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,

#5451

Assunta Cuyegkeng

#96209
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Ma. Assunta Caoile-Cuyegkeng is a Professor of Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry, School of Science and Engineering, Ateneo de Manila University. She was former Vice President for the Loyola Schools of the university. In 2006, she succeeded Professor Anna Miren Gonzales-Intal of the Department of Psychology to become the second person to hold the highest position in the Loyola Schools. She also served as the Acting Dean of the then School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Science and Engineering. In September 2009, she decided to step down from her position as the Loyola Schools Vice President.
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#5452

Nicola Pohl

#168780
Overall Influence
Nicola Lucia B. Pohl is an American chemist who is the Joan & Marvin Carmack Chair at Indiana University Bloomington. She also serves as Associate Dean of Natural and Mathematical Sciences. Her research considers new approaches to make and analyse sugars. In 2020 she was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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#5453

David S. Eisenberg

#179004
Overall Influence
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#5454

Peter Klæboe

#170329
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Peter Klæboe was a Norwegian chemist. He took the cand.real. degree at the University of Oslo in 1956, the PhD degree at the University of Oklahoma in 1960 and the dr.philos. degree in Oslo in 1967. Upon returning from the US in 1960 he was hired as lecturer at the University of Oslo, advancing to docent and then professor of physical chemistry. His pioneering field was molecular spectroscopy. Retiring as a professor in 1999, he continued his research nonetheless and had by his 80th birthday penned 350 scientific articles. He was a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and th...
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#5455

Jack R. Norton

#175093
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Jack Richard Norton is an American organometallic chemist and Professor at Columbia University. His research has focused on the studying the reactivity and properties of transition metal hydrides. He coauthored the textbook "Principles and Applications of Organotransition Metal Chemistry."
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#5456

Dacheng Ren

#170737
Overall Influence
Dacheng Ren is the Stevenson-endowed professor in the Department of Biomedical and Chemical Engineering at Syracuse University. He also serves as the director for the Syracuse Biomaterials Institute. Ren is known for research on biofilm growth and work on inhibition of bacterial growth on medical devices.
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#5457

Robert E. Cohen

#110852
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Robert E. Cohen is an American chemical engineer currently at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2010, Cohen was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for research on polymer morphology and surfaces, commercial products and processes, successful entrepreneurship, and novel educational programs. He is also a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.
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#5458

René Peters

#179045
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
René Peters is a German chemist and since 2008 Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Stuttgart. Life and work Peters studied chemistry at RWTH Aachen University from 1992 to 1997 and subsequently received his doctorate under Dieter Enders until 2000. This was followed by a stay as a postdoc at Harvard University with Yoshito Kishi as a DAAD scholarship holder. Between 2001 and 2004 he worked as a process research chemist at F. Hoffmann-La Roche LTD . From 2004 to 2008, Peters was an assistant professor at ETH Zurich. Since 2008 he has been Professor of Organic Chemistry at the U...
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#5459

Turhan Nejat Veziroğlu

#47810
Overall Influence
Turhan Nejat Veziroğlu , sometimes referred to as TN Veziroglu, is a professor emeritus at the University of Miami, and during the 1970s chaired its mechanical engineering department and was its associate dean for research. He is the President of the International Association for Hydrogen Energy and founding editor of the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy. A research center at the University of Niğde, Turkey carries his name.
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#5460

Michael Hartshorn

#145689
Overall Influence
1936 - 2017 (81 years)
Michael Philip Hartshorn was a British-born New Zealand organic chemist. He was awarded the Hector Memorial Medal by the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1973. Early life and education Born in Keresley on the outskirts of Coventry, Warwickshire, England, on 10 September 1936, Hartshorn was the son of Bernard Hartshorn and Christine Evelyn Hartshorn . He studied at Imperial College London, from where he graduated BSc and ARCS, and at University College, Oxford, where he obtained a DPhil in 1960. His doctoral thesis was titled Steroid hormone analogues.
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#5461

Karen Hudson-Edwards

#178254
Overall Influence
Karen A. Hudson-Edwards is a Canadian mineralogist and geochemist. She is Professor for Sustainable Mining jointly between the Camborne School of Mines and Environment & Sustainability Institute, University of Exeter.
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#5462

Carel Jan Van Oss

#179184
Overall Influence
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#5463

