanne DiMaggio - long-time analyst of U.S. Foreign Policy in Asia and the Middle East
* 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 (did not graduate)
* 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
* Milton Leitenberg 1955 - American arms control expert
* Guillermo Linares 1975 – first Dominican-American New York City Council member
* Colin Powell – United States Secretary of State (2001–2005); Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989–1993) and U.S. Army General; National Security Advisor (1987–1989)
* 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
* Marilyn Zayas 1965 - Judge, Ohio's First District Court of Appeals

### 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 (The Wizard of Oz, Finian's Rainbow)
* Judd Hirsch 1960 – actor
* Alvin Hollingsworth - painter, co-organizer of African American artist contributors to 1963 March on Washington, and early comic book artist
* Ernest Lehman 1937 (BS) – screenwriter (North by Northwest, The Sound of Music, Sweet Smell of Success, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)
* 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 (his character, Toby Ziegler, also attended CCNY)
* 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 (BA) – 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 (1952)
* 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 (1906)
* Robert Sobel 1951 BSS, 1952 MA – best-selling author of business histories
* Gary Weiss 1975 – investigative journalist; author of Born to Steal (2003) and Wall Street Versus America (2006)

### 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 (National Security Agency) 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 (1966-1990)

### 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
