Search People Result | Academic Influence

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,

#601

Howard A. Stone

Howard A. Stone

#24652

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Howard Alvin Stone is the Donald R. Dixon '69 and Elizabeth W. Dixon Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. His field of research is in fluid mechanics, chemical engineering and complex fluids. He became an Editor of the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics in 2021.

#602

Raphael David Levine

Raphael David Levine

#26089

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

Raphael David Levine is an Israeli chemist who is a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Los Angeles and the Crump Institute for Molecular Imaging of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

#603

Andrew Bruce Holmes

#35554

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Andrew Bruce Holmes is an Australian and British senior research chemist and professor at the Bio21 Institute, Melbourne, Australia, and the past President of the Australian Academy of Science. His research interests lie in the synthesis of biologically-active natural products and optoelectronic polymers .

#604

Suzanne Fortier

Suzanne Fortier

#10062

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Suzanne Fortier is a Canadian crystallographer and the 17th Principal and Vice-Chancellor of McGill University. Early life and education Fortier was born in Saint-Timothée, Quebec, a town on Île-de-Salaberry in the St. Lawrence River. Her parents ran a small local hotel. She grew up speaking only French and attended a small local convent, which served as elementary school. A nun who taught chemistry and was enthusiastic about the subject inspired her to pursue science.

#605

Kristy Turner

#32597

Overall Influence

Kristy Turner is a British chemist, lecturer in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Manchester and a chemistry teacher at Bolton School, Manchester. Her research is based on the field of chemical education, science communication, development of the chemistry curriculum and assessment, and also in engagement of STEM subjects within school students. She is the current chair of the Education in Chemistry magazine editorial board at the Royal Society of Chemistry.

#606

Louise Natrajan

#32763

Overall Influence

Louise Sarah Natrajan is a British chemist and a reader in the Department of Chemistry at The University of Manchester. Her research typically is based on actinide chemistry and luminescence spectroscopy, though some of her published research has extended to lanthanide chemistry, transition metal complexes and organic chemistry.

#607

Hamao Umezawa

#57390

Overall Influence

#608

Mark E. Davis

#30926

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Mark E. Davis is the Warren and Katherine Schlinger Professor of Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. He is a member of the City of Hope National Medical Center. He earned his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in chemical engineering all from the University of Kentucky. His lab focuses on the synthesis of materials for catalysis and biocompatible materials for drug delivery.

#609

Kenneth Wade

#42414

Overall Influence

1932 - 2014 (82 years)

Kenneth Wade, was a British chemist and professor emeritus at Durham University. Early life and education Kenneth Wade was born in Sleaford on 13 October 1932, the second son of Harry Kennington Wade and his wife, Anna Elizabeth Wade. He was educated at Carre's Grammar School, and graduated from the University of Nottingham as the first PhD student of Norman Greenwood, and Cornell University.

#610

Heinz L. Fraenkel-conrat

#57842

Overall Influence

#611

Hoyt C. Hottel

#27352

Overall Influence

1903 - 1998 (95 years)

Hoyt Clarke Hottel was a professor in the department of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He was an expert on energy, radiant heat transfer, fire, fuels and combustion.

#612

Mohammad-Nabi Sarbolouki

Mohammad-Nabi Sarbolouki

#7729

Overall Influence

Mohammad-Nabi Sarbolouki was a distinguished Iranian biophysicist and polymer chemist and one of the most influential individuals behind modern scientific movement in Iran. He was known as the inventor of a DNA vehicle called "dendrosome". Sarbolouki was one of the main founders and pioneers of nano science, biomaterials, biotechnology and biophysics in Iran.

#613

Avner Treinin

#27040

Overall Influence

1928 - 2011 (83 years)

Avner Treinin was an Israeli poet and professor of physical chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Biography Treinin was born in Tel Aviv on February 14, 1928. At the age of two, his family moved to Jerusalem. Treinin attended the Tachkemoni school and Gymnasia Rehavia.

#614

Simone Badal-McCreath

#25200

Overall Influence

Simone Anne Marie Badal-McCreath is a Jamaican chemist and cancer researcher. In 2014 she was one of five women awarded the Elsevier Foundation Award for Early Career Scientists in the Developing World for her creation of a lab at the Natural Products Institute to research the anti-cancer properties of natural Jamaican products. She currently lectures in Basic Medical Sciences

#615

L. K. Doraiswamy

#31870

Overall Influence

1927 - 2012 (85 years)

Laxmangudi Krishnamurthy Doraiswamy was an Indian-American chemical engineer, author and academic, known for his contributions in developing Organic synthesis engineering as a modern science discipline. Chemical Engineering journal of McGraw Hill listed him among the 10 most distinguished chemical engineers in the world in 1988. He was the author of nine texts in chemical engineering, including Organic Synthesis Engineering, a 2001 publication which is known to have introduced the topic as a definitive scientific stream and Heterogeneous reactions: Analysis, Examples, and Reactor Design, repo...

