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,
#701
Thom Dunning Jr.
#51041
Overall Influence
Thom H. Dunning Jr. is an American chemist currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of Illinois.
Go to Profile#702
Geoffrey Eglinton
#41090
Overall Influence
1927 - 2016 (89 years)
Geoffrey Eglinton, FRS was a British chemist and emeritus professor and senior research fellow in earth sciences at the University of Bristol. Education Eglinton was educated at Sale Grammar School and the University of Manchester where he was awarded Bachelor of Science, Doctor of Philosophy and Doctor of Science degrees.
Go to Profile#703
Robert E. Connick
#39072
Overall Influence
1917 - 2014 (97 years)
Robert E. Connick was a professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. Life Connick studied chemistry at Berkeley, receiving his B.S. in 1939 and his Ph.D. in 1942. He was a research associate on the Manhattan Project from 1943 - 1946, and has been a professor, chair of the chemistry department, dean of the college of chemistry, vice chancellor, and chair of the academic senate at both Berkeley and the entire University of California system.
Go to Profile#704
Xu Guangxian
#17920
Overall Influence
1920 - 2015 (95 years)
Xu Guangxian , also known as Kwang-hsien Hsu, was a Chinese chemist. He was an academician of the Chinese Academy of Science who is respected for his contributions in both theoretical and experimental chemistry. He is a former president of the Chinese Chemical Society, and is known as "The Father of Chinese Rare Earths Chemistry".
Go to Profile#705
Donna Blackmond
#44507
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Donna Blackmond is an American chemical engineer and the John C. Martin Endowed Chair in Chemistry at Scripps Research in La Jolla, CA. Her research focuses on prebiotic chemistry, the origin of biological homochirality, and kinetics and mechanisms of asymmetric catalytic reactions. Notable works include the development of Reaction Progress Kinetic Analysis , analysis of non-linear effects of catalyst enantiopurity, biological homochirality and amino acid behavior.
Go to Profile#706
Les Ebdon
#29244
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Sir Leslie Colin Ebdon CBE DL is the former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bedfordshire and Director of Fair Access to Higher Education . Education Ebdon attended Hemel Hempstead Grammar School . Ebdon went on to obtain both his BSc in Chemistry in 1968 and PhD in 1971 at Imperial College London.
Go to Profile#707
Gustavo E Scuseria
#62984
Overall Influence
#708
Stephen S. Hecht
#63127
Overall Influence
#709
Karen L. Wooley
#45778
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Karen L. Wooley is an American polymer chemist. She is a Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University whose research focuses on developing novel polymers and nanostructured materials. Early life and education Wooley was born and raised in Oakridge, Oregon, a small logging community in the mountains of Oregon. She received her B.Sc. in Chemistry from Oregon State University in 1988, and a Ph.D. in Polymer/Organic Chemistry from Cornell University in 1993 under the guidance of Jean Fréchet.
Go to Profile#710
Daniel S. Kemp
#57778
Overall Influence
1936 - 2020 (84 years)
Daniel Schaeffer Kemp was an American organic chemist, an emeritus professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kemp's work was focused on the synthesis and conformational analysis of peptides. He developed several chemical ligation strategies and methods for templating the formation of helices and sheets. The eponymous and the reaction are among his developments. He was the author of an organic chemistry textbook. He died from COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic in Massachusetts.
Go to Profile#711
Paul Schimmel
#27461
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Paul Reinhard Schimmel is an American biophysical chemist and translational medicine pioneer. Career Paul Schimmel is a Professor of Molecular Medicine at The Scripps Research Institute. Prior to joining The Scripps Research Institute, he was a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at MIT . Author or coauthor of many scientific research publications, he is also coauthor of a widely used 3-volume textbook on biophysical chemistry. His research interests have focused on aminoacyl tRNA synthetases as fundamental interpreters of the genetic information. Throu...
Go to Profile#712
Joanna Aizenberg
#27983
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Joanna Aizenberg is a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University. She is the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the co-director of the Kavli Institute for Bionano Science and Technology and a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. She is a prominent figure in the field of biologically inspired materials science, having authored 90 publications and holding 25 patents.
