George Emil Palade was a Romanian-American cell biologist. Described as "the most influential cell biologist ever", in 1974 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine along with Albert Claude and Christian de Duve. The prize was granted for his innovations in electron microscopy and cell fractionation which together laid the foundations of modern molecular cell biology, the most notable discovery being the ribosomes of the endoplasmic reticulum – which he first described in 1955.

Romanian Americans are Americans who have Romanian ancestry. According to the 2017 American Community Survey, 478,278 Americans indicated Romanian as their first or second ancestry, however other sources provide higher estimates, which are most likely more accurate, for the numbers of Romanian Americans in the contemporary United States; for example, the Romanian-American Network supplies a rough estimate of 1.2 million who are fully or partially of Romanian ethnicity. There is also a significant number of people of Romanian Jewish ancestry, estimated at about 225,000.