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).
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List of the most influential people in Chemistry,
#1051
E. Bruce Watson
#69664
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Edward Bruce Watson is an American geochemist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Education and career Watson received in 1972 his bachelor's degree in geology from the University of New Hampshire and in 1976 his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in geochemistry. As a postdoc, he worked at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. In 1977 became an assistant professor of geochemistry at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and was subsequently promoted to associate professor and full professor. Since 2011 he has also held a professorship of materials science and engineering.
Go to Profile#1052
Gordon Hammes
#32102
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (91 years)
Gordon G. Hammes is a distinguished service professor of biochemistry, emeritus, at Duke University, professor emeritus at Cornell University, and member of United States National Academy of Sciences. Hammes' research involves the study of enzyme mechanisms and enzyme regulation.
Go to Profile#1053
Pulickel Ajayan
#35878
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Pulickel Madhavapanicker Ajayan, known as P. M. Ajayan, is the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor in Engineering at Rice University. He is the founding chair of Rice University's Materials Science and NanoEngineering department and also holds joint appointments with the Department of Chemistry and Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Prior to joining Rice, he was the Henry Burlage Professor of Material Sciences and Engineering and the director of the NYSTAR interconnect focus center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute until 2007. Known for his pioneering work of ...
Go to Profile#1054
Patrice Simon
#60364
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Patrice Simon is a French chemist in the field of materials science and electrochemistry. He is currently a Distinguished Professor at the Université Paul Sabatier since 2007. His research activities are focused onto the modification of the material/electrolyte interfaces in electrodes for electrochemical energy storage devices such as supercapacitors and batteries. He is also former Director of the European Research Institute "ALISTORE ERI", and currently deputy director of the French Newtwork on Electrochemical Energy Storage .
Go to Profile#1055
Milton L. Lee
#77239
Overall Influence
Milton L. Lee is the H. Tracy Hall Professor of Chemistry at Brigham Young University . Education Lee received a B.A. degree in chemistry from the University of Utah in 1971 and a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from Indiana University Bloomington in 1975, after which he spent one year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral research associate. Upon leaving MIT, he accepted a faculty position in the Chemistry Department at Brigham Young University, where he is the H. Tracy Hall Professor of Chemistry.
Go to Profile#1056
Anthony Stone
#63963
Overall Influence
Anthony J. Stone is a British theoretical chemist and emeritus professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge. Education Stone studied Natural Sciences at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and obtained a Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry under H. Christopher Longuet-Higgins.
Go to Profile#1057
Steven A. Benner
#28034
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Steven Albert Benner is an American chemist. He has been a professor at Harvard University, ETH Zurich, and most recently at the University of Florida, where he was the V.T. & Louise Jackson Distinguished Professor of Chemistry. In 2005, he founded The Westheimer Institute of Science and Technology and the Foundation For Applied Molecular Evolution. Benner has also founded the companies EraGen Biosciences and Firebird BioMolecular Sciences LLC.
Go to Profile#1058
Francis Albarède
#40592
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Francis Albarède is a French geochemist. He is Professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon and a member of the Academia Europaea. In January 2011, he became the first director of the Laboratory of Geology Lyon .
Go to Profile#1059
Mark Thompson
#66226
Overall Influence
Mark E. Thompson is a Californian chemistry academic who has worked with OLEDs. Career Mark E. Thompson graduated with honors from the University of California, Berkeley, earning his B.S. in chemistry in 1980. He earned a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry working under the guidance of Prof. John E. Bercaw. He conducted research at a Smithsonian Environmental Research Center as a Research Fellow in an Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at Oxford University. There, Thompson worked with Prof. Malcolm L. H. Green investigating specific properties of organometallic materials.
Go to Profile#1060
Katharina Landfester
#74628
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Katharina Landfester is a German chemist who is a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research. Her research considers the physical properties of droplets, polymerisation in emulsion and the synthesis of nanoparticles.
Go to Profile#1061
Fazlul Halim Chowdhury
#57299
Overall Influence
1930 - 1996 (66 years)
Fazlul Halim Chowdhury was a fellow of the Bangladesh Academy of Sciences and one of the longest-serving Vice-Chancellors of the University of Dhaka. He made pioneering contributions to the development of physical chemistry in Bangladesh, publishing more than 20 articles. He focused on cellulose fibers , polyelectrolytes, and proteins.
Go to Profile#1062
Matthew Rosseinsky
#66909
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Matthew Jonathan Rosseinsky FRS is Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Liverpool. He was awarded the Hughes Medal in 2011 "for his influential discoveries in the synthetic chemistry of solid state electronic materials and novel microporous structures."
