Will Bagley, BA 1971 – historian of 1800s American West
Michael A. Bellesiles, BA 1975 – author of a book "Arming America: The origins of a National Gun Culture" which won the Bancroft Prize in 2001; the prize was rescinded by Columbia University in 2002 as for having "violated basic norms of scholarship and the high standards expected of Bancroft Prize winners."
Susie Bright – writer, sex activist and sex therapy focus leader
James Charles Kopp, BA Biology 1976 – murderer of Buffalo abortion doctor Barnett Slepian in 1998; convicted in 2003 and serving sentence of 25 years to life
Pamela Silver, BA 1974 – Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, first Director of Harvard University Systems Biology Graduate Program, synthetic biologist
Kathryn D. Sullivan, BS 1973 – astronaut, science museum CEO (COSI Columbus), Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere, NOAA Administrator
Gregory Bateson – late lecturer and fellow of Kresge College; anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist
William L. Burke – late professor of physics (cosmologist); chaos theory "godfather"
James H. Clark – assistant professor of information science, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape
James Clifford – professor of history of consciousness, known for publications of postmodernist and postcolonial interpretations of anthropology and ethnography
David Cope – professor of music; notable for his experiments in A.I. and computer-created musical compositions
Angela Davis – professor of history of consciousness, writer, activist
Donna Haraway – professor of history of consciousness; doctorate in biology; often-cited author of feminist history of science and culture studies of cyborg
David Haussler – professor of biomolecular engineering; he and his team assembled the public draft human genome and developed the Genome Browser as part of the Human Genome Project; member of the AAAS (elected 2006)[16] and the National Academy of Sciences
Jim Kent – associate research scientist in the Department of Biomolecular Engineering; directs the genome browser development and quality assurance staff of the UCSC Genome Bioinformatics Group; created the computer program that assembled the first working draft of the human genome sequence; participates in the public consortium efforts to produce, assemble, and annotate genomes
Chip Lord – professor of film and digital media; member of Ant Farm, a groundbreaking, experimental art and architecture collective he founded in 1968 with fellow architect Doug Michels
Larry Polansky – professor of music, composer and performing artist
Joel Primack – professor of physics, noted cosmologist; renowned for Cold Dark Matter Theory proposed along with Sandra Faber (see above) and Sir Martin Rees
Harold Widom – member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 2006)[16]
Gurdon Woods – sculptor, founding chair of the art department at UC Santa Cruz, from 1966 to 1974[17][18]
Stanford E. Woosley – professor of astronomy and astrophysics; noted for his work on supernovagamma ray bursts; member of the NAS (elected 2006) and American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 2001)[16]
^Hallmark, Kara Kelley (2007). Encyclopedia of Asian American Artists, Artists of the American mosaic. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 87–90. ISBN978-0313334511.