University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign alumni

Robert E. Riggs (1927–2014) held the Guy Anderson chair of law in the J. Reuben Clark Law School of Brigham Young University (BYU).
Riggs was born in Mesa, Arizona and raised as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was a participating member of that Church throughout his life.
Riggs graduated from Mesa Union High School in 1945. Later that year he was drafted into the United States military as World War II was about to conclude. He was stationed for a time in Korea, after the end of World War II and before the Korean War began. He then served a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the British Isles. For the second year of his two year mission he was the editor of the Millennial Star. In September 1949 Riggs married Hazel Dawn MacDonald in the Mesa Arizona Temple. They had seven children.
Riggs received a bachelors and master's degree in political science from the University of Arizona. He then earned a PhD in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign while also spending a year at the University of Oxford on a Rotary Foundation Fellowship.
From 1955 to 1960 Riggs was a professor of political science at BYU. During this time he took a year leave and served as a Rockefeller Research Fellow in International Organization at Columbia University. From 1960 to 1963 Riggs was a reaerch associate at the University of Arizona while also earning a law degree there. He was then a lawyer in private practice in Arizona very briefly. He then went to Minnesota where he was a professor in the political science department at the University of Minnesota from 1964 to 1975. He served as mayor of Golden Valley, Minnesota for two terms. He also ran as a Democrat in the Minnesota 3rd Congressional District in 1974, which election he lost.
In 1975 Riggs joined the faculty of the BYU Law School, where he remained until 1992. From 1993 to 1994 he and his wife served as missionaries for the Church at the Mesa Arizona Temple Visitors Center.

George Rushing Kempf (Globe, Arizona, August 12, 1944 – Lawrence, Kansas, July 16, 2002) was a mathematician who worked on algebraic geometry, who proved the Riemann–Kempf singularity theorem, the Kempf–Ness theorem, the Kempf vanishing theorem, and who introduced Kempf varieties.

Robert Couth Mathis (July 3, 1927 – April 27, 2016) was a United States Air Force four-star general who served as Vice Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force (VCSAF) from 1980 to 1982.

Richard Louis Meier (1920 - February 26, 2007) was a US regional planner, systems theorist, scientist, urban scholar, and futurist, as well as a Professor in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California at Berkeley. He was an early thinker on sustainability in planning, and recognized as a leading figure in city planning and development. He is not related to the New York-based architect Richard Meier, whom he was often confused with.

Virginia A. Myers (8 May 1927 – 7 December 2015) was an American artist, professor, and inventor. She was born in Greencastle, Indiana, and grew up with her parents and younger sister mostly in Cleveland, Ohio, where her father taught at various colleges and schools.
She studied at George Washington University and the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., and received her B.A. in drawing and painting in 1949. Then, in 1951 she went on to earn an M.F.A. in Painting from The California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland. Myers completed post-graduate work at the University of Illinois (Urbana) and in 1955 came to the University of Iowa to study printmaking with Mauricio Lasansky. From 1961 to 1962, Myers studied in Paris at Atelier 17 with Stanley William Hayter under a Fulbright Scholarship.
To supplement her income while completing post-graduate work in Iowa, Myers learned how to gild picture frames with silver lead. This work inspired her to incorporate silver and gold leaf in her intaglio prints.In 1962 Myers became an instructor at the University of Iowa, where she taught printmaking classes in the School of Art and Art History - she was the only woman teaching studio courses at this time. Myers would go on to earn a faculty position at the University of Iowa. In 1985 Myers attended a seminar taught by Glenn. E Hutchinson (President of Universal Stamping and Embossing Company). From this seminar, Myers learned of foil stamping and began to more seriously pursue this aspect of her artistic practice.
Myers taught intaglio printmaking and foil imaging, made possible by her invention of the Iowa Foil Printer, which makes use of the commercial foil stamping process. After the invention of the press, she worked in conjunction with community members and students to improve and document the printmaking process of foil stamping using the Iowa Foil Press, and they collectively produced a book, Foil Imaging...A New Art Form, in 2001.
She presented in more than 100 one-person exhibitions in the United States and abroad, and participated in more than 150 juried exhibitions and traveling shows nationally and internationally. Her work is included in collections at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; the Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio; and the Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa, among others.

Rafael López Nussa (22 February 1885 – 3 March 1943) was a Puerto Rican physician and public servant. In 1916 López Nussa performed the first heart surgery operation in Puerto Rico.

Onofre Dizon Corpuz ONS (December 1, 1926 – March 23, 2013) was a Filipino academic, economist, and historian. He served as the Secretary of Education of the Philippines from 1968 to 1971 and was the 13th president of the University of the Philippines System from 1975 to 1979. Dr. Corpuz was later named Minister of Education under the parliamentary system wherein he was also member of the now defunct Batasang Pambansa (National Assembly) from 1979 to 1983.
Being the first one to come up with the idea of establishing the Career Executive Service (CES) in the Philippines based on existent bureaucratic structures in other countries, Corpuz served as the first chairman of the Career Executive Service Board (CESB) from 1973 to 1978.In 2004, he was named National Scientist of the Philippines for his contributions to Filipino scholarship particularly in areas of economics, history, political science, and public administration. At the time of his death, he was a Professor Emeritus at the School of Economics of the University of the Philippines Diliman.

Samuel Lawrence Klusman Parks (December 13, 1914 – April 13, 1975) was an American stage and film actor. His career arced from bit player and supporting roles to top billing, before it virtually ended when he admitted to having been a member of a Communist Party cell, which led to his blacklisting by all Hollywood studios. His best known role was Al Jolson, whom he portrayed in two films: The Jolson Story (1946) and Jolson Sings Again (1949).

Joseph Epstein (born January 9, 1937) is an American writer who was the editor of the magazine The American Scholar from 1975 to 1997. His essays and stories have appeared in books and other publications.

Donald Carl Johanson (born June 28, 1943) is an American paleoanthropologist. He is known for discovering, with Yves Coppens and Maurice Taieb, the fossil of a female hominin australopithecine known as "Lucy" in the Afar Triangle region of Hadar, Ethiopia.