Go to Profile#1063
Leslie Leiserowitz
#51336
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (91 years)
Leslie Leiserowitz is an Israeli chemist and crystallographer. Leiserowitz studied electrical engineering at the University of Cape Town with a bachelor's degree, and then worked briefly as an electrical engineer and received a master's degree in physics . In 1959 he joined the X-ray crystallography department at the Weizmann Institute under Gerhard Schmidt, a student of Dorothy Crowfoot-Hodgkin. The group at the Weizmann Institute has an international reputation in solid-state chemistry. From 1966 to 1968 he set up the organic chemistry X-ray crystallography department at the University of Heidelberg at the invitation of Heinz Staab.
Go to Profile#1064
Maki Kawai
#43570
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Maki Kawai is a Japanese chemist who developed spatially selective single-molecule spectroscopy. In 2018, she became the first woman to become president of the Chemical Society of Japan. Early life and education Kawai earned her bachelor's degree at the University of Tokyo in 1975. She completed her doctoral studies at the University of Tokyo in 1980. Her PhD was supervised by Kenji Tamaru.
Go to Profile#1065
Abraham Clearfield
#79431
Overall Influence
#1066
Holden Thorp
#20762
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Herbert Holden Thorp is an American chemist, professor and entrepreneur. He is a professor of chemistry at George Washington University. He was the tenth chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, assuming the position on July 1, 2008, succeeding James Moeser, and, at age 43, was noted as being among the youngest leaders of a university in the United States. At the time of his selection as chancellor, Thorp was the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and a Kenan Professor of chemistry at the university. Thorp is a 1986 graduate of UNC; he later earned a Ph.D. in chemi...
Go to Profile#1067
David Stuart
#75876
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Sir David Ian Stuart is a Medical Research Council Professor of Structural Biology at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford where he is also a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. He is best known for his contributions to the X-ray crystallography of viruses, in particular for determining the structures of foot-and-mouth disease virus, bluetongue virus and the membrane-containing phages PRD1 and PM2. He is also director of Instruct and Life Sciences Director at Diamond Light Source.
Go to Profile#1068
Ronnie Kosloff
#75220
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Ronnie Kosloff is a professor of theoretical chemistry at the Institute of Chemistry and Fritz Haber Center for Molecular Dynamics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Education and career Ronnie Kosloff grew up in Jerusalem and then moved to Haifa in Israel. He graduated from Hebrew Reali School in Haifa in 1966. He joined the armoured corps of the Israel Defence Force. He studied at the Hebrew University from 1969 to 1978 when he obtained his PhD. From 1978 to 1980 he was a post doctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. Ronnie Kosloff joined the Hebrew University faculty at 1981 whe...
Go to Profile#1069
Serge N. Timasheff
#79540
Overall Influence
#1070
Gary Schuster
#32440
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Gary Benjamin Schuster was the interim president of the Georgia Institute of Technology, a position he held from July 1, 2008, when former president G. Wayne Clough stepped down, until April 1, 2009, when George P. "Bud" Peterson was named Georgia Tech's permanent president. He still holds the office Vasser Woolley Chair of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
Go to Profile#1071
Serena DeBeer
#60683
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Serena DeBeer is an American chemist. She is currently a W3-Professor and the director at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion in Muelheim an der Ruhr, Germany, where she heads the Department of Inorganic Spectroscopy. Her expertise lies in the application and development of X-ray based spectroscopic methods as probes of electronic structure in biological and chemical catalysis.
Go to Profile#1072
Barnett Rosenberg
#19769
Overall Influence
1926 - 2009 (83 years)
Barnett Rosenberg was an American chemist best known for the discovery of the anti-cancer drug cisplatin. Rosenberg graduated from Brooklyn College in 1948 and obtained his PhD in physics at New York University in 1956. He joined Michigan State University as a professor of biophysics in 1961 and worked there until 1997.
Go to Profile#1073
Günther Wilke
#26038
Overall Influence
1925 - 2016 (91 years)
Günther Wilke was a German chemist who was influential in organometallic chemistry. He was the director of the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research from 1967–1992, succeeding Karl Ziegler in that post. During Wilke's era, the MPI made several discoveries and achieved some financial independence from patents and a gift from the Ziegler family. The institute continued as a center of excellence in organometallic chemistry.
Go to Profile#1074
Jordi Bruix
#79699
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
#1075
Roland Clift
#31256
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Roland Clift is a chemical engineering professor widely known for his work and media contributions on the topic of sustainability. Career Clift was born 19 November 1942 and studied Chemical Engineering at Cambridge , achieving first class honours in 1964. He received a PhD from McGill University in 1970 for work on particle-fluid interactions, and this was his main research area in subsequent years. He became Head of the Department of Chemical Engineering at Surrey in 1981. His growing interest in the application of engineering principles to environmental issues led him in 1992 to establish...
