List of Famous people born in United States of America
Grant McCune
Grant McCune was an American special effects designer whose entry into Hollywood was the uncredited creation of the great white shark in the 1975 film Jaws. His efforts there led to work on a series of major films, including his design of the robots in the Star Wars films, winning an Oscar in 1977 for his efforts in the first film in the series.
Leigh Whipper
Leigh Rollin Whipper was an American actor on the stage and in motion pictures. He was the first African American to join the Actors' Equity Association, and one of the founders of the Negro Actors Guild of America. He is best known for creating the role of Crooks in the original Broadway production of Of Mice and Men, which he reprised in the 1939 film version.
Stanley B. Prusiner
Stanley Benjamin Prusiner is an American neurologist and biochemist. He is the director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Prusiner discovered prions, a class of infectious self-reproducing pathogens primarily or solely composed of protein. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1994 and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1997 for prion research developed by him and his team of experts beginning in the early 1970s.
Jon Oringer
Jon Oringer is an American programmer, photographer, and billionaire businessman, best known as the founder and CEO of Shutterstock, a stock media company headquartered in New York City. Oringer started his career while a college student in the 1990s, when he created "one of the Web's first pop-up blockers." He went on to found about ten small startups that used a subscription method to sell "personal firewalls, accounting software, cookie blockers, trademark managers," and other small programs.
Michael Foreman
Michael James Foreman is a retired U.S. Navy pilot and a NASA astronaut. While with NASA, Foreman was part of a mission that delivered the Japanese Experiment Module and the Canadian Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator to the International Space Station. Foreman was also a crewmember of the STS-129 mission in November 2009. In 2018, he was elected mayor of Friendswood, Texas. His wife Lorrie is a civil engineer.
Mary Louise Gribble
Mary Louise Baker, known professionally as Joan Barry, was an American actress best known for winning a paternity suit in California in 1943 against Charlie Chaplin after an affair between the two resulted in two terminated pregnancies and the subject of the suit, a live-born girl named Carol Ann. Chaplin supported the girl financially until her 21st birthday.
Rod Thorn
Rodney King Thorn is an American basketball executive and a former professional player and coach, Olympic Committee Chairman, with a career spanning over 50 years. In 2018, Thorn was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Robin Hartshorne
Robin Cope Hartshorne is an American mathematician who is known for his work in algebraic geometry.
Jake Porter
Jake Vernon Haven Porter was an American jazz trumpeter and record producer.
Anthony Zinni
Anthony Charles Zinni is a former United States Marine Corps general and a former Commander in Chief of the United States Central Command (CENTCOM). From 2001 to 2003, he served as a special envoy for the United States to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. From 2017 to 2019, he served as a special envoy to help resolve the Qatar diplomatic crisis.