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,
#751
Yusuke Yamauchi
#65587
Overall Influence
#752
Jacek Namieśnik
#54409
Overall Influence
1949 - 2019 (70 years)
Jacek Namieśnik was a Polish chemist, full professor of Gdańsk University of Technology. He was head of Analytical Department , dean of Faculty of Chemistry , rector of Gdańsk University of Technology since 1 September 2016 until his death.
Go to Profile#753
Peter Schreiner
#64562
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Peter Richard Schreiner is a German chemist who is a professor at Justus Liebig University Giessen. , his h-index is 73. Career Schreiner studied at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, where he received his diploma in 1992 . He obtained his doctorate in organic chemistry in 1995 from the University of Georgia. From 1996 to 1999 he was a Liebig Fellow at the University of Göttingen. While there he received the ADUC Prize for his work. From 1999 to 2002, he was associate professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Georgia. Since 2002 he has been a professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Giessen.
Go to Profile#754
Yoshio Okamoto
#21987
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Yoshio Okamoto is a Japanese chemist, who was awarded the 2019 Japan Prize for his groundbreaking work in asymmetric polymerization and its practical applications in drug discovery. Okamoto was the first to prove that synthetic polymer conformations could be controllable, publishing work on asymmetric polymerization from 1979 onwards.
Go to Profile#755
George Radda
#17728
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
Sir George Charles Radda is a Hungarian - British chemist. In 1957, he attended Merton College, Oxford, to study chemistry, having set aside an earlier interest in literary criticism. His early work was concerned with the development and use of fluorescent probes for the study of structure and function of membranes and enzymes. He became interested in using spectroscopic methods including nuclear magnetic resonance to study complex biological material. In 1974, his research paper was the first to introduce the use of NMR to study tissue metabolites. In 1981, he and his colleagues published the first scientific report on the clinical application of his work.
Go to Profile#756
David W. Turner
#43526
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (98 years)
David Warren Turner is a physical chemist known for the development of ultra-violet photoelectron spectroscopy , a technique for the measurement of molecular orbital energies in gas-phase molecules.
Go to Profile#757
Otto S. Wolfbeis
#36409
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Otto S. Wolfbeis was a professor of analytical chemistry and Interface chemistry at the University of Regensburg in Germany until his retirement in 2013. Biography Wolfbeis studied chemistry at the University of Graz and in 1972 received a PhD in organic chemistry. He then was a post-doctoral fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for Radiation Chemistry in the group of Prof. Koerner von Gustorf. In 1974 he became an assistant professor at the Institute of Organic Chemistry at the University of Graz. In 1978 he was a visiting scientist at the Technical University of Berlin in the group of Prof.
Go to Profile#758
Michael F. Lappert
#61423
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Michael Franz Lappert was a Czech-born British inorganic chemist. Mainly located at the University of Sussex, he was recognized for contributions to organometallic complexes. Early life and education Lappert was born in Czechoslovakia and came to the UK as a Kindertransport refugee. He received his PhD in 1951 at the Northern Polytechnic, London.
Go to Profile#759
Peter Bruce
#35259
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Sir Peter George Bruce, is a British chemist, and Wolfson Professor of Materials in the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford. In 2018, he was appointed as Physical Secretary and Vice President of the Royal Society. Bruce is a founder and Chief Scientist of the Faraday Institution.
Go to Profile#760
Madeleine M. Joullié
#41179
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (98 years)
Madeleine M. Joullié is an American-Brazilian organic chemist. She was the first woman to join the University of Pennsylvania chemistry faculty as well as the first female organic chemist to be appointed to a tenure track position in a major American university. She was one of the first affirmative action officers at the University of Pennsylvania. She has a distinguished record as a teacher of both undergraduate and graduate-level organic chemistry, and as a mentor of students.
Go to Profile#761
Michael E. Phelps
#66320
Overall Influence
#762
Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu
#5155
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Ekmeleddin Mehmet İhsanoğlu is a Turkish chemistry and science history professor, academician, diplomat and politician who was Secretary-General of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation from 2004 to 2014. He is also an author and editor of academic journals and advocate of intercultural dialogue.
Go to Profile#763
Lawrence F. Dahl
#55327
Overall Influence
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
Lawrence F. Dahl was an R.E. Rundle and Hilldale Professor of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Dahl was an inorganic chemist, and his research focused on high-nuclearity metallic compounds. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1988.