#616

Dennis A. Dougherty

#43709

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Dennis A. Dougherty is the George Grant Hoag Professor of Chemistry at California Institute of Technology. His research applies physical organic chemistry to systems of biological importance. Dougherty utilizes a variety of approaches to further our understanding of the human brain, including the in vivo nonsense suppression methodology for incorporating unnatural amino acids into a variety of ion channels for structure-function studies.

#617

Joseph L. Gormley

#14005

Overall Influence

1914 - 2004 (90 years)

Joseph Leo Gormley was the chief of chemistry and toxicology for the FBI. Born in Clinton, Massachusetts, he was raised in Somerville, Massachusetts. Gormley received his bachelor's and master's degrees in chemistry from Boston College. With his wife Frances he fathered and raised nine children.

#618

Jack Baldwin

#32019

Overall Influence

1938 - 2020 (82 years)

Sir Jack Edward Baldwin was a British chemist. He was a Waynflete Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford and head of the organic chemistry at Oxford. Education Baldwin was the second son of Frederick C N Baldwin and Olive F Headland. He was educated at Brighton Grammar School and Lewes County Grammar School. He attended Imperial College, London . He received his Ph.D. working under the direction of Sir Derek H.R. Barton, FRS, Nobel Laureate, who described him as his best student.

#619

John A. Rogers

#9630

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

#620

Duilio Arigoni

#38380

Overall Influence

1928 - 2020 (92 years)

Duilio Arigoni was a Swiss chemist and Emeritus Professor at ETH Zurich. He worked on the biosynthetic pathways of many organic natural substances. Birth and education Born in Lugano, Switzerland, Arigoni completed his undergraduate studies in chemistry at the ETH Zürich in 1951. He completed his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the ETH Zurich in 1955. His doctoral thesis was “Über konfigurative Beziehungen Steroid- und Terpenverbindungen”.

#621

Martin Pumera

#58277

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (51 years)

#622

Harry Stone Mosher

#55900

Overall Influence

1915 - 2002 (87 years)

Harry Stone Mosher was an American chemist and the discoverer of Mosher's acid. Early life Mosher attended Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, where he received a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1937. He went on to Oregon State University, where he earned a master's degree in 1938. He then returned to Willamette to teach for one year. In 1939, he continued his graduate work at Pennsylvania State University under the mentorship of Frank C. Whitmore, a renowned organic chemist. In 1942, Mosher completed his PhD in organic chemistry. He remained at Pennsylvania State as an assistant profes...

#623

Charles Rees

#28947

Overall Influence

1927 - 2006 (79 years)

Charles Wayne Rees CBE FRS FRSC was a British organic chemist. Early life and education Rees was born in Egypt, and educated in England at Farnham Grammar School. After three years as a laboratory technician at the Royal Aircraft Establishment he went to University College at Southampton where he graduated in 1950. He took his PhD there with Professor A. Albert of the Australian National University – at Euston Road, London.

#624

Richard Catlow

#40748

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Sir Charles Richard Arthur Catlow FLSW is a British chemist and professor at University College London and Cardiff University. Previously, he was Director of the Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory , and Wolfson Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution. Since 2016, he has served as the foreign secretary of the Royal Society., and since 2021 as President of the InterAcademy Partnership .

#625

Varinder Aggarwal

#53575

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Varinder Kumar Aggarwal is a British organic chemist specialising in asymmetric synthesis. He is a Professor of Synthetic Chemistry at the School of Chemistry of the University of Bristol. Early life Aggarwal was born in 1961 in Kalianpur, a town in Northern India. In 1963 his family emigrated to the United Kingdom. He was one of six sons, and grew up in Scotland, then Nottingham, England.

#626

Amos Smith

#24391

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Amos B. Smith III is an American chemist. Biography He is most notable for his research in the total synthesis of complex natural product, as well as the chemistry of mammalian pheromones and chemical communication.

