List of Cornell University faculty

Nobel laureates

Chemistry

• Peter Debye — Chemistry 1936; National Medal of Science
• Manfred Eigen — Chemistry 1967
• Richard R. Ernst — Chemistry 1991
• Paul Flory — Chemistry 1974; National Medal of Science
• Otto Hahn — Chemistry 1944
• Gerhard Herzberg — Chemistry 1971
• Roald Hoffmann — Chemistry 1981; National Medal of Science
• Linus Pauling — Chemistry 1954; the bulk of his most influential scientific book The Nature of the Chemical Bond was completed while he was at Cornell and was published by Cornell University Press in 1939
• James B. Sumner — Chemistry 1946
• Henry Taube — Chemistry 1983; National Medal of Science
• Vincent du Vigneaud — Chemistry 1955; Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research

Peace, Literature, or Economics

• Norman Borlaug — Peace 1970; National Medal of Science
• Linus Pauling — Peace 1962
• Octavio Paz — Literature 1990
• Amartya Sen — Economics 1998; National Humanities Medal
• Wole Soyinka — Literature 1986
• Richard Thaler — Economics 2017; member of the National Academy of Sciences

Physics

• Hannes Alfvén — Physics 1970
• Hans Bethe — Physics 1967; National Medal of Science
• Richard Feynman — Nobel Prize in Physics 1965; National Medal of Science
• Pierre-Gilles de Gennes — Physics 1991
• Brian D. Josephson — Physics 1973
• David Lee — Physics 1996
• Anthony James Leggett — Physics 2003; Wolf Prize in Physics
• Roger Penrose — Physics 2020
• Robert Coleman Richardson — Physics 1996
• John Robert Schrieffer — Physics 1972; National Medal of Science
• George Paget Thomson — Physics 1937
• Kip Thorne — Physics 2017
• Kenneth G. Wilson — Physics 1982; Wolf Prize in Physics

Physiology or Medicine

• James P. Allison — Physiology or Medicine 2018, Wolf Prize in Medicine
• Robert F. Furchgott — Physiology or Medicine 1998
• Herbert Spencer Gasser — Physiology or Medicine 1944
• Paul Greengard — Physiology or Medicine 2000
• Haldan Keffer Hartline — Physiology or Medicine 1967
• Robert W. Holley — Physiology or Medicine 1968
• Har Gobind Khorana — Physiology or Medicine 1968; National Medal of Science
• Fritz Albert Lipmann — Physiology or Medicine 1953; National Medal of Science
• Peter Medawar — Physiology or Medicine 1960
• Harold E. Varmus — Physiology or Medicine 1989; National Medal of Science

MacArthur awards

• Archie Randolph Ammons — poetry 1981
• William Dichtel — Chemistry 2015
• Craig Fennie — materials science 2013
• Mitchell J. Feigenbaum — physics 1984; Wolf Prize in Physics, member of the National Academy of Sciences and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Alice Fulton — poetry 1991
• Deborah Estrin — computer science 2018; member of the National Academy of Engineering
• Henry Louis Gates Jr. — literary critic ; National Humanities Medal recipient
• Paul Ginsparg — physics 2002
• Jon Kleinberg — computer science 2005
• Stephen Lee — chemistry 1993
• Michal Lipson — optical physics 2010; member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Robert Parris Moses — educator and philosopher
• Rebecca J. Nelson — plant pathologist
• Sheila Nirenberg — neuroscience 2013
• Margaret W. Rossiter — historian of science 1989
• Gregory Vlastos — classicist and philosopher 1990

Sports

• Bob Blackman — member of the College Football Hall of Fame
• Charles E. Courtney — rower and rowing coach
• Melody Davidson — head coach of the Canadian national women's hockey team and the Canadian 2006 Winter Olympics women's hockey team
• Hilary Gehman — two-time Olympian; six-time member of the U.S. national rowing team
• Edward Moylan — tennis player; gold medal winner at the 1955 Pan American Games with Art Larsen
• Nicole Ross — Olympic foil fencer; won the 2010 NCAA individual women's foil title
• Michel Sebastiani — Olympic fencing coach and member of the US Fencing Association Hall of Fame; his women’s team won the Intercollegiate Women's Fencing Association National Championship in 1967, 1968, and 1969, and his fencers also won the NIWFA individual title in 1968, and another won the NCAA men’s épée title in 1968
• Michael Slive — commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, 2002–15
• Phil Sykes — U.S. Olympic field hockey defender
• Al Walker — former basketball player and college coach, now a scout for the Detroit Pistons of the NBA