Go to Profile#713
Russell J. Hemley
#40747
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Russell Julian Hemley is an American geophysicist, solid-state physicist, and physical chemist. Hemley grew up in California, Colorado and Utah. He studied chemistry and philosophy at Wesleyan University with bachelor's degree in 1977 and then physical chemistry at Harvard University with master's degree in 1980 and Ph.D. in 1983. As a postdoc he was at Harvard University and was from 1984 to 1987 a Carnegie fellow at the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution in Washington D.C. From 1987 to 2016 he was a staff member of the Geophysical Laboratory, where he was from 2007 to 2013 t...
Go to Profile#714
Vincenzo Balzani
#47998
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
Vincenzo Balzani is an Italian chemist, now emeritus professor at the University of Bologna. Career He has spent most of his professional life at the “Giacomo Ciamician” Department of Chemistry of the University of Bologna, becoming full professor in 1973. He has been appointed emeritus professor on November 1, 2010.
Go to Profile#715
Hanns Malissa
#38048
Overall Influence
1920 - 2010 (90 years)
Hanns Malissa was an Austrian analytical chemist and environmental chemist who published about 250 scientific papers and several books. Academic career Malissa completed high school in his home town Bruck an der Mur in March 1939, and studied chemistry first at the Prague University of Technology but earned his doctorate at the Graz University of Technology in December 1943. Subsequently he became an assistant at the institutes for food chemistry and geochemistry. From July 1948 to February 1949 he was a guest scientist at Uppsala University. From 1953-1959 he worked at the Max Planck Institu...
Go to Profile#716
Horst Prinzbach
#60381
Overall Influence
1931 - 2012 (81 years)
Horst Prinzbach was a German chemist and professor emeritus. Prinzbach studied chemistry at the University of Freiburg and received his PhD under Arthur Lüttringhaus. He joined William von Eggers Doering at Yale University for postdoctoral work. In 1962 he completed his habilitation at Freiburg with a dissertation on sesquifulvalenes. In 1965 he became a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and in 1969 he became a full professor in organic chemistry at Freiburg.
Go to Profile#717
Takeshi Oka
#50620
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (93 years)
Takeshi Oka, , is a Japanese-American spectroscopist and astronomer specializing in the field of galactic astronomy, known as a pioneer of astrochemistry and the co-discoverer of interstellar trihydrogen cation . He is now R.A. Milliken Distinguished Service Emeritus Professor, Departments of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Chemistry; Enrico Fermi Institute; and the College of University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#718
Stephen Liddle
#55500
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Stephen T. Liddle FRSE FRSC is a British professor of inorganic chemistry at the University of Manchester. He is Head of Inorganic Chemistry and Co-Director of the Centre for Radiochemistry Research at the University of Manchester since 2015.
Go to Profile#719
Ira N. Levine
#29473
Overall Influence
1937 - 2015 (78 years)
Ira N. Levine was an American author, scientist, professor and faculty member in the chemistry department at Brooklyn College. He widely acknowledged for his research in the field of microwave spectroscopy, and for several widely known textbooks in physical chemistry and quantum chemistry.
Go to Profile#720
Ferenc Szabadváry
#14236
Overall Influence
1923 - 2006 (83 years)
Ferenc Szabadváry was a Hungarian chemist and historian. From 1971 he was director at the Hungarian National Museum for Science and Technology. In 1960 he published a history of analytical chemistry in Hungarian. A translation was made by Gyula Svehla in 1966, first published with Pergamon Press and later Gordon and Breach.
Go to Profile#721
Walter Kaminsky
#54726
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Walter Kaminsky is a German chemist. His research dwells in olefin polymerization, and also in plastic recycling. He discovered the high activity of Group 4 metallocene/methylaluminoxane mixtures as catalysts for olefin polymerization in 1980.
