The Most Influential People Across History

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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List of the most influential people in Chemistry,

#5101

David Zitoun

#129978
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (50 years)
David Zitoun is an Israeli chemist and materials scientist. Biography David Zitoun obtained his M.Sc. in Physical chemistry from Ecole Normale Superieure, France, and a Ph.D. from the University Toulouse III, France, under the supervision of Bruno Chaudret, with a dissertation on the magnetism of clusters. In 2003 he was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley with Prof. Peidong Yang, investigating the diluted magnetic semiconducting nanowires. Between 2004 and 2009 he was a senior lecturer at Montpellier 2 University, France, and in 2009 he joined the Dep...
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#5102

Miguel García-Garibay

Miguel García-Garibay
#85715
Overall Influence
Miguel A. García-Garibay is a professor of chemistry and biochemistry and the dean of physical sciences at University of California, Los Angeles . His research focuses on solid state organic chemistry, photochemistry and spectroscopy, artificial molecular machines, and mesoscale phenomena.
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#5103

Roman Gladyshevskii

Roman Gladyshevskii
#97507
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Roman Gladyshevskii is a Ukrainian chemist, academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Doctor of Chemistry, professor, vice-rector for research of University of Lviv. Biography 1980 – He graduated from the Ivan Franko State University of Lviv, Faculty of Chemistry.
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#5104

José Cuatrecasas

José Cuatrecasas
#76671
Overall Influence
1903 - 1996 (93 years)
José Cuatrecasas was a Spanish botanist. He was born on March 19, 1903, in Camprodon, Catalonia, Spain. His research focused on the high-elevation páramo and sub-páramo regions of the Andes Mountains in South America, especially the flowering plant families Asteraceae and Malpighiaceae. He played an important role in the founding of the Organization for Flora Neotropica.
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#5105

Jennifer Hollingsworth

#152794
Overall Influence
Jennifer Ann Hollingsworth is a scientist and laboratory fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory . Education Hollingsworth received a B.A. in chemistry from Grinnell College in 1992 and a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from Washington University in St. Louis in 1999.
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#5106

Paula Alves

#155326
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Paula Marques Alves is a Portuguese biochemical engineer who is a professor at the NOVA University Lisbon. She is the chief executive officer of the Instituto de Biology Experimental e Tecnológica. She was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering in 2021.
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#5107

Amy Hauck Newman

Amy Hauck Newman
#118886
Overall Influence
Amy Hauck Newman is an American medicinal chemist who is the scientific director of the intramural research program at the National Institute on Drug Abuse. She researches the design, synthesis, and evaluation of central nervous system active agents as potential treatment medications for substance use disorders, with an emphasis on selective ligands for the dopaminergic system.
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#5108

Linda M. Field

#62497
Overall Influence
Linda M. Field FRES FRSB is a British scientist noted for her work on the insecticide mode of action and resistance. Biography Field was awarded a PhD on the molecular basis of insecticide resistance at Rothamsted Research in 1989. She became leader of the Insect Molecular Biology Group at Rothamsted in 2002, and then Head of the Department of Biological Chemistry in 2010 .
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#5109

Samuel Traina

#169591
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Samuel Traina is an American environmental chemist and a founder of The Sierra Nevada Research Institute whose work used to be funded by the National Science Foundation, the United States Department of Energy and the United States Environmental Protection Agency. He also a member of various committees such as the Earth Resources Committee and National Research Council. From 1985 to 2002 he was faculty member of the Ohio State University and was a co-director of the Environmental Molecular Science Institute.
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#5110

Norman Sheppard

#136491
Overall Influence
1921 - 2015 (94 years)
Norman Sheppard FRS was a chemist and expert on the application of vibrational spectroscopy to molecular structure, in solids, on surfaces, in solution and in the gas phase. Biography Norman Sheppard was born at 15 St Hilda Street Hull on 16 May 1921, son of Walter and Anne Clarges . After attending Hymers College from 1930 to 1940, where he developed a liking for physical chemistry, he went up to St Catharine's College, Cambridge in 1940, and graduated in 1943. He studied for his PhD under Gordon Sutherland and was awarded the higher degree in 1947.
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#5111

Curtis P. Berlinguette

#167806
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Curtis P. Berlinguette is a professor of chemistry. and chemical and biological engineering at the University of British Columbia. He is also a CIFAR Program Co-Director, a principal investigator at the Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His academic research group designs and builds electrochemical reactors for:Reactive CO2 capture ;Electro-catalytic hydrogenation; andLow-temperature nuclear fusion .His research group also builds self-driving laboratories that combine flexible automation and artificial intelligence
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#5112

