Imperial College London Admitted Student Profiles & Alumni

Alexander Fleming

Discovered penicillin

MD / Medicine

1906

Sir Derek Barton

Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1969) for work on conformational analysis

PhD in Chemistry

1942

Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson

Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1973) for organometallic chemistry

PhD in Chemistry

1943 

Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1929) for discovery of vitamins

BSc / Medicine basis (student)

N/A

Abdus Salam

Nobel Prize in Physics (1979) for electroweak unification

N/A (Professor)

N/A 

Sir George Paget Thomson

Nobel Prize in Physics (1937) for electron diffraction

N/A

N/A

H. G. Wells

Author (The War of the Worlds, etc.)

N/A

N/A

Sir Brian May

Guitarist (Queen), astrophysicist; completed his PhD in Astrophysics after years in music

BSc Physics; PhD Astronomy

BSc 1968; PhD 2007

Roger Bannister

First man to run a sub-4 minute mile

N/A

1954 (mile) / Student at Imperial 1940s

John Ambrose Fleming

Inventor, electrical engineer

N/A

N/A

William Crookes

Chemist and physicist; worked on spectroscopy and discovered elements

N/A

N/A

Thomas Henry Huxley

Biologist; advocate of Darwin’s theory

N/A

N/A 

Rajiv Gandhi

Former Prime Minister of India

N/A

N/A 

Sir Ernst Boris Chain

Nobel Prize in Medicine (1945) for penicillin work

N/A

N/A

Roger Daltrey (attended)

Lead singer of The Who

N/A

N/A

Cyrus Pallonji Mistry

Business magnate, former chairman of Tata Group

BEng Civil Engineering

1990 

Sir Alec Skempton

Pioneer in soil mechanics; civil engineer

N/A (studied and later taught)

N/A

John Coulson

Chemical engineer; co-author of Coulson & Richardson’s Chemical Engineering textbook

PhD in Chemical Engineering

1935

Dame Judith Hackitt

Former Chair of the UK Health and Safety Executive; influential in engineering safety policy

BSc Chemical Engineering

1975

Iain Conn

Former CEO of Centrica; high-level business leader

BSc Chemical Engineering

1983