Go to Profile#722
Ian Fleming
#52944
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Ian Fleming is an English organic chemist, and an emeritus professor of the University of Cambridge, and an emeritus fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was the first to determine the full structure of chlorophyll and was involved in the development of the synthesis of cyanocobalamin by Robert Burns Woodward. He has made major contributions to the use of organosilicon compounds for stereospecific syntheses; reactions which have found application in the synthesis of natural compounds. He is also a prolific author, and has written a number of textbooks, encyclopedia chapters and influe...
Go to Profile#723
Włodzimierz Kołos
#40355
Overall Influence
1928 - 1996 (68 years)
Włodzimierz Kołos was a Polish chemist and physicist who was one of the founders of modern quantum chemistry, and pioneered accurate calculations on the electronic structure of molecules. Life and scientific work Kołos was born on September 6, 1928, in Pinsk. He received his M.Sc. in chemistry in 1950 and began his academic career as an organic chemist. However, he was soon attracted to theoretical physics. He began his graduate studies in theoretical physics in 1951 and completed his thesis in only two years. The University of Warsaw and the Polish Chemical Society award the Kołos Medal ever...
Go to Profile#724
Dennis C. Liotta
#26405
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Dennis Liotta is a chemistry professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. He is noted for his work on the development of antiviral drugs. Career Liotta's fields of research are organic synthesis and medicinal chemistry. Along with Dr. Raymond F. Schinazi and Dr. Woo-Baeg Choi of Emory, he invented Emtricitabine, which is a breakthrough HIV drug. Emory University sold its royalties on the drug to Royalty Pharma and Gilead Sciences in July 2005 for $525 million. It is currently marketed under the name Emtriva. Emtriva is a component of a number of combination therapies used ...
Go to Profile#725
Remziye Hisar
#12688
Overall Influence
1902 - 1992 (90 years)
Remziye Hisar was a Turkish academic and chemist. As the first Turkish woman with a degree from Sorbonne University, she occupied academic positions at various Turkish universities during her career and published numerous articles, mostly on metaphosphates and Turkish herbs. She is considered to be one of the first modern women scientists of Turkey.
Go to Profile#726
Stephen Hanessian
#61098
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Stephen Hanessian, OC, FRSC, is a chemist and professor of Canadian and United States citizenship born in Alexandria, Egypt. His research group at Université de Montréal is well known for developing synthetic methodologies, as well as natural product total synthesis. In addition, his group developed Chiron, a computer program used by organic chemists for synthetic planning.
Go to Profile#727
John Shipley Rowlinson
#40821
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Sir John Shipley Rowlinson was a British chemist. He attended Oxford University, where he completed his undergraduate studies in 1948 and doctoral in 1950. He then became research associate at University of Wisconsin , lecturer at University of Manchester , Professor at Imperial College London and back at Oxford from 1974 to his retirement in 1993.
Go to Profile#728
Ron Grigg
#59923
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
Ronald Ernest Grigg FRS was a British chemist and Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Leeds. Education Prior to university, Grigg worked at Glaxo Laboratories from 1952 to 1960 whilst studying part-time for his first degree. He received his PhD from the University of Nottingham and undertook postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge with the team led by Nobel Laureate Alexander Todd.
Go to Profile#729
Michael R. Wasielewski
#60900
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Michael Roman Wasielewski is an American physical chemist. He is currently the Clare Hamilton Hall Professor of Chemistry, director of the Center for Molecular Quantum Transduction , and Executive Director of the Institute for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern University.
Go to Profile#730
Eva Åkesson
#49071
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Eva Barbro Helen Åkesson is a Swedish professor of chemical physics who was the Rector of Uppsala University 2012–2020. She was previously Pro-Rector of Lund University. Career After taking the social sciences programme at Ängelholm Upper Secondary School, Åkesson studied chemistry at Umeå University, completing her doctorate in physical chemistry in 1989. She subsequently joined the faculty of Lund University as a researcher and teacher, later serving as director of studies in chemistry. In 2003, Rector Göran Bexell appointed her to one of the two newly established positions as Vice-Rector a...
