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

Steven Chu is an American physicist, Nobel laureate, and the 12th United States Secretary of Energy. He is currently the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University. He is known for his research at the University of California, Berkeley and his research at Bell Laboratories and Stanford University regarding the cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, for which he shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips.

Carolyn Janice Cherry, better known by the pen name C. J. Cherryh, is an American writer of speculative fiction. She has written more than 80 books since the mid-1970s, including the Hugo Award-winning novels Downbelow Station (1981) and Cyteen (1988), both set in her Alliance–Union universe. She is known for "world building", depicting fictional realms with great realism supported by vast research in history, language, psychology, and archeology.

William Wells Bent was a frontier trader and rancher in the American West, with forts in Colorado. He also acted as a mediator among the Cheyenne Nation, other Native American tribes and the expanding United States. With his brothers, Bent established a trade business along the Santa Fe Trail. In the early 1830s Bent built an adobe fort, called Bent's Fort, along the Arkansas River in present-day Colorado. Furs, horses and other goods were traded for food and other household goods by travelers along the Santa Fe trail, fur-trappers, and local Mexican and Native American people. Bent negotiated a peace among the many Plains tribes north and south of the Arkansas River, as well as between the Native American and the United States government.

Stephen Nathaniel Limbaugh Sr. is a former United States District Judge who held concurrent appointments to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri and the United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri from 1983 until his retirement in 2008. He was appointed by president Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s after a distinguished career as a trial lawyer in Missouri. Like his father Rush Limbaugh Sr. before him, Limbaugh served as president of the Missouri Bar from 1982 to his appointment to the bench. His son, Stephen N. Limbaugh Jr., is currently a federal judge for the Eastern District of Missouri.

Martha Ellen Young Truman was the mother of U.S. president Harry Truman, the paternal grandmother of Margaret Truman, and the mother-in-law of Bess Truman.

Suzan Lee Pitt was an American film animator and painter, whose surreal, psychological animated films and paintings have been acclaimed and exhibited worldwide.

Leonard Leroy Boswell was an American politician who served as the U.S. Representative for Iowa's 3rd congressional district from 1997 to 2013, a district based in Des Moines. A member of the Democratic Party, he was defeated for reelection in 2012 by 4th district incumbent Tom Latham, who decided to run against him after redistricting. Boswell left Congress in January 2013.

James William Fulbright was an American politician, academic, and statesman who represented Arkansas in the United States Senate from 1945 until his resignation in 1974. As of 2021, Fulbright is the longest serving chairman in the history of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He is best known for his staunch multilateralist positions on international issues, opposition to American involvement in the Vietnam War, and the creation of the international fellowship program bearing his name, the Fulbright Program.

Robert William "Bevo" Nordmann was an American professional basketball player.

Robert Coldwell Wood was an American political scientist, academic and government administrator, and professor of political science at MIT. From 1965 to 1969, Wood served as the Under Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Lyndon B. Johnson, and for two weeks as the Secretary at the end of the Johnson Administration.