David Haddleton

#177359
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
David Mark Haddleton is a professor in the department of chemistry at The University of Warwick. Haddleton’s work focuses on controlled polymer synthesis and the industrial applications of polymer materials. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
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#5464

Peter Edwards

#148462
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Peter Philip Edwards FRSC FRS is a British Emeritus Professor of Inorganic Chemistry and former Head of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford. Edwards is the recipient of the Corday-Morgan Medal , the Tilden Lectureship and Liversidge Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1996 and was awarded the 2003 Hughes Medal of the Royal Society "for his distinguished work as a solid state chemist. He has made seminal contributions to fields including superconductivity and the behaviour of meta...
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#5465

Laura J. Crossey

#177595
Overall Influence
Laura J. Crossey is an American hydrologist and geochemist and Distinguished Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of New Mexico . Crossey is part of UNM's Sustainable Water Resources Grand Challenge team, which studies water and climate in New Mexico and other arid regions. She has studied springs and groundwater in areas including the Western Desert of Egypt, Australia's Great Artesian Basin, Tibet, the Middle Rio Grande Basin and the Grand Canyon.
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#5466

Charles U. Jr. Pittman

#179277
Overall Influence
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#5467

Santiago Grisolía, 1st Marquess of Grisolía

Santiago Grisolía, 1st Marquess of Grisolía
#48054
Overall Influence
1923 - 2022 (99 years)
Santiago Grisolía García, 1st Marquess of Grisolía was a Spanish biochemist. Career Born in Valencia, Spain, Grisolía studied at the University of Valencia, obtaining his doctorate in medicine in 1949 before continuing his studies at New York University, under Severo Ochoa. He later became a professor of biochemistry and biology at universities in Kansas, Chicago and Wisconsin.
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#5468

Lindsay Cahill

#88002
Overall Influence
Lindsay Cahill is a Canadian chemist who uses Magnetic Resonance Imaging to study metabolic abnormalities in pregnancy. She has published more than 70 articles on her research related to nuclear magnetic resonance in studying electrochemical materials and for imaging animal fetuses and placenta. She has published widely-used protocols for the imaging of mouse brains.
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#5469

Katherine Seley-Radtke

#73548
Overall Influence
Katherine Seley-Radtke is an American medicinal chemist who specializes in the discovery and design of novel nucleoside or nucleotide based enzyme inhibitors that may be used to treat infections or cancer. She has authored over 90 peer-reviewed publications,is an inventor of five issued US patents, and is a professor in the department of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her international impact includes scientific collaborations, policy advising and diplomatic appointments in biosecurity efforts.
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#5470

Anna Stec

#85680
Overall Influence
Anna Agnieszka Stec is Professor in Fire Chemistry and Toxicology at the University of Central Lancashire. Her interests include the assessment of toxic and irritant hazards in fires, and the factors affecting fire gas toxicity.
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#5471

Robert A. Varin

Robert A. Varin
#105534
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Robert Andrzej Varin is a Polish-Canadian scientist, Professor of technical sciences, specialist of materials science and engineering. Academic career He studied at the Faculty of Power and Aeronautical Engineering of Warsaw University of Technology and then at the State Technical School of Thermal Processing. Then he received his master’s degree in Metal Science and Heat Treatment , and a Doctorate of Technical Sciences in Materials Science and Engineering from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Technology at the Warsaw University of Technology. His doctoral dissertation Electron microscopy examination of grain boundary structure in copper was supervised by Prof.
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#5472

Surita Bhatia

#123422
Overall Influence
Surita Bhatia is an American chemist who is professor and vice provost of faculty affairs at Stony Brook University. Her work considers the structure of soft materials, including polymeric hydrogels and colloidal glasses. She was elected Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and the Society of Rheology in 2020.
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#5473

Angela Violi

#132758
Overall Influence
Angela Violi is an Italian and American combustion engineer whose research topics include chemical kinetics, aerosols, the creation of nanoparticles from combustion, and nanoscale self-assembly. She is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan, in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Macromolecular Science and Engineering, Biophysics, Applied Physics, and Chemical Engineering.
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#5474

Joseph Atubokiki Ajienka

#55582
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Joseph Atubokiki Ajienka is a Nigerian professor of Petroleum engineering, educational administrator and the seventh vice chancellor of University of Port Harcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria. Under his leadership, the University of Port Harcourt was ranked 6th in Africa and 1st in Nigeria in Research Influence by Times Higher Education .
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#5475

