Víctor Andrés Belaúnde, the president of the United Nations General Assembly from 1959 to1960, taught Latin American history at the College of Arts & Sciences in the 1920s and helped establish Latin American studies as an academic area. After returning to his home country of Peru in the 1930s, Belaúnde continued to be involved in the University of Miami, serving as a member of the Board of Trustees from 1934 to 1947.
Howard Aiken, who invented the world’s first large-scale computer in collaboration with IBM, became a distinguished service professor of information technology at the University in 1961. He helped develop the Arthur A. Ungar Computing Center, the building that today houses the College’s computer science and mathematics departments.
Behram N. Kursunoglu, an accomplished physics professor at the College, founded the Center for Theoretical Studies at the University in 1965. The center attracted scientists and mathematicians from around the world, including many Nobel Prize winners. Affiliated with the College, the center offered courses for graduate credit and a lecture series open to graduate students and faculty.
One of the first physicists to visit the center was J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the development of the atomic bomb.
Paul A.M. Dirac, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933 and is considered one of the founders of quantum mechanics, spent several semesters writing, researching, and lecturing at the center. The center continued to operate until Kursunoglu’s retirement in 1992.
Behram N. Kursunoglu, Edward Teller, and Paul A.M. Dirac. Photo courtesy of George Alexandrakis
After a chance meeting with then-University president Edward T. Foote II on a boat in Alaska, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer James A. Michener spent three years between 1986 and 1989 at the College as a distinguished visiting professor in English/creative writing. Michener’s time on the Coral Gables campus inspired him to give back, leading him to endow a creative writing fellowship program for graduate students.
photo credit: Jeff Freeman/Miami Hurricane
The poet Robert Frost, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry four times, owned a winter home in South Miami and lectured at the University in the 1940s.
Donna Shalala, who served as president of the University and as a professor of political science in the College from 2001 to 2015, has held numerous leadership and public service roles. Most notably, she was the Secretary of Health and Human Services for eight years under President Bill Clinton and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 2019 to 2021.
Susan Haack, a faculty member in both the College and the University of Miami School of Law, is a world-famous philosopher whose areas of study include epistemology and the philosophy of science. She was included, along with Confucius, Plato, and Aristotle, in Peter J. King’s One Hundred Philosophers: The Life and Work of the World's Greatest Thinkers, and has received numerous awards, including the Ulysses Medal, the highest honor given by University College Dublin.
Neil Schneiderman, a faculty member in the psychology department from 1965 to 2023, was a pioneer in the fields of health psychology and behavioral medicine. Among his many accomplishments, Schneiderman served as a principal investigator of the most comprehensive long-term study of health and disease in Hispanics and Latinos living in the United States.