Go to Profile#1076
Nicholas A. Kotov
#69197
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Nicholas A. Kotov is the Irving Langmuir Distinguished Professor of Chemical Sciences and Engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI, USA. Prof. Nicholas Kotov demonstrated that the ability to self-organize into complex structures is the unifying property of all inorganic nanostructures. He has developed a family of bioinspired composite materials with a wide spectrum of properties that were previously unattainable in classical materials. These composite biomimetic materials are exemplified by his nacre-like ultrastrong yet transparent composites, enamel-like, stiff yet vibrat...
Go to Profile#1077
Robert J. Forster
#65962
Overall Influence
Robert J. Forster is a professor of Physical Chemistry at Dublin City University. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Work Forster has authored many research papers in leading international journals in chemistry. His research has focused on attempts to create new materials with useful electronic or photonic properties, to create new experimental techniques to discover chemical reactivity under extreme conditions and at short timescales and to find theoretical insights into factors influencing electron transfer. His work has implications for a wide variety of areas which include the fol...
Go to Profile#1078
Maurice Brookhart
#61971
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Maurice S. Brookhart is an American chemist, and professor of chemistry at the University of Houston since 2015. Brookhart received his bachelor's degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1964. He received his PhD in 1968 from the University of California, Los Angeles, in physical organic chemistry where his thesis advisor was Saul Winstein. After an NSF postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1968 and a NATO postdoctoral fellowship at Southampton University, England. In 1969, he joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina, where he stayed until 201...
Go to Profile#1079
Yoshito Ikada
#79845
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
#1080
Michael O’keeffe
#79921
Overall Influence
#1081
Judith Howard
#47203
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Judith Ann Kathleen Howard is a British chemist, crystallographer and Professor of Chemistry at Durham University. Early life and education Judith Howard attended Salisbury Grammar School for girls, and later attended University of Bristol in 1963 to study chemistry.
Go to Profile#1082
Christian Amatore
#65489
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Christian Amatore is a French chemist and a member of the French Academy of Sciences. He is an author of works in electrochemistry. Biography Coming from a modest family , he spent a large part of his childhood in Algeria in several garrison towns of Laghouat, Hain-el-Adjar, Sidi Bel Abbès where his father was an NCO of the Foreign Legion. He followed his father's advice "if you are intelligent but you have no education, you remain mute" and followed brilliant studies in Algeria and then in France where his Blackfoot family was repatriated: first to the Lycée Pascal-Paoli in Corte, then to th...
Go to Profile#1083
Michael D. Fayer
#66818
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Michael David Fayer is an American chemical physicist. He is the David Mulvane Ehrsam and Edward Curtis Franklin Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University. Education and academic career He attended the University of California, Berkeley for both undergraduate and graduate school. He received his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1974 under the supervision of Professor Charles B. Harris. Fayer began his academic career at Stanford University as an assistant professor in 1974.
Go to Profile#1084
Seth Marder
#57291
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Seth R. Marder is an American physical chemist best known for his development of the quantum mechanical foundations of nonlinear electro-optics in organic dyes and materials. Education Marder obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978 and doctorate from Wisconsin-Madison in 1985, after which he was a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford from 1985-1987.
Go to Profile#1085
Christoph Janiak
#80076
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
#1086
David Clary
#52779
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Sir David Charles Clary, FRS is a British theoretical chemist. He was president of Magdalen College, Oxford, from 2005 to 2020. He was the first chief scientific adviser to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office from 2009 to 2013. He is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#1087
Joseph Francisco
#60223
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Joseph S. Francisco is an American scientist and the former president of the American Chemical Society from 2009 to 2010. He currently serves as the President's Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science and professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. He was the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and held the Elmer H. and Ruby M. Cordes Chair in chemistry at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln until 2018.
Go to Profile#1088
Judith Klinman
#50408
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Judith P. Klinman is an American chemist, biochemist, and molecular biologist known for her work on enzyme catalysis. She became the first female professor in the physical sciences at the University of California, Berkeley in 1978, where she is now Professor of the Graduate School and Chancellor's Professor. In 2012, she was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Barack Obama. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Philosophical Society.
Go to Profile#1089
He Tian
#80261
Overall Influence
#1090
Gerard Meijer
#48592
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Gerardus Johannes Maria Meijer , more often Gerard J. M. Meijer. is a Dutch physicist who has made significant contributions in the field of molecular physics, with a particular focus on laser-based spectroscopic detection techniques and cold molecules. His group invented the technique of Stark deceleration using the Stark effect for controlled generation of cold molecules.
