Nine graduates of City College have won the Nobel Prize

Dr. Julius Axelrod (1912 - 2004)

Class of 1933
Julius Axelrod shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1970 with Sir Bernard Katz of the United Kingdom and Ulf von Euler of Sweden "for their discoveries concerning the humoral transmitters in the nerve terminals and the mechanism for their storage, release and inactivation."

Dr. Axelrod was born on May 30th, 1912, in New York City. He obtained his B. Sc. in 1933 at the College of the City of New York, his M. A. in 1941 at New York University, and Ph. D. in 1955 from the George Washington University. For More information click here.

Dr. Robert Hofstadter (1915 -1990)

Class of 1935
Robert Hofstadter was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his pioneering studies of electron scattering in atomic nuclei and for his thereby achieved discoveries concerning the structure of the nucleons."

Dr. Hofstadter was born in New York, N.Y., on February 5, 1915. He attended elementary and high schools in New York City, and was graduated in 1935 from The City College of New York with a B.S. degree, magna cum laude. He went to graduate school at Princeton University where he studied physics from 1935 - 1938, and received both the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in 1938 from that institution.  For more information click here.

Dr. Jerome Karle

(1918

-
Class of 1937
Jerome Karle shared the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with a fellow CCNY classmate, Herbert Hauptman, "for their outstanding achievements in the development of direct methods for the determination of crystal structures."

Dr. Karle was born in New York City in 1918. A graduate of the New York City public school system, he entered the City College of New York in 1933 and upon graduation studied biology at Harvard University where he received a master's degree, in 1938. He earned a Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan in 1944. For more information click here.

Dr. Herbert A. Hauptman

(1917 -

Class of 1937
Herbert Hauptman shared the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with a fellow CCNY classmate, Jerome Karle, "for their outstanding achievements in the development of direct methods for the determination of crystal structures."

Dr. Hauptman was born in New York City on February 14, 1917. He graduated from the City College of New York (1937) with a B.S. degree in mathematics and received an M.A. degree in mathematics from Columbia University (1939) and his Ph.D. from the   University of Maryland in 1955. For more information click here.

Dr. Arthur Kornberg

(1918 -

2007)

Class of 1937
Arthur Kornberg shared the 1961 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Severo Ochoa "for their discovery of the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of ribonucleic acid and deoxyribonucleic acid"

Dr. Kornberg was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 3rd March, 1918. He received his undergraduate degree in science from the City College of New York in 1937 and the M.D. degree from the University of Rochester in 1941. For more information click here.

Dr. Kenneth Arrow 

(

1921 -

Class of 1940
Kenneth Arrow shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Economics with John Hicks of the United Kingdom "for their pioneering contributions to general economic equilibrium theory and welfare theory."  Dr. Arrow was also awarded the 2004 National Medal of Science, the nation's highest prize in science, by the White House, for contributions in the areas of making decisions using imperfect information and of bearing risk. 

Dr. Arrow was born in New York City on August 23, 1921. He graduated from The City College of New York in 1940 with the degree Bachelor of Science in Social Science but a major in Mathematics. He entered Columbia University for graduate study and received both his M.A. degree (1941) and Ph.D. from there. For more information click here.

Dr. Leon M. Lederman

(1922 -

Class of 1943
Leon Lederman shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988 with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger "for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino."

Dr. Lederman was born in New York on July 15, 1922.  He graduated from The City College in 1943 and entered the Graduate School of Physics at Columbia University in 1946, where he received his Ph.D. 1951.  For more information click here.

Dr. Arno A. Penzias

(1933 -

Class of 1954
Arno Penzias shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978 with Robert Woodrow Wilson "for their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation."

Dr. Penzias was born in Munich, Germany, in 1933. He arrived in New York with his family in January 1940. He earned a B.Sc degree in physics from The City College of New York (1954) and received both his M.A. (1958) and Ph.D. (1962) from Columbia University.  For more information click here.

Dr. Robert J. Aumann 

(1930 -

Class of 1950
Robert J. Aumann is The City College of New York’s ninth and newest Nobel Prize winner, sharing the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics with Thomas C. Schelling "for having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis."

Robert Aumann was born in Frankfurt-on-the-Main, Germany, in 1930. He graduated from City College in 1950 with a B.Sc degree in mathematics and received his S.M. (1952) and Ph.D. (1955) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been on the faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Mathematics Department since 1956. For More information click here.