Education

• Arthur S. Adams — president of the University of New Hampshire ; president of the American Council on Education
• Charles Kendall Adams — president of the University of Wisconsin, 1892–1901
• John L. Anderson — president of the Illinois Institute of Technology, provost and university vice president of Case Western Reserve University, dean of the College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University ; member of the National Academy of Engineering and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
• Elisha Andrews — president of Denison University and Brown University ; chancellor of the University of Nebraska
• Sanford Soverhill Atwood — president of Emory University
• Sarah Gibson Blanding — president of Vassar College, 1946–1964
• Detlev Bronk — president of Johns Hopkins University and of the Rockefeller Institute; member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Robert F. Chandler — president of the University of New Hampshire ; winner of the World Food Prize, 1988
• James Mason Crafts — president of MIT, 1897–1900
• Cornelis W. de Kiewiet — president of the University of Rochester
• Lloyd Hartman Elliott — president of the University of Maine and George Washington University
• Thomas E. Everhart — chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, president of the California Institute of Technology ; member of the National Academy of Engineering and foreign fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering
• W. Kent Fuchs — president of the University of Florida, 2015-
• Richard H. Gallagher — president of Clarkson University and member of National Academy of Engineering
• Charles De Garmo — president of Swarthmore College
• Theodore L. Hullar — chancellor of UC Riverside and UC Davis
• Harry Burns Hutchins — president of the University of Michigan, 1909–1920
• William Rea Keast — president of Wayne State University, 1965–1971
• David C. Knapp — president of the University of Massachusetts
• Asa S. Knowles — president of the University of Toledo and of Northeastern University
• Edward H. Litchfield — twelfth chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh
• Carolyn Martin — chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, 2008–2011; president of Amherst College, 2011–
• Alan G. Merten — president of George Mason University
• John Niland — vice-chancellor and principal of the University of New South Wales, Australia
• Paul Olum — president of the University of Oregon, 1980–1989
• Russell K. Osgood — president of Grinnell College 1998–2010
• Robert A. Plane — president of Clarkson University and of Wells College
• Don Michael Randel — president of the University of Chicago, 2000–2006
• Charles Ashmead Schaeffer — president of the University of Iowa, 1887–1898
• Benjamin Ide Wheeler — president of the University of California, 1899–1919
• Roy A. Young — chancellor of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 1976–1980

Engineering and computer science

Computer science

• Robert L. Constable — Work connecting programs and mathematical proofs, especially the Nuprl system
• Richard W. Conway — industrial engineering, simulation, scheduling theory, PL/C and other programming languages and dialects for instructional use, first director of the Office of Computing Services
• R. Keith Dennis — Known for his work in algebraic K-theory
• Carla Gomes — Director of the Institute for Computational Sustainability
• Paul Ginsparg — developer of the arXiv e-print archive, MacArthur Award
• David Gries — author of The Science of Programming, 4 national education awards
• Joseph Halpern — computer scientist; recipient of the Gödel Prize, member of the National Academy of Engineering
• Juris Hartmanis — Turing Award recipient, 1993; member of the National Academy of Engineering
• John Hopcroft — Turing Award recipient, IEEE John von Neumann Medal recipient, member of the National Academy of Engineering and of the National Academy of Sciences
• Jon Kleinberg — MacArthur Award and Nevanlinna Prize, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences
• Dexter Kozen — computer scientist specializing in dynamic logic
• Trevor Pinch — Chair of the Science and Technology Studies department
• Gerard Salton — father of information retrieval; recipient of Guggenheim Fellowship, ASIS Award for Best Information Science Paper, Best Information Science Book, the first Gerard Salton Award for Outstanding Contributions to Information Retrieval, the Alexander von Humboldt Senior Science Award, the ASIS Award of Merit ; ACM Fellow
• David Shmoys — ACM Fellow and INFORMS Fellow, and recipient of the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize
• Fred B. Schneider — member of the National Academy of Engineering
• Éva Tardos — recipient of the Fulkerson Prize, the George B. Dantzig Prize and the Gödel Prize ; member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and of the Association for Computing Machinery
• Robert Tarjan — computer scientist and mathematician, known for discovering several graph algorithms, including Tarjan's off-line least common ancestors algorithm; co-inventor of splay trees and Fibonacci heaps; Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University; recipient of Turing Award
• Tim Teitelbaum — known for his early work on integrated development environments (IDEs), syntax-directed editing, and incremental computation
• David P. Williamson — Editor-in-chief of the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics; recipient of the Fulkerson Prize and the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize
• Theodore Paul Wright — aeronautical engineer and educator

