Tour guides frequently say that one in every 720 Americans is a graduate of Penn State. But it’s hard to wrap your mind around the influence of Penn State alumni until you see something like this.

Time Magazine recently named its world-wide Top 100 most influential people in 2009, and Onward State wants to congratulate the three Penn State people that made the list:

Roland Fryer  (01 MA ‘02 PhD Lib)

Time says that after Fryer earned his Ph. D. from Penn State, Fryer became “the youngest tenured African-American professor in Harvard University’s history.” Fryer’s ground-breaking research specializes in the field of education. He created the Education Innovation Laboratory at Harvard, which strives to apply the scientific method to understand performance gaps in education and implement creative solutions.

Professors Stephan Schuster (Biochemistry and Molecular Biology) and Webb Miller (Computer Science and Engineering)

Earlier this year, we wrote about Schuster and Miller, who sequenced the DNA of a 20,000-year-old woolly mammoth. Time reports that though scientists previously thought that nuclear DNA degraded soon after death, Schuster and Miller “[offer] the tantalizing possibility of sequencing the genomes of historical figures from just a lock of hair.”

Has anyone taken a class from Schuster and Miller, or met Fryer?

[Photos courtesy of Time.com]