List of lay Catholic scientists

Lay Catholic scientists

A

• Maria Gaetana Agnesi – mathematician who wrote on differential and integral calculus
• Georgius Agricola – father of mineralogy
• Ulisse Aldrovandi – father of natural history
• Rudolf Allers – Austrian psychiatrist; the only Catholic member of Sigmund Freud's first group, later a critic of Freudian psychoanalysis
• Alois Alzheimer – credited with identifying the first published case of presenile dementia, which is now known as Alzheimer's disease
• André-Marie Ampère – one of the main discoverers of electromagnetism
• Leopold Auenbrugger – first to use percussion as a diagnostic technique in medicine
• Adrien Auzout – astronomer who contributed to the development of the telescopic micrometer
• Amedeo Avogadro – Italian scientist noted for contributions to molecular theory and Avogadro's Law

B

• Jacques Babinet – French physicist, mathematician, and astronomer who is best known for his contributions to optics
• Eva von Bahr Swedish physicist and first female docent in Sweden
• Stefan Banach – Polish mathematician, founder of modern functional analysis
• Stephen M. Barr – professor emeritus in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Delaware and a member of its Bartol Research Institute; founding president of the Society of Catholic Scientists
• Joachim Barrande – French geologist and paleontologist who studied fossils from the Lower Palaeozoic rocks of Bohemia
• Laura Bassi – physicist at the University of Bologna and Chair in experimental physics at the Bologna Institute of Sciences, the first woman to be offered a professorship at a European university
• Antoine César Becquerel – pioneer in the study of electric and luminescent phenomena
• Henri Becquerel – awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his co-discovery of radioactivity
• Carlo Beenakker – professor at Leiden University and leader of the university's mesoscopic physics group, established in 1992.
• Giovanni Battista Belzoni – prolific Italian explorer and pioneer archaeologist of Egyptian antiquities
• Pierre-Joseph van Beneden – Belgian zoologist and paleontologist who established one of the world's first marine laboratories and aquariums
• Claude Bernard – physiologist who helped to apply scientific methodology to medicine
• Jacques Philippe Marie Binet – mathematician known for Binet's formula and his contributions to number theory
• Jean-Baptiste Biot – physicist who established the reality of meteorites and studied polarization of light
• Evelyn Livingston Billings – Australian pediatrician; co-developed the Billings ovulation method with her husband, John Billings
• John Billings – Australian neurologist; co-developed the Billings ovulation method with his wife, Evelyn Livingston Billings
• John Birmingham (astronomer) – Irish astronomer who discovered the recurrent nova T Coronae Borealis and revised and extended Schjellerup's Catalogue of Red Stars
• Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville – zoologist and anatomist who coined the term paleontology and described several new species of reptiles
• Giovanni Alfonso Borelli – often referred to as the father of modern biomechanics
• Raoul Bott – mathematician known for numerous basic contributions to geometry in its broad sense
• Marcella Boveri – biologist and first woman to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, husband of Theodor Boveri
• Theodor Boveri – first to hypothesize the cellular processes that cause cancer
• Louis Braille – inventor of the Braille reading and writing system
• Edouard Branly – inventor and physicist known for his involvement in wireless telegraphy and his invention of the Branly coherer
• James Britten – botanist, member of the Catholic Truth Society and Knight Commander of the Order of St. Gregory the Great
• Hermann Brück – Astronomer Royal for Scotland from 1957–1975; honored by Pope John Paul II
• Mary Brück – Irish astronomer and historian of astronomy
• Albert Brudzewski – first to state that the Moon moves in an ellipse

