Famous Teachers a to z

Grace Abbott is best known for her social activism on behalf of immigrants and children. She headed the Children's Bureau from 1921 to 1934.

Chinua Achebe is a Nigerian novelist and author of Things Fall Apart, a work that in part led to his being called the "patriarch of the African novel."

Syed Ahmed Khan was an Indian educator, politician and Islamic reformer whose work inspired a new generation of Muslims and pioneered the revival of Indian Islam in the late 19th century.

Amos Bronson Alcott, teacher, mystic, writer and the father of Louisa May Alcott, became an itinerant teacher before settling in Boston to found his own school.

Rodolfo Anaya is a Mexican-American writer best known for his Chicano-themed books such as Bless Me, Ultima, Heart of Aztlán and Tortuga.

Social activist and pacifist Emily Greene Balch won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946 for being a lifetime advocate of the persecuted and oppressed.

The first U.S. commissioner of education, Henry Barnard founded the Connecticut Common School journal and the Rhode Island Institute of Instruction.

Clara Barton was an educator, nurse and founder of the American Red Cross.

Patricia Bath is the first African American to complete a residency in ophthalmology. She invented the Laserphaco Probe for cataract treatment in 1986.

Arnold Beckman was an American chemist who founded Beckman Instruments and funded the first silicon transistor company, giving rise to Silicon Valley.

Lawrence Beesley was a teacher, journalist and Titanic survivor. After the collision, he boarded lifeboat 13, which was eventually rescued by the Carpathia.

Alexander Graham Bell was one of the primary inventors of the telephone, did important work in communication for the deaf and held more than 18 patents.

Isaiah Berlin was a trailblazing 20th century scholar, philosopher and author, who championed pluralistic thinking and openness to ideas.

Mary McLeod Bethune was an educator and activist, serving as president of the National Association of Colored Women and founding the National Council of Negro Women.

Jill Biden is best known for being the wife of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, and for her role as America's second lady.

Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to graduate from medical school in the United States. She became a leading public health activist during her lifetime.

Louis Braille was a French educator who developed the Braille system of printing and writing for the blind.

Charlotte Hawkins Brown was a teacher and founder of the Palmer Memorial Institute, a trailblazing Southern prep school for African-American students.

Dan Brown is the New York Times-bestselling author of The Da Vinci Code. He is known for the intricate plotting and detail in his books.

African-American poet Sterling Brown is best known for writing poetry distinctly rooted in folklore and authentic black dialect. His works, including Southern Road (1932), have been widely praised for their authenticity and phonetic spelling.

In 1949, mathematician Marjorie Lee Browne became one of the first two African-American women to earn a Ph.D. in her field.

Laura Bush is the wife of 43rd U.S. President George W. Bush. She served as first lady from 2001 to 2009.

An advocate of children and families in Harlem, NY, Geoffrey Canada is president of the Harlem Children’s Zone. In 2009, President Barack Obama announced plans to replicate the educational center in 20 cities.

Charles Chesnutt was a trailblazing short-story author and novelist who presented African-American life in works like The Conjure Woman and The Colonel's Dream.

Judy Chicago is an American artist, educator and writer, and a leading figure in feminist art. She received critical acclaim in the 1970s for her art project "The Dinner Party."

Psychologist and educator Kenneth Bancroft Clark was the first black president of the American Psychological Association.

Septima Poinsette Clark was a pioneering educator and activist who championed teacher’s rights with organizations like the NAACP.

Lucille Clifton is a poet whose works generally examine family life, racism and gender issues.

Chuck Close is noted for his highly inventive techniques used to paint the human face. He rose to fame in the late 1960s for his large-scale, photo-realist portraits.

Teacher Marva Collins was one of the most influential education activists of the 20th century, working to gain equal access for minorities to quality education.

As head principal of the Institute for Colored Youth, Fanny Coppin innovated a practice-teaching system and an elaborate industrial-training department.

Lucy Craft Laney was a school teacher and educator who opened a school for African-American students in the South in the late 1800s.

