These three Yale alums cofounded Higher One in 2000, a startup that provides educational institutions with an efficient method for handling financial disbursements including student refunds, purchases, payroll and collection of payments and offers students flexible options and financial literacy programs. The company supports more than 1,600 schools and approximately 13 million enrolled students.

Anne Wojcicki graduated from Yale in 1996 with a biology degree and went on to cofound 23andMe, a personal genetic testing startup. The company provides DNA analysis to individuals via a saliva test and then posts the results online with regular updates allowing people to see the genetic probabilities of inheriting particular diseases. The startup has had its share of controversies, including an ongoing regulation battle with the FDA.

Gualberto Ruaño received a PhD in human genetics from Yale in 1993 and is the inventor of Coupled Amplification and Sequencing (CAS), a method of gene discovery that formed the basis of Ruano’s first startup, Gennaissance. Ruaño is currently the President and Founder of Genomas, a company dedicated to DNA-guided management and prescription of drugs.

Jonathan M. Rothberg is a pioneer in DNA sequencing, who received an MS, MPhil and PhD in biology from Yale. His thesis work centered on decoding the slit gene which is responsible for the wiring of the nervous system. Rothberg founded CuraGen while at Yale, one of the first genomics companies to develop therapies for treating metastatic skin and breast cancer (sold to CellDex Therapeutics).  He later founded 454 Life Sciences (acquired by Roche) and Ion Torrent (acquired by Life Technologies).

Barry Nalebuff is the Milton Steinbach Professor at Yale University who joined the faculty in 1990 as well as an expert on game theory and how it applies to business strategy and co-author of six books. In 1998, he and former student Seth Goldman cofounded Honest Tea to compete with the over-sweetened beverage market, bringing it to $70 million in sales before selling the company to Coca Cola in 2011.

Richard Flavell was the founding chairman of the Department of Immunobiology at Yale. He won the Vilcek Prize for Biomedical Sciences with Ruslan Medzhitov for having posed a unifying theory to describe how inflammation can impact the body’s control mechanisms to trigger the onset of disease. Flavell continues to chair Yale’s Department of Immunobiology and is the Sterling Professor of Immunobiology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

Kevin Ryan is a leading internet entrepreneur who founded the online retailer Gilt Groupe as well as Business Insider and MongoDB. Under his leadership, the online ad service and Google subsidiary DoubleClick grew from a 20-person startup to a multibillion dollar global leader. Ryan was named one of the “50 Most Influential Business People” by Crain’s New York Business and he currently serves on the board of Yale University and is a member of the Yale International Council.

After joining the Dept. of Computer Science at Yale in 1985, Vladimir Rokhlin went on to co-invent the Fast Multipole Method, one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century. It is used to solve a classic problem in mathematical physics called the n-body problem, which determines how the gravitational attraction between two or more bodies affects their motion and has a wide number of applications in physics, from studying planetary motion to describing electromagnetic phenomena.

Tze-Chiang Chen, a pioneer in the development of silicon chip technologies, received his PhD in Engineering and Applied Science from Yale in 1985. He is currently Vice President of Science and Technology Research & Development at IBM, where he led the development of technology that formed the basis of semiconductor devices in IBM computers. He also led a team of international collaborators to build the fastest and smallest DRAM technology and is an IEEE Fellow.

Tarek Sherif is the founder of Medidata Solutions, the leading global provider of cloud-based solutions to the life science industry—a business that supports clinical trials in over 115 countries and defines the vertical cloud company business model. Sherif led Medidata’s successful IPO in June 2009, positioning Medidata as one of the best performing companies to go public since 2009 and New York City’s most successful public technology company.