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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Chemistry,
#551
Ahmed Al-Harrasi
#34953
Overall Influence
Ahmed Sulaiman Al-Harrasi is an Omani scientist and a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Nizwa, Nizwa, Sultanate of Oman. Education Ahmed Al-Harrasi completed his Ph.D. from Freie Universität Berlin in Synthetic Organic Chemistry in 2005. His name has appeared as the alumni Ph.D. Student of the Reissig Research Group at Freie Universität Berlin.
Go to Profile#552
Antony John Williams
#33286
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Antony John Williams is a British chemist and expert in the fields of both nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and cheminformatics at the United States Environmental Protection Agency. He is the founder of the ChemSpider website that was purchased by the Royal Society of Chemistry in May 2009. He is a science blogger and an author.
Go to Profile#553
Janusz Pawliszyn
#49361
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Janusz Boleslaw Pawliszyn is a Polish chemist. He is a Canada Research Chair at the University of Waterloo and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Chair in New Analytical Methods and Technologies.
Go to Profile#554
Kazuhito Hashimoto
#35799
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
is a Japanese chemist. Between 2004 and 2007 he headed the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo. In 2016–2022 he served as President of the National Institute for Materials Science and as the editor-in-chief of the journal Science and Technology of Advanced Materials. On April 1, 2022 he assumed the position of President of Japan Science and Technology Agency.
Go to Profile#555
Robert N. Clayton
#42579
Overall Influence
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
Robert Norman Clayton was a Canadian-American chemist and academic. He was the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the University of Chicago. Clayton studied cosmochemistry and held a joint appointment in the university's geophysical sciences department. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was named a fellow of several academic societies, including the Royal Society.
Go to Profile#556
John C. Tully
#48557
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
John C. Tully is a theoretical chemist, a researcher and Sterling Professor emeritus of Chemistry at Yale University. He is known for his development of surface hopping, a method for including excited states in molecular dynamics calculations. Much of his career was spent at Bell Labs, from 1970-1996, exploring theoretical chemistry and surface science. In 1996, he became a faculty member at Yale University, where he pursued research in physical chemistry and physics. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science. In 2020 he was a...
Go to Profile#557
Mathias Nilsson
#31337
Overall Influence
Mathias Nilsson is a Swedish chemist and a Professor in the Department of Chemistry at The University of Manchester. His research in general is based on physical chemistry and analytical chemistry, specifically on development and application of novel methods in Liquids NMR Spectroscopy
Go to Profile#558
Joseph Klafter
#4103
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Joseph Klafter is an Israeli chemical physics professor who is the Heineman Chair of Physical Chemistry at Tel Aviv University, and was the eighth President of Tel Aviv University from 2009 to 2019. He won the 2020 Israel Prize in the fields of Chemistry and Physics.
Go to Profile#559
Donna Nelson
#16295
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Donna J. Nelson is an American chemist and professor of chemistry at the University of Oklahoma. Nelson specializes in organic chemistry, which she both researches and teaches. Nelson served as a science advisor to the AMC television show Breaking Bad. She was the 2016 President of the American Chemical Society with her presidential activities focusing on and guided by communities in chemistry. Nelson's research focused on five primary topics, generally categorized in two areas, Scientific Research and America's Scientific Readiness. Within Scientific Research, Nelson's topics have been on ...
Go to Profile#560
Marshall Fixman
#51124
Overall Influence
1930 - 2016 (86 years)
Marshall Fixman was an American physical chemist, University Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Colorado State University, and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Fixman earned his undergraduate degree in 1950 from Washington University in St. Louis, and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1954.
Go to Profile#561
Terrell L. Hill
#55157
Overall Influence
#562
Jon Clardy
#32122
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Jon Clardy is currently the Hsien Wu and Daisy Yen Wu professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on the isolation and structural characterization of natural products, and currently investigates the role of biologically active small molecules in mediating symbiotic interactions and disease.