C

• Nicola Cabibbo – Italian physicist, discoverer of the universality of weak interactions, President of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences from 1993 until his death
• Alexis Carrel – awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for pioneering vascular suturing techniques
• John Casey (mathematician) – Irish geometer known for Casey's theorem
• Giovanni Domenico Cassini – first to observe four of Saturn's moons and the co-discoverer of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter
• Augustin-Louis Cauchy – mathematician who was an early pioneer in analysis
• Andrea Cesalpino – botanist who also theorized on the circulation of blood
• Jean-François Champollion – published the first translation of the Rosetta Stone
• Michel Chasles – mathematician who elaborated on the theory of modern projective geometry and was awarded the Copley Medal
• Guy de Chauliac – most eminent surgeon of the Middle Ages
• Chien-jen Chen – Taiwanese epidemiologist researching hepatitis B, liver cancer risk of people with hepatitis B, link of arsenic to, etc.
• Michel Eugène Chevreul – considered one of the major figures in the early development of organic chemistry; stated "Those who know me also know that born a Catholic, the son of Christian parents, I live and I mean to die a Catholic"
• Agnes Mary Clerke – Irish astronomer and science educator
• Mateo Realdo Colombo – discovered the pulmonary circuit, which paved the way for Harvey's discovery of circulation
• Arthur W. Conway – remembered for his application of biquaternion algebra to the special theory of relativity
• E. J. Conway – Irish biochemist known for works pertaining to electrolyte physiology and analytical chemistry
• Carl Ferdinand Cori – shared the 1947 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with his wife for their discovery of the Cori cycle
• Gerty Cori – biochemist who was the first American woman win a Nobel Prize in science
• Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis – formulated laws regarding rotating systems, which later became known as the Coriolis effect
• Domenico Cotugno – Italian anatomist who discovered the nasopalatine nerve, demonstrated the existence of the labyrinthine fluid, and formulated a theory of resonance and hearing, among other important contributions
• Angélique du Coudray – head midwife at the Hôtel-Dieu, Paris, inventor of the first lifesize obstetrical mannequin, and author of an early midwifery textbook; commissioned by Louis XV to teach midwifery to rural women, she taught over 30,000 students over almost three decades
• Maurice Couette – best known for his contributions to rheology and the theory of fluid flow; appointed a Knight of the Order of St. Gregory the Great by Pope Pius XI in 1925
• Charles-Augustin de Coulomb – physicist known for developing Coulomb's law
• Clyde Cowan – co-discoverer of the neutrino
• Jean Cruveilhier – made important contributions to the study of the nervous system and was the first to describe the lesions associated with multiple sclerosis; originally planned to enter the priesthood
• Endre Czeizel – discovered that folic acid prevents or reduces the formation of more serious developmental disorders, such as neural tube defects like spina bifida

D

• Gabriel Auguste Daubrée – pioneer in the application of experimental methods to the study of diverse geologic phenomena
• Peter Debye – awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1936 "for his contributions to our knowledge of molecular structure through his investigations on dipole moments and on the diffraction of X-rays and electrons in gases."
• Piedad de la Cierva – Spanish scientist, pioneer in the study of artificial radiation in Spain and in the industrialization of optical glass.
• Charles Enrique Dent – British biochemist who defined new amino-acid diseases such as various forms of Fanconi syndrome, Hartnup disease, argininosuccinic aciduria and homocystinuria
• César-Mansuète Despretz – chemist and physicist who investigated latent heat, the elasticity of vapors, the compressibility of liquids, and the density of gases
• Máirin de Valéra Irish botanist; deeply Catholic, attending daily Mass whenever possible
• Peter Dodson – American paleontologist at the University of Pennsylvania; co-editor of The Dinosauria, widely considered the definitive scholarly reference on dinosaurs
• Ignacy Domeyko – Polish scientist who made major contributions to the study of Chile's geography, geology, and mineralogy
• Christian Doppler – Austrian physicist and mathematician who enunciated the Doppler effect
• Pierre Duhem – historian of science who made important contributions to hydrodynamics, elasticity, and thermodynamics
• Félix Dujardin – biologist remembered for his research on protozoans and other invertebrates; became a devout Catholic later in life and was known to read The Imitation of Christ
• Jean-Baptiste Dumas – chemist who established new values for the atomic mass of thirty elements
• André Dumont – Belgian geologist who prepared the first geological map of Belgium and named many of the subdivisions of the Cretaceous and Tertiary
• Charles Dupin – mathematician who discovered the Dupin cyclide and the Dupin indicatrix

E

• Stephan Endlicher – botanist who formulated a major system of plant classification
• Bartolomeo Eustachi – one of the founders of human anatomy