Go to Profile#731
Kazunari Domen
#64609
Overall Influence
#732
Pavel Jungwirth
#49586
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Pavel Jungwirth is a Czech physical chemist. Since 2004, he has been the head of the Senior Research Group at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He has also been a professor in the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University since 2000. He has also been a senior editor of the Journal of Physical Chemistry since 2009. He is popularly known for studying the explosive reaction between alkali metals, such as sodium and potassium, and water; his research on this subject indicates that these reactions result from a Coulomb explosion. H...
Go to Profile#733
Harvey G. Stenger
#12694
Overall Influence
Harvey G. Stenger is an American educator and academic administrator, who is serving as the seventh president of Binghamton University since 2012. Background and education Harvey G. Stenger is a native of upstate New York. He received his B.S. from Cornell University in chemical engineering in 1979 and his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983. While at Cornell, he joined Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity.
Go to Profile#734
Shaul Mukamel
#55318
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Shaul Mukamel is a chemist and physicist, currently serving as a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine. He is known for his works in Non linear Optics and Spectroscopy. Early life and education Shaul Mukamel was born in Baghdad, Iraq on December 11, 1948. Mukamel received his B.Sc. degree in 1969, with the distinction cum laude and his M.Sc. and Ph.D., both summa cum laude, in 1971 and 1976 respectively from Tel Aviv University. His Masters supervisor was Uzi Kaldor. He finished his PhD working under Joshua Jortner. Following graduation, Mukamel served as postdoc at ...
Go to Profile#735
Giuliana Tesoro
#31843
Overall Influence
1921 - 2002 (81 years)
Giuliana Tesoro was an Italian-born American chemist who earned more than 125 patents, with her most notable consisting of improvements in fabric comfort, practicality, and flame resistance. Biography Guiliana Cavaglieri was born to Gino and Margherita Maroni Cavaglieri, in Venice, Italy during the center of Facism’s rise in the region. Her parents were wealthy Jewish people with college degrees, and the prestige certainly carried over to Tesoro who began third grade at the early age of six. Tesoro graduated from Liceo Classico Marco Polo high school in 1938 shortly after her father passed away in 1934.
Go to Profile#736
Dennis P. Curran
#62958
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Dennis P. Curran is an American organic chemist and a professor of chemistry at University of Pittsburgh known for his research in the fields of organic chemistry, radical chemistry, and fluorous chemistry.
Go to Profile#737
Edward Anders
#36550
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (99 years)
Edward Anders is a Latvian-born American chemist and emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago. His major areas of research have included the origin and ages of meteorites, the existence of presolar grains in meteorites, the solar-system abundance of chemical elements, and mass extinctions in earth history. In the 1970s, he was one of the 142 principal investigators who studied lunar samples brought back to Earth by the Apollo program. After retiring from scientific research in 1991, he became a prominent researcher, speaker and writer on issues related to the Holocaust in ...
Go to Profile#738
Helen M. Berman
#19481
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Helen Miriam Berman is a Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University and a former director of the RCSB Protein Data Bank . A structural biologist, her work includes structural analysis of protein-nucleic acid complexes, and the role of water in molecular interactions. She is also the founder and director of the Nucleic Acid Database, and led the Protein Structure Initiative Structural Genomics Knowledgebase.
Go to Profile#739
Lesley Yellowlees
#45970
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
#740
Mary Peters Fieser
#43326
Overall Influence
1909 - 1997 (88 years)
Mary Peters Fieser was an American chemist best known for the many books she wrote with her husband Louis Fieser. Biography She was born Mary Peters in 1909 in Atchison, Kansas. Her father, Robert Peters, was a college professor of English: the family later moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, when he accepted a position at the Carnegie Institute of Technology . Mary and her sister Ruth were educated in a private girls’ high school, and both went on to study at Bryn Mawr College. Mary graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1930 with a B.A. in chemistry.
Go to Profile#741
Andrea C. Ferrari
#57030
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Andrea Carlo Ferrari is a professor of nanotechnology at the University of Cambridge. Academic career Ferrari earned a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Cambridge after obtaining a Laurea in nuclear engineering at Polytechnic University of Milan, in Italy. He was also awarded an ScD from the University of Cambridge. He is the Founder and Director of the Cambridge Graphene Centre at the University of Cambridge, and the EPSRC Doctoral Training Centre in Graphene Technology. Prof. Ferrari is the Science and Technology Officer and the Chair of the Management Panel of the Graph...