Go to Profile#764
Lawrence M. Principe
#23435
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Lawrence M. Principe is the Drew Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University in the Department of History of Science and Technology and the Department of Chemistry. He is also currently the Director of the Charles Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe, an interdisciplinary center for research at Johns Hopkins. He is the first recipient of the Francis Bacon Medal for significant contributions to the history of science. Principe's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and a 2015-2016 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Go to Profile#765
Jacob Bigeleisen
#30700
Overall Influence
1919 - 2010 (91 years)
Jacob Bigeleisen was an American chemist who worked on the Manhattan Project on techniques to extract uranium-235 from uranium ore, an isotope that can sustain nuclear fission and would be used in developing an atomic bomb but that is less than 1% of naturally occurring uranium. While the method of using photochemistry that Bigeleisen used as an approach was not successful in isolating useful quantities of uranium-235 for the war effort, it did lead to the development of isotope chemistry, which takes advantage of the ways that different isotopes of an element interact to form chemical bonds.
Go to Profile#766
Clare Grey
#45740
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Dame Clare Philomena Grey is Geoffrey Moorhouse Gibson Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. Grey uses nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to study and optimize batteries.
Go to Profile#767
Max Lu
#18192
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Gaoqing Max Lu FREng FIChemE, FRSC is a Chinese–Australian chemical engineer and nanotechnologist. He is the current Vice-Chancellor of the University of Surrey. Early life and education Lu was born in the countryside of Shandong, China. He obtained his bachelor's degree in engineering from Northeastern University in Shenyang. He subsequently received a scholarship from the University of Queensland in Australia, where he earned his Ph.D. in chemical engineering.
Go to Profile#768
Edward Kosower
#57500
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (96 years)
Edward Malcolm Kosower was an American-Israeli chemist. Kosower was born in Brooklyn, New York on February 2, 1929 and attended high school at Stuyvesant, where he was a classmate of fellow chemist Andrew Streitwieser.
Go to Profile#769
Michel Boudart
#61698
Overall Influence
1924 - 2012 (88 years)
Michel Boudart was the William M. Keck Sr. Professor of Chemical Engineering Emeritus at Stanford University. He earned his BS and MS from the University of Louvain in 1944 and 1947 respectively and earned his PhD in chemistry at Princeton University in 1950 under the guidance of Hugh Stott Taylor. He was a professor at Princeton until 1961 and briefly at University of California, Berkeley where he help to establish their program in catalysis and reactions engineering.
Go to Profile#770
Zehev Tadmor
#12842
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Zehev Tadmor is a retired Israeli chemical engineer who has served as distinguished professor, president, and chairman of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. He is also chairman of the Samuel Neaman Institute for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology, a policy research center. His main research interest is polymer and plastics engineering and processing. He won the Emet Prize in 2005.
Go to Profile#771
Benjamin Chu
#47667
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (93 years)
Benjamin Thomas Chu is a Chinese-born American chemist. Chu received his secondary education at schools in Shanghai and Hong Kong. He moved to the United States in 1953 to attended St. Norbert College on scholarship. Chu earned a doctorate in radiochemistry from Cornell University in 1959, and started work as a research associate of Peter Debye. Chu began his teaching career at the University of Kansas in 1962. He joined the State University of New York at Stony Brook faculty in 1968. That same year, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Chu was named a leading professor of chemistry in 1988, and appointed to a distinguished professorship in 1992.
Go to Profile#772
Ralph Nuzzo
#49123
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Ralph G. Nuzzo, born February 23, 1954, in Paterson, New Jersey, is an American chemist and professor. Nuzzo is a researcher in the chemistry of materials, including processes that occur at surfaces and interfaces. His work has led to new techniques for fabricating and manipulating materials at the nano scale level, including functional device structures for microelectronics, optics and chemical sensing.
Go to Profile#773
Yitzhak Apeloig
#21460
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Yitzhak Apeloig is a pioneer in the computational chemistry field of the Ab initio quantum chemistry methods for predicting and preparing the physical and chemical properties of materials. He was the president of the Technion from 2001 until 2009 where the position was handed off to Peretz Lavie. Distinguished Prof. Apeloig currently holds the Joseph Israel Freund Chair in Chemistry and is the co-director of the Lise Meitner Minerva Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry at the Technion. He served as dean of the Faculty of Chemistry from 1995 to 1999, where he was named Teacher of the Yea...
Go to Profile#774
Jürgen Gauß
#23978
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Jürgen Gauß is a German theoretical chemist. Gauß was born on 13 August 1960 in Konstanz. He studied chemistry at the University of Cologne from 1979 till 1984. After finishing his PhD thesis on abinitio calculations at the University of Cologne in 1988, he did postdoctoral studies at the University of Washington in Seattle and at the University of Florida in Gainesville about quantum theory. He did his habilitation in 1994 at the University of Karlsruhe on abinitio calculations of NMR-shiftss. In 1995, he became professor at the University of Mainz.
