People from Lafayette

Joan Kent Dillon (30 April 1925 – 18 January 2009) was a teacher, a nationally known historic preservation activist and an author.

Lyman W. Porter (1930–2015) was an American academic administrator. He was the dean of the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine from 1972 to 1983. He was the co-author of many books of management, and "one of the primary founders of the study of organizational behavior."

Philip E. Nelson (born 1934) is an American food scientist who is best known for his work in bulk aseptic processing and packaging of food and the use of chlorine dioxide gas and hydrogen peroxide liquid to commercially sterilize food products and food contact surfaces.
He was the Scholle Chair and Professor in Food Processing at the Department of Food Science at Purdue University. Aseptic processing and packaging would be involved in the relief efforts following the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
He received the World Food Prize in 2007 for his work on aseptic food storage.Nelson was president of the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) for 2001-2. He has earned four awards from IFT for his efforts: the Food Technology Industrial Achievement Award in 1976, a fellow in 1980, the Nicholas Appert Award in 1995, and the Carl R. Fellers Award in 2005.
In his early life, Nelson worked at his family's tomato cannery on their farm near Morristown, Indiana, developing an interest in horticulture. This led him to a 4-H award when he was 15 at the Indiana State Fair, earning him lunch with the Indiana governor, a gold watch, and a drive around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Nelson would return to his family farm as a canning plant manager of his family farm in the late 1950s. After the plant closed in 1960, he returned to Purdue and earned his PhD on flavor volatility in canned tomatoes.
Nelson retired from teaching at Purdue in 2010. The Food Science Building at Purdue which he helped design that opened in 1998 was renamed in his honor as the Philip E. Nelson Hall of Food Science.

Jack Philip Greene (born August 12, 1931) is an American historian, specializing in Colonial American history and Atlantic history.
Greene was born in Lafayette, Indiana and received his PhD from Duke University in 1956. He spent most of his career as Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University’s history department. In 1990-1999 he was a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine, and he has been a visiting professor at the College of William and Mary, Oxford University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, University of Richmond, Michigan State University, and the Freie Universitat of Berlin, and has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others. In 1975-1976 Greene was the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University. He was a member of both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.Greene retired in 2005 and is currently an Invited Research Scholar at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Charles Foley (September 6, 1930 – July 1, 2013) was the co-inventor of the game Twister, with Neil W. Rabens.

Peter Carruthers (1935 – August 3, 1997) was an American physicist best known for leading the theoretical division of Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1973 until 1980.