Rick Scott was born in Bloomington, Illinois, and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, where his father was a truck driver and his mother worked as a clerk at J.C. Penney, among other jobs. Scott graduated from high school in 1970, and then attended one year of community college after which he...

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...

The distinguished attorney, educator and diplomat Max Kampelman was born in New York City, and earned his undergraduate degree at New York University in 1940. A conscientious objector in World War II, he volunteered for a starvation experiment at the University of Minnesota. Following...

Raymond Kurzweil has founded four successful businesses, all based on artificial intelligence technology he developed. He pioneered systems for optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, and speech recognition. He developed the CCD (charge-coupled device) flatbed...

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...

Oscar de la Renta first won renown as the designer of elegant evening gowns, but is now the master of a design and fashion empire that embraces women's wear, men's wear, accessories, household items furniture and perfume. Born in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic, he traveled to Spain...

A physician by training, Dr. Aaron Ciechanover may once have dreamed of winning a Nobel Prize in Medicine, but he could scarcely have imagined his work would someday lead to a Nobel Prize in another discipline altogether. Yet, when the call from Stockholm came, it was to inform him that...

David Herbert Donald (1920 - 2009) was a distinguished historian, longtime chair of the graduate program in American history at Harvard, and a leading authority on the Civil War era and the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Donald's first book, published in 1948, was a study of Lincoln's...

Orville Wayne Rollins (1912 – 1991) was born in rural Georgia to a farmer father and a schoolteacher mother. He worked on the family farm throughout high school and graduated valedictorian of his class in 1930. Rollins hoped to became a lawyer, but a hailstorm destroyed the family's crops...

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,...

Michael J. Saylor is the co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of MicroStrategy, a software company specializing in business intelligence, enterprise reporting, and online analytical processing. The son of an Air Force sergeant, he spent his childhood living around the world, and graduated high school at...

Mike Wallace is one of the most influential figures in the history of broadcast journalism. From his ground-breaking television interview programs of the 1950s to his 38-year run as co-host of 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace exemplified the most uncompromising standard of American journalism,...

Beginning as a young trainee at a funeral home, Steven J. Ross (1927-1992) effected an ingenious series of deals and mergers, building a publicly traded company that expanded into publishing and entertainment, acquiring businesses including DC Comics and Mad magazine, before taking over...

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...

In 1957, Clayton W. "Claytie" Williams, Jr. quit his job as an insurance salesman to go into the oil business with only $2,000 in savings. From this humble beginning, he grew to be the largest individual oil producer in the State of Texas. He struggled through the 1960s before making a...

In 1966, while flying a combat mission from the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, U.S. Navy Captain Gerald Coffee was shot down over North Vietnam. Although he parachuted safely, he was captured immediately. For the next seven years, he was held as a POW in communist prisons, including the...

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...

Today, Ken Griffin is the Chairman, President and CEO of Citadel Investment Group, the Chicago-based hedge fund that has grown into a global investment giant with offices in New York, London, Hong Kong and Tokyo, handling more than $20 billion in investment capital. A teenage computer whiz from...

If you use the Internet, chances are you use Google every day. The search engine and the enormously successful company that shares its name were the creation of a pair of Stanford University graduate students still in their mid-20s, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It was Larry Page who first...

Melvin Simon (1926 - 2009) was the founder and longtime Chairman of Simon Property, the largest shopping mall operator in the United States, as well the nation’s largest retail real estate investment trust. The son of an immigrant tailor in Manhattan's garment district, he was drafted into...

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...

At the 2007 International Achievement Summit in Washington, D.C., the Academy of Achievement presented a panel discussion with social entrepreneurs who have founded nonprofit organizations to provide quality education or nutrition to disadvantaged youth. The panel includes Teach for...

Mitchell D. Kapor pioneered the consumer software industry as founder of Lotus Development Corporation, and the creator of Lotus 1-2-3, the revolutionary spreadsheet and graphics application. A teenage math prodigy from Freeport, Long Island, he studied psychology, linguistics and computer...

In 1992, Gary Becker was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his application of economic theory to sociological issues, particularly his pioneering studies of human capital, discrimination and crime. A Princeton University graduate, he studied with Milton Friedman at the University of...

One day in 1993, a lost mountain climber, starving and disoriented, stumbled from the slopes of the treacherous peak known as K2 into an isolated Pakistani village. The impoverished villagers sheltered and fed him until he was well enough to move on. When he learned they had no school for...

Bernard William Rogers (July 16, 1921 – October 27, 2008) served as Chief of Staff of the United States Army and later as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. He attended the U.S. Military Academy, where he was First Captain of the Corps of Cadets. After World War II, he was an aide to...

George Herbert Walker Bush has devoted his life to his family and to his country. At age 18, he enlisted in the Naval Reserve and became the youngest pilot in the Navy. During World War II, he was shot down in combat over the Pacific and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross. After a successful...

