Get to Know the world's top 5 wealthiest professors

ADI SHAMIR

After getting his PhD in 1977, Shamir worked as a researcher at MIT and eventually returned to a his alma mater, Israel’s Weizmann Institute, for a professorship. He also taught courses at the Ecole Normale Supeieure in Paris. While Shamir plays a major role in computer science academia, he also helped develop some major cryptography algorithms that made him quite wealthy. Patents on the RSA algorithm, Feige-Fiat-Shamir identification scheme and a variety of digital signatures and voting systems have netted him hundreds of millions (if not over a billion) over the past few decades. It also earned millions more in royalties for the Weizmann Institute.

HENRY SAMUELI

Today, Henry Samueli is the co-founder, senior vice president and CTO at the Broadcom Corporation — but he didn’t always work in the business world. After receiving his PhD in electrical engineering from UCLA, Samueli began working as a professor there. It was not until a decade later, in 1991, that he decided to found Broadcom Corporation with a former student, each putting in a modest investment $5,000 invest. This paid off for the professor, and by 1998 he retired from his academic position and focused on the business full time. Today, Samueli has a net worth estimated at $2.3 billion — a big step up from his UCLA salary.

DAVID CHERITON

Professor David Cheriton has taught computer science at Stanford since 1981 and taken part in some amazing research into operating systems. He’s also won numerous accolades for his work. Yet he is best known for his investments in budding technology companies. In 1995, he put money towards a nascent Google, a smart move that has earned him just over a billion to date. The professor also invested in a number of other technology companies, and is now worth around $1.8 billion total. While notoriously frugal with his money, Cheriton has been quite generous with giving back to the academic community, donating $25 million to the University of Waterloo and another $2 million to the University of British Columbia.

ROBERT S. LANGER

An engineer and David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT (one of the highest honors the school offers), Langer is one of the leading academics working in the fields of biomedical and chemical engineering today. Known for his biotech research on drug delivery systems and tissue engineering, Langer holds over 760 patents in the medical and engineering worlds. It is these patents, as well as his work as a director at multiple medical research and pharmaceutical companies, that have helped make him one of the wealthiest academics today. Langer not only has a generous net worth of his own, but directs over $10 million in grants for his MIT research lab – the largest biomedical example in the world.

STEPHEN HAWKING

One of the best-known names on this list, Stephen Hawking is a legend in cosmology and theoretical physics — not to mention of the most renowned academics of all time. Hawking was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge for 30 years, retiring in 2009. Throughout his career, he received numerous awards and made major breakthroughs in our understanding of black holes, general relativity and quantum gravity. An academic celebrity, much of Hawking’s wealth comes from the popularity of his books, including the runaway best seller A Brief History of Time. Today, the retired Hawking is estimated to be worth about $20 million.