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 – 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 – 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