From 1969 until his retirement in 2008, legendary trial attorney Gerry Spence never lost a civil case. And in his entire career, as both prosecutor and defense attorney, he only lost one criminal case, and that verdict was reversed on appeal. He began his career as a criminal prosecutor in...

Jack Kemp (1935 - 2009) made the unusual transition from professional athlete to member of Congress, becoming one of his party's prominent leaders and a nationally recognized advocate for low taxation and limited government. Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, he was quarterback of...

After a legendary career in professional football, Steve Largent entered public service, and was elected to four terms in the United States Congress. A star athlete in high school, he graduated from the University of Tulsa, where he led the nation in touchdown catches. Often called the...

One of the world's leading experts in radar astronomy, Irwin I. Shapiro served as director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics from 1982 to 2004. At the Center, he oversaw the research of a dedicated team of astronomers, studying the evolution of matter from the birth of the...

James Van Allen (1914 - 2006) was a pathbreaking astrophysicist best known for his work in the development of research satellite technology and the discovery of the bands of radiation that circle the Earth. Born in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, he graduated from Iowa Wesleyan College and...

J. Craig Venter, biologist and entrepreneur, was among the first scientists to sequence the human genome, an accomplishment he achieved at his own institute, completely independent of the federal government's human genome project. He first became involved with human genome research while...

John Young is a legendary American astronaut, test pilot, and aeronautical engineer who, in 1972, was the ninth person to walk on the Moon as commander of the Apollo 16 mission. Young had the longest, busiest and most diverse career of any astronaut in American history. Over the course of...

The entrepreneur and financier T. Boone Pickens won renown for his daring acquisition of oil and gas companies, and his attempted takeovers of such industry giants as Philips, Gulf and Unocal. Today, this iconic Texas oil man has become an unexpected advocate for alternative energy. Born...

The career of Jim Plunkett is one of the most inspiring in the history of professional football. Time and again, he overcame hardship, injuries and professional disappointments that would have discouraged a less determined man. Plunkett was born in San Jose, California to Mexican-American...

The Big Bang theory proposes that the universe we know emerged from a uniformly hot and impenetrable mass of protons, electrons and radiation. But until recently, we knew very little of the first stages of the 13 billion year process in which our cosmos took shape. In 1974, a young...

Dr. Kenneth H. Cooper is heralded as the "Father of Aerobics" and the leader of the international physical fitness movement. He published his first best seller, "Aerobics," in 1968, and introduced a new word and a new concept – launching a worldwide fitness revolution. He continues to be...

Dr. Leroy Hood is the Co-founder and President of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle and one of the world's leading scientists in molecular biotechnology and genomics. He received the Lemelson-MIT Prize for inventing "four instruments that have unlocked much of the mystery of...

The paleoanthropologist Lee Rogers Berger has supervised archeological expeditions across South Africa, in Zimbabwe, and on the islands of the Micronesian archipelago. In 1997, he received the first National Geographic Society Prize for Research and Exploration for his studies of human...

Although he is renowned in medical circles as "the father of Viagra," the discoveries of Louis Ignarro have profound implications for all circulatory conditions, not least heart disease, the leading cause of death around the world. Nitroglycerin has been used in treating heart disease...

Marian Wright Edelman is the founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund and one of the most respected voices for children in the nation. The youngest daughter of a Baptist minister, she developed a sense of mission while growing up in a small segregated South Carolina town....

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...

Growing up in a working class neighborhood in Chicago, Mike Krzyzewski learned to rely on himself to organize the games he wanted to play. When he failed to make his high school football team, he turned to basketball and became a local star. At that time, he hoped for nothing more than...

Roger Milliken (October 24, 1915 – December 30, 2010) was the President and Chief Executive Officer of Milliken & Company, the largest privately owned textile and chemical manufacturer in the world with $4 billion in annual sales. He led the company for 71 years, and was heralded as...

Dr. Robert H. Grubbs was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for an achievement that will lead to the development of new medicines for illness, and new materials for industry and daily living, while dramatically reducing the hazard of chemical waste in the environment. The Swedish...

Allan C. Wilson (October 18, 1934 – July 21, 1991) was a pioneer in the use of molecular approaches to understand evolutionary change and revolutionized the study of human evolution. He was one of the most controversial figures in post-war biology and created one of the most provocative...

When Neil Sheehan arrived in Vietnam as a young reporter in 1962, he had no idea that he was entering a conflict that would shape his entire career. As America's military involvement escalated, he found that the war he was observing firsthand no longer resembled the contest the U.S....

"When I went to the movies with other black children, we had to sit in the balcony while the white kids got to sit in the better seats below. We had to walk to school while the white children rode in school buses paid for by our parents' taxes. Such messages, saying we were inferior, were a daily...

A distinguished physician, educator and public servant, Dr. Louis W. Sullivan was the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services (H&HS) in the administration of President George H.W. Bush. The son of an undertaker in rural Georgia, Louis Sullivan excelled academically and...