Go to Profile#742
Lanny D. Schmidt
#28692
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Lanny D. Schmidt was an American chemist, inventor, author, and Regents Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota. He is well known for his extensive work in surface science, detailed chemistry , chemical reaction engineering, catalysis, and renewable energy. He is also well known for mentoring over a hundred graduate students and his work on millisecond reactors and reactive flash volatilization.
Go to Profile#743
Michael Hollingshead
#13624
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (94 years)
Michael Hollingshead was a British researcher who studied psychedelic drugs, including psilocybin and LSD, at Harvard University in the mid-20th century. He was the father of comedian Vanessa Hollingshead. He evangelized the use of LSD to many notable figures.
Go to Profile#744
Donald Crothers
#38997
Overall Influence
1937 - 2014 (77 years)
Donald Crothers was a professor of chemistry at Yale University in the United States. He was best known for his work on nucleic acid structure and function. Early life and education Donald Crothers was the son of the late Morris King Crothers and Florence Kittredge Crothers. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale University in 1958 with a B.S. in Chemistry and earned a B.A. from the University of Cambridge in 1960. His study of Chemistry at Clare College, Cambridge was supported by a Mellon Fellowship. He received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, San Diego, in 1963, ...
Go to Profile#745
Christopher M. Reddy
#40105
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Christopher Michael Reddy is a Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the Department of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry. Reddy's research spans from the source, fate and transport of combustion-derived materials, PCBs, and DDT to the environmental chemistry of oil spills, biofuels, plastics, nanoparticles, as well as developing environmentally friendly products.
Go to Profile#746
Peter Guy Wolynes
#45129
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Peter Guy Wolynes is an American theoretical chemist and physicist. Since 2011 he has been a Bullard-Welch Foundation Professor of Science and professor of chemistry at Rice University. He is widely recognized for his significant contributions to the theories of protein folding, glasses, and gene networks. Previously he was James R. Eiszner Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Francis H.C. Crick Chair of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego.
Go to Profile#747
Brian M. Hoffman
#47347
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Brian M. Hoffman is an American bioinorganic and physical chemist. Career Hoffman is a graduate of Lane Tech High School in Chicago and then studied chemistry at the University of Chicago receiving a bachelor's degree in 1962 and at Caltech with a PhD in chemistry in 1966 under the direction of Harden M. McConnell. Hoffman was briefly a postdoctoral scholar with Alexander Rich at MIT. In 1967 he started his appointment at Northwestern University, where he has remained throughout his career.
Go to Profile#748
Robert Gomer
#39698
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
Robert Gomer was an Austrian scientist known for his research on field electron emission and field ionization, and his role as an adviser to the United States government. He was educated at Pomona College and the University of Rochester, where he received his doctorate in 1949. From 1949 to 1950, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and worked with G. B. Kistiakowsky. He subsequently moved to the University of Chicago, where he was a professor of chemistry in the James Franck Institute and the department of chemistry.
Go to Profile#749
Yuri Struchkov
#40162
Overall Influence
1926 - 1995 (69 years)
Yuri Timofeevich Struchkov was a Russian and Soviet chemist. He was a prominent scientist in the field X-ray crystallography, a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the vice-president of the International Union of Crystallography . Struchkov was the founder and the first Director of the X-Ray Structural Laboratory of Nesmeyanov Institute of Organoelement Compounds and X-Ray Structural Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences . He made important contributions to the fields of chemistry and crystallography of organic, organoelement and coordination compounds. As an aut...
Go to Profile#750
Merle Battiste
#47733
Overall Influence
1933 - 2009 (76 years)
Merle A. Battiste was an American chemist and emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of Florida. Early life and education Battiste was born on July 22, 1933, in Mobile, Alabama. His parents were David Theodore Battiste and Flossie Mae Battiste . Battiste was the youngest of four siblings: one which died at infancy , Marion Theodore Battiste , James Melvin Battiste , and Marie Wilson. He attended Murphy High School.
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