Carel Jan Van Oss

#169695
Overall Influence
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#5113

Leon Phillips

#163676
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Leon Francis Phillips is a New Zealand physical chemist specialising in the gas-liquid interface and atmospheric chemistry. Biography Born in Thames on 14 July 1935, Phillips was educated at Westport Technical College and Christchurch Boys' High School. He studied at Canterbury University College, from where he graduated with an MSc with first-class honours in 1958. After a PhD at the University of Cambridge and post-doctoral research at McGill University, he returned to lecture at Canterbury, rising to the rank of professor in 1966.
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#5114

Shen Panwen

#88231
Overall Influence
1916 - 2017 (101 years)
Shen Panwen was a Chinese chemist. Shen was born in September 1916 in Jilin City, Jilin, with his ancestral home in Conghua, Guangzhou and studied chemistry at National Southwestern Associated University.
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#5115

Punit Boolchand

#97207
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Punit Boolchand is a materials scientist, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computing Systems in the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Cincinnati , where he is director of the Solid State Physics and Electronic Materials Laboratory He discovered the Intermediate Phase: an elastically percolative network glass distinguished from traditional liquid–gas spinodals by strong non-local long-range interactions. The IP characterizes space-filling, nearly stress-free and non-aging, critically self-organized non-equilibrium glassy networks . H...
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#5116

Tami Bond

#44384
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Tami Bond holds the Walter Scott, Jr. Presidential Chair in Energy, Environment and Health at Colorado State University since 2019. For many years she was a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois, and an affiliate professor of Atmospheric Science. Bond has focused research on the effective study of black carbon or soot in the atmosphere. She is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. A MacArthur Fellowship was awarded to her in 2014.
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#5117

Samuel M. Nabrit

#20032
Overall Influence
1905 - 2003 (98 years)
Samuel Milton Nabrit was an American marine biologist. He was the first African American to be awarded a doctoral degree from Brown University, the first Morehouse College graduate to earn a Ph.D. and the first African American appointed to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission . He was also the first African American to serve on the Brown University Board of Trustees.
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#5118

Melvin Barnett Comisarow

#100808
Overall Influence
Melvin Barnett Comisarow is a Canadian physicist and analytical chemist who co-invented the Fourier-transform ion cyclotron resonance technique of Mass spectroscopy, together with Alan G. Marshall, at the University of British Columbia. Comisarow was born in Alberta to a Ukrainian-Canadian family, and earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Alberta, 1963, before obtaining his PhD at Case Western Reserve University, under the supervision of George Andrew Olah in 1969, and subsequently a postdoc with John D. Baldeschwieler at Stanford University. His first academic appointment was at ...
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#5119

David Mark

David Mark
#35175
Overall Influence
1947 - 2022 (75 years)
David Mark was a SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geography at the University at Buffalo, USA. He made several contributions to research and education in Geographic Information Science , most recently in human spatial cognition and language.
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#5120

Charles L. Mader

Charles L. Mader
#76087
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
Charles Lavern Mader was an American physical chemist known for his work in the fluid dynamics of explosives and water waves. He was a Laboratory Fellow of Los Alamos National Laboratory. He wrote several books on numerical modeling of explosives, propellants, and water waves, and he authored or co-authored over 160 technical papers.
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#5121

Kim Jelfs

#112714
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Kim E. Jelfs is a computational chemist based at Imperial College London who was one of the recipients of the Harrison-Meldola Memorial Prizes in 2018. She develops software to predict the structures and properties of molecular systems for renewable energy.
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#5122

Kathryn Whitehead

#169386
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (45 years)
Kathryn Ann Whitehead is an American chemical engineer who is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research considers the development of nanomaterial-based drug delivery systems for gene therapy, oral macromolecular delivery systems, and maternal and infant therapeutics. She is an elected Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2021 and Fellow of the Controlled Release Society.
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#5123

Kannan Moudgalya

#109120
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Kannan M. Moudgalya is an Indian professor of Chemical Engineering, Systems and Control, and Education Technology at IIT Bombay. Education Kannan earned his Bachelor of Technology degree in chemical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Madras with distinction in 1980 and master's degree in electrical engineering from Rice University, Houston in 1985. He received his doctoral degree on same year in chemical engineering from Rice University, Houston.
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#5124

