This page lists notable alumni and faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz; alumni may have attended without graduating.

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• Martin Abadi - Professor Emeritus, Computer Science and Engineering. Known for Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic and Baby Modula-3
• Ralph Abraham – professor emeritus of mathematics, notable for founding the Visual Mathematics Institute and for his pioneering work on chaos theory
• Bettina Aptheker – professor of feminist studies and history
• Elliot Aronson – professor emeritus of psychology; author of The Social Animal and Nobody Left to Hate: Teaching Compassion after Columbine; creator of the Jigsaw Classroom model; one of the few psychologists to win the American Psychological Association's highest honor in all three fields
• John Backus – late adjunct professor of Computer Science; Won Turing Award for creating Fortran
• Reyner Banham – late professor of art history and a preeminent architectural historian, in particular of the modern era
• Tom Banks – professor of physics. Known for work on string theory, elementary particle physics, and cosmology
• Gregory Bateson – late lecturer and fellow of Kresge College; anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist
• George R. Blumenthal – professor of astronomy and astrophysics, and chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz
• Bakthan Singaram – professor of organic chemistry and former researcher
• Norman O. Brown – late professor emeritus of humanities
• 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
• Nathaniel Deutsch – professor and Baumgarten Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies
• John Dizikes – professor emeritus of American studies, author, won the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award
• Frank Drake – professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics; proposed the Drake Equation; member of the AAAS (elected 1974)^[16]
• William Everson – late lecturer and poet-in-residence
• Sandra M. Faber – professor of astronomy and astrophysics; instrumental in inventing cold dark matter theory and fundamental work in the field of galaxy formation and evolution; member of the NAS (elected 1985), the AAAS (elected 1989),^[16] and the American Philosophical Society (elected 2001)
• Alison Galloway – forensic anthropologist who worked in identifying the physical remains of Laci Peterson in the trial of Scott Peterson^[16]
• Shelly Grabe – associate professor of social psychology and scholar-activist in women's human rights
• Craig Haney – professor of psychology and instrumental researcher in the Stanford Prison Experiment
• 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
• George Herbig – emeritus professor of astronomy and astrophysics, pioneer in the study of star formation, discoverer of the Herbig Ae/Be stars and Herbig-Haro Objects, member of the National Academy of Sciences
• George Hitchcock – late lecturer, poetry and theater
• David A. Huffman – deceased; founding faculty of the Information and Computer Science Board; developed Huffman coding
• Harry Huskey – deceased; Professor of Computer Science; advised many countries on how to establish an academic Computer Science program
• Frederic Jameson – professor of history of consciousness; cultural critic and theorist of the post-modern; published the essay "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism", a significant investigation into contemporary culture and the political economy
• 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
• Robert P. Kraft – professor of astronomy and astrophysics, stellar astronomer, member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Cynthia Ling Lee – professor of theatre arts, known for postmodern and classical Indian dance
• Tom Lehrer – lecturer in American studies and mathematics; known for his satire and songwriting
• Darrell Long – professor of computer science and engineering, fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
• 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
• Nathaniel Mackey – poet and editor
• Dominic W. Massaro – professor of psychology and computer engineering; originator of the fuzzy logical model of perception, one of the leading theories of speech perception
• Claire Ellen Max – professor of astronomy and astrophysics, member of the AAAS (elected 2002)^[16] and the National Academy of Sciences
• Gordon Mumma – professor emeritus of music, composer
• Richard Abel Musgrave – member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 1961)^[16]
• Jerry Nelson – professor of astronomy and astrophysics; pioneered the use of mirror segments, making the Keck telescopes possible; member of the NAS
• Harry Noller – professor of biology. RNA research; member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 1969)^[16] and the National Academy of Sciences (elected 1992)
• Donald E. Osterbrock – member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 1968)^[16] and the National Academy of Sciences (elected 1966)
• Micah Perks – fiction writer and memoirist
• 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
• Geoffrey Pullum – professor of linguistics and distinguished professor of humanities; co-author of Cambridge Grammar of the English Language; member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 2003)^[16]
• Adrienne Rich – late professor, poet and essayist
• Constance M. Rockosi – chair of the astronomy and astrophysics department
• Beth Shapiro – professor of ecology and evolutionary biology; author of How to Clone a Mammoth
• Page Smith – Historian
• Michael Ellman Soule – member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 2005)^[16]
• Ben Stein – former professor of economics, more notable for his work as a comedian, actor and political commentator
• Stephen Thorsett – professor of astronomy and astrophysics; dean of physical and biological science; known for work on properties of compact stars
• Anna Tsing – professor of anthropology; Guggenheim Fellow and Niels Bohr Professorship
• Noah Wardrip-Fruin – associate professor of computer science, digital media and interactive fiction researcher
• Manfred K. Warmuth – Professor of Computer Science, known for Weighted Majority Algorithm
• Hayden White – member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 1991)^[16]
• Jim Whitehead – chair of Computer Science and creator of WebDAV
• 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 supernova gamma ray bursts; member of the NAS (elected 2006) and American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 2001)^[16]
• Karen Tei Yamashita – author and playwright, recipient of the National Book Award's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2021