Category
People
Individuals with a documented public record — educators, founders, researchers and public officials.
- Minnie F. Abrams
An American Methodist missionary, evangelist and revivalist in India whose 1906 book on baptism in the Holy Spirit is credited with helping spark the Pentecostal movement in Chile.
- Abdulrahman Al Awar
UAE Minister of Human Resources and Emiratisation since 2021 and Acting Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research since 2024, a former oil-and-gas geoscientist and federal HR official who has overseen the country's mandatory private-sector Emiratisation targets.
- Yaqoub Al-Rifai
Kuwaiti finance minister appointed in a February 2026 cabinet reshuffle, who has since represented Kuwait at international financial forums and restructured his ministry's senior leadership.
- Jack Altman
American technology entrepreneur and investor who co-founded and led the HR software company Lattice, later founded the venture firm Alt Capital, and became a general partner at Benchmark in 2026.
- Sam Altman
American technology entrepreneur and investor, chief executive of OpenAI since 2019, who co-founded Loopt, led Y Combinator, and was briefly removed and then reinstated as OpenAI's CEO in November 2023.
- Shieny Aprilia
Indonesian entrepreneur and co-founder of the Bandung video game developer Agate who was promoted from chief operating officer to chief executive in June 2022, succeeding Arief Widhiyasa.
- Mohit Aron
Indian-American computer scientist and entrepreneur who worked on Google's file system, co-founded Nutanix, and founded the data management company Cohesity, where he served as chief executive until 2022.
- Ankit Baiyanpuria
An Indian wrestler-turned-fitness-influencer, born Ankit Singh in Haryana, known for desi workout content and the "75 Hard Challenge," who won a national creator honor from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and later faced UFC fighter Arman Tsarukyan in a grappling exhibition.
- Nandita Bakhshi
An American banking executive who served as CEO of Bank of the West from 2016 to 2023, known for restricting the bank's financing of activities deemed harmful to the environment, and later a board member at BMO, Grameen America, Beyond Meat and Quaker Houghton.
- Édouard Balladur
Prime Minister of France from 1993 to 1995 under Socialist President François Mitterrand, who privatized major state companies, later stood trial in the "Karachi affair" arms-kickback case, and died on 31 August 2026 at age 97.
- Michael F. Barry
A longtime Quaker Chemical Corporation executive who served as CEO from 2008 and chairman from 2009, led the 2019 merger that created Quaker Houghton, retired as chairman in 2026, and later joined FMC Corporation's board of directors.
- Jim Baum
American technology executive who led Netezza as president and CEO through its 2010 acquisition by IBM, later ran the warehouse-robotics startup CasePick Systems, and has since served on multiple corporate boards.
- Beau Bayh
A seventh-generation Hoosier, Marine Corps veteran and attorney who in 2025 became the fourth generation of his family to seek statewide office, winning the 2026 Democratic nomination for Indiana Secretary of State and now facing Republican Max Engling in the November general election.
- Rochelle Bilal
The first woman and first Black woman elected Sheriff of Philadelphia, a former police officer whose tenure has drawn sustained Inquirer investigative coverage, including a 2024 finding that her campaign used AI to fabricate news headlines.
- Alex Breingan
New Zealand television producer facing 33 fraud and forgery charges from the Serious Fraud Office over the collapse of his Stripe Media/Stripe Studios production companies, which owed creditors more than $20 million.
- Greg Brockman
American computer scientist and entrepreneur, co-founder and president of OpenAI, who was previously chief technology officer at Stripe, resigned from OpenAI's board in November 2023 during Sam Altman's brief ouster, and took a sabbatical from August to November 2024.
- Evans Chan
Hong Kong-born, New York-based independent filmmaker known for hybrid documentary-fiction films on Hong Kong's handover, the Chinese diaspora, and postcolonial history, screened at Berlin, Rotterdam and London.
- Pushpindar Singh Chopra
Indian aviation historian and journalist who founded Vayu Aerospace & Defence Review in 1974, authored a multi-volume history of the Indian Air Force, and later founded a magazine on Sikh heritage.
- Cipto Adiguno
Indonesian game-industry executive who co-founded Bandung studio Ekuator Games, became a Vice President at its acquirer Agate, chaired the Indonesian Game Association from 2019 to 2024, and co-founded the publishing accelerator Indiesche Partners in 2025.
- Frederic René Coudert
American lawyer at Coudert Brothers who served as a special assistant U.S. Attorney General and legal adviser to the British Embassy during World War I, and was a Columbia University trustee for over four decades.
- James Cuff
High-performance-computing research technologist who built Harvard's research-computing organization and its North East Storage Exchange before moving on to lead scientific-computing strategy at composable-computing startup GigaIO.