Mitsuo Kagawa

#59196
Overall Influence
1923 - 2001 (78 years)
Mitsuo Kagawa was a Japanese archaeologist and a professor at Beppu University in Ōita Prefecture, Japan. He committed suicide by hanging himself on March 9, 2001, as a result of the Japanese Paleolithic hoax.
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#5125

Richard A. Larson

#169907
Overall Influence
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#5126

David Kupfer

#169998
Overall Influence
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#5127

Leslie Shemilt

#136886
Overall Influence
1919 - 2011 (92 years)
Leslie Webster Shemilt, was a Canadian chemical engineer and professor. Born in Souris, Manitoba, he received a B.A.Sc. degree in 1941 from the University of Toronto and a M.Sc. degree in 1946 from the University of Manitoba. He received a Ph.D. degree in Physical Chemistry from the University of Toronto in 1947.
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#5128

Howard Hang

#80632
Overall Influence
Howard Chi Hang is an American chemist and professor in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology and Department of Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute. He was previously Richard E. Salomon Family Associate Professor and the head of the Laboratory of Chemical Biology and Microbial Pathogenesis at the Rockefeller University in New York City. He won the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry in 2017.
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#5129

Farah Naz Talpur

#155842
Overall Influence
Farah Naz Talpur, Ph.D. , is a Pakistani chemist, who is active in the fields of analytical chemistry and environmental science; she is an associate professor of the University of Sindh and sub-editor of Pakistan Journal of Analytical and Environmental Chemistry.
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#5130

Rosemarie Wesson

#137775
Overall Influence
Rosemarie Wesson is the Associate Dean of Research at City College of New York. She was the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan. She has worked at the National Science Foundation, Louisiana State University and Dow Chemical Company.
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#5131

Hu Zhuangyou

#123906
Overall Influence
Hu Zhuangyou , was a Chinese chemist, educator and former President of Zhejiang University. Biography Hu's birth and death years are missing. Hu was born in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province. Hu's courtesy name was Yuruo .
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#5132

Marcos Nogueira Eberlin

#118479
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Marcos Nogueira Eberlin is a Brazilian chemist and former professor at the Institute of Chemistry of the University of Campinas. He is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and received the Brazilian National Order of Scientific Merit in 2005 and the Thomson Medal in 2016.
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#5133

Evan Siemann

#64162
Overall Influence
Evan Siemann is a professor in the Biosciences Department at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He received his AB from Cornell University in 1990 and his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1997. The focus of his research has been investigating how local environmental factors interact with post-invasion adaptation to determine the likelihood and severity of Chinese tallow tree invasions into East Texas coastal prairie, mesic forests, and floodplain forests. The results of this research have been highlighted in Science Daily, Environmental News Service, and The Sciences. He has also recently begun to explore the ecosystem level impacts of exotic tree invasions into coastal prairies.
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#5134

Blanca Renée Arrillaga

Blanca Renée Arrillaga
#159483
Overall Influence
1917 - 2011 (94 years)
Blanca Renée Arrillaga Oronoz de Maffei was a Uruguayan chemist, botanist, professor and agrostologist. Originally from the Uruguayan Department of Artigas, she began her studies there then moved to Montevideo where she earned a degree in pharmaceutical chemistry from the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of the Republic . Her most important publications include 'Nuevas especies y notas taxonómicas en Uruguay y Paraguay' in collaboration; Plantas Medicinales and Gramíneas Uruguayas with B. Rosengurtt and P. Izaguirre de Artucio.
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#5135

Dominique Weis

#90680
Overall Influence
Dominique Weis is a Canadian scientist. She is a Canada Research Chair in the Geochemistry of the Earth's Mantleat at the University of British Columbia. Early life and education Weis obtained her B.Sc in Geology and Mineralogy and PhD from the Université Libre de Bruxelles . She later completed a master's degree in Environmental Sciences and Habilitation Geochemistry at Université Libre de Bruxelles.
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#5136

Katheryn Emanuel Lawson

#146178
Overall Influence
1926 - 2008 (82 years)
Kathryn Lee Emanuel Lawson was one of the first few female African American chemists who worked in Sandia National Laboratories. She studied properties of irradiated materials in Crystal Physics research division. She earned her PhD from the University of New Mexico in radiochemistry in 1957.
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#5137

Tijana Rajh

#165534
Overall Influence
Tijana Rajh is a Serbian American materials scientist who is a professor and director of the Arizona State University School of Molecular Sciences. Her research considers the development of nanomaterials and materials for quantum technologies. She was awarded the Association for Women in Science Innovator Award in 2009, and named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2014.
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#5138

