Donald Cram (April 22, 1919 – June 17, 2001) was an American chemist who won the National Medal of Science and shared the 1987 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for research that has yielded significant new insights into chemical reactions that take place within human cells, an extraordinary...

Calvin Edwin "Cal" Ripken, Jr. was a 19-time All-Star shortstop and third baseman of the Baltimore Orioles, nicknamed the "Iron Man" of baseball, and one of the most admired athletes of our time. He is perhaps best known for breaking New York Yankees first baseman Lou Gehrig's record for...

Dr. Burton Richter is the Director Emeritus of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics. He was born into a Jewish family in Brooklyn and raised in the Queens neighborhood of Far Rockaway. Richter earned both his bachelor's degree and his...

The American chemist Dudley Herschbach received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for contributions including his "crossed molecular beam" experiments that have yielded a molecular-level understanding of elementary chemical reactions, such as those used in the synthesis of drugs, plastics...

Ambassador Sol Myron Linowitz (December 7, 1913 – March 18, 2005) was a Senior Partner of the international law firm Coudert Brothers in Washington, D.C. Linowitz emerged from an immigrant Jewish household during the Great Depression to become a Phi Beta Kappa college graduate who earned...

Donald Glaser is a pioneering American physicist and neurobiologist and, for more than 50 years, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He was a brilliant young physicist at the University of Michigan, who became frustrated when he tried to observe the tracks of atom...

As one of the great pioneers of modern physics, and as a strenuous advocate for America's national security, Edward Teller (1908-2003) made his mark on our times in a way that few could equal. A mathematical prodigy from Budapest, Hungary, the young Teller played a major role in the...

In 1975, Elias Zerhouni, at age 24, came to the United States from Algeria with $369 in his pocket. He had taught himself just enough English to pass an equivalency exam. A recent graduate of the University of Algiers medical school, he had come to take up a residency in radiology, hardly...

Freeman Dyson is an internationally renowned theoretical physicist, mathematician and author, esteemed for his work in quantum field theory, solid-state physics, astronomy and nuclear engineering. Beyond his theoretical work at the outer edges of human knowledge, he has been deeply...

The astronomer Harlan Smith Ph.D. (1924 - 1991), longtime Director of the McDonald Observatory of the University of Texas, was distinguished for his discovery of the optical variability of small, quasi-stellar objects, and for his efforts to share the wonders of the cosmos with the general...

The American physicist Sheldon Glashow is famed for his discoveries concerning the elementary particles of matter and the interaction of the fundamental forces of nature. In particular he extended our understanding of the relationship of the "weak force" and electromagnetism, accurately...

Dr. Steven A. Rosenberg is the Chief of Surgery at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. He pioneered the development of immunotherapy that has resulted in the first effective immunotherapies for selected patients with advanced cancer. Dr. Rosenberg also pioneered the...

The American astronomer Robert W. Wilson received the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). Dr. Wilson was at work on a new type of antenna for Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, when he sought to identify a source of noise in...

When Ralph Sampson graduated from high school in Harrisonburg, Virginia, he was the most heavily recruited college basketball prospect in the country. As center for the University of Virginia Cavaliers, the seven-foot-four Sampson was the first player in the team's history to score 1,000...

Picabo Street is an American alpine ski racer who won gold medals in the super G at the 1988 Winter Olympics and in the downhill at the 1996 World Championships, along with three other Olympic and World Championship medals. When she participated in the 1996 Achievement Summit she was...

Robert S. Mulliken (June 7, 1896 – October 31, 1986) was an American physicist and chemist who received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1966. He was a distinguished member of the faculty at the University of Chicago for 55 years. Mulliken was primarily responsible for the early...

Robert S. Langer is heralded as one of the most prolific inventors in the history of medicine, the father of controlled drug release and tissue engineering. His research laboratory at MIT is the largest biomedical engineering lab in the world, maintaining about $10 million in annual grants and...

Robert H. Hofstadter (1915 -1990) received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1961 for his pioneering studies of electron scattering in atomic nuclei and for his discoveries concerning the structure of nucleons. Born in New York City, he earned his undergraduate degree at City College, with...

Dr. Peter Raven is a world-renowned plant biologist, conservationist, and an outspoken defender of endangered plant species. For 40 years, he was the director of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. Born in China and raised in California, his interest in plants dates from his...

In recognition of Women's History Month, the Academy of Achievement presents a selection of extraordinary women who have defied expectations, broken boundaries, and made history around the world. They include courageous political leaders and human rights activists, recipients of the...

Dr. Robert Jarvik made news around the world in 1982 when a mechanical artificial heart he had designed, the Jarvik 7, was successfully implanted in a living human being. By his own account, Jarvik had been an undistinguished undergraduate student who was rejected by numerous medical...

William Wilson Morgan (January 3, 1906 – June 21, 1994) was a Professor Emeritus at Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, and whose work on the properties of stars and galaxies was fundamental in the creation of modern astronomy during the second half of the twentieth century. He graduated from...

Faye Wattleton was the first African-American, first woman, and the youngest President & CEO ever elected to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Her father was a factory worker and her mother was a seamstress and a Church of God minister. Wattleton entered Ohio State...

One of the most distinguished musical artists of our time, the singer Jessye Norman was born in Augusta, Georgia. As a ten-year-old child, she was spellbound by a recording of the great contralto Marian Anderson. Inspired by Anderson's recordings and autobiography, she resolved to become a...

J. Desmond Clark (1916 - 2002) was a British-born archeologist famed for his explorations of prehistoric Africa. Clark graduated form Cambridge University in the 1937 and worked as a curator of the Livingstone Museum in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) until the outbreak of World War II. During...

