Stanford Alumni

A huge list of famous and influential men and women have been student's at Stanford. Here is the large and complete list coming from Stanford's very own website.

Academic leaders

William Brody, Salk Institute president, Nancy Cantor, Syracuse chancellor and president; Michael Drake, UC-Irvine chancellor, Pamela Eibeck, University of the Pacific president; Vartan Gregorian, Carnegie Corporation president; and the Rev. William Leahy, Boston College president.

Arts and entertainment

Actors Andre Braugher, Jennifer Connelly and Sigourney Weaver; artists Richard Diebenkorn* and Robert Motherwell*; broadcasters Gretchen Carlson, Ted Koppel and Rachel Maddow; composer David Lang; directors David Chase, Alexander Payne and Jay Roach; pianist Jon Nakamatsu; producers David Brown*, Gale Anne Hurd, Edward Pressman and Richard Zanuck.*

Athletics

Baseball players Mike Mussina and Jack McDowell; football players John Elway, Toby Gerhart, Andrew Luck, John Lynch, Jim Plunkett and Richard Sherman; basketball players Jason Collins, Brook and Robin Lopez, Nneka Ogwumike and Candace Wiggins; golfers Tom Watson and Tiger Woods; Olympians Jennifer Azzi, Janet Evans, Julie Foudy, Eric Heiden, Bob Mathias*, Pablo Morales, Jessica Mendoza, Summer Sanders, Kerri Strug, Jenny Thompson and Kerri Walsh; and tennis players Bob and Mike Bryan and John McEnroe.

Business

Steve Ballmer (Microsoft), Jeffrey Bewkes (Time Warner), Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google), Doris Fisher (Gap), Reed Hastings (Netflix), William Hewlett* and David Packard* (Hewlett-Packard), Konstantin Guericke and Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Phil Knight (Nike), Marissa Mayer (Yahoo), Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla and Andy Bechtolsheim (Sun Microsystems), Azim Premji (Wipro), Charles R. Schwab, (Charles Schwab Corp.), Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger (Instagram), Peter Thiel (PayPal) and Jerry Yang and David Filo (Yahoo).

Government

U.S. president Herbert Hoover*; Supreme Court justices Stephen Breyer, Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor and William Rehnquist*; U.S. senators Max Baucus, Cory Booker, Dianne Feinstein, Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden; Susan Rice, U.S. National Security Adviser; Penny Pritzker, U.S. Secretary of Commerce; Mohammed Waheed Hassan, president of the Maldives; former Israel Prime Minister Ehud Barak; and mayor Julian Castro of San Antonio, Texas.

Science and engineering

Inventors Vinton Cerf (the Internet protocol), John Chowning (synthesizer), Ray Dolby* (noise-reduction system), Ted Hoff (microprocessor), Ted Maiman* (laser), Brad Parkinson (GPS), and Brent Townshend (56K modem); Nobel Prize winners Dudley Herschbach, Roger Kornberg and K. Barry Sharpless (chemistry) and Eric Cornell, Richard E. Taylor and Carl Wieman (physics).

Creative writing

Novelists Michael Cunningham, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ernest Gaines, Allegra Goodman, Alice Hoffman, Ken Kesey*, Nicole Krauss, N. Scott Momaday, John Steinbeck*, Vikram Seth, Scott Turow, Jessamyn West and Tobias Wolff; playwrights David Henry Hwang and Mark Medoff; poets laureate Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky.

And more

Episcopal presiding bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori; Nobel Prize-winning economists Al Roth and Oliver E. Williamson; statistician Edward Tufte; philanthropic leaders Jeffrey Skoll (Skoll Foundation), Jeff Raikes (The Gates Foundation) and Jessica Jackley and Matt Flannery (Kiva); Internet pioneer Stewart Brand, Mozilla Firefox developer Blake Ross; surgeon Atul Gawande; vintners Paul Draper and Robert Mondavi*; and 17 astronauts, including first American woman in space Sally Ride*.