University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering alumni

Robert Rowe Gilruth (October 8, 1913 – August 17, 2000) was an American aerospace engineer and an aviation/space pioneer who was the first director of NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center, later renamed the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center.He worked for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) from 1937 to 1958 and its successor NASA, until his retirement in 1973. He was involved with early research into supersonic flight and rocket-powered aircraft, and then with the United States human spaceflight program, including the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs.

Stéphane Bancel (born July 20, 1972) is a French business executive. He is the chief executive officer (CEO) of the American pharmaceutical and biotechnology company Moderna, known for its COVID-19 vaccine. Before joining Moderna, Bancel was the CEO of French diagnostics company BioMérieux. Bancel is a partner at Flagship Pioneering, and has served on the boards of Indigo Agriculture, Boston's Museum of Science, and Qiagen. As of May 2023, his net worth was estimated at US$4.1 billion, owning about 8% of Moderna.

Sherwood B. Idso (born June 12, 1942) is the president of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, which rejects the scientific consensus on climate change. Previously he was a Research Physicist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service at the U.S. Water Conservation Laboratory in Phoenix, Arizona, where he worked since June 1967. He was also closely associated with Arizona State University over most of this period, serving as an adjunct professor in the Departments of Geology, Geography, and Botany and Microbiology. His two sons, Craig and Keith, are, respectively, the founder and vice president of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.
Idso is the author or co-author of over 500 publications including the books Carbon Dioxide: Friend or Foe? (1982) and Carbon Dioxide and Global Change: Earth in Transition (1989). He served on the editorial board of the international journal Agricultural and Forest Meteorology from 1973 to 1993 and since 1993 has served on the editorial board of Environmental and Experimental Botany. Over the course of his career, he has been an invited reviewer of manuscripts for 56 different scientific journals and 17 different funding agencies, representing an unusually large array of disciplines. He is an ISI highly cited researcher.