List of Famous people born in Illinois, United States of America

Robert Merritt Chanock was an American pediatrician and virologist who made major contributions to the prevention and treatment of childhood respiratory infections in more than 50 years spent at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Timothy D. Rose is an American actor and puppeteer.

Donald William Kerst was an American physicist who worked on advanced particle accelerator concepts and plasma physics. He is most notable for his development of the betatron, a novel type of particle accelerator used to accelerate electrons.

William Zeckendorf Sr. was a prominent American real estate developer. Through his development company Webb and Knapp — for which he began working in 1938 and which he purchased in 1949 — he developed a significant portion of the New York City urban landscape. Architects I. M. Pei and Le Corbusier designed structures for Zeckendorf's development projects.

David Turnbull was an American physical chemist who worked in the interdisciplinary fields of materials science and applied physics. Turnbull made seminal contribution to solidification theory and glass formation. Turnbull was born in Elmira, Elmira Township, Stark County, Illinois. He graduated from high school in 1932 and then received a bachelor's degree in 1936 from Monmouth College (Illinois), specializing in physical chemistry. He received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry under T. E. Phipps from the University of Illinois in 1939. He was on the faculty of Case Institute of Technology from 1939 to 1946.

Donald Adam May is an American actor. He is known for his role in Colt .45 (1957-1960).

Stewart Brand is an American writer, best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He founded a number of organizations, including The WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. He is the author of several books, most recently Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.

Karen O'Hara is an American art director. She won an Academy Award in the category Best Art Direction for the film Alice in Wonderland and was nominated for another one for The Color of Money.

Saul Perlmutter is a U.S. astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Perlmutter shared the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy, the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with Brian P. Schmidt and Adam Riess for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

Martin Lee Chalfie is an American scientist. He is University Professor at Columbia University. He shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Osamu Shimomura and Roger Y. Tsien "for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP". He holds a Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard University.