- Dang Thanh Tam
Vietnamese industrialist and chairman of Kinh Bac City Development Holding Corporation, whose company is developing the Trump Organization's licensed golf and residential project in Hung Yen province.
- Dang Thi Hoang Yen
Vietnamese businesswoman who founded Tan Tao Group, was removed as a National Assembly delegate in 2012 amid disputed circumstances, and later filed billion-dollar international arbitration claims against Vietnam.
- Lynn Devin
American adoption agency operator who ran Seattle International Adoptions with her sister Lauryn Galindo and pleaded guilty in 2003 to conspiracy to commit visa fraud and money laundering over Cambodian adoptions.
- Süleyman Dilbirliği
A Turkish non-commissioned officer who, during the Korean War, found and cared for an orphaned five-year-old girl he named Ayla, was separated from her for sixty years by Korean law, and was reunited with her in 2010 in a reunion later covered by Turkish national press and a 2017 feature film.
- Abhijeet Dipke
An Indian political-communications strategist who founded the satirical "Cockroach Janta Party" in May 2026 after India's Chief Justice referred to unemployed youth as cockroaches, drawing tens of thousands of sign-ups and international press coverage.
- Bill Doogue
Australian criminal defence lawyer and founding director of Doogue + George, a Melbourne firm, who has represented clients in a number of high-profile Victorian criminal cases.
- Ignacio Dülger
A Chilean lawyer and Republican Party (Partido Republicano) politician, a regional councilor (CORE) for the Santiago Metropolitan Region and, as of 2026, the party's mayoral candidate for Peñalolén, with a political career built through José Antonio Kast's campaigns.
- Eron
Brazilian footballer, full name Eronildo dos Santos Rocha, who won the 2023 Campeonato Brasileiro Série D top-scorer title with Caxias before transferring to Vegalta Sendai in Japan's J2 League.
- Joseph Fessio
American Jesuit priest who co-founded Ignatius Press in 1978, became a primary English-language editor of Pope Benedict XVI's works, and was removed from three institutions he helped build amid recurring disputes with administrators.
- Knut Frängsmyr
A Swedish former Klarna executive appointed CEO of Avanza in 2023 who left the role after roughly one week when the bank withdrew its approval of him following a financial regulator's disclosure about fines tied to renovation work on his home.
- Arthur Gaeth
An American who led the first Latter-day Saint mission in a Slavic country as a 24-year-old in 1929, then reported live from Nuremberg in 1946 on the execution of convicted Nazi war criminals, a broadcast held by Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
- Lauryn Galindo
American adoption facilitator who arranged roughly 700-800 Cambodian adoptions from 1990-2001, including actress Angelina Jolie's adoption of her son Maddox, before pleading guilty in 2004 to visa fraud and money laundering conspiracy.
- Paul Graham
American computer scientist, essayist and investor who co-founded the web-store company Viaweb (sold to Yahoo in 1998) and, in 2005, co-founded the startup accelerator Y Combinator, which he led as president until 2014.
- Jen Guyton
American-German conservation ecologist and wildlife photographer whose doctoral fieldwork in Mozambique and Namibia produced a Nature paper on vegetation patterns, a Wildlife Photographer of the Year award, and a national conservation-science honor.
- Stevin Hoover
Former Kansas City hedge fund manager who ran Hoover Capital Management's Chestnut Fund and was permanently barred from the investment-advisory industry after pleading guilty to defrauding clients of roughly $200,000.
- Kirsten Hughes
Massachusetts Republican Party chairwoman from 2013 to 2019, elected amid a divided state committee and a Scott Brown-shaped transition, who led the party through two Charlie Baker gubernatorial wins before stepping down.
- Hiroshi Ichikura
A Japanese advertising copywriter and creative director, born in Gunma Prefecture in 1955, who founded his own agency in 1990 after working on Suntory's advertising and was inducted into the Tokyo Copywriters Club Hall of Fame in 2023.
- Robert Jacquinot de Besange
A French Jesuit priest who negotiated a civilian safe zone in wartime Shanghai in 1937, sheltering roughly 250,000 refugees from the fighting, an arrangement later cited as an influence on the 1949 Geneva Conventions' protections for civilians.
- Fawn Johnson
A Washington, D.C.-based journalist and policy analyst whose documented work covers Congress, public policy and education reporting, including an Education Writers Association national award.
- Shibani Joshi
An American business and technology journalist who spent about six years as a Fox Business/Fox News reporter, whose on-air comparison of German and American solar potential drew an independent fact-check from Slate in 2013.
- Susan Kandel
An American art critic turned mystery novelist, born 1961 in Los Angeles, who spent seven years as an art critic for the Los Angeles Times before writing the five-book "Cece Caruso" mystery series, independently reviewed by Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly.