Chemist John Dalton is credited with pioneering modern atomic theory. He was also the first to study color blindness.

Miguel de la Madrid was president of Mexico from 1982 to 1988. He was a political conservative and his administration was characterized by an economic crisis.

Michael DeBakey was an American cardiovascular surgeon and surgical pioneer.

Educator John Dewey originated the experimentalism philosophy. A proponent of social change and education reform, he founded The New School for Social Research.

Dorothea Dix was an educator and social reformer whose devotion to the welfare of the mentally ill led to widespread international reforms.

Theodosius Dobzhansky was a 20th century scientist, professor and author who did pioneering work in genetics and evolution.

Austrian physicist Christian Doppler first described the Doppler effect, in reference to the observed frequency of light and sound waves, in the paper "Concerning the Coloured Light of Double Stars."

William O. Douglas was a government official who in 1939 became the second youngest Supreme Court justice in U.S. history.

W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the most important African-American activists during the first half of the 20th century. He co-founded the NAACP and supported Pan-Africanism.

Renato Dulbecco was an Italian virologist best known winning the Nobel Prize for pioneering the growing of viruses in culture in the 1950s.

Ralph Ellison was a 20th century African-American writer and scholar best known for his renowned, award-winning novel Invisible Man.

Robert F. Engle is a co-recipient of the 2003 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, honored for developing methods to analyze unpredictable movements in the financial market.

Personality development, in Erik H. Erikson's view, occurs through a series of identity crises that occur in stages that must be overcome and internalized.

Jaime Escalante became famous for his work with troubled, "unteachable" high school math students. His story was told in the 1988 film Stand and Deliver.

Laura Esquivel is the author of Like Water for Chocolate, an imaginative and compelling combination of novel and cookbook, as well as other books.

Abigail Fillmore was an American first lady from 1850 to 1853. She was the wife of Millard Fillmore, the 13th president of the United States.

William Findley's long political career began after the Revolutionary War. He believed in limiting the power of government in order to protect people's rights.

John Ambrose Fleming was an English scientist who made groundbreaking innovations in electrical engineering.

Associate Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter was a noted law scholar who served as the high court's leading exponent of the doctrine of judicial self-restraint.

A four-time Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry, American Robert Frost depicted realistic New England life through language and situations familiar to the common man.

Playwright Christopher Fry wrote a series of major plays in free verse, with undertones of religion and mysticism, including A Phoenix Too Frequent (1946).

Thomas Gallaudet was an education pioneer and established the American School for the Deaf in 1817.

Clifford Geertz was a leading proponent of a form of anthropology that stresses the importance of symbols and interpretation in human social life.

Doris Kearns Goodwin is best known for authoring biographies of American presidents, including Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.

Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, and the best-selling writer of popular science books.

Temple Grandin is a noted animal expert and advocate for autistic populations who has penned the books Animals in Translation and Animals Make Us Human.

American psychologist G. Stanley Hall was a trailblazer in his field. He established the concept of child psychology and founded Clark University.

Alice Hamilton was a physician and authority on lead poisoning and industrial disease. The NIOSH present an award in her name.

Andrew Hamilton was a lawyer who defended John Peter Zenger in a case that marked the first victory for freedom of the press in the American colonies.

In 1982, Jean Harris shot and killed author and cardiologist Herman Tarnower, who wrote the international best-seller The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet.

Economist F.A. Hayek was noted for his criticisms of the Keynesian welfare state and of totalitarian socialism. In 1974 he shared the Nobel Prize for Economics.

Seamus Henry is a renowned Irish poet and professor who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Painter, Al Held was know for his painting complex cube-like structures in the 1960s, and his precise and brightly colored geometric forms in the 1980s.

German painter Hans Hofmann was an influential 20th century art teacher whose work paved the way for Abstract Expressionism.

Maxine Hong Kingston is a Chinese American author of memoirs and fiction. Her best known work is The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among the Ghosts.

An influential teacher in the 19th century, theologian Mark Hopkins stressed moral values over intellectual achievement and self-education over dogmatic education.