For over 40 years, Robert Strauss has been one of the most influential figures in American politics and diplomacy. Presidents of both major parties have entrusted him with the most difficult and delicate assignments, culminating in his service as Washington's last ambassador to the Soviet...

When he retired in 1985 at the age of 63, General Vessey was the longest serving active duty member in the United States Army. He began his 46-year military career in the Minnesota National Guard in 1939 when he was only 16. He was a 21-year-old sergeant when he won a battlefield...

John Shalikashvili (1936 - 2011) was born in Warsaw, Poland, where his family, Georgian subjects of the Russian Empire, had sought refuge after the 1917 Revolution. The onset of World War II divided the family. The father became a prisoner of war, while nine-year old John and his mother...

Art Buchwald (October 20, 1925 – January 17, 2007) was one of America’s most popular humorists who “spoofed the tangled web of national politics and the muddle of modern life” as a syndicated columnist for The Washington Post. Buchwald was once described as a “Will Rogers with chutzpah.”...

For over 60 years, Hal David (1921-2012) wrote the words America loves to sing. His career spanned the decades from the swing era to the age of hip-hop and took him from Hollywood to Broadway to Nashville. He wrote his first hit song in 1947 and continued to score hits throughout the...

Michael Crichton (1942 - 2008) was a literary phenomenon. He sold his first article to The New York Times when he was only 14, and worked his way through Harvard Medical School writing detective stories. He struck gold with his 1969 bestseller The Andromeda Strain, a taut thriller, replete...

Nora Ephron (1941 - 2012) achieved international success as a director and writer of feature films, a field that had been effectively closed to women for over half a century. Her earlier work as a journalist and essayist had already won her a reputation for sharp-eyed social observation and...

The most celebrated American ballerina of her generation, Suzanne Farrell was a young student from Cincinnati when, at age 15, she first auditioned for the legendary choreographer George Balanchine. She danced a section of Glazunov's The Seasons, humming her own accompaniment, and the...

Fred Smith, Chairman and CEO of Federal Express Corporation, is known as the "father of the overnight delivery business." A Marine Corps veteran who once teetered on the verge of bankruptcy, he is one of American business's greatest success stories. As an undergraduate at Yale, Fred Smith...

Dr. Louis Sokoloff was the Chief of the Laboratory of Cerebral Metabolism at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He received his college degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1943 and graduated from Penn's School of Medicine in 1946. He joined the...

Dr. Nathan P. Myhrvold is the former Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft and is the co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, which is building a large patent portfolio. He was a precocious student who began college at age 14, and studied mathematics, geophysics, and space physics at UCLA....

Greg Marshall is a scientist, inventor, and filmmaker who has dedicated the last 25 years to studying, exploring, and documenting life in the oceans.
 Beginning in 1986, he developed a revolutionary research tool to record images, sound, and data from an animal's perspective. Today that...

One of the nation's largest shopping center developers, Theodore "Ted" Lerner is a self-made man. When his father died, young Ted worked day and night to support his mother and siblings. He sold houses on weekends while attending George Washington University Law School. The year after...

"There is no such thing as an average human being. If you have a normal brain, you are superior. There's almost nothing that you can't do." When Benjamin Carson was in fifth grade, he was considered the "dummy" of his class. His classmates and teachers took it for granted that Ben would take an...

Ian Frazer was working with AIDS patients in the early 1980s when he first noticed a correlation between the sexually transmitted papilloma virus and cervical cancer, one of the leading causes of cancer death among women, especially in the developing world. A young immunologist, newly arrived in...

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910 - 1995) was an Indian-born American astrophysicist who, with William A. Fowler, won the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics for key discoveries that led to the currently accepted theory on the later evolutionary stages of massive stars. Chandrasekhar was the...

George Schaller is a senior conservationist at the Wildlife Conservation Society in the Bronx, New York. He is a legendary zoologist, naturalist, conservationist, and best-selling author, who is recognized as the world's pre-eminent field biologist, studying wildlife throughout Africa,...

Vartan Gregorian is President of Carnegie Corporation of New York and is the former President of Brown University as well as the former President of the New York Public Library. Born in Tabriz, Iran, at age six, his mother died of pneumonia and his grandmother raised him. At age ten, he...

James (Jim) Goodnight is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of SAS Institute Inc., the largest privately-owned software company in the nation. He is the wealthiest person in North Carolina and one of the wealthiest men in the world, with a net worth of $7 billion. The son of a...

Dr. Laszlo N. Tauber (February 18, 1915 – July 28, 2002) was a Hungarian-born surgeon who saved other Jews in the Budapest ghetto during World War II, then made a real estate fortune in Washington, D.C. and became a major philanthropist to medical research and Jewish causes. Dr. Tauber was...

Jim Davis is the creator of the comic strip and marketing phenomenon “Garfield” which today is syndicated in 2,400 newspapers and is read by 200 million loyal readers each day. Davis grew up on a small farm in Fairmount, Indiana, with his parents Jim and Betty, a brother Dave, and 25 cats....

America's greatest living chronicler of men at war, Rick Atkinson draws on an intimate knowledge of the soldier's life. The son of a career army officer, he was born in Germany and grew up on military posts. He developed his mastery of research -- along with his powerful prose style and keen eye...

The philanthropist, art collector and education advocate Agnes Gund is President Emerita of New York's Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she fell in love with arts as a child and earned a master's degree in art history at Harvard. Beneficiary of a substantial...