Go to Profile#563
Catherine J. Murphy
#41258
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Catherine "Cathy" J. Murphy is an American chemist and materials scientist, and is the Larry Faulkner Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . The first woman to serve as the head of the department of chemistry at UIUC, Murphy is known for her work on nanomaterials, specifically the seed-mediated synthesis of gold nanorods of controlled aspect ratio. She is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.
Go to Profile#564
Claudia Felser
#42102
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Claudia Felser is a German solid state chemist and materials scientist. She is currently a director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids. Felser was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering in 2020 for the prediction and discovery of engineered quantum materials ranging from Heusler compounds to topological insulators.
Go to Profile#565
Galen D. Stucky
#15968
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
Galen D. Stucky is an American inorganic materials chemist who is a Distinguished Professor and the Essam Khashoggi Chair In Materials Chemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is noted for his work with porous ordered mesoporous materials such as SBA-15. He won the Prince of Asturias Award in 2014, in the Scientific and Technological Research area. Stucky was elected a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1994, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2013.
Go to Profile#566
Daniel A. Vallero
#24834
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Daniel A. Vallero is an American environmental author and scientist. He was born in East St. Louis, Illinois and grew up in Collinsville, Illinois. He received a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in city and regional planning from Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville. He also earned a masters in civil and environmental engineering from the University of Kansas and a PhD in civil and environmental engineering from Duke University with a thesis on "“Dicarboximide Fungicide Flux to the Lower Troposphere from an Aquic Hapludult Soil”
Go to Profile#567
Alan Brisdon
#31679
Overall Influence
Alan K. Brisdon is a British chemist and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry at The University of Manchester. His research in general is based on fluorine chemistry, including on HCFCs, fluorine-containing organometallic systems, fluorophosphines and fluorine-containing materials, such as ionic liquids and fluorographenes.
Go to Profile#568
Chi-Tang Ho
#45988
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Chi-Tang Ho is a Chinese-born American food scientist. He received his PhD in organic chemistry in 1974 and started working as a researcher and professor in the food science department at Rutgers University. He is now director of the food science graduate program at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Go to Profile#569
Stephen C. Harrison
#17544
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Stephen C. Harrison is professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology, professor of pediatrics, and director of the Center for Molecular and Cellular Dynamics of Harvard Medical School, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Medicine at Boston Children's Hospital, and investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Go to Profile#570
Stephen J. Benkovic
#20981
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Stephen James Benkovic is an American chemist known for his contributions to the field of enzymology. He holds the Evan Pugh University Professorship and Eberly Chair in Chemistry at The Pennsylvania State University. He has developed boron compounds that are active pharmacophores against a variety of diseases. Benkovic has concentrated on the assembly and kinetic attributes of the enzymatic machinery that performs DNA replication, DNA repair, and purine biosynthesis.
Go to Profile#571
Vijay S. Pande
#8597
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Vijay Satyanand Pande is a Trinidadian–American scientist and venture capitalist. Pande is the former director of the biophysics program and is best known for orchestrating the distributed computing disease research project known as Folding@home. His research is focused on distributed computing and computer-modelling of microbiology and on improving computer simulations regarding drug-binding, protein design, and synthetic bio-mimetic polymers. Pande became the ninth general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz in November 2015. He is the founding investor of their Bio + Health ...
Go to Profile#572
Jack L. Koenig
#53723
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
Jack L. Koenig was a chemical engineer noted for pioneering spectroscopic methods of polymer characterization. In particular, he played a significant role in developing characterization methods to provide fundamental structure-property relationships for polymers used in thermoplastic and thermoset systems.
Go to Profile#573
Joachim Maier
#39168
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Joachim Maier is Emeritus Director at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart and Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society. Education and career Maier studied chemistry at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, made his Masters and PhD in Physical Chemistry there. He received his habilitation at the University of Tübingen. From 1988 to 1991 he was responsible for the activities on functional ceramics at the MPI for Metals Research in Stuttgart, and from 1988 to 1996 he taught defect chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Notwithstanding other prestigious offers, he decided in favor of the Max Planck Society.