Go to Profile#775
Samir Mitragotri
#24885
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Samir Mitragotri is an Indian American professor at Harvard University, an inventor, an entrepreneur, and a researcher in the fields of drug delivery and biomaterials. He is currently the Hiller Professor of Bioengineering and Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Prior to 2017, he was the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Chair Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara.
Go to Profile#776
Ken A. Dill
#25380
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Kenneth Austin Dill is a biophysicist and chemist best known for his work in folding pathways of proteins. He is the director of the Louis and Beatrice Laufer Center for Physical and Quantitative Biology at Stony Brook University. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2008. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014. He has been a co-editor or editor of the Annual Review of Biophysics since 2013.
Go to Profile#777
Philip S. Portoghese
#51358
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (94 years)
Philip Salvatore Portoghese is an American medicinal chemist who has made notable contributions to the design and synthesis of ligands targeting opioid receptors. He is a Distinguished Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He also served as the Editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry from 1972 to 2012, when the job was taken on by his departmental colleague, Gunda I. Georg, who shares the Editor-in-chief position with Shaomeng Wang at the University of Michigan.
Go to Profile#778
Mircea Dincă
#42502
Overall Influence
Mircea Dincă is a Romanian-American inorganic chemist. He is a Professor of Chemistry and W. M. Keck Professor of Energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . At MIT, Dincă leads a research group that focuses on the synthesis of functional metal-organic frameworks , which possess conductive, catalytic, and other material-favorable properties.
Go to Profile#779
Bernt Krebs
#53868
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Bernt Krebs is a German scientist. He is conducting research at the Faculty of Chemistry, University of Münster. Academic career After his studies in chemistry at the University of Göttingen from 1958 to 1963 and after his diploma in chemistry in 1963, Bernt Krebs received his Dr. rer.nat. degree in 1965. In 1965 and 1966 he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory with Walter Hamilton and Don Koenig. After his habilitation in the field of inorganic chemistry at the University of Göttingen he got tenure as a Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Kiel in 1971.
Go to Profile#780
Gregorio Weber
#42525
Overall Influence
1916 - 1997 (81 years)
Gregorio Weber was an Argentinian scientist who made significant contributions to the fields of fluorescence spectroscopy and protein chemistry. Weber was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1975.
Go to Profile#781
Lutz Ackermann
#67185
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
#782
Harmon Craig
#22843
Overall Influence
1926 - 2003 (77 years)
Harmon Craig was an American geochemist who worked briefly for the University of Chicago before spending the majority of his career at Scripps Institution of Oceanography . Craig was involved in numerous research expeditions, which visited the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, the crater of Loihi , the Afar Depression of Ethiopia, Greenland's ice cores, and Yellowstone's geysers, among many others. This led to him being described as "the Indiana Jones of the Earth sciences", someone "whose overriding impulse was to get out and see the world they were studying".
Go to Profile#783
Martin Winter
#65563
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Martin Winter is a German chemist and materials scientist. His research in the field of electrochemical energy storage and conversion focuses on the development of new materials, components and cell designs for batteries and supercapacitors, lithium ion batteries and lithium metal batteries.
Go to Profile#784
Paul Wender
#62644
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Paul A. Wender is an American chemist whose work is focused on organic chemistry, organometallic chemistry, synthesis, catalysis, chemical biology, imaging, drug delivery, and molecular therapeutics. He is currently the Francis W. Bergstrom Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and is an Elected Fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#785
Herbert Weissbach
#67568
Overall Influence
#786
Cynthia Friend
#30057
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Cynthia Friend is president and chief operating officer of The Kavli Foundation. She is on leave from the department of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University. Friend was the first female full professor of chemistry at Harvard, attaining the position in 1989. Friend has held the Theodore William Richards Chiar in Chemistry and served as professor of materials science in the Paulson School of Engineering. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Association of Arts and Sciences and the American Chemical Society.
Go to Profile#787
Ignacio Tinoco Jr.
#55755
Overall Influence
1930 - 2016 (86 years)
Ignacio "Nacho" Tinoco Jr. was a Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley from 1956 to 2016. Ignacio Tinoco received a bachelor's degree from the University of New Mexico in 1951, and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1954. He was a postdoctoral fellow with John G. Kirkwood at Yale University from 1954 to 1956. He joined the University of California, Berkeley as a faculty member in 1956, where he was professor in the graduate school and a faculty senior scientist, physical biosciences division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Go to Profile#788
Huimin Zhao
#28181
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Huimin Zhao is the Steven L. Miller Chair Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, as well as the leader of the Biosystems Design research theme in the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. His research focuses on directed evolution, metabolic engineering, bioinformatics and high throughput technologies.