Wei-Shou Hu

#67334
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Wei-Shou Hu is a Taiwanese-American chemical engineer. He earned his B.S. in agricultural chemistry from National Taiwan University in 1974 and his Ph.D. in biochemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the guidance of Daniel I.C. Wang in 1983. He has been a professor with the University of Minnesota since 1983. Dr. Hu has long impacted the field of cell culture bioprocessing since its infancy by steadfastly introducing quantitative and systematic analysis into this field. His work, which covers areas such as modeling and controlling cell metabolism, modulating g...
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#5476

Silvia Giordani

#173439
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Silvia Giordani is an Italian chemist who is Professor of Nanomaterials at Dublin City University. Her research considers carbon-based functional materials for biotechnology. She was awarded a L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science fellowship in 2012.
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#5477

Graeme Barker

#179536
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
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#5478

Regina Murphy

#175356
Overall Influence
Regina Mary Murphy is an American chemical engineer. She is the Robert Byron Bird Department Chair in Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 2010, Murphy was elected a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering for "pioneering discoveries on protein aggregation in neurodegenerative disease."
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#5479

Naoki Yamamoto

#179648
Overall Influence
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#5480

David Leitner

#177838
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
David M. Leitner is an American chemist currently Professor at University of Nevada, Reno and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Education He earned his B.S. at Cornell University in 1985 and then his Ph.D at University of Chicago in 1989 under R. Stephen Berry.
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#5481

Arie Lev Gruzman

Arie Lev Gruzman
#170445
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Arie Lev Gruzman is a professor of chemistry at Bar Ilan University specializing in Medicinal Chemistry. Biography Arie Lev Gruzman was born in Gorky , Russia. He graduated from as a practical nurse. At the same year, he enrolled at the Pediatric faculty of Gorky Academy for Medicine . After two and a half years, he interrupted his education towards M.D. and repatriated to Israel in 1991. He obtained his B.Sc. in Medicinal chemistry from Bar-Ilan University and a Ph.D. from the School of Pharmacy, Faculty of Medicine, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the supervision of Prof. Shlomo Sasson and Prof.
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#5482

Haroon Ahmed

#30420
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Haroon Ahmed FREng , is a British Pakistani scientist in specialising the fields of microelectronics and electrical engineering. He is Emeritus Professor of Microelectronics at the Cavendish Laboratory, the Physics Department of the University of Cambridge, Honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
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#5483

Oleg Prezhdo

Oleg Prezhdo
#171428
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Oleg V. Prezhdo is a Ukrainian–American physical chemist whose research focuses on non-adiabatic molecular dynamics and time-dependent density functional theory . His research interests range from fundamental aspects of semi-classical and quantum-classical physics to excitation dynamics in condensed matter and biological systems. His research group focuses on the development of new theoretical models and computational tools aimed at understanding chemical reactivity and energy transfer at a molecular level in complex condensed phase environment. Since 2014, he is a professor of chemistry and ...
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#5484

David Rhodes

#179745
Overall Influence
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#5485

Margaret Wooldridge

#117518
Overall Influence
Margaret Stacey Wooldridge is an American engineer known for her research on combustion of fuel-air mixtures and its byproducts, including the operation of gas turbines and diesel engines. She is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Walter J. Weber, Jr. Professor of Sustainable Energy, Environmental and Earth Systems Engineering at the University of Michigan, where she directs the Wooldridge Combustion Laboratory.
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#5486

Erik Thulstrup

#179498
Overall Influence
Erik Waaben Thulstrup was a Danish chemist. Lehto earned his PhD in 1970 from the Aarhus University. He was an associate professor at Aarhus University from 1972 to 1981, professor at the Danish School of Education from 1981 to 1989, and lastly at Roskilde University from 1993. In between he headed the World Bank Science and Technology for Development program from 1990 to 1993.
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#5487

Benjamin J. Whitaker

#170624
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
J Benjamin C Whitaker was Professor of Chemical Physics in the School of Chemistry at the University of Leeds. Whitaker was educated at University College School, London and the University of Sussex where he also completed his doctorate on laser induced emission spectroscopy under the supervision of Professor Tony McCaffery . He was mainly known for work in molecular reaction dynamics and photofragment-ion imaging. He was also associated with some of the early chemical applications of the web with Henry Rzepa. He was also a committed science communicator and educator, and a founding member of the Superposition arts-science collective.
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#5488