F

• Jean-Henri Fabre – naturalist, entomologist, and science writer; "The Homer of Insects"
• Hieronymus Fabricius – father of embryology
• Gabriele Falloppio – pioneering Italian anatomist who studied the human ear and reproductive organs
• Mary Celine Fasenmyer – religious sister and mathematician, founder of Sister Celine's polynomials
• Hervé Faye – astronomer whose discovery of the periodic comet 4P/Faye won him the 1844 Lalande Prize and membership in the French Academy of Sciences
• Pierre de Fermat – number theorist who contributed to the early development of calculus
• Jean Fernel – physician who introduced the term physiology
• Fibonacci – popularized Hindu-Arabic numerals in Europe and discovered the Fibonacci sequence
• Hippolyte Fizeau – first person to determine experimentally the velocity of light
• Lawrence Flick – American physician who pioneered research and treatment of tuberculosis
• Emily Fortey – British chemist and politician who investigated synthetic cyclohexane and cyclohexane in fractions of crude oil; converted to Catholicism in 1884
• Philip G. Fothergill FRSE – British biologist and historian of science
• Léon Foucault – invented the Foucault pendulum to measure the effect of the Earth's rotation
• Joseph von Fraunhofer – discovered Fraunhofer lines in the Sun's spectrum
• Augustin-Jean Fresnel – made significant contributions to the theory of wave optics
• Johann Nepomuk von Fuchs – confirmed the stoichiometric laws and observed isomorphism and the cation exchange of zeolites

G

• Galileo Galilei – Considered a father of observational astronomy, modern-era classical physics, the scientific method, and modern science.
• Luigi Galvani – formulated the theory of animal electricity
• Dorothy Annie Elizabeth Garrod – archaeologist specialised in the Palaeolithic period
• William Gascoigne – developed the first micrometer
• Paula González – religious sister and professor of biology
• Johannes Gutenberg – inventor of the printing press
• Paul Guthnick – astronomer who pioneered the application of photoelectric methods to the measurement of the brightness of celestial bodies

H

• Samuel Stehman Haldeman – American naturalist and convert to Catholicism who researched fresh-water mollusks, the human voice, Amerindian dialects, and the organs of sound of insects
• Jean Baptiste Julien d'Omalius d'Halloy – one of the pioneers of modern geology
• Morgan Hebard – American entomologist who described over 800 new species of orthopteroids and compiled an entomological collection of over 250,000 specimens
• Eduard Heis – astronomer who contributed the first true delineation of the Milky Way
• Jan Baptist van Helmont – founder of pneumatic chemistry
• Karl Herzfeld – Austrian-American physicist who provided the first fundamental explanation of the mechanism of the absorption of sound by molecules
• Victor Franz Hess – Austrian-American physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics, who discovered cosmic rays.
• George de Hevesy – Hungarian radiochemist and Nobel laureate
• Charles Hermite – mathematician who did research on number theory, quadratic forms, elliptic functions, and algebra
• John Philip Holland – developed the first submarine to be formally commissioned by the US Navy

J

• Antoine Laurent de Jussieu – first to propose a natural classification of flowering plants

K

• Karl Kehrle – Benedictine Monk of Buckfast Abbey, England; beekeeper; world authority on bee breeding, developer of the Buckfast bee
• Mary Kenneth Keller – Sister of Charity and first American woman to earn a PhD in computer science
• Annie Chambers Ketchum – convert to Catholicism and botanist who published Botany for academies and colleges: consisting of plant development and structure from seaweed to clematis
• Marie-Victorin Kirouac – Christian Brother and botanist best known as the father of the Jardin botanique de Montréal
• Brian Kobilka – American Nobel Prize winning professor who teaches at Stanford University School of Medicine
• Karl Kreil – meteorologist and astronomer who conducted important studies of terrestrial magnetism
• Stephanie Kwolek – chemist who developed Kevlar at DuPont in 1965

L

• René Laennec – physician who invented the stethoscope
• Laurent Lafforgue – mathematician, winner of Fields Medal
• Joseph Louis Lagrange – mathematician and astronomer known for Lagrangian points and Lagrangian mechanics
• Jean-Baptiste Lamarck – French naturalist, biologist and academic whose theories on evolution preceded those of Darwin
• Johann von Lamont – astronomer and physicist who studied the magnetism of the Earth and was the first to calculate the mass of Uranus
• Karl Landsteiner – Nobel Prize winner who identified and classified the human blood types
• Pierre André Latreille – pioneer in entomology
• Antoine Lavoisier – father of modern chemistry
• Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier – working with her husband, she was instrumental to the standardization of the scientific method.
• Claude-Nicolas Le Cat – invented or perfected several instruments for lithotomy and was one of the first adherents of a mechanistic approach to physiology
• Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon – one of the pioneers of natural history, especially through his monumental Histoire Naturelle
• Xavier Le Pichon – French geophysicist; known for his comprehensive model of plate tectonics, helping create the field of plate tectonics
• Jérôme Lejeune – pediatrician and geneticist, best known for his discovery of the link of diseases to chromosome abnormalities
• Jacques Jean Lhermitte – French neurologist and neuropsychiatrist; clinical director at the Salpêtrière Hospital
• André Lichnerowicz – French differential geometer and mathematical physicist considered the founder of modern Poisson geometry
• Karl August Lossen – geologist who mapped and described the Harz Mountains
• Jonathan Lunine – planetary scientist at the forefront of research into planet formation, evolution, and habitability; serves as vice-president of the Society of Catholic Scientists