Go to Profile#574
Donald Tomalia
#50317
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Donald A. Tomalia is an American chemist who is known as one of the early discoverers of dendrimers. Biography Tomalia earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan, a master's degree from Bucknell University and a Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry from Michigan State University. He worked at Dow Chemical for many years as a research scientist. In 1979, Tomalia created synthetic particles known as dendrimers, which have been used in nanotechnology and pharmaceuticals.
Go to Profile#575
Bernhard Schrader
#44732
Overall Influence
1931 - 2012 (81 years)
Bernhard Schrader was a German professor of Theoretical and Physical Chemistry and teaching until his retirement in 1996 at the University of Essen, where he died. Schrader was an internationally acclaimed pioneer of experimental molecular spectroscopy in Germany, especially of Raman- and Infrared spectroscopy and its routine application in chemical analysis. Amongst his numerous achievements was his historic landmark paper with Bergmann of 1967 about the first successful use of Transmission Raman spectroscopy for chemical analysis of Organic solids, e.g. pharmaceutical powders, which has bec...
Go to Profile#576
Véronique Gouverneur
#32909
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Véronique Gouverneur is the Waynflete Professor of Chemistry at Magdalen College at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Prior to the Waynflete professorship, she held a tutorial fellowship at Merton College, Oxford. Her research on fluorine chemistry has received many professional and scholarly awards.
Go to Profile#577
Christine S. Chow
#31424
Overall Influence
Christine "Christy" Chow is a professor of chemistry and former associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Wayne State University. She works on modified RNAs, RNA-ligand interactions and RNA therapeutics. She is a Fellow of the American Chemical Society .
Go to Profile#578
Karl O. Christe
#45499
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
Karl Otto Christe is an inorganic chemist. He is the best reference in respectful handling of a huge number of extremely reactive components and his extensive experience in fluorine chemistry earned him the title of 'The Fluorine God'. His research covers fluorine chemistry of nitrogen and halogens and the synthesis of new energetic materials.
Go to Profile#579
Ted Ringwood
#32513
Overall Influence
1930 - 1993 (63 years)
Alfred Edward "Ted" Ringwood FRS FAA was an Australian experimental geophysicist and geochemist, and the 1988 recipient of the Wollaston Medal. The mineral ringwoodite is named after him. Early life and study Ringwood was born in Kew, only child of Alfred Edward Ringwood. He attended Hawthorn West State School where he played cricket and Australian Rules football. In 1943 he was successful in gaining a scholarship to Geelong Grammar School where he boarded. On matriculation, he enrolled in Geology a science degree at the University of Melbourne where he held a Commonwealth Government Scholarship, and was awarded a resident scholarship at Trinity College.
Go to Profile#580
Alexis T. Bell
#55257
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Alexis Tarassov Bell is an American chemical engineer. He is currently the Dow professor of Sustainable Chemistry in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in UC Berkeley's college of chemistry. He is also the Faculty Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is known for his work with heterogenous catalystss and characterizing the mechanisms of these reactions on a quantum level.
Go to Profile#581
Jean-Luc Brédas
#47635
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Jean-Luc Brédas is an American chemist, working at the University of Arizona. He was born in Fraire, Belgium, on 23 May 1954. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Namur, Belgium, in 1979. In 1988, he was appointed Professor at the University of Mons, Belgium, where he established the Laboratory for Chemistry of Novel Materials. While keeping an "Extraordinary Professorship" appointment in Mons, he moved to the US in 1999 and became Full Professor of Chemistry at the University of Arizona. In 2003, he moved to the Georgia Institute of Technology as Full Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
Go to Profile#582
John Thomas Finch
#19451
Overall Influence
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
John Finch FRS was a British X-ray crystallographer and electron microscopist. After working and receiving a PhD at Birkbeck College London, where he was hired by Rosalind Franklin, he worked at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge from 1962 on biological structures and macromolecules, including of nucleosomes and of viruses such as tobacco mosaic virus.