#627

Carol V. Robinson

#32139

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

#628

Douglas Stephan

#44789

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Douglas Wade Stephan is professor of Chemistry at the University of Toronto, a post he has held since 2008. Education Stephan was educated at McMaster University where he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in 1976 and the University of Western Ontario where he was awarded a PhD in 1981 for research investigating enantioselective synthesis supervised by Nicholas C. Payne. Stephan was also a NATO PDF with Dick Holm at Harvard from 1980 to 1982.

#629

Doron Aurbach

#29019

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Doron Aurbach is an Israeli electrochemist, materials and surface scientist. Biography Doron Aurbach was born in 1952 in Israel to parents who survived the Holocaust and fought the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, grew up in Ramat Gan and studied in Blich High School. He served in Sayeret Golani reconnaissance unit, a.k.a. 631st Reconnaissance Battalion, and fought west to the Suez Canal during the Yom Kippur War . Later he returned to Golani Brigade as a deputy commander of a combat support company, and was discharged from reserve duty with a rank of a Major , at the age of 46, as a patrol officer in...

#630

John Warner

#29548

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

John Charles Warner is an American chemist, educator, and entrepreneur, best known as one of the founders of the field of green chemistry. Warner worked in industry for nearly a decade as a researcher at Polaroid Corporation, before moving to academia where he worked in various positions at University of Massachusetts Boston and Lowell. Warner is co-founder, President, and Chief Technology Officer at the Warner-Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry, as well as co-founder and President of Beyond Benign. He is the recipient of the 2014 Perkin Medal, widely acknowledged as the highest honor in A...

#631

Egon Matijevic

#53118

Overall Influence

1922 - 2016 (94 years)

Egon Matijevic was an American chemist. He earned his B.Sc. and Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Zagreb. After specialization at the University of Cambridge he continued to work at the Clarkson University. He is the author of more than 550 scientific papers in colloidal and surface chemistry with numerous applications in medicine and industry. Matijevic was a member of American Chemical Society, American Association for Crystal Growth, World Academy of Ceramics, International Association of Colloid and Interface Scientists and honorary member of American Ceramic Society, German Collo...

#632

John Monteith

#25544

Overall Influence

1929 - 2012 (83 years)

John Lennox Monteith DSc, FRS was a British scientist who pioneered the application of physics to biology. He was an authority in the related fields of water management for agricultural production, soil physics, micrometeorology, transpiration, and the influence of the natural environment on field crops, horticultural crops, forestry, and animal production.

#633

Peter Dervan

#28226

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Peter B. Dervan is the Bren Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. The primary focus of his research is the development and study of small organic molecules that can sequence-specifically recognize DNA, a field in which he is an internationally recognized authority. The most important of these small molecules are pyrrole–imidazole polyamides. Dervan is credited with influencing "the course of research in organic chemistry through his studies at the interface of chemistry and biology" as a result of his work on "the chemical principles involved in sequence-specific recognition of double helical DNA".

#634

Roy M. Harrison

Roy M. Harrison

#48983

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Roy Michael Harrison is a British environmental scientist. He has been Queen Elizabeth II Birmingham Centenary Professor of Environmental Health at the University of Birmingham since 1991, and is a distinguished adjunct professor at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

#635

Stefanie Dehnen

#30439

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Stefanie Dehnen is a German chemist. She is the executive director of the Institute of Nanotechnology at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. From 2006 to 2022, she was a full professor for inorganic chemistry at the University of Marburg. She has received numerous awards for her research in inorganic chemistry. In 2024 and 2025, she will be the president of the German Chemical Society.

#636

Krishnan Raghavachari

#48263

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Krishnan Raghavachari is a Professor of Chemistry at Indiana University Bloomington. Raghavachari began his education in his native India, completing his undergraduate degree in 1973 at Madras University and his masters from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1975. Following this, he moved to the United States to attend Carnegie-Mellon University for his doctorate under the tutelage of John Pople, completing it in 1981. Upon completing his degree, Raghavachari entered the private sector as a research scientist at Bell Labs. He served as a member of the technical staff until 1987 when he was named a distinguished member.

#637

Harald Schäfer

#58728

Overall Influence

1913 - 1992 (79 years)

Harald Schäfer was a professor of inorganic chemistry at the University of Münster in Germany. He is recognized for popularizing the use of chemical vapor transport and the discovery of many new inorganic compounds.

#638

Hiroaki Suga

#36656

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Hiroaki Suga is a Japanese biochemist and businessman. He is best known for his work on artificial ribozymes and their application in mRNA display . Suga was awarded the 2023 Wolf Prize in Chemistry, jointly with Chuan He and Jeffery W. Kelly, "for pioneering discoveries that illuminate the functions and pathological dysfunctions of RNA and proteins and for creating strategies to harness the capabilities of these biopolymers in new ways to ameliorate human diseases."