- Celeste Katz
An American political journalist whose two-decade career spans the New York Daily News, Mic, Glamour and Newsweek, and whose 2020 departure from Newsweek amid a wave of editor firings drew independent press scrutiny for its apparent timing.
- Serge Losique
Founder of the Montreal World Film Festival who fought to keep it alive through a 2018 government funding cut, a tax dispute, and a legal battle with Telefilm Canada over a rival festival.
- Dee Jay Mailer
Healthcare and global-health executive who left her role as COO of The Global Fund to become CEO of Kamehameha Schools in 2004, chosen from 200 applicants.
- Matiur Rahman Mallik
Bangladeshi student activist (1953–1969) shot dead by police during the January 1969 mass-upsurge movement in Dhaka; the anniversary of his death is observed nationally as Mass Uprising Day, and he received Bangladesh's posthumous Independence Award in 2018.
- Jeremiaha Maluze
A German footballer from Duisburg who worked through youth academies and semi-professional clubs before a breakout season at fourth-tier Rot-Weiß Erfurt earned him a first-team contract with Bundesliga club Eintracht Frankfurt in 2025, followed by a competitive debut in the 2026 DFB-Pokal.
- James Marsh (artist)
British illustrator and painter best known for designing Talk Talk's album covers from 1982 onward, including "Spirit of Eden," whose 2012 retrospective book was reviewed by Record Collector magazine.
- Jeremy Matlow
Tallahassee city commissioner (Seat 3) known for publicly criticizing the city's response to a corruption scandal and for a still-unresolved 2026 trespassing investigation tied to a tree-removal protest.
- Golden Matonga
Malawian investigative journalist and Director of Investigations at the Platform for Investigative Journalism-Malawi, an ICIJ member journalist who has contributed to the Pandora Papers and FinCEN Files investigations.
- Shana Merlin
An Austin, Texas improv performer and teacher who founded the Merlin Works Institute for Improvisation and has been reviewed and profiled by the Austin Chronicle across more than two decades of the city's improv scene.
- Vladislav Mikosha
Soviet cinematographer and photojournalist whose World War II footage and photographs of the siege of Sevastopol, and later color-photography work for Izvestia and Pravda, were the subject of a 2014 Swedish documentary.
- Marsha Miro
Longtime Detroit Free Press art critic who co-founded the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit after a five-year attempt to place a modern-art wing inside the Detroit Institute of Arts fell through.
- Oliver Mulherin
Australian software engineer who has worked at the IOTA Foundation, Broadwing, SPARK Neuro, and Meta, and who married OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman in January 2024.
- Elon Musk
South African-born entrepreneur, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of X, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015, left its board in 2018, and sued the company and Sam Altman in 2024 in a case a jury dismissed in May 2026.
- Satya Nadella
American technology executive and chief executive officer of Microsoft since 2014, who led its cloud-computing pivot, its 2023 hiring of Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, and testified in the 2026 Musk v. OpenAI trial.
- Kiran Nazish
Pakistani war correspondent who founded the Coalition For Women In Journalism after a career-related breakdown, building it into a nonprofit that documents violence against women journalists worldwide.
- Lorenzo Nigro
Italian archaeologist and Full Professor at Sapienza University of Rome, whose 2022 reinterpretation of a Phoenician structure at Motya, Sicily, as a sacred pool rather than a harbor drew international coverage.
- Nurunnahar Nimni
Bangladeshi mountaineer and Pubali Bank officer who became the third Bangladeshi woman to summit Mount Everest, 14 years after the previous successful ascent by a Bangladeshi woman.
- Jackie Northam
Longtime NPR international correspondent who covered the Gulf War, the Rwandan genocide, and conflicts across the Middle East and South Asia over a four-decade career, retiring in 2026.
- Ömer Özsoy
Turkish-born theologian who became the first Muslim theology professor at a German university in 2006, holding an endowed Koranic-exegesis chair at Goethe University Frankfurt and advocating historical-critical readings of the Koran.
- Ana Luz Porzecanski
Uruguayan-born conservation biologist who directs the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History and co-curated the museum's 2016 exhibition on Cuban biodiversity.
- Johan Raja Lawak
A Malaysian comedian, actor and long-running Hot FM radio presenter, born Mohd Yazid Lim bin Mohamad Aziz, who placed third in the first season of Raja Lawak in 2007 and later pivoted much of his public focus toward entrepreneurship, including a restaurant and a vending-machine business.
- R. H. Richharia
A Cambridge-trained rice geneticist who led India's Central Rice Research Institute, published clonal-propagation research in Nature, and was removed from his post after opposing Green Revolution seed policy in favour of conserving indigenous rice varieties.
