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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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Chemistry,

#901

Gregory A. Voth

Gregory A. Voth

#46399

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Gregory A. Voth is a theoretical chemist and Haig P. Papazian Distinguished Service Professor of Chemistry at the University of Chicago. He is also a professor of the James Franck Institute and the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics.

#902

David Colin Sherrington

#55678

Overall Influence

1945 - 2014 (69 years)

David Colin Sherrington FRS was a polymer chemist whose research career was based at the University of Strathclyde. Biography David Colin Sherrington was born at Webster Street, Litherland, Liverpool on 5 March 1945, the second child of Alfred George Sherrington, a dock labourer, and Lucy Gladys Sherrington, née Pyke. He attended two primary/junior schools before passing the eleven-plus exam, enabling him to go to Waterloo Grammar School. Crosby. His A-Level results were good enough for him to by-pass the first year of the chemistry degree course at the University of Liverpool and enter the second year in 1963.

#903

Vivian Yam

#48246

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Professor Vivian Yam Wing-wah CSci, CChem, FRSC, is a Hong Kong chemist. Yam is the youngest female member ever to be elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. She was a 2011 L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science laureate "for her work on light-emitting materials and innovative ways of capturing solar energy."

#904

Davorin Dolar

#45671

Overall Influence

1921 - 2005 (84 years)

Davorin Dolar was a Slovenian chemist at the University of Ljubljana. He was a physical chemist who studied polyelectrolyte solutions. He is regarded as a founder of modern physical chemistry teaching in Slovenia. He was a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

#905

Ralph Raphael

#56637

Overall Influence

1921 - 1998 (77 years)

Ralph Alexander Raphael was a British organic chemist, well known for his use of acteylene derivatives in the synthesis of natural products with biological activity. Early life and education Ralph Raphael was born in Croydon, London on New Year's Day 1921, the son of master tailor Jacob Raphael and his wife, Lily . He attended secondary school at Wesley College, Dublin and then Tottenham County School, where a chemistry master, Edgar Ware, introduced him to the subject that would become Raphael's lifetime passion. In 1939 he won scholarships to study at Imperial College, graduating BSc with a first-class degree in 1941 and winning the Hofmann Prize for practical chemistry.

#906

Jean'ne Shreeve

#61254

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (92 years)

Jean'ne Marie Shreeve is an American chemist known for her studies of fluorine compounds and explosives. She has held her namesake professorship at the University of Idaho since 2004. Early life and education Born in Deer Lodge, Montana in 1933, Jean'ne Shreeve was the second of two children to Mary-Frances and Charles W. Shreeve. She was named after the popular 1928 song "Jeannine, I Dream of Lilac Time". Though Jean'ne's father worked for the Northern Pacific Railway, her mother, a teacher, was unemployed for much of her childhood due to the Great Depressionand the prevailing notion that families only needed one breadwinner.

#907

Colin Raston

#26102

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Colin Llewellyn Raston is a Professor of Chemistry of Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia and the Premier's Professorial Fellow in Clean Technology. In 2015, he was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in "for inventing a chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg". In 2016, Raston was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for his services to science.

#908

Ali Javey

#48522

Overall Influence

Ali Javey is a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, a senior faculty scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and co-director of the Bay Area Photovoltaic Consortium and the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center. His research is focused on materials and device innovation for technological applications, particularly photovoltaics, wearable sensors, nanoelectronics, and programmable materials.

#909

Cheves Walling

#65116

Overall Influence

1916 - 2007 (91 years)

Cheves Walling was an American organic chemist, having been a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at and also the former Editor-in-Chief of Journal of the American Chemical Society. He was also a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

#910

Sharon Hammes-Schiffer

#60853

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Sharon Hammes-Schiffer is a physical chemist who has contributed to theoretical and computational chemistry. She is currently a Sterling Professor of Chemistry at Yale University. She has served as senior editor and deputy editor of the Journal of Physical Chemistry and advisory editor for Theoretical Chemistry Accounts. she is editor-in-chief of Chemical Reviews.

#911

Andrew Orr-Ewing

Andrew Orr-Ewing

#57375

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (60 years)

Andrew John Orr-Ewing is a British chemist and Professor of physical chemistry at the University of Bristol. His work investigates the mechanisms of chemical reaction in both the gas and liquid phases and has used ultrafast laser spectroscopy to observe the effects of solvents on molecular reaction and the dynamics of photodissociation.