Jeanne Crassous

#173291
Overall Influence
Jeanne Crassous is a French chemist who is a Professor and Director of Research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research . She leads the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions International Training Network HEL4CHIROLED.
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#5489

Peter J. A. Davies

#179816
Overall Influence
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#5490

Andrew Harrison

#89020
Overall Influence
Andrew Harrison OBE is a British chemist and a research manager. From 1978 he studied chemistry at Oxford University, where he graduated as PhD in 1985. Then he worked as a researcher in Britain, Canada and France. In October 2020 he became an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.
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#5491

Theodore Sourkes

#118369
Overall Influence
1919 - 2015 (96 years)
Theodore Lionel Sourkes, was a Canadian biochemist and neuropsychopharmacologist who helped advance the treatment of Parkinson's disease and hypertension. Born in Montreal, Quebec, Sourkes received a Bachelor of Science degree in Nutritional Sciences from McGill University in 1939. Unable to fight in Canadian Army during World War II due to his poor eyesight, he worked in a chemical engineering factory in Toronto during the war. After the war, he received a Master of Science degree from McGill studying under Earle Wilcox Crampton. He received a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1948 working with James B.
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#5492

Darin Toohey

#157346
Overall Influence
Darin W. Toohey is an American atmospheric scientist. He is a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder since 1999. Toohey's research addresses the role of trace gases and aerosols on Earth's climate, atmospheric oxidation, and air quality. He was a Jefferson Science Fellow at the United States Department of State, 2011-2012.
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#5493

Penelope L. King

#170353
Overall Influence
Penelope King uses geochemistry and cosmochemistry to study planetary processes to better understand past and future planetary environments, and what this information may tells us about climate change. She is a professor at the Australian National University in the Research School of Earth Sciences . King holds many awards, including Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the Mineralogical Society of America in 2019, and winning the AGU Joanne Simpson Medal for Mid-Career Scientists the same year. She currently leads a research group examining surface and interior processes on planetary...
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#5494

Laurie Butler

#112287
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Laurie Jeanne Butler is an American physical chemist known for her experimental work testing the Born–Oppenheimer approximation on separability of nuclear and electron motions. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Chicago.
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#5495

Glen M. Davis

#173927
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Glen Macartney Davis is an Australian-Canadian scientist who is Professor of Clinical Exercise Sciences at the University of Sydney. Career Davis received his undergraduate and post-graduate education in Canada, with his Ph.D. degree being conferred at the University of Toronto in 1986. Davis is a member of several international scientific societies including a Fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine and Vice President of the International Functional Electrical Stimulation Society. Since 1985, he has conducted a variety of invited workshops, lectures and symposia with international scope in his research area of Exercise Therapy in Special Populations.
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#5496

Moon J. Park

#173397
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Moon Jeong Park is a Korean chemical engineer who is a Professor of Chemistry at Pohang University of Science and Technology. She is interested in polymers for energy storage and transport. She studies the transport in charge-containing polymeric materials. She is the second non-American recipient to be awarded the American Physical Society John D. Dillion Medal and the 2016 Hanwha Total IUPAC Young Scientist Award.
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#5497

Rajendra Rathore

#72932
Overall Influence
1961 - 2018 (57 years)
Rajendra Rathore was an organic chemist and professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin as Pfletschinger-Habermann professor of organic chemistry. He made important contributions in the area of supramolecular chemistry, synthesis of novel electro-active molecules, and drug discovery. Rathore died on February 16, 2018, after complications from chronic pulmonary sarcoidosis.
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#5498

Kerri Pratt

#171678
Overall Influence
Kerri Pratt is an American chemist who is associate professor of chemistry at the University of Michigan. Her research considers atmospheric chemistry and how it impacts human health. She studies the interactions of atmospheric gases using mass spectrometry based techniques.
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#5499

Tina van de Flierdt

#168595
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Tina van de Flierdt is a Professor of Isotope Geochemistry at Imperial College London. Education Van de Flierdt grew up in rural western Germany. In 2000 van de Flierdt completed a diploma in Geology at the University of Bonn. She earned a PhD at ETH Zurich in 2003, working with Alexander Halliday.
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#5500

Mary Rakowski DuBois

#178467
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Mary Rakowski DuBois is an inorganic chemist, now retired from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory . She made multiple contributions to inorganic and organometallic chemistry, focusing on synthetic and mechanistic studies. In recognition of her scientific contributions, she received several awards.
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