List of Famous people born in Massachusetts, United States of America
Samuel Atkins Eliot
Samuel Atkins Eliot was a member of the notable Eliot family of Boston, Massachusetts who served in political positions at the local, state and national levels.
William P. Murphy Jr.
William P. Murphy Jr. is a medical doctor and inventor of medical devices including collaborating on a flexible sealed blood bag used for blood transfusions. He is the son of the American physician William Parry Murphy who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology for Medicine in 1934, and Harriett Adams, the first licensed female dentist in Massachusetts.
Barbara Simons
Barbara Bluestein Simons is an American computer scientist and the past president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She is a Ph.D. graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and spent her early career working as an IBM researcher. She is the founder and former co-Chair of USACM, the ACM U.S. Public Policy Council. Her main areas of research are compiler optimization, scheduling theory and algorithm analysis and design.
Solomon Stoddard
Solomon Stoddard was the pastor of the Congregationalist Church in Northampton, Massachusetts Bay Colony. He succeeded Rev. Eleazer Mather, and later married his widow around 1670. Stoddard significantly liberalized church policy while promoting more power for the clergy, decrying drinking and extravagance, and urging the preaching of hellfire and the Judgment. The major religious leader of what was then the frontier, he was known as the "Puritan Pope of the Connecticut River valley" and was concerned with the lives of second-generation Puritans. The well-known theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) was his grandson, the son of Solomon's daughter, Esther Stoddard Edwards. Stoddard was the first librarian at Harvard University and the first person in American history known by that title.
Orra White Hitchcock
Orra White Hitchcock was one of America's earliest women botanical and scientific illustrators and artists, best known for illustrating the scientific works of her husband, geologist Edward Hitchcock (1793–1864), but also notable for her own artistic and scientific work.
Claire M. Fraser
Claire M. Fraser is an American genome scientist and microbiologist who has worked in microbial genomics and genome medicine. Her research has contributed to the understanding of the diversity and evolution of microbial life. Fraser is the director of the Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD, where she holds the Dean's Endowed Professorship in the School of Medicine. She has joint faculty appointments at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in the Departments of Medicine and Microbiology/Immunology. In 2019, she began serving a one-year term as President-Elect for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which will be followed by a one-year term as AAAS president starting in February 2020 and a one-year term as chair of the Board of Directors in February 2021.
Torbert Macdonald
Torbert Hart Macdonald, nicknamed Torby, was an American politician from Massachusetts. He served as a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives from 1955 until his death in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1976.
Gurdon Saltonstall
Gurdon Saltonstall was governor of the Colony of Connecticut from 1708 to 1724. Born into a distinguished family, Saltonstall became an accomplished and eminent Connecticut pastor. A close associate of Governor Fitz-John Winthrop, Saltonstall was appointed the colony's governor after Winthrop's death in 1707, and then reelected to the office annually until his own death.
Mitch Epstein
Mitchell Epstein is an American fine-art photographer, among the first to make significant use of color. Epstein's books include Sunshine Hotel (2019), Rocks and Clouds (2018), New York Arbor, (2013) Berlin (2011); American Power (2009); Mitch Epstein: Work ( 2006); Recreation: American Photographs 1973-1988 (2005); and Family Business (2003), which won the 2004 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award.
John Schuck
Conrad John Schuck Jr. is an American actor, primarily in stage, movies and television. He is best known for his role as Sgt. Charles Enright in the 1970s crime drama McMillan & Wife. He also played Herman Munster in the late-1980s/early 1990s sitcom The Munsters Today, in which he reprised the role originated by Fred Gwynne in the 1960s sitcom The Munsters.