#912

Andrea Sella

#41180

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Andrea Sella is a chemist and broadcaster based at University College London where he is a Professor of Inorganic Chemistry. He studies rare-earth metals and collaborates with several research groups on hydrogen storage, carbonitrides, and nanotube insertion chemistry. He has been involved in numerous television documentaries, including the 2010 BBC documentary Chemistry: A Volatile History, which was nominated for the 2010 British Academy Television Awards in the category Specialist Factual. In 2014 he presented "My Family and other Ibex" and "Urine Trouble: What's in our Water" on BBC Radio 4.

#913

Kristi Anseth

#33711

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Kristi S. Anseth is the Tisone Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, an Associate Professor of Surgery, and a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her main research interests are the design of synthetic biomaterials using hydrogels, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine.

#914

Vernon C. Gibson

#54288

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Vernon Charles Gibson is a British scientist who served as Chief Scientific Adviser at the Ministry of Defence between 2012 and 2016. He was reappointed to the MoD CSA role in May 2023. He is visiting professor at Imperial College London and the University of Oxford, Honorary Professor at the University of Manchester. He delivered the Royal United Services Institute Prince Philip Lecture on Military Education in Nov 2023.

#915

Mark Hersam

#23228

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (50 years)

Mark Christopher Hersam is a professor of Chemistry and Materials Science Engineering at Northwestern University who, according to the National Science Foundation, has made "major breakthrough[s]" in the field of nanotechnology. He is a 2014 recipient of the MacArthur "Genius" Award and a 1996 Marshall Scholar. He is also an Executive Editor of ACS Nano. As of October 2023, he has been cited over 68,000 times according to Google Scholar.

#916

Herbert H. Uhlig

#56244

Overall Influence

1907 - 1993 (86 years)

Herbert Henry Uhlig was an American physical chemist who studied corrosion. Biography He received his B.S. in chemistry from Brown University in 1929 and his Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1932 from MIT under John Kirkwood and Frederick Keyes. He worked briefly as a biochemist at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and then the Lever Brothers Company before returning to MIT in 1936 as a research associate in the Corrosion Laboratory. This was interrupted by World War II, during which time he joined the staff of the Research Laboratory at the General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York, to study metal corrosion on aircraft and other military equipment.

#917

Karl Schlögl

#57402

Overall Influence

1924 - 2007 (83 years)

Karl Schlögl was professor of organic chemistry at the University of Vienna and secretary as well as vice-president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Biography Schlögl was born October 5, 1924, in Vienna. Schlögl's first contact with organic chemistry happened during his middle-school education, when his father - the principal and teacher for natural sciences - took young Karl to school after hours to do experiments together. Schlögl graduated from high-school in 1943 and was declared unfit for service by the Wehrmacht due to his asthma. He started studying chemistry at the University of V...

#918

Dudley Howard Williams

#73072

Overall Influence

#919

Eiichi Nakamura

#68980

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Eiichi Nakamura is a Japanese chemist and professor of chemistry at University of Tokyo in Japan. Education 1973 BS Faculty of Science, Tokyo Institute of Technology 1978 PhD in chemistry, Department of Chemistry, Tokyo Institute of Technology 1978-1980 Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Chemistry, Columbia University, New York

#920

Martha Greenblatt

#52170

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Martha Greenblatt is a chemist, researcher, and faculty member at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. As of January 2008 she was the only female chair of a science department in the School of Arts and Science. Greenblatt took the position of chair of the chemistry department at Rutgers while pursuing research interests in solid state inorganic chemistry. She was also the recipient of the 2003 American Chemical Society’s Garvan-Olin Medal – a national award given yearly to an outstanding woman chemist. In 2004, she became Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry at Rutgers.

#921

Richard Kaner

#61803

Overall Influence

Richard B. Kaner is an American synthetic inorganic chemist. He is a distinguished professor and the Dr. Myung Ki Hong Endowed Chair in Materials Innovation at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he holds a joint appointment in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the Department of Material Science and Engineering. Kaner conducts research on conductive polymers , superhard materials and carbon compounds, such as fullerenes and graphene.

#922

Joyce Jacobson Kaufman

Joyce Jacobson Kaufman

#54249

Overall Influence

1929 - 2016 (87 years)

Joyce Jacobson Kaufman was an American chemist known for advancing the science of quantum chemistry and for clinical research on anaesthetics. Born to an immigrant family in the Bronx and educated at Johns Hopkins University, she worked at the Sorbonne and Martin Marietta before returning to Johns Hopkins.