M

• William James MacNeven – Irish-American physician and chemist who was an early proponent of atomic theory
• Juan Martín Maldacena – Argentine theoretical physicist, first Carl P. Feinberg Professor of Theoretical Physics in the Institute for Advanced Study's School of Natural Sciences, and first proponent of AdS/CFT correspondence
• Marcello Malpighi – father of comparative physiology
• Anna Morandi Manzolini – anatomist and anatomical wax artist who lectured at the University of Bologna
• Giovanni Manzolini – anatomical wax artist and Professor of anatomy at the University of Bologna
• Guglielmo Marconi – father of wireless technology and radio transmission
• Luigi Ferdinando Marsili – one of the founders of modern oceanography
• Pierre Louis Maupertuis – known for the Maupertuis principle and for being the first president of the Berlin Academy of Science
• Agnes McLaren – Scottish physician who inspired other women to dedicate their medical knowledge to the care of the poor. First female to graduate as medical doctor from the University of Montpellier.
• Michele Mercati – one of the first to recognize prehistoric stone tools as man-made
• Charles W. Misner – American cosmologist dedicated to the study of general relativity
• Kenneth R. Miller – American cell biologist and molecular biologist who teaches at Brown University
• Mario J. Molina – Mexican chemist, one of the precursors to the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole
• John J. Montgomery – American physicist and inventor of gliders and aerodynamics
• Giovanni Battista Morgagni – father of modern anatomical pathology
• Helmut Moritz – Austrian physical geodesist internationally known for fundamental work on error propagation in geodesy
• Marston Morse – inventor of Morse Theory, one of the original members of the Institute for Advanced Study
• Johannes Peter Müller – founder of modern physiology
• Joseph Murray – Nobel Prize in Medicine laureate

N

• John von Neumann – Hungarian-born American mathematician and polymath who converted to Catholicism
• Charles Nicolle – French bacteriologist who received the 1928 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his identification of lice as the transmitter of epidemic typhus; came back to the Catholic Church at the end of his life
• Martin Nowak – evolutionary theorist and Director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University; serves on the board of the Society of Catholic Scientists

O

• Niall Ó Glacáin – Irish physician who worked to treat victims of bubonic plague outbreaks in various places throughout Europe. He was a pioneer in pathological anatomy.
• Karin Öberg – her Öberg Astrochemistry Group discovered the first complex organic molecule in a protoplanetary disk; serves on the board of the Society of Catholic Scientists
• Abraham Ortelius – created the first modern atlas and theorized on continental drift
• Jean-Michel Oughourlian – Armenian-French neuropsychiatrist and psychologist; President of the Association of Doctors of the American Hospital of Paris; honorary member of the Association Recherches Mimétiques

P

• Blaise Pascal – French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and philosopher
• Louis Pasteur – father of bacteriology
• Pierre Joseph Pelletier – co-discovered strychnine, caffeine, quinine, cinchonine, among many other discoveries in chemistry
• Georg von Peuerbach – called the father of mathematical and observational astronomy in the West
• Gabrio Piola – Italian physicist and mathematician who made fundamental contributions to continuum mechanics
• Giambattista della Porta – Italian polymath, made contributions to agriculture, hydraulics, military engineering, and pharmacology
• Pierre Puiseux – French astronomer who created a photographic atlas of the Moon