Go to Profile#583
Octavio Augusto Ceva Antunes
#30333
Overall Influence
Octávio Augusto Ceva Antunes was a professor of chemistry and pharmaceutics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro who had published over 200 scientific articles during his veteran career at the university. Antunes had also served as consultant to the World Health Organization for the production of anti-HIV drugs for four years until 2008. He was among 228 passengers aboard Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Paris, France, which disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean on 1 June 2009. His wife Patricia Nazareth Antunes and their 3-year-old son Matthew were also aboard.
Go to Profile#584
Buddy Ratner
#36205
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Buddy Ratner is an American professor of chemical engineering and bioengineering. He is the director of the Research Center for Biomaterials at the University of Washington . He is also the faculty member for the Program for Technology Commercialization at the University of Washington.
Go to Profile#585
Helmut Zahn
#21070
Overall Influence
1916 - 2004 (88 years)
Helmut Zahn was a German chemist who is often credited as the first to synthesize Insulin in 1963. His results synthesizing insulin were achieved almost simultaneously with that of Panayotis Katsoyannis at the University of Pittsburgh. His work was not honoured by the Nobel prize because in 1958 Frederick Sanger was the first who discovered the chemical structure of Insulin.
Go to Profile#586
Wilhelm Keim
#32258
Overall Influence
1934 - 2018 (84 years)
Wilhelm Keim was a German chemist and professor of chemistry at the Technical Chemistry and former director of the Institute for Technical and Petrol Chemistry at RWTH Aachen in Germany. Wilhelm Keim was one of the key figures in the development of the SHOP – process . SHOP-olefines have a broad range of applications in industrial chemistry, e.g. for the modification of polyethylene as ethylene-alpha-olefine-copolymere, as source for synthetic fatty alcohols or olefine sulfonates.He studied chemistry at the Münster and Saarbrücken University. He earned his PhD degree from Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim an der Ruhr, having studied under Karl Ziegler.
Go to Profile#587
Rodney S. Ruoff
#37246
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Rodney S. "Rod" Ruoff is an American physical chemist and nanoscience researcher. He is one of the world experts on carbon materials including carbon nanostructures such as fullerenes, nanotubes, graphene, diamond, and has had pioneering discoveries on such materials and others. Ruoff received his B.S. in chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin and his Ph.D. in chemical physics at the University of Illinois-Urbana . After a Fulbright Fellowship at the MPI fuer Stroemungsforschung in Goettingen, Germany and postdoctoral work at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center , Ruoff became a staff scientist in the Molecular Physics Laboratory at SRI International .
Go to Profile#588
Arnold L. Rheingold
#49844
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Arnold L. Rheingold is an American chemist and Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, San Diego. Early life Rheingold was born in Chicago, Illinois on October 6, 1940. He completed his B.S. in Chemistry in 1962 and M.S. in Inorganic Chemistry in 1963 from Case Western Reserve University. From 1963 to 1965, he was a Project Manager at Glidden Company. He completed his Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry from the University of Maryland in 1969.
Go to Profile#589
Graham Hutchings
#27017
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Graham John Hutchings CBE FRS FIChemE FRSC FLSW is a British chemist, Professor for Research at Cardiff University. He gained his BSc in 1972 at University College London, a PhD from University College in 1975 in Biological Chemistry and a DSc from the University of London in 2002 for his work on heterogeneous catalysis.
Go to Profile#590
Jacob A. Marinsky
#39819
Overall Influence
1918 - 2005 (87 years)
Jacob Akiba Marinsky was a chemist who was the co-discoverer of the element promethium. Biography Marinsky was born in Buffalo, New York on April 11, 1918. He attended the State University of New York at Buffalo, beginning at age 16 and receiving a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1939.