Engineering

• Lynden Archer — member of the National Academy of Engineering
• Henry G. Booker — member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Lance Collins
• Susan Daniel
• Lov Grover
• Zygmunt Haas
• David A. Hammer
• Mark E. Lewis
• Chekesha Liddell
• Hod Lipson
• Michal Lipson — MacArthur Award, research into nanotech applications to optics
• Carlo Montemagno — "father of bionanotechnology"
• Christopher Ober
• Richard D. Robinson
• Britney Schmidt
• Peter C. Schultz — co-inventor of the fiber optics now used worldwide for telecommunications; member of the National Academy of Engineering, inductee to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, recipient of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation
• William R. Sears — notable aeronautical engineer and educator; member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Huili Grace Xing
• Fengqi You

Government, law, business

• Iajuddin Ahmed — president of Bangladesh, 2002–09
• Ifeoma Ajunwa — organizational behavior, law
• Alfred C. Aman Jr. — dean of Suffolk University Law School and Indiana University School of Law
• G. Robert Blakey — professor of law and director of the Cornell Institute on Organized Crime — author of the RICO statute and chief counsel to House Select Committee on Assassinations
• Herbert W. Briggs — prominent in international law
• George W. Casey Jr. — chief of staff of the United States Army, 2007–11; Commander of Multi-National Force — Iraq, 2004–07
• David J. Danelski — constitutional law, civil rights lawyer, University Ombudsman
• Michael J. Freeman — inventor; business consultant, behavior sciences
• Benjamin Ginsberg — American government
• Andrew Hacker — political scientist; questioned race, class, and gender in American society
• Harry George Henn
• Robert C. Hockett
• Charles Evans Hughes — governor of New York, 1907–10; U.S. Supreme Court associate justice, 1910–16; U.S. presidential candidate, 1916; U.S. secretary of state, 1921–25; chief justice of the United States, 1930–41
• Irving Ives — U.S. senator from New York, 1947–59; namesake of Ives Hall
• William A. Jacobson — attorney, Cornell Law School professor, and blogger
• Robert Jarrow — expert on derivative securities; co-developer of Heath-Jarrow-Morton framework and Jarrow-Turnbull model
• George McTurnan Kahin — expert on Southeast Asia and critic of the Vietnam War
• Alfred E. Kahn — advisor to President Jimmy Carter on deregulation; economist
• Peter J. Katzenstein — international relations; Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science
• Milton R. Konvitz — head of Liberian codification project
• Isaac Kramnick — English and American political thought and history; fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Theodore J. Lowi — American government and public policy; president of the American Political Science Association
• Cynthia McKinney — U.S. representative from Georgia, 1993–2003, 2005–2007
• Edwin Barber Morgan — U.S. Representative from New York, 1853–59; Director of American Express
• Robert Parris Moses — a leader of the Civil Rights Movement; creator of the Algebra Project; MacArthur "genius"
• John Nesheim — venture capitalist, teaches classes on entrepreneurship
• Richard Neustadt — political scientist specializing in the United States presidency; advised presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton
• Frances Perkins ; first female U.S. Cabinet member
• Aziz Rana
• Richard Rosecrance — international relations
• Clinton Rossiter — political scientist
• Myron Rush — the politics and foreign policy of the Soviet Union
• Frederick A. Sawyer — Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, 1873–74; Senator from South Carolina, 1968–73
• Martin Shefter — political scientist
• Arthur E. Sutherland Jr. — constitutional and commercial law expert and author; Harvard Law School professor
• Lynn Stout — Distinguished Professor of Corporate & Business Law
• Jessica Chen Weiss — Michael J. Zak Professor for China and Asia-Pacific Studies

Humanities

Architecture and design

• Esra Akcan — Michael A. McCarthy Professor
• Bristow Adams — journalist, professor, forester, illustrator
• Buckminster Fuller — architect and inventor, known for work with geodesic domes
• Romaldo Giurgola — architect, winner of the AIA Gold Medal
• Valerio Olgiati — architect and professor
• Colin Rowe — architectural historian and theoretician
• Oswald Mathias Ungers — architect
• Raphael Zuber — architect

Fine arts and photography

• Michael Ashkin — sculptor
• Jacqueline Livingston — feminist photographer
• Alison Lurie — Pulitzer Prize-winning author
• Jason Seley — sculptor