Go to Profile#1091
Gautam Radhakrishna Desiraju
#32642
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Gautam Radhakrishna Desiraju is an Indian structural chemist, educationist and an honorary professor at the Indian Institute of Science. He worked on crystal engineering and weak hydrogen bonding and co-authored a textbook in crystal engineering . He subsequently wrote a book entitled "Bharat: India 2.0" in which he claims that India is a 5000 year civilization that does not need a constitution. He espouses ideas of intrinsic Indian sacredness, righteousness, and the belief that scientists should not take part in political discussions and has been an outspoken critic of academics who speak a...
Go to Profile#1092
James A. Wells
#76863
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
James Allen Wells is a Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Cellular & Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He received his B.A. degrees in biochemistry and psychology from University of California, Berkeley in 1973 and a PhD in biochemistry from Washington State University with Ralph Yount, PhD in 1979. He completed his postdoctoral studies at Stanford University School of Medicine with George Stark in 1982. He is a pioneer in protein engineering, phage display, fragment-based lead discovery, cellular ap...
Go to Profile#1093
Peter T. Wolczanski
#63104
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Peter Thomas Wolczanski is the George W. and Grace L. Todd professor of Chemistry at Cornell University. Education Wolczanski obtained his B.S. in Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976 while doing research under the direction of Mark Wrighton. He entered graduate school at the California Institute of Technology, working under John Bercaw on various chemistries of permethylzirconocene hydrides and was awarded a doctorate degree in 1981.
Go to Profile#1094
Clare Lloyd
#18787
Overall Influence
Clare Margaret Lloyd is a Professor of Medicine and Vice Dean for Institutional Affairs at Imperial College London. She investigates allergic immunity in early life. Early life and education Lloyd earned her BSc and PhD in immunology at King's College London. She earned her Bachelor's degree in 1987 and her PhD in 1991. She was awarded a National Kidney Research Fund Fellowship and joined the United Medical and Dental Schools of Guy's and St Thomas' Hospitals. Her work considered mouse models of glomerulonephritis. She joined Harvard University to work on chronic inflammatory glomerulonephritis.
Go to Profile#1095
James Pitts
#71826
Overall Influence
1921 - 2014 (93 years)
James N. Pitts Jr. was an American chemist and researcher known for his work in the fields of photochemistry and atmospheric chemistry. Pitts was a pioneer in the study of smog and air pollution, especially in Los Angeles County. Pitts co-founded the Statewide Air Pollution Research Center at the University of California, Riverside in 1961 and served as the center's director from 1970 to 1988. He authored more than 400 scientific publications and four books on the subjects, especially smog.
Go to Profile#1096
Kenneth Poeppelmeier
#66978
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Kenneth Reinhard Poeppelmeier is the Charles E. & Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University. Poeppelmeier was raised in St. Charles, Missouri. He completed a bachelor's degree in chemistry from University of Missouri and, after serving in the Peace Corps, he attended Iowa State University where he was an awarded a doctorate in 1978 under the direction of John Corbett. After working at Exxon for six years, he joined the Northwestern University chemistry faculty in 1984. At Northwestern, his groups work has focused on the role of synthesis and materials design with applications in superconductivity, nonlinear optical materials, catalysis, and energy storage.
Go to Profile#1097
Atsuhiro Osuka
#56071
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Atsuhiro Osuka is a research professor of organic chemistry in the Department of Chemistry, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University . He is recognized in the fields of porphyrinoid chemistry for his works in extended π-electron systems and its tunable aromatic behaviors.
Go to Profile#1098
Georgi Bliznakov
#75175
Overall Influence
1920 - 2004 (84 years)
Georgi Bliznakov Biography Bliznakov was born in 1920 in Berkovitsa, Bulgaria. After graduating in chemistry in 1943 from Sofia University he worked in industry until 1946, when he joined the University of Varna as an assistant in inorganic and physical chemistry. In 1949 he joined the Department of Physical Chemistry at the Polytechnic Institute in Sofia as an assistant where he stayed until moving to the Department of Inorganic Chemistry at Sofia University in 1951, becoming full professor and head of department in 1960. He stayed in that post until 1989, serving as university rector from ...
Go to Profile#1099
Harry Irving
#64737
Overall Influence
1905 - 1993 (88 years)
Harry Munroe Napier Hetherington Irving , often cited as H. M. N. H. Irving, was a British chemist. Education As a student as The Queen's College, Oxford, Irving received a BA in 1928 and a DPhil in 1930, the same year he received his Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music. In 1954, he was awarded a DSc.
Go to Profile#1100
Jacopo Tomasi
#80727
Overall Influence