#923

Peter Willett

#60013

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Peter Willett is an Emeritus Professor of Information Science at the University of Sheffield, England. Life and education Willett was born 20 April 1953, obtained an Honors degree in Chemistry from Exeter College, Oxford in 1975 and then went to the Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield where he obtained an MSc in Information Studies in 1976. He obtained a PhD in the same department in 1979.

#924

Christian Klixbüll Jørgensen

#73309

Overall Influence

#925

Harold S. Johnston

#43610

Overall Influence

1920 - 2012 (92 years)

Harold S. "Hal" Johnston was an American scientist who studied chemical kinetics and atmospheric chemistry. After beginning his teaching career at Stanford University, he was a faculty member and administrator at the University of California, Berkeley for nearly 35 years. In 1971, Johnston authored a paper suggesting that environmental pollutants could erode the ozone layer.

#926

Wu Yundong

#39329

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Wu Yundong is a Chinese chemist. He is a theoretical organic chemist based in the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and holds a concurrent position in Peking University. He was born 10 May 1957 in Liyang, Jiangsu, China. He graduated with a BS from Lanzhou University in 1982 and received his PhD in 1986 from the University of Pittsburgh, working with Kendall N. Houk in computational organic chemistry. He went on to become a research associate in University of California Los Angeles from 1989 to 1992, before beginning his independent research career in Hong Kong.

#927

Leo Brewer

#59914

Overall Influence

1919 - 2005 (86 years)

Leo Brewer was an American physical chemist. Considered to be the founder of modern high-temperature chemistry, Brewer received his BS from the California Institute of Technology in 1940 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1942. Brewer joined the Manhattan Project following his graduate work, and joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley in 1946. Leo Brewer married Rose Strugo in 1945. They had three children, Beth Gaydos, Roger Brewer, and Gail Brewer. He died in 2005 as a result of Beryllium poisoning from his work in World War II.

#928

Bernard Pullman

#35494

Overall Influence

1919 - 1996 (77 years)

Bernard Pullman was a French theoretical quantum chemist and quantum biochemist. Pullman studied at the Sorbonne, then spent the Second World War as a French Army officer in Africa and the Middle East. Returning to Paris in 1946, he completed his licence ès sciences in 1946 and the Docteur-es-Science in 1948. From 1946 to 1954, he worked at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique . In 1954 he was appointed Professor at the Sorbonne. In 1959, he became Director of the Department of Quantum Biochemistry at the Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique. In 1963, he was promoted to Director of the Institute.

#929

Dominic Tildesley

Dominic Tildesley

#65955

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Dominic Tildesley is a British chemist. He gained his undergraduate chemistry degree from the University of Southampton in 1973. He went on to complete a DPhil at Oxford University in 1976 before undertaking postdoctoral research at Penn State and Cornell universities in the United States. He returned to the University of Southampton in the UK for a lectureship, before becoming professor of theoretical chemistry and moving to Imperial College London in 1996 as Professor of Computational Chemistry.

#930

Frank Caruso

#66784

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Francesco Caruso is Melbourne Laureate Professor and National Health and Medical Research Council Senior Principal Research Fellow in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Caruso is deputy director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Convergent Bio-Nanoscience and Technology.

#931

Norbert Peters

#27941

Overall Influence

1942 - 2015 (73 years)

Norbert Peters was a professor at RWTH Aachen University, Germany and one of the world-wide authorities in the field of combustion engineering. He headed the Institut für Technische Verbrennung . Born in Linz, Austria, he was educated at the Karlsruhe University of Technology and later at the Technical University of Berlin. He worked in Rourkela Steel Plant for six months.

#932

Paras N. Prasad

#63578

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Paras Nath Prasad is an Indian chemist. He is the SUNY Distinguished Professor at the University at Buffalo and holds a tenured faculty appointment in the department of Chemistry. In addition, he also holds non-tenured appointments in Physics, Medicine, and Electrical Engineering at the University at Buffalo and serves as the Executive Director of the Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics.

#933

Christopher Spencer Foote

#68061

Overall Influence

1935 - 2005 (70 years)

Christopher Spencer Foote was a professor of chemistry at UCLA and an expert in reactive oxygen species, in particular, singlet oxygen. He published 259 articles, editorials, and notes. He was cited over 14,000 times with an average of 450 citations per year since 1989. He has an h-index of 67. He was also known for his textbook Organic Chemistry .