History

• Felix Adler — early 20th-century Jewish rationalist and social reformer
• Glenn C. Altschuler — Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies; Weiss Presidential Fellow; dean of the School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions at Cornell University
• Carl L. Becker — historian; namesake of Carl Becker House
• Martin Bernal — professor of modern Chinese history; author of Black Athena
• Sherman Cochran — Hu Shih Professor Emeritus of Chinese history
• David Brion Davis — 1967 Pulitzer Prize winner; scholar of slavery and American intellectual history; National Humanities Medal
• Anthony Grafton — a leading scholar of the Renaissance
• D. G. E. Hall — emeritus professor of Southeast Asian History
• Charles Henry Hull — professor of American History, dean of the Arts and Sciences College
• Donald Kagan — classicist; National Humanities Medal
• Michael Kammen — 1973 Pulitzer Prize winner; U.S. Constitution scholar
• Bernard Lewis — recipient of National Humanities Medal, Harvey Prize
• Mostafa Minawi — Ottoman History
• Benzion Netanyahu — professor emeritus of history at Cornell University; father of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
• Walter LaFeber — U.S. foreign policy historian
• Fredrik Logevall — — 2013 Pulitzer Prize winner
• Mary Beth Norton — American colonial history, women's history; fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, president of the American Historical Association
• Richard Polenberg — 20th-century American history
• Hunter R. Rawlings III — 10th president of Cornell University
• Joel H. Silbey — 19th century American history
• Goldwin Smith — historian; university reformer; namesake of Goldwin Smith Hall
• Carl Stephenson — early 20th-century medievalist
• John Szarkowski — photography curator, historian, and critic
• Eric Tagliacozzo — historian of modern Southeast Asia
• Herbert Tuttle — 19th-century historian, author
• Andrew Dickson White — first president of Cornell University; first president of the American Historical Association
• L. Pearce Williams — history of Western civilization, history of science
• O. W. Wolters — 20th-century historian of early Southeast Asia

Languages

• Herbert Deinert — emeritus professor of German Studies

Literature

• M. H. Abrams — author of the Mirror and the Lamp; literary critic; fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; recipient of National Humanities Medal
• Frederick Ahl — classics scholar
• Charles Edwin Bennett — classicist
• Thomas G. Bergin — author and translator
• Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen — author
• Hiram Corson — professor of literature
• Jonathan Culler — literary critic and theorist
• Louis Dyer — educator and author
• Roberto González Echevarría — literature critic; member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recipient of the National Humanities Medal
• Max Farrand — author of American historical subjects
• Emily Fridlund — author of History of Wolves
• Alice Fulton — poet, fiction writer, MacArthur Award
• Henry Louis Gates Jr. — Afro-American Studies scholar; MacArthur Fellow
• Robert Kaske — scholar of medieval literature
• Victor Lange — professor of modern languages
• Alison Lurie — fiction writer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
• Paul de Man — professor of Comparative Literature
• Vladimir Nabokov — author of the novel Lolita
• Adrienne Rich — feminist poet
• Noliwe Rooks — — interdisciplinary scholar
• Edgar Rosenberg — emeritus professor of English and Comparative Literature, awarded Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973
• William Sale Jr.
• Nathaniel Schmidt — American orientalist
• William De Witt Snodgrass — poet, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
• Melanie Thernstrom — author and freelance journalist
• Alvin Toffler — writer, sociologist, and futurist; Future Shock
• Helena Maria Viramontes — Chicana fiction writer
• Wendy Wasserstein — Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright

Music

• Malcolm Bilson — music historian
• David Borden — composer of minimalist music
• Donald Byrd — jazz trumpeter and educator
• Adolf Dahm-Petersen — voice specialist and teacher of artistic singing
• Karel Husa — composer best known for his Music for Prague 1968; won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for his String Quartet No. 3
• Hunter Johnson — composer
• Alejandro L. Madrid — musicologist and ethnomusicologist — recipient of the Dent Medal
• Wynton Marsalis — Classical and Jazz musician, composer
• James Thomas Quarles — organist and music educator
• Steven Stucky — Pulitzer Prize-winning composer

Philosophy

• Kwame Anthony Appiah — African Studies philosopher and novelist; National Humanities Medal
• Max Black
• Allan Bloom — philosophy and government, author of Closing of the American Mind, recipient of the National Humanities Medal
• Richard Boyd — philosopher of epistemology
• Judith Butler — philosophy 2003–2007; Andrew White Professor at Large
• Edwin Arthur Burtt — Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy in 1941, author of works on philosophy
• Harold F. Cherniss — author and expert on the philosophy of Ancient Greece
• Morris Raphael Cohen — Jewish philosopher, lawyer and legal scholar
• James Edwin Creighton — philosopher
• Werner J. Dannhauser — political philosophy, expert on Nietzsche and on Judaism and politics
• Terence Irwin
• Anthony Kenny
• Norman Kretzmann
• David Lyons —joint appointment in College of Arts and Sciences and School of Law
• Norman Malcolm — Ludwig Wittgenstein scholar
• Evander Bradley McGilvary — philosophical scholar
• John Rawls — philosopher; author of A Theory of Justice, Political Liberalism, and The Law of Peoples; National Humanities Medal ; namesake of Asteroid 16561 Rawls
• Sydney Shoemaker — philosopher and metaphysician
• Jason Stanley
• Brian Weatherson — philosopher, metaphysician
• Allen W. Wood — leading scholar on Kant

