Princetonians of the Decade

Samuel Alito ’72 joined the Supreme Court in 2006. He has maintained a generally conservative voting record and opined in several high profile cases. In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, he voted against the majority, holding that the government did have the authority to set up military commissions to try Guantanamo Bay inmates. In 2007, he voted with the majority to uphold the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act as constitutional.

Bonnie Bassler defied conventional wisdom in microbiology, showing that bacteria communicate with each other through emitting and detecting tiny particles. This discovery unleashed a new wave of possibilities for understanding bacteria and attacking harmful bacteria through drugs. She won a MacArthur fellowship, better known as a “genius grant,” in 2002 and continues to research the field as a molecular biology professor.

Ben Bernanke is the 14th chairman of the Federal Reserve. Until 2005, he was an economics professor at Princeton. Appointed by President George W. Bush in 2006, Bernanke has steered the country through the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression, overseeing efforts to pump cash into the economy to encourage private spending and the distribution of the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program.

Jeff Bezos ’86, founder and chief executive of Amazon.com, took the company from a small online bookstore run from his garage in 1994 to to America’s largest Internet retailer. He has seen his wealth balloon to $12.6 billion and has started a private human spaceflight company called Blue Origin. He also came up with the idea of “artificial artificial intelligence,” in which computers delegate some problems with which they struggle to humans.

Josh Bolten ’76 served as President George W. Bush’s top policy analyst on the campaign trail and later was director of the Office of Management and Budget from 2003 to 2006 and Bush’s chief of staff from 2006 to 2009. In the latter position, he was charged with smoothing Bush’s relationship with Congress and revitalizing White House staff and is credited with the successful recruitment of former Goldman Sachs chief executive Henry Paulson as Treasury secretary.

Bill Frist ’74, a physician, politician and a former University trustee, served two terms as a Republican senator from Tennessee. He rose to majority leader from 2003 until his retirement in 2007. During his time as majority leader, he engineered the Medicare prescription drug benefit and attained notoriety for claiming to diagnosis Terri Schiavo by watching video footage. In the 2007-08 academic year, he was a visiting professor at the Wilson School.

Elena Kagan ’81 argued before the Supreme Court for a year as President Barack Obama’s first solicitor general before joining the court as a justice. From 2003 to 2009, she also served as the dean of Harvard Law School, where she upheld the school’s policy of barring military recruiters from campus. She is the first person appointed to the Supreme Court without any previous experience as a judge since William Rehnquist in 1972.

Wendy Kopp ’89, founder and chief executive of Teach For America, turned her senior thesis into a nationwide phenomenon. Over the past decade, Kopp has taken TFA from a 500-teacher program with five placement sites to a 28,000-teacher program operating in 35 cities. Kopp is also the chief executive of Teach For All, a program she founded in 2007 to expand TFA’s mission to the worldwide community.

Paul Krugman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2008 for his work on patterns of international trade. A Wilson School professor, he has authored over 20 books and is the 12th-most cited economist in the world. Krugman’s work focuses on international economics. Today, Krugman is better known as a liberal op-ed columnist for The New York Times, where he has regularly critiques President Barack Obama from the left.

Eric Lander ’78, who was valedictorian and won a Rhodes Scholarship as an undergraduate, began the decade by completing the Human Genome Project. In 2001, his team published a public draft of the human genome in the journal Nature, and the project officially came to a close in 2003. The Massachusett Institute of Technology biology professor became a co-chair of President Barack Obama’s Science and Technology Advisory Council in 2008.

Christopher Lu ’88, as cabinet secretary to President Barack Obama, is one of the highest-ranking Asian-Americans in government. After beginning his career as an attorney, he served as a congressional staffer before working for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign.He then joined the senatorial office of Obama, and after his election, Lu was tasked by the president-elect with overseeing the presidential transition team in 2008.

Toni Morrison published the novels “Love” and “A Mercy,” a nonfiction book on school integration, a compilation of essays, and a libretto over the last 10 years. A creative writing professor at Princeton who retired in 2006, Morrison has won numerous honors, including the Nobel Prize in literature and a Pulitzer Prize. The Nobel Prize Committee stated in 1993 that Morrison’s works are characterized by “by visionary force and poetic import.”

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Michelle Obama ’85 moved from Chicago to the White House upon becoming the first lady of the United States. Since her husband’s inauguration, she has launched a “Let’s Move” campaign aimed at tackling child obesity through encouraging healthier lifestyles and has advocated on behalf of military families. She is noted for having planted the first White House vegetable garden since Eleanor Roosevelt lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Peter Orszag ’91 directed the Congressional Budget Office from 2007 to 2008 and served in President Barack Obama’s cabinet as budget director from 2009 to 2010. During his service under presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama, Orszag paid special attention to the nation’s struggling health-care system, and he is credited with designing many of the key health-care deliver reforms included in the Affordable Care Act.

Gen. David Petraeus GS ’87 is widely regarded as the leading military mind of the decade. After co-authoring the military’s counterinsurgency strategy, he was tapped by President George W. Bush in 2007 to take over as commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. In 2008, Bush promoted him to become chief of the U.S. Central Command, and in 2010 he was once again charged with salvaging a troubled war effort, this time as the commander of allied forces in Afghanistan.

Jared Polis ’96 became the first openly gay man to be elected to Congress in 2008. After working as an entrepreneur and founding several startup Internet companies, Polis was elected to the Colorado State Board of Education in 2000 and founded an educational philanthropic organization. He was re-elected to the House of Representative in 2010, where he serves on the education and rules committees.

Harvey Rosen joined President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers in 2003, becoming its chairman in 2005. After leaving government, he returned to Princeton — where he was chair of the economics department in the mid-1990s — becoming the inaugural master of Whitman College in 2007. A public finance and taxation expert, he received the National Tax Association’s lifetime contribution award in 2007.

Eric Schmidt ’76 has led Google for nearly the entire decade, joining its board of directors in 2001 and becoming its chief executive five months later. Under his leadership, Google soared from a fledgling search engine to a technology behemoth valued at $150 billion. Schmidt has expanded his personal horizons beyond business and now serves on President Barack Obama’s Science and Technology Advisory Council.

Anne-Marie Slaughter ’80

Sonia Sotomayor ’76 became the first Latina justice on the Supreme Court when she was confirmed by the Senate in August 2009. In nominating Sotomayor — then a judge sitting on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit — to the high court, President Barack Obama called her “an inspiring woman who I believe will make a great justice.” Before joining the court, she stepped down as a trustee of the University.

Frank Wilczek ’75 is one of the most prolific physicists in recent memory. As a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he has discovered that quarks defy normal laws of attraction and has also studied dark matter and theoretical physics. He won the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics, the 2002 Lorentz Medal, which is given once every four years, and the Lillienfeld Prize, which recognizes physicists who perform outstanding work and can present to diverse audiences.