Stanford Facts: Faculty

The Stanford Faculty

David Starr Jordan was appointed president in March 1891, and by June his first faculty -- 15 men of "youth and scholarly promise" -- had accepted appointments. Jordan sought professors who combined abilities for teaching and research, and he wrote, "Mr. Stanford wants me to get the best. He wants no ornamental or idle professors."

Today, Stanford has 1,934 tenure-line faculty, senior fellows and center fellows at specified policy centers and institutes, and Medical Center-line faculty. Fifty-five percent of the faculty have earned tenure. Faculty at Stanford are expected to be among the best teachers and researchers in their fields. There are 513 faculty members appointed to endowed chairs. Stanford faculty have won 27 Nobel Prizes since the university's founding.

Stanford's current community of scholars includes:

• 17 Nobel laureates
• 4 Pulitzer Prize winners
• 24 MacArthur Fellows
• 18 recipients of the National Medal of Science
• 2 National Medal of Technology recipients
• 263 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 150 members of the National Academy of Sciences
• 94 National Academy of Engineering members
• 64 members of the Institute of Medicine
• 31 members of the National Academy of Education
• 51 American Philosophical Society members
• 7 Wolf Foundation Prize winners
• 6 winners of the Koret Foundation Prize
• 3 Presidential Medal of Freedom winners

Living Nobel Laureates

Kenneth J. Arrow

Professor Emeritus in the Department of Economics, shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Economics for pioneering contributions to general economic equilibrium theory and welfare theory.

Gary S. Becker

Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, won the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economics for extending the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior and interaction, including non-market behavior.

Paul Berg

Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry, shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his fundamental studies of the biochemistry of nucleic acids, with particular regard to recombinant DNA.

Steven Chu

Professor in the Departments of Physics and Applied Physics, Emeritus, shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.

Andrew Fire

Professor in the Departments of Pathology and of Genetics, shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries related to RNA interference.

Roger Kornberg

Professor in the Department of Structural Biology, won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in understanding how DNA is converted into RNA, a process known as transcription.

Robert B. Laughlin

Professor in the Departments of Physics, shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics for explaining the fractional quantum Hall effect, in which electrons flowing in a semiconductor subjected to strong electromagnetic fields act like a liquid made up of “particles” with an electrical charge that is a fraction of that of an electron.

Douglass North

Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economics for work in economic history that applied economic theory and quantitative methods to explain economic and institutional change.

Douglas Osheroff

Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics, shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of superfluidity in helium-3.

Martin Perl

Professor Emeritus at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the tau lepton.

Burton Richter

Professor Emeritus at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, shared the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the psi particle and for pioneering work in high-energy physics.

Thomas J. Sargent

Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Economics for research that shed light on the cause-and-effect relationship between the economy and policy instruments such as interest rates and government spending.

Myron S. Scholes

Professor Emeritus at the Graduate School of Business, shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Economics for a new method to determine the value of derivatives.

William Sharpe

Professor Emeritus at the Graduate School of Business, shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Economics for his contributions to the theory of price formation for financial assets, the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM).

A. Michael Spence

Professor Emeritus at the Graduate School of Business, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Economics, shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information.

Joseph E. Stiglitz

Professor Emeritus in the Department of Economics, and A. Michael Spence, Professor Emeritus at the Graduate School of Business, shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information.

Richard E. Taylor

Professor at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics for investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons that have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics.

Stanford Pulitzer Prize Winners

David M. Kennedy

2000, History

Jack Rakove

1997, History

James Risser

1976, 1979, National Reporting

Carl N. Degler

1972, History

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