Media

Journalism, film, television, theatre

• John Cleese — comedian and actor
• David Feldshuh — playwright
• John Pilger — journalist and documentary filmmaker
• Amy Villarejo — researcher of feminist and queer media, critical theory, and television studies

Natural sciences and related fields

Astronomy

• Joseph A. Burns — dual appointment with the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
• James L. Elliot — astrophysicist; discoverer of the ring system of Uranus while at Cornell; discoverer of the atmosphere of Pluto
• Riccardo Giovanelli — Henry Draper Medal recipient
• Thomas Gold — astrophysicist, coined the term "magnetosphere"; member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Martha P. Haynes — Henry Draper Medal recipient, member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Jonathan Lunine — Harold C. Urey Prize recipient, member of the National Academy of Sciences, fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Geophysical Union
• Jean-Luc Margot — astronomer, awarded the H. C. Urey Prize by the American Astronomical Society, 2004
• Carl Sagan — space sciences
• Edwin Ernest Salpeter — astronomer; Crafoord Prize, member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Saul Teukolsky — theoretical astrophysicist and co-author of Numerical Recipes; member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Aleksander Wolszczan — discoverer of first extrasolar planets and pulsar planets

Biology, ecology, botany, and nutrition

• Louis Agassiz — zoologist, glaciologist, and geologist
• Liberty Hyde Bailey — botanist, early progenitor of the 4-H movement, namesake of Bailey Hall; member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Joan Jacobs Brumberg — scholar in adolescence, body image and eating disorders, and related fields
• T. Colin Campbell — nutritionist; director of the China Project;author of The China Study
• William Henry Chandler — botanist in pomology; member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Anna Botsford Comstock — nature studies, appointed first woman assistant professor at Cornell, full professor
• Derrill M. Daniel — US Army major general
• Thomas Eisner — pioneer of chemical ecology; member of the National Academy of Sciences, recipient of the National Medal of Science
• Rollins A. Emerson — member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Barton Warren Evermann — ichthyologist
• Claudia Fischbach James M. and Marsha McCormick Director of Biomedical Engineering and the Stanley Bryer 1946 Professor of Biomedical Engineering
• Martin Gibbs — member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Jane Goodall — naturalist
• Everett Peter Greenberg — American microbiologist who received the Shaw Prize in 2015; member of the National Academy of Sciences and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Donald Griffin — zoologist, member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Ann Hajek — entomologist
• Maria Harrison — plant biologist, member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Franz-Ulrich Hartl — director of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany ; recipient of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-Prize, Gairdner Foundation International Award, Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, Shaw Prize, etc., member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences
• Charles Frederick Hartt — Canadian-American geologist, palaeontologist and naturalist who specialized in the geology of Brazil
• Robert W. Howarth — biogeochemist
• Maria Jasin — member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences ; recipient of the Shaw Prize in Life Sciences
• William Tinsley Keeton — expert in animal navigation, namesake of William Keeton House
• Graham Kerr — chef, "The Galloping Gourmet"
• Simon A. Levin — Recipient of the National Medal of Science, Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, Kyoto Prize
• Gene Likens — ecologist; member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; recipient of National Medal of Science, Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award
• John T. Lis — Guggenheim Fellow, member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Yiqi Luo — Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor at the School of Integrative Plant Science, Soil and Crop Sciences
• Thomas Lyttleton Lyon − emeritus professor of Soils Science for the Department of Agriculture; co-winner of the Howard N. Potts Medal
• Jerrold Meinwald — chemical ecologist; member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society ; fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences ; recipient of the National Medal of Science
• Gero Miesenböck — recipient of the Brain Prize and BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award
• John Keith Moffat — Guggenheim Fellow, former associate professor in Biochemistry, Molecular, and Cell Biology at Cornell, later deputy provost at University of Chicago, noted for Advanced Photon Source and Time resolved crystallography
• Corrie Moreau — myrmecologist / ant researcher; fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Entomological Society of America fellow, Royal Entomological Society fellow
• Rebecca J. Nelson — MacArthur Fellow ; researcher in crop disease resistance
• Karl J. Niklas
• Katharine Payne — whale and elephant researcher
• David Peakall
• Pinstrup-Andersen Per — recipient of the World Food Prize
• Donald W. Roberts former adjunct professor, Department of Entomology and Department of Plant Pathology
• Wendell L. Roelofs — recipient of Alexander von Humboldt Award, Wolf Prize in Agriculture, National Medal of Science
• Benoît Roux from the Royal Society of Canada
• W. Mark Saltzman — member of the National Academy of Medicine and of the National Academy of Engineering
• John C. Sanford — inventor of the gene gun
• Harold Hill Smith — geneticist
• Steven D. Tanksley — plant breeding and agronomy researcher; recipient of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Award, Martin Gibbs Medal of the American Society of Plant Biologists, the Wolf Prize in Agriculture and the Japan Prize, member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Stanley Temple — avian ecologist
• Helen Turley — winemaker
• Herbert John Webber — plant physiologist, developed the citrange
• Robert Whittaker — vegetation ecologist; member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Burt Green Wilder — comparative anatomist
• Charles Edward Stevens — Fulbright Scholar and internationally recognized expert in the field of comparative physiology and digestive systems.
• Bruce Wallace — member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Hao Wu — member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Donald Zilversmit — nutritional biochemist; member of the National Academy of Sciences