#639

Russell S. Drago

#51529

Overall Influence

1928 - 1997 (69 years)

Russell Stephen Drago was an American professor of inorganic chemistry. He mentored more than 130 PhD students, authored over a dozen textbooks and four hundred research documents, which have been published in several languages. He filed 17 process patents. and established the Florida Catalysis Conference Foundation, Inc.

#640

Eugene van Tamelen

#35784

Overall Influence

1925 - 2009 (84 years)

Eugene Earle van Tamelen was an organic chemist who is especially recognized for his contributions to bioorganic chemistry. van Tamelen published five papers while an undergraduate at Hope College. He conducted graduate work at Harvard University, receiving his doctorate in 1950 with Gilbert Stork as his advisor. He began his academic career at the University of Wisconsin, later joining the faculty of Stanford University, where he spent the majority of his career. Among his many students was Nobelist K. Barry Sharpless.

#641

Kenichi Honda

#31461

Overall Influence

1925 - 2011 (86 years)

Kenichi Honda was a Japanese chemist. He made a significant contribution to the discovery and characterization of photocatalytic properties of titanium dioxide , for which he shared the 2004 Japan Prize with his former student Akira Fujishima.

#642

Keith A. Nelson

#53203

Overall Influence

Keith Adam Nelson is an American physical chemist, currently the Haslam and Dewey Professor of Chemistry at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Education and career Nelson studied chemistry at Stanford University and received his B.S. in 1976, followed by a Ph.D. in physical chemistry at the same university in 1981. His thesis was supervised by Michael D. Fayer. Nelson then spent a year at University of California, Los Angeles as a postdoc with John P. McTague before joining Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a faculty member in the department of chemistry in 1982.

#643

Xue-Min Cheng

#50149

Overall Influence

Xue-Min Cheng is a medicinal chemist, author and pharmaceutical executive best known as the co-author of The Logic of Chemical Synthesis, which formalized retrosynthesis. The concept for this Elias J. Corey won the 1990 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

#644

Bengt Nordén

#42493

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Bengt Johan Fredrik Nordén is a Swedish chemist. Biography and academic career Bengt Nordén graduated 1967 with a Master of Science degree in chemistry, theoretical physics and mathematics from Lund University and was awarded his Ph.D. in 1971 from Lund University where he became Associate Professor of Inorganic Chemistry in 1972. In 1979 he was appointed to the Chair Professorship of Physical Chemistry of Chalmers University of Technology.

#645

Mas Subramanian

Mas Subramanian

#33888

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Mas Subramanian, , is a solid-state materials scientist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon. He is a University Distinguished Professor and the Milton Harris Chair of Materials Science in the university's Department of Chemistry. His work in solid-state chemistry on structure-property relationships of inorganic compounds has led to several breakthrough discoveries of novel functional materials, many of which have found usage in various applications. Subramanian has authored 400 research publications and holds 60 patents. His publications have received more than 30,000 citations .

#646

Donald Othmer

#30614

Overall Influence

1904 - 1995 (91 years)

Donald Frederick Othmer was an American professor of chemical engineering, an inventor, multi-millionaire and philanthropist, whose most famous work is the Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology, which is a major reference work in chemistry.

#647

Robert W. Field

#51366

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

For the painter, see Robert Field Robert W. Field is the Haslam and Dewey Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has been a professor since 1974. His AB degree is in chemistry from Amherst College, and his PhD is in chemistry from Harvard University, where he worked with Bill Klemperer. He was a postdoc with Herbert Broida at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

#648

Gérard Férey

#23295

Overall Influence

1941 - 2017 (76 years)

Gérard Férey was a French chemist who was a member of the French Academy of Sciences and a professor at the Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines University. He specialized in the physical chemistry of solids and materials. He focused on the crystal chemistry of inorganic fluorides and on porous solids.

#649

Shneior Lifson

#23623

Overall Influence

1914 - 2001 (87 years)

Shneior Lifson , was an Israeli chemical physicist, scientific director of the Weizmann Institute of Science, a founder of the Open University of Israel, and laureate of the 1969 Israel Prize in the life sciences. Lifson is best known for his consistent force field method, one of the major theories behind 3-D computer modeling of large molecules.

#650

Alice Y. Ting

#25996

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Alice Yen-Ping Ting is Taiwanese-born American chemist. She is a professor of genetics, of biology, and by courtesy, of chemistry at Stanford University. She is also a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub investigator and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

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