| Did You Know? | |
Famous U of U Alumni: - Rocky Anderson (Class of ’73) – Mayor of Salt Lake City
- Alan Ashton (Class of ’66; PhD ’70) – Co-founder of WordPerfect Corp
- Nolan Bushnell (Class of ’69) – The father of the video game industry as co-founder of Atari and inventor of Pong
- Ed Catmull (Class of ’69; PhD ’74) – Co-founder and president of Pixar Animation Studios. He also shared an Oscar, awarded in 2001, for development of software used in the Toy Story films and in A Bug’s Life, Jurassic Park, Titanic, and Gladiator.
- Stephen Covey (Class of ’53) – Business consultant, best-selling author of "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," founder of the former Covey Leadership Center, and vice-chairman of FranklinCovey Co., a management and leadership development firm
- EJ “Jake” Garn (Class of ’55) – Republican U.S. Senator from Utah, 1975-93, and first public official to fly aboard the space shuttle—a seven-day flight of Discovery in November 1984
- Gordon B. Hinckley (Class of ’32) – President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
- Robert K. Jarvik (Class of ’76) – Inventor of the Jarvik-7 artificial heart, which surgeon William DeVries implanted in 1982 in Seattle dentist Barney Clark, who survived 112 days
- J. Willard Marriott (Class of ’26) and J. Willard Marriott, Jr. (Class of ’54) – The senior Marriott, who died in 1985, founded Marriott International, Inc., a worldwide hospitality company that had its origins when he and his wife, Alice S. Marriott (Class of ’27), opened a nine-seat root beer stand in Washington, DC, in 1927. J. Willard Marriott, Jr. succeeded his father as chief executive officer of Marriott Corp. in 1972. Marriott International now has nearly 2,100 hotels in 50 states and 59 countries and territories.
- Andre Miller (Class of ’98) – University Basketball player and 1999 NBA draft pick for the Cleveland Cavaliers
- Keith Van Horn (Class of ’97) – University basketball player and, in 1997, the NBA No. 2 draft pick for the Philadelphia 76ers
- Terry Tempest Williams (Class of ’79) – Author of "Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place" (1991), "An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field" (1994) and other books, most recently "Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert" (2001)
|