Chemistry

• Héctor D. Abruña — member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Geoffrey W. Coates — member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the National Academy of Sciences
• Wilder Dwight Bancroft — physical chemist
• Thomas Bruice — member of the National Academy of Sciences
• James Crafts — president of MIT, 1897-1900
• Jean Fréchet — Japan Prize ; fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Chemical Society, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, member of National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering
• Gordon Hammes — member of the National Academy of Sciences
• James L. Hoard — National Academy of Sciences
• John R. Johnson — chemist; member of the National Academy of Sciences
• John Gamble Kirkwood — chemist
• Stephen Lee — MacArthur Award and Sloan Fellow
• Franklin A. Long — member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Jerrold Meinwald — member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, recipient of the National Medal of Science and Chemical Pioneer Award of the American Institute of Chemists
• Earl Muetterties — member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Gregory Petsko — member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Efraim Racker — founder of the biochemistry department at Cornell University; member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences; recipient of Warren Triennial Prize, National Medal of Science, Gairdner Award
• Frank Spedding — member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Benjamin Widom

Geology and geography

• Heinrich Ries — economic geologist
• Ralph Stockman Tarr — geographer

Mathematics

• Kenneth Brown — algebra, topology, group theory; fellow of the American Mathematical Society
• William J. Cook — university professor of the University of Waterloo, member of the National Academy of Engineering, American Mathematical Society fellow, INFORMS Fellow and SIAM fellow, recipient of the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize of INFORMS
• Eugene Dynkin — mathematician
• Walter T. Federer — statistician, fellow of American Statistical Association, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Royal Statistical Society, Institute of Mathematical Statistics
• Walter Feit — mathematician, co-author of the Feit–Thompson theorem
• William Feller — mathematician, known in probability theory; recipient of the National Medal of Science, member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Richard S. Hamilton — mathematician who laid groundwork for the Poincaré conjecture proof
• Allen Hatcher — mathematician, proved the Smale conjecture
• Kiyosi Itô — Wolf Prize in Mathematics and Kyoto Prize ; member of the National Academy of Sciences
• John Irwin Hutchinson — mathematician
• Mark Kac — member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Jack Kiefer — Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and member of the National Academy of Sciences; president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics
• Anthony W. Knapp — representation theory; fellow of the American Mathematical Society
• Saunders Mac Lane — developer of algebra's category theory; recipient of the National Medal of Science
• Greg Lawler — Wolf Prize in Mathematics recipient
• Kathryn Mann — mathematician
• Amy McCune — evolutionary biologist and senior associate dean of the Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
• Justin T. Moore — set theorist and logician, known for his solution to the problem of constructing an L-space.; recipient of the Young Scholar's Competition award in 2006, in Vienna, Austria
• Marston Morse — mathematician, known for Morse theory in differential topology; recipient of Bôcher Memorial Prize ; National Medal of Science
• George Nemhauser — president of the Operations Research Society of America; member of the National Academy of Engineering and recipient of John von Neumann Theory Prize
• Anil Nerode — mathematical logic; fellow of the American Mathematical Society ; longest tenure as active faculty member at Cornell in any discipline
• Piergiorgio Odifreddi — mathematician
• Paul Olum — mathematician, president of the University of Oregon 1980-89
• Joseph Slepian — mathematician
• Frank Spitzer — member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Robert Strichartz — mathematical analysis, fractals; fellow of the American Mathematical Society
• Steven Strogatz — mathematician
• Éva Tardos — mathematician, Guggeinheim fellow, winner of the Fulkerson Prize, 1988; member of the National Academy of Engineering
• William Thurston — mathematician; Fields Medal winner
• Charles F. Van Loan — mathematician
• Harry Vandiver — Cole Prize recipient ; member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Karen Vogtmann — mathematician, American Mathematical Society Fellow, Noether Lecturer, known for Culler–Vogtmann Outer space
• William C. Waterhouse — modern algebra, exposition, history of mathematics
• Jacob Wolfowitz — member of the National Academy of Sciences