- Ardavan Safaee
President of French film studio and distributor Pathé Films since 2019, who testified to a French National Assembly committee on how the company changed its on-set conduct policies after handling a 2020 misconduct complaint against a director.
- Sathupati Prasanna Sree
A linguist and English professor from Andhra Pradesh who has created scripts for tribal languages and became vice-chancellor of Adikavi Nannaya University in February 2025.
- Jit Saxena
Massachusetts-based technology entrepreneur who founded and led Applix and then co-founded Netezza, taking both companies public, and who has since served on the boards of numerous data and software startups.
- J. Michael Shepherd
An American banking lawyer and executive who led Bank of the West as President and CEO from 2008 to 2016, chaired BNP Paribas USA through 2023, and later joined the boards of CoreLogic and Discover Financial Services.
- Sam Sidiqi
Afghanistan-born, MIT-educated mountaineer who became the first Afghanistan-born climber to summit Denali in June 2021, using the climb to raise funds and awareness for his mountain-safety charity, Afghan Peaks.
- Ramchandra Singh Deo
The last ruler of the former princely state of Koriya who became Chhattisgarh's first finance minister when the state was created in 2000, after an earlier career that included working as a photographer for the filmmaker Satyajit Ray.
- Adam Stafford
A Scottish musician and filmmaker, born in Sunderland and based in Falkirk, who fronted the band Y'all Is Fantasy Island, has released more than a dozen solo albums including a 2020 comeback, and has directed an award-winning music video and the seven-award-winning short film "The Shutdown."
- Donna Steichen
An American Catholic author from St. Cloud, Minnesota, whose 1991 book "Ungodly Rage: The Hidden Face of Catholic Feminism" became an unexpected bestseller for a first-time author and drew both praise and sharp criticism within the Catholic Church.
- Shomari Stone
An American broadcast journalist who has worked in the Miami and Washington markets, served as a CNBC correspondent, and joined WTTG in 2023 as a reporter and anchor.
- Daniel Susott
American physician and self-described "hanai" (adopted) brother of Lauryn Galindo whose 2010 and 2019 transfers of a Kauai apartment to her were both voided by federal courts as fraudulent, and who surrendered his California medical license in 2013 amid regulatory allegations.
- Ilya Sutskever
Computer scientist who co-created AlexNet, co-founded OpenAI and served as its chief scientist, played a central and later-regretted role in the November 2023 board vote to remove Sam Altman, and in 2024 left to found the AI-safety company Safe Superintelligence Inc.
- Igor Tanzil
Indonesian creative executive and former advertising copywriter who served as Agate's chief marketing and chief creative officer before co-founding Mythic Protocol, later rebranded Confiction Labs, where he is Chief Creative Officer.
- Elinor Tatum
Publisher and editor-in-chief of the New York Amsterdam News since 1997, the first Black woman named Editor & Publisher magazine's Publisher of the Year in its 140-year history.
- Peter Thiel
American entrepreneur and venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal and Palantir Technologies, co-founded the venture firm Founders Fund, was an early Facebook investor, and was named among the private backers whose funding launched OpenAI in December 2015.
- Elaine Tierney
An American lightweight rower who won a silver medal at the 2022 World Rowing Championships and a bronze in 2023, in the women's coxless pair with partner Solveig Imsdahl, following a five-year rowing career at Temple University.
- Helen Toner
Australian-born AI policy researcher and interim executive director of Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, who as an independent OpenAI board member voted to remove Sam Altman as CEO in November 2023 and later testified as a trial witness in Musk v. OpenAI.
- Severino Twinobusingye
A Ugandan senior advocate who won an unprecedented UGX 12.9 billion legal-fees award for a 2011 constitutional challenge, later represented Amama Mbabazi's 2016 presidential election petition, and now chairs the university council of the disputed Karamoja Peace and Technology University.
- Ioannis Vardoulakis
Greek civil engineer and geomechanicist (1949–2009), Professor of Mechanics at the National Technical University of Athens, known for work on shear-band formation and bifurcation theory in granular materials.
- Arief Widhiyasa
Indonesian entrepreneur who co-founded and led the Bandung video game developer Agate as chief executive from 2009 to 2022, then became its Chairman and co-founded the web3 gaming company Mythic Protocol.
- Reuven Yaron
An Israeli legal historian, born in Vienna in 1924, who taught ancient Near Eastern and Roman law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for decades and became dean of its law faculty, publishing widely on Aramaic papyri, biblical law and the Laws of Eshnunna.
- Avni Zogiani
A Kosovo human rights defender and investigative journalist who has led anti-corruption and organized-crime reporting through the civil society movement Çohu since 2005, and who Front Line Defenders has documented as facing threats over that work.