Go to Profile#789
Ann C. Noble
#28768
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Ann C. Noble is a sensory chemist and retired professor from the University of California, Davis. During her time at the UC Davis Department of Viticulture and Enology, Noble invented the "Aroma Wheel" which is credited with enhancing the public understanding of wine tasting and terminology. At the time of her hiring at UC Davis in 1974, Noble was the first woman hired as a faculty member of the Viticulture department. Noble retired from Davis in 2002 and in 2003 was named Emeritus Professor of Enology. Since retirement she has participated as a judge in the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Compet...
Go to Profile#790
David E. H. Jones
#12409
Overall Influence
1938 - 2017 (79 years)
David Edward Hugh Jones was a British chemist and writer, who under the pen name Daedalus was the fictional inventor for DREADCO. Jones' columns as Daedalus were published for 38 years, starting weekly in 1964 in New Scientist. He then moved to the journal Nature, and continued to publish until 2002. Columns from these magazines, along with additional comments and implementation sketches, were collected in two books: The Inventions of Daedalus: A Compendium of Plausible Schemes and The Further Inventions of Daedalus .
Go to Profile#791
Edwin Haslam
#54771
Overall Influence
1932 - 2013 (81 years)
Edwin Haslam was an organic chemist and an author of books on polyphenols. He was an alumnus of Sir John Deane's College in Northwich, Cheshire, United Kingdom and was for many years Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Sheffield.
Go to Profile#792
Donald Charlton Bradley
#49115
Overall Influence
1924 - 2014 (90 years)
Donald Charlton Bradley , was a British chemist who was recognized for his work on the chemistry of metal-alkoxides and metal-amides, their synthesis, structure and bonding, and for his studies of their conversions to metal-oxides and metal-nitrides.
Go to Profile#793
Janine Cossy
#48591
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Janine Cossy is a French chemist who specialises in the synthesis of biologically-active products and is an emeritus professor of organic chemistry at ESPCI Paris. Biography Janine Cossy earned a doctorate in chemistry at the University of Reims, and then undertook a post-doctoral fellowship with the team of Professor Barry Trost at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Appointed as a professor at ESPCI ParisTech in 1990, her work focuses on the total synthesis of natural biologically-active products like anticancer agents, antibiotics, anti-inflammatories or products acting on the central nervous system.
Go to Profile#794
Bettye Washington Greene
#45989
Overall Influence
1935 - 1995 (60 years)
#795
Catherine Coleman
#8360
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Catherine Grace "Cady" Coleman is an American chemist, engineer, former United States Air Force colonel, and retired NASA astronaut. She is a veteran of two Space Shuttle missions, and departed the International Space Station on May 23, 2011, as a crew member of Expedition 27 after logging 159 days in space.
Go to Profile#796
Lars-Erik Tammelin
#38235
Overall Influence
1923 - 1991 (68 years)
Lars-Erik Tammelin was a Swedish chemist, defence researcher and civil servant. Tammelin served as Director-General of the Swedish National Defence Research Institute from 1984 to 1985. Career Tammelin was born in Stockholm, Sweden, the son of Supreme Court Justice Erik Tammelin and his wife Elsa . Tammelin, who was an organic chemist, was recruited to the Swedish National Defence Research Institute in 1950 for research on nerve gas and nerve gas countermeasures. At this time, FOA had become aware that large quantities of nerve gas, primarily Tabun, had been stockpiled during World War II. ...
Go to Profile#797
Laura Robinson
#48366
Overall Influence
Laura Frances Robinson, born November 1976, is a British scientist who is Professor of Geochemistry at the University of Bristol. She makes use of geochemistry to study the processes that govern the climate. In particular, Robinson studies radioactive elements, as these can be analysed in geological materials. She was awarded the 2010 President's Award of the Geological Society of London.
Go to Profile#798
Forman A. Williams
#30106
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (91 years)
Forman Arthur Williams is an American academic in the field of combustion and aerospace engineering who is Emeritus Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California San Diego.
Go to Profile#799
G. D. Yadav
#39160
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Ganapati Dadasaheb Yadav is an Indian chemical engineer, inventor and academic, known for his research on nanomaterials, gas absorption with chemical reaction and phase transfer catalysis. He served as the vice chancellor of the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai from 2009 until November 2019. He is currently the Emeritus Professor of Eminence at ICT Mumbai.
Go to Profile#800
Dan Eley
#60415
Overall Influence
1914 - 2015 (101 years)
Daniel Douglas Eley OBE, FRS was a British chemist and Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Nottingham. He is known for the Eley–Rideal mechanism in surface chemistry. Biography Eley obtained a BSc in Chemistry from the University of Manchester in 1934, and an MSc in 1935. He studied for a PhD with Michael Polanyi which he obtained in 1937, but then moved to St John's College, Cambridge where he undertook a second PhD with Eric Rideal which he obtained in 1940.
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