Medicine

• Alexander Gordon Bearn — member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine
• Edward Boyse — member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellow of the Royal Society
• Eugene Floyd DuBois — member of the National Academy of Sciences
• James Ewing — pathologist; discovery of a form of malignant bone tumor that later became known as Ewing sarcoma
• Don W. Fawcett — member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Duane Gish — prominent for his advocacy of creationist theory
• Elvin A. Kabat — immunologist, member of the National Academy of Sciences and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; president of the American Association of Immunologists ; recipient of the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize and the National Medal of Science
• Robert Foster Kennedy — one of the first to use electroconvulsive treatment to treat psychosis; first to link shell shock and hysteria
• Bruce Lerman — cardiologist, chief of the Division of Cardiology and director of the Cardiac Electrophysiology Laboratory at Weill Cornell Medicine and the New York Presbyterian Hospital
• C. Walton Lillehei — American surgeon who pioneered open-heart surgery; recipient of the Harvey Prize, Gairdner Foundation International Award, Lasker Award
• Walsh McDermott — member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Agnes Claypole Moody — first woman appointed a position in the Medical Department
• Georgios Papanikolaou — inventor of the Pap smear test for cervical cancer
• Stephen J. Roberts — chairman of the Department of Large Animal Medicine, Obstetrics and Surgery, 1965-1966 and 1969-1972
• Juan Rosai — author and editor of a main textbook in surgical pathology; discoverer of several entities such as Rosai-Dorfman disease and desmoplastic small round cell tumor
• Alexander Rudensky — recipient of the Crafoord Prize in Polyarthritis ; member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Tom Shires — trauma surgeon; use of saline solution in shock
• Daniel Stern — studied early child development
• Ashutosh Tewari
• Theodore H. Schwartz
• Madelon Lubin Finkel
• Carl J. Wiggers — recipient of Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research; member of the National Academy of Sciences

Physics

• Neil Ashcroft — solid-state physicist and member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Robert Bacher — Manhattan Project leader and member of Atomic Energy Commission; member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Robert Brout — recipient of the Wolf Prize in Physics and Sakurai Prize for his significant contributions in elementary particle physics
• Dale R. Corson — as president, defused riots and armed stand-off in 1969
• Harold Craighead — applied physicist
• Persis Drell — particle physicist; director of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, dean of the Stanford University School of Engineering and provost of Stanford University
• Gene Dresselhaus — condensed matter physicist, 2022 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Physics Prize Recipient
• Freeman Dyson — physicist, mathematician; recipient of the Wolf Prize in Physics, Templeton Prize
• Mitchell Feigenbaum — physicist whose pioneering studies in chaos theory led to the discovery of the Feigenbaum constant
• Craig Fennie — applied physicist; MacArthur Fellow
• Michael Fisher — Irving Langmuir Award, Wolf Prize in Physics, Boltzmann Medal, Lars Onsager Prize, Royal Medal, BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award ; Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Peter Goldreich — astrophysicist
• Kurt Gottfried — particle physics; co-founder of the Union of Concerned Scientists
• Brian Greene — theoretical physicist and author, specializing in string theory
• Alan Guth — recipient of Fundamental Physics Prize and Kavli Prize
• Arthur Kantrowitz — physicist and engineer
• Toichiro Kinoshita — Japanese-American theoretical physicist; member of the National Academy of Sciences and recipient of the Sakurai Prize
• Raphael M. Littauer — fellow of the American Physical Society, Robert R. Wilson Prize for Achievement in the Physics of Particle Accelerators ; introduction of pioneering classroom response system
• M. Stanley Livingston — member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Richard V. E. Lovelace — fellow of the American Physical Society
• Boyce McDaniel — Manhattan Project physicist and synchrotron designer; member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Paul McEuen — physicist, specializes in carbon nanotubes and graphene
• David Mermin — physicist; member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Philip Morrison — member of the National Academy of Sciences
• David A Muller — applied physicist
• Yuri Orlov — nuclear physicist; former Soviet dissident; human rights activist
• Edward Ott — American physicist known for his contributions to the development of chaos theory
• Albert Overhauser — physicist, known for Overhauser effect; member of the National Academy of Sciences and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; recipient of National Medal of Science and Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize
• Robert Otto Pohl — condensed matter physics; Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize, member of the National Academy of Sciences
• John Reppy — member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Bruno Rossi — National Medal of Science, Wolf Prize in Physics
• Dennis William Sciama — physicist
• Harold Scheraga — member of the National Academy of Sciences
• George Paget Thomson — Nobel Prize, Physics 1937
• Kip Thorne — astrophysicist
• Watt W. Webb — member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Robert R. Wilson — youngest group leader on the Manhattan Project; first director of Fermilab; National Medal of Science