#934

Ole J. Kleppa

#57752

Overall Influence

1920 - 2007 (87 years)

Ole J. Kleppa was a Norwegian-born physical chemist and a pioneer and leading authority in the study of metals, molten salts, ceramics and minerals at high temperatures. Kleppa was a professor at the University of Chicago, where he held appointments in the department of chemistry, the department of geophysical sciences, the James Franck Institute, and the college. He was the director of the James Franck Institute and the materials research laboratory.

#935

Lawrence Bartell

#58969

Overall Influence

1923 - 2017 (94 years)

Lawrence Sims Bartell was the Philip J. Elving Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the University of Michigan. His research in physical chemistry focused on electron diffraction studies of molecular structure and later on molecular mechanics. Bartell retired from his faculty position at Michigan in 1993.

#936

Myrtle Bachelder

Myrtle Bachelder

#41772

Overall Influence

1908 - 1997 (89 years)

Myrtle Claire Bachelder was an American chemist and Women's Army Corps officer, who is noted for her secret work on the Manhattan Project atomic bomb program, and for the development of techniques in the chemistry of metals.

#937

George Feher

#28838

Overall Influence

1924 - 2017 (93 years)

George Feher was an American biophysicist working at the University of California San Diego. Birth and education George Feher was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia in 1924. Fehér is a hungarian name and his birth town was ceeded from Hungary 4 years before his birth. So Fehér was a hungarian jew.

#938

Denham Harman

#74147

Overall Influence

#939

Harry Gunning

#61702

Overall Influence

1916 - 2002 (86 years)

Harry Emmet Gunning, was a Canadian scientist and administrator. Born in Toronto, Ontario, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree, a Master of Arts degree, and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1942 from the University of Toronto.

#940

Omowunmi Sadik

#23992

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Omowunmi "Wunmi" A. Sadik is a Nigerian professor, chemist, and inventor working at New Jersey Institute of Technology. She has developed microelectrode biosensors for detection of drugs and explosives and is working on the development of technologies for recycling metal ions from waste, for use in environmental and industrial applications. In 2012, Sadik co-founded the non-profit Sustainable Nanotechnology Organization.

#941

Abigail Doyle

#33717

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Abigail Gutmann Doyle is a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she holds the Saul Winstein Chair in Organic Chemistry. Her research focuses on the development of new chemical transformations in organic chemistry.

#942

Bernhard Keppler

Bernhard Keppler

#60976

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Bernhard K. Keppler is a German bioinorganic chemist and physician. He is chair of inorganic chemistry at the University of Vienna, head of the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry and dean of the Faculty of Chemistry.

#943

Joseph Hupp

#71113

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Joseph Thomas Hupp is an American chemist. He is the Morrison Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University. Early life and education Hupp was born on March 23, 1957, in Cuba, New York. He attended Cuba Central School and played on their football team. As a senior, he placed 14th among 114 high school students who took the Nevins Mathematics Contest at Alfred University and was awarded automatic admission. Despite this, he attended Houghton College for his Bachelor of Science degree and Michigan State University for his PhD.

#944

Berend Smit

#74504

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

#945

Carolina Henriette MacGillavry

#49978

Overall Influence

1904 - 1993 (89 years)

Carolina Henriette MacGillavry was a Dutch chemist and crystallographer. She is known for her discoveries on the use of diffraction in crystallography. Biography MacGillavry was born the second of six children in an intellectual family .

#946

Takuzo Aida

#40849

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Takuzo Aida is a polymer chemist known for his work in the fields of supramolecular chemistry, materials chemistry and polymer chemistry. Aida, who is the Deputy Director for the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science and a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Tokyo, has made pioneering contributions to the initiation, fundamental progress, and conceptual expansion of supramolecular polymerization. Aida has also been a leader and advocate for addressing critical environmental issues caused by plastic waste and microplastics in the oceans, soil, and food supply, through th...

#947

Guy Bertrand

#29232

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Guy Bertrand, born on July 17, 1952, at Limoges is a chemistry professor at the University of California, San Diego. Bertrand obtained his B.Sc. from the University of Montpellier in 1975 and his Ph.D. from the Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, in 1979. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Sanofi Research, France, in 1981.

#948

Roland Kenith Robins

#74722

Overall Influence

#949

Jeremy Sanders

#36713

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Jeremy Keith Morris Sanders is a British chemist and Emeritus Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Royal Society Open Science. He is known for his contributions to many fields including NMR spectroscopy and supramolecular chemistry. He served as the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Institutional Affairs at the University of Cambridge, 2011–2015.

#950

Philip Jeffrey Hay

#74837

Overall Influence

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