Rice University alumni

Charles William Duncan Jr. (September 9, 1926 – October 18, 2022) was an American businessman, administrator, and politician best known for serving as U.S. Secretary of Energy in the Cabinet of President Jimmy Carter from 1979 to 1981. He had previously served as Carter's United States Deputy Secretary of Defense during the Iranian Revolution. Earlier, Duncan had run the family business, Duncan Coffee Company of Houston, Texas, for seven years, until the Coca-Cola Company acquired it in 1964. After seven years on the Coke board, Duncan became the corporation's president.

Ralph A. Anderson Jr. (January 1, 1923 – February 3, 1990) was an architect, based in Houston, Texas, USA. After completing his B.A. in architecture at Rice University in 1943, he served in the United States Infantry in the European Theatre of Operations. He received a head wound at the Battle of the Bulge, and was consequently awarded both the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star. He became partner in the firm Wilson, Morris, Crain & Anderson in 1952, which had become just Crain and Anderson by 1978. Anderson retired in 1988.

Earl Nicholas McArthur Jr. (January 1, 1925 - July 17, 2016) was a suffragan bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of West Texas.

Roy Mark Hofheinz Jr. (born 1935) is an American academic, sinologist who was Professor of Government at Harvard University. He is best-known for his work on the Chinese Communist Revolution.

Marguerite (Peggy) Moilliet Rogers (1915–1989) was a Mexican-born American physicist who became the "country's leading authority in the field of air-launched conventional weapons".

Carl Mark Pearcy, Jr. (born August 25, 1935) is an American mathematician whose research has been concentrated on operator theory and operator algebras. He has coauthored several books, including "Introduction to Operator Theory I", Introduction to Analysis", and "Measure and integration", all published by Springer and coauthored by Arlen Brown (and Hari Bercovici in the case of Measure and integration). Pearcy had 31 Ph. D. students at Michigan and TAMU
, several of whom are outstanding mathematicians. Pearcy's bibliography contains more than 150 papers, and his research has concerned the invariant subspace problem and the theory of dual algebras.

William Maurice "Doc" Ewing (May 12, 1906 – May 4, 1974) was an American geophysicist and oceanographer.Ewing has been described as a pioneering geophysicist who worked on the research of seismic reflection and refraction in ocean basins, ocean bottom photography, submarine sound transmission (including the SOFAR channel), deep sea core samples of the ocean bottom, theory and observation of earthquake surface waves, fluidity of the Earth's core, generation and propagation of microseisms, submarine explosion seismology, marine gravity surveys, bathymetry and sedimentation, natural radioactivity of ocean waters and sediments, study of abyssal plains and submarine canyons.

Robert Lee Leuschner Jr. (March 13, 1935 – July 19, 2016) was a rear admiral in the United States Navy. He was Commander of the nuclear-powered carrier USS Enterprise from 1983 to 1986. A native of Texas, he was born in Waco, and later moved with his family to San Diego, California, where he graduated from high school. In 1953, he was admitted to Rice Institute in Houston, where he enrolled in the chemical engineering curriculum. He also joined the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (NROTC), so that immediately after receiving his bachelor's degree, he was also commissioned as ensign in the U.S. Navy.

Riki Kobayashi (1924–2013) was a chemical engineer and a long-time professor of chemical engineering at Rice University. A native of Harris County, Texas, he attended Rice University (then known as Rice Institute) and earned the Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering at the age of 19. After serving in the U.S. Army, he went to the University of Michigan, where he earned the Master of Science degree in 1946 and the Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1951, both in chemical engineering. He became a member of the Rice faculty in 1951 and remained there until he retired in 1994. He died July 19, 2013, in Houston, Texas.

Eleanor Ardel Vietti (November 5, 1927—disappeared May 30, 1962) was an American physician and missionary. She worked at the Buôn Ma Thuột leper colony where she was taken as a prisoner of war on May 30, 1962. She is currently the only American woman unaccounted for from the Vietnam War.