Social sciences and policy management

Anthropology, sociology, other social sciences

• Yutaka Tsujinaka — professor of political science
• John Adair — anthropologist
• Benedict Anderson — author of Imagined Communities
• Walter Berns — Constitutional law and political philosophy professor; recipient of National Humanities Medal in 2005
• Fred Buttel — sociologist
• John Collier — visual anthropologist
• Dian Fossey — anthropologist whose murder was recreated in the film Gorillas in the Mist
• Betty Friedan — feminist, author of The Feminine Mystique
• Rose Goldsen — pioneer in studying the effects of television and popular culture
• Charles F. Hockett — linguist; member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Jay Jasanoff — Indo-European linguistics specialist
• Bronisław Malinowski — founder of social anthropology
• George McGovern — Democratic nominee for U.S. president, senator from South Dakota ; taught on US foreign policy
• John V. Murra — professor of anthropology, with a focus on the Inca Empire
• Alan Nussbaum — Indo-European linguist and classical philologist
• Meredith Small — anthropologist and primatologist, author of several books on child development, including Our Babies, Ourselves
• Adam T. Smith — anthropologist researching the history and societies of the South Caucasus
• Richard Swedberg — Swedish economic sociologist
• Mark P. Talbert — senior lecturer of hotel management, and subject of a viral YouTube video publicly criticizing an unknown student who was yawning loudly in one of his classes
• Sidney Tarrow — researcher of comparative politics, social movements, and political sociology
• James D. Thompson — sociologist
• Bassam Tibi — political scientist of Islamic countries
• James E. Turner — co-founder and director of the Institute for Women and Work at the Industrial and Labor Relations School

Economics

• Francine D. Blau — received her B.S. in industrial and labor relations in 1966 from Cornell
• Kaushik Basu — Indian economist; chief economist of the World Bank; fellow of the Econometric Society
• Marco Battaglini — fellow of the Econometric Society
• Lawrence Blume — fellow of the Econometric Society
• Morris Copeland — president of the American Economic Association
• David Easley — fellow of the Econometric Society and recipient of the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize
• George M. von Furstenberg — economist best known for monetary policy, free trade policy and international finance
• George H. Hildebrand — president of the Industrial Relations Research Association
• Charles Henry Hull — economist and historian. Edited The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty
• Louis Hyman Economic historian
• Jeremiah Jenks — president of the American Economic Association.
• John D. Kasarda — earned a bachelor of science degree in applied economics from Cornell in 1967 and masters of business administration degree in Organizational Theory from Cornell in 1968; developer of the aerotropolis concept, which defines the role of airports and aviation-driven economic development in shaping 21st-century urban growth and form; directs the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Kenan-Flagler Business School
• James Laurence Laughlin — founded the Federal Reserve System
• John Williams Mellor
• Emmett J. Rice — former governor of the Federal Reserve System
• Thomas Sowell — economist; National Humanities Medal
• Holbrook Working — economic theorist in the financial field
• Brian Wansink — famously discredited food scientist who was discovered to have repeatedly falsified scientific journal articles
• Allyn Young — president of the American Economic Association

Psychology

• Samuel B. Bacharach — director of the Smithers Institute
• Daryl Bem — social psychologist, creator of self-perception theory
• Sandra Bem — psychologist; created the Bem Sex-Role Inventory; studies gender roles
• Stephen J. Ceci — researcher of children's courtroom testimony
• Michael J. Freeman — behavior sciences
• Eleanor J. Gibson — perception and developmental psychology; fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; member of the National Academy of Sciences; recipient of the National Medal of Science
• James J. Gibson — perception, member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Thomas Gilovich — researcher of decision making and behavioral economics
• Paulina Kernberg — child psychiatrist and authority on personality disorders
• Lee C. Lee — researcher in developmental psychology and Asian-American identity and history
• Kurt Lewin — founder of modern social psychology
• James Maas — sleep studies; longtime teacher of Cornell's most popular class, Psychology 101
• Neal E. Miller — experimental psychologist, recipient of the National Medal of Science
• Ulrich Neisser — studied intelligence and memory
• Robert Morris Ogden — Cornell University graduate, professor of Psychology, and Cornell's dean of Arts and Sciences, 1923–1945
• David A. Pizarro
• Ritch Savin-Williams — sexual orientation researcher
• Robert Sternberg — president of the American Psychological Association; professor of Psychology and provost at Oklahoma State University, dean of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University; IBM Professor of Psychology and Education at Yale University; known for triarchic theory of intelligence, triangular theory of love and three-process view; fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science
• Edward B. Titchener — psychologist; inventor of structuralism