Go to Profile#591
Katsuko Saruhashi
#25242
Overall Influence
1920 - 2007 (87 years)
Katsuko Saruhashi was a Japanese geochemist who created tools that let her take some of the first measurements of carbon dioxide levels in seawater. She later showed evidence of the dangers of radioactive fallout and how far it can travel. Along with this focus on safety, she also researched peaceful uses of nuclear power.
Go to Profile#592
Donald R. Paul
#55110
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
Donald R. Paul is an American materials scientist and engineer currently the Ernest Cockrell, Sr. Chair in Engineering at University of Texas at Austin. His interests are polymer engineering, biomaterials and membranes. An expert in his field, he was Elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1988 and also has been Elected to the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and American Chemical Society.
Go to Profile#593
Håkon Flood
#51440
Overall Influence
1905 - 2001 (96 years)
Håkon Flood was a professor of inorganic chemistry at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim, Norway, from 1953 to 1975. He also worked as the director of the Institute of Silicate Research at NTH. Professor Flood was one of the pioneers of molten salt chemistry and, together with Hermann Lux, is known for the Lux-Flood theory of acid-base reactions.
Go to Profile#594
Arthur Wahl
#29855
Overall Influence
1917 - 2006 (89 years)
Arthur Charles Wahl was an American chemist who, as a doctoral student of Glenn T. Seaborg at the University of California, Berkeley, first isolated plutonium in February 1941. He was a worker on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos until 1946, when he joined Washington University in St. Louis. Beginning in 1952, he was the Henry V. Farr Professor of Radiochemistry; he received the American Chemical Society Award in Nuclear Chemistry in 1966 and retired in 1983. He moved back to Los Alamos in 1991 and continued his scientific writing until 2005. He died in 2006 of Parkinson's disease and pneum...
Go to Profile#595
William R. Roush
#44243
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
William R. Roush is an American organic chemist. He studied chemistry at the University of California Los Angeles and Harvard University . Following a year postdoctoral appointment at Harvard, he joined that faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1987, Dr. Roush moved to Indiana University and was promoted to Professor in 1989 and Distinguished Professor in 1995. Two years later, he moved to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and served as the Warner Lambert/Parke Davis Professor of Chemistry. He served as chair of the University of Michigan's Department of Chemistry from 2002-2004.
Go to Profile#596
Peter Wothers
#41910
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Peter David Wothers, , is a British chemist and author of several popular textbooks aimed at university students. He is a teaching fellow in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge and is a fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#597
Dirk Willem van Krevelen
#37535
Overall Influence
1914 - 2001 (87 years)
Dirk Willem van Krevelen was a prominent Dutch chemical engineer, coal and polymer scientist. He successfully combined an industrial career, managing a research division at DSM, and an academic career, as a professor of Delft Technical College. His contributions span a wide range of research fields, and his name is linked to the van Krevelen–Hoftyzer diagram for chemical gas absorption, the Mars–van Krevelen mechanism for catalytic oxidation reactions, the van Krevelen–Chermin method to estimate the free energy of organic compounds, the van Krevelen diagram that is used in coal and coal proce...
Go to Profile#598
Jürgen Gmehling
#29268
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Jürgen Gmehling is a retired German professor of technical and industrial chemistry at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. Biography His career started with an apprenticeship as a laboratory assistant at the Duisburg copper works before he studied chemical engineering at the engineering school in Essen and then chemistry in Dortmund and Clausthal. He received his diploma from the University of Dortmund in 1970 and his PhD in 1973. After this he worked as a scientific coworker in Dortmund before he became a private lecturer and, after his habilitation, an assistant professor.
Go to Profile#599
David P. Mills
#30562
Overall Influence
David Paul Mills is a British chemist and a Professor in the Department of Chemistry at The University of Manchester. His research typically investigates the chemistry of the lanthanide and actinide f-block elements. This is generally based on the synthesis of new f-block complexes, structural and bonding properties and their uses in different fields including in nuclear fuel cycles, energy and single molecule magnets.
Go to Profile#600
Karl August Folkers
#57018
Overall Influence