Maria Tchernycheva

#138019
Overall Influence
Maria Tchernycheva born in St. Petersburg, Russia is working in the field of photonics and nanotechnology at both the Universite Paris-Sud XI and Centre national de la recherche scientifique. She has an h-index of 54 with the most cited work being Systematic experimental and theoretical investigation of intersubband absorption in Ga N/ Al N quantum wells which was published in 2006 and received 211 since that year.
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#5139

Chris Hunter

#131824
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Christopher Alexander Hunter, FRS is a British chemist and academic. Since 2014, he has been Herchel Smith Professor of Organic Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge. His research is currently focused on molecular recognition. He was previously a lecturer at the University of Otago and a lecturer then professor at the University of Sheffield.
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#5140

Rodney Priestley

#129095
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (45 years)
Rodney Dewayne Priestley is an American chemical engineer and professor at Princeton University. His research considers the phase transitions of polymers and their application in electronic devices and healthcare. In 2020 he was made the Princeton University Vice Dean of Innovation. He was named dean of The Graduate School effective June 1, 2022.
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#5141

Ghislaine Crozaz

#140193
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
Ghislaine Crozaz is a cosmochemist known for her research on the early history of the solar system through tracking trace elements in meteorites. Education and career Crozaz received a B.Sc. in 1961 and a Ph.D. in 1967 from the University of Brussels. In 1967, and from 1971 to 1972, she was a visiting associate in Geochemistry at California Institute of Technology. She moved to Washington University in St. Louis as a postdoctoral investigator in the lab of Robert M. Walker . As of 2021, she is professor emerita in Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and lives i...
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#5142

Nobuo Tanaka

#170301
Overall Influence
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#5143

David A. Kofke

#170321
Overall Influence
David A. Kofke is an American chemical engineer, currently SUNY Distinguished Professor at State University of New York. He is a Fellow of American Institute of Chemical Engineers.
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#5144

Deanna D'Alessandro

#165720
Overall Influence
Deanna Michelle D'Alessandro is an Australian chemist who is a Professor and Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the University of Sydney. Her research considers fundamental aspects of electron transfer in molecular coordination complexes and in nanoporous materials, and the development of metal–organic frameworks for environmental applications including carbon dioxide capture and conversion.
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#5145

Andrée Marquet

#108088
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (91 years)
Andrée Marquet , is a French chemist specializing in organic chemistry and chemical biology, professor emeritus at the Pierre and Marie Curie University and correspondent at the French Academy of sciences since 1993.
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#5146

Barbara Albert

#49237
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Barbara Ruth Albert is a German chemist and rector of the University of Duisburg-Essen. She was Professor of Solid State Chemistry at the Eduard-Zintl-Institute for Inorganic and Physical Chemistry of the Technische Universität Darmstadt. From 2012 to 2013 she was the president of the German Chemical Society.
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#5147

William Arthur Smeaton

#151847
Overall Influence
1924 - 2001 (77 years)
William Arthur Smeaton was a British chemist and historian of science, who wrote more than seventy-five articles and several books on the history of chemistry in France in the 18th and 19th centuries.
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#5148

Chris Ireland

#114635
Overall Influence
Chris Ireland is an American pharmacist, currently the Dean and L. S. Skaggs Presidential Endow Chair for Pharmacy and Distinguished Professor at University of Utah.
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#5149

Daniel Nomura

#116114
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Daniel K. Nomura is an American chemical biologist and Professor of Chemical Biology and Molecular Therapeutics at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Departments of Chemistry and Molecular & Cell Biology. His work employs chemoproteomic approaches to develop small molecule therapeutics and therapeutic modalities against traditionally "undruggable" proteins.
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#5150

Sven Josef Cyvin

#130882
Overall Influence
1931 - 2013 (82 years)
Sven Josef Cyvin was a Norwegian chemist. Early life and education He was born in Czechoslovakia, but emigrated to Norway with his parents in 1940. He finished his secondary education at Trondheim Cathedral School in 1949 and graduated in chemical engineering at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in 1956. During his studies, he met his wife and collaborator Bjørg Cyvin. In 1960 he took the dr.techn. degree. From 1964 he was a docent, and from 1970 to his retirement he was a professor of theoretical chemistry at the Norwegian Institute of Technology. He was a fellow of the Norwegian Academy...
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