R

• Giancarlo Rastelli – pioneering cardiac surgeon at the Mayo Clinic who developed the Rastelli procedure; he is a Servant of God in the Catholic Church
• René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur – scientific polymath known especially for his study of insects
• Francesco Redi – his experiments with maggots were a major step in overturning the idea of spontaneous generation
• Henri Victor Regnault – chemist with two laws governing the specific heat of gases named after him
• Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro – one of the founders of tensor calculus
• Norbert Rillieux – French-speaking Creole, one of the earliest chemical engineers and inventory of the multiple-effect evaporator
• Gilles de Roberval – mathematician who studied the geometry of infinitesimals and was one of the founders of kinematic geometry
• Clemens C. J. Roothaan – physicist known for developing the Roothaan equations
• Frederick Rossini – Priestley Medal and Laetare Medal-winning chemist
• Paolo Ruffini – Italian mathematician who contributed to the Abel–Ruffini theorem and described Ruffini's rule

S

• Paul Sabatier (chemist) – awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work improving the hydrogenation of organic species in the presence of metals
• Adhémar Jean Claude Barré de Saint-Venant – remembered for Saint-Venant's principle, Saint-Venant's theorem, and Saint-Venant's compatibility condition; given the title Count by Pope Pius IX in 1869
• Theodor Schwann – founder of the theory of the cellular structure of animal organisms
• Ignaz Semmelweis – early pioneer of antiseptic procedures, discoverer of the cause of puerperal fever
• J. Wolfgang Smith – mathematician, physicist, and philosopher of science
• Anne-Marie Staub – French biochemist and chemist. Worked on Bacillus anthracis, the pathogen causing Anthrax.
• George Sperti – inventor of Preparation H hemorrhoid medication, the Sperti Ultraviolet Lamp, and Aspercreme; co-founder of the Institutum Divi-Thomae and of the Basic Science Research Laboratory of the University of Cincinnati
• Horatio Storer – physician; founder of the Gynaecological Society of Boston, the first medical society devoted exclusively to gynecology; leader of the "physicians' crusade against abortion"
• Karl Stern – German-Canadian neurologist and psychiatrist; lecturer in neuropathology and assistant neuropathologist at the Montreal Neurological Institute
• Miriam Michael Stimson – American Adrian Dominican Sister, chemist, and the second woman to lecture at the Sorbonne; played a role in the history of understanding DNA
• Jadwiga Szeptycka – Polish archeologist and writer

T

• Louis Jacques Thénard – discovered hydrogen peroxide and contributed to the discovery of boron
• Leonardo Torres Quevedo – Spanish civil engineer, inventor and mathematician who was a pioneer in automatic calculating machines and remote control.
• Evangelista Torricelli – inventor of the barometer
• Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli – Italian mathematician, astronomer and cosmographer
• Richard Towneley – mathematician and astronomer whose work contributed to the formulation of Boyle's Law
• Louis René Tulasne – biologist with several genera and species of fungi named after him

V

• Máirin de Valéra – Irish botanist, expert in phycology
• Louis Nicolas Vauquelin – discovered the chemical element beryllium
• Urbain Le Verrier – mathematician who predicted the discovery of Neptune
• Andreas Vesalius – father of modern human anatomy
• François Viète – father of modern algebra
• Leonardo da Vinci – Renaissance anatomist, scientist, mathematician, and painter
• Vincenzo Viviani – mathematician known for Viviani's theorem, Viviani's curve and his work in determining the speed of sound
• Alessandro Volta – physicist known for the invention of the battery

W

• Wilhelm Heinrich Waagen – geologist and paleontologist who provided the first example of evolution described from the geologic record, after studying Jurassic ammonites
• James Joseph Walsh – dean and professor of nervous diseases and of the history of medicine at Fordham University; Laetare Medal recipient
• Karl Weierstrass – often called the father of modern analysis
• Anna Wierzbicka – linguist, founder of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage, based at the Australian National University, her research was cited more than 41,000 times
• E. T. Whittaker – English mathematician who made contributions to applied mathematics and mathematical physics
• Fr. Thomas Van Winkle - American nuclear scientist who helped on the Manhattan project then later became a priest.
• Johann Joachim Winckelmann – one of the founders of scientific archaeology
• Bertram Windle – anthropologist, physician, and former president of University College Cork
• Jacob B. Winslow – convert to Catholicism who was regarded as the greatest European anatomist of his day

Z

• Antonino Zichichi – Italian nuclear physicist, former President of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare
• Gregory Zilboorg – Ukrainian-American psychiatrist and historian of psychiatry