Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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List of the most influential people in Chemistry,

#1301

George K. Fraenkel

#54479

Overall Influence

1921 - 2009 (88 years)

George K. Fraenkel was an American physical chemist, dean of Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and chairman of the chemistry department at Columbia University. Fraenkel was noted for his research of electron spin resonance. He also pioneered in the use of electronic techniques to study structures of molecules.

#1302

Basil Weedon

#48414

Overall Influence

1923 - 2003 (80 years)

Professor Basil Charles Leicester Weedon CBE, FRS was an organic chemist and university administrator. Using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, he was the first to map the structures of carotenoid pigments, including astaxanthin, rubixanthin and canthaxanthin.

#1303

Eric Christopher Herbst

#87824

Overall Influence

#1304

Sangeeta N. Bhatia

Sangeeta N. Bhatia

#26900

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Sangeeta N. Bhatia is an American biological engineer and the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor at MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Bhatia's research investigates applications of micro- and nano-technology for tissue repair and regeneration. She applies ideas from computer technology and engineering to the design of miniaturized biomedical tools for the study and treatment of diseases, in particular liver disease, hepatitis, malaria ...

#1305

Annemie Bogaerts

#86100

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (54 years)

Annemie Bogaerts is a Belgian chemist known for her work in plasma chemistry, plasma-based green chemistry, which include amongst others CO2 conversion, CH4 conversion for H2 synthesis or the synthesis of hydrocarbons and N2 fixation as basis for fertilizer production, as well as for her work in plasma medicine for cancer treatment, and the use of laser ablation to sample chemicals and form plasmas. She is a full professor of chemistry at the University of Antwerp.

#1306

Anthony Barrett

#73540

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Anthony Gerard Martin Barrett FRS, FMedSci is a British chemist, and Sir Derek Barton Professor of Synthesis, Glaxo Professor of Organic Chemistry at Imperial College London. He is Director of the Wolfson Centre for Organic Chemistry in Medical Science. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1999 and Academy of Medical Sciences in 2003. He obtained a BSc as well as PhD from Imperial College London in 1973 and 1975 respectively.

#1307

Héctor D. Abruña

#76885

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Héctor Daniel Abruña is a Puerto Rican physical chemist whose work focuses on electrochemistry, molecular electronics, fuel cells, batteries, and electrocatalysis. Abruña is director of the Energy Materials Center and Emile M. Chamot professor for chemistry at Cornell University. He became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2006, a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007, and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2018. Abruña conducts research into battery and fuel cell systems using electrochemical techniques and X-ray microsc...

#1308

Albert J. R. Heck

Albert J. R. Heck

#77935

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Albert J.R. Heck is a Dutch scientist and professor at Utrecht University, the Netherlands in the field of mass spectrometry and proteomics. He is known for his work on technologies to study proteins in their natural environment, with the aim to understand their biological function. Albert Heck was awarded the Spinoza Prize in 2017, the highest scientific award in the Netherlands.

#1309

John F. MacGregor

John F. MacGregor

#59345

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

John Frederick MacGregor is a statistician whose work in the field of statistical process control has received significant recognition. His pioneering work was in the area of latent variable/multivariate analysis methods applied to industrial processes.

#1310

Peter Pauson

#72176

Overall Influence

1925 - 2013 (88 years)

Prof Peter Ludwig Israel Pauson FRSE FRIC was a German–Jewish emigrant who settled in Britain and who is remembered for his contributions to chemistry, most notably the Pauson–Khand reaction and as joint discoverer of ferrocene.

#1311

Barbara J. Finlayson-Pitts

#69398

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Barbara J. Finlayson-Pitts is a Canadian-American atmospheric chemist. She is a professor in the chemistry department at the University of California, Irvine and is the Director of AirUCI Institute. Finlayson-Pitts and James N. Pitts, Jr. are the authors of Chemistry of the Upper and Lower Atmosphere: Theory, Experiments, and Applications . She has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2006 and is the laureate for the 2017 Garvan–Olin Medal. In 2016 she co-chaired the National Academy of Science report "The Future of Atmospheric Chemistry Research"

#1312

SonBinh Nguyen

#52902

Overall Influence

SonBinh T. Nguyen is the McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence and the Dow Chemical Company Research Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University. He is also the former Director of the Integrated Sciences Program.

#1313

Michael J. Welch

#88290

Overall Influence

#1314

Robert Caret

#30999

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Robert Laurent Caret is an American academic and the former chancellor of the University System of Maryland. He became chancellor on July 1, 2015. Caret, a native of New England, became chancellor of the University System of Maryland after completing presidencies at San Jose State University, Towson University and the University of Massachusetts.

#1315

Paul Connett

#34052

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Paul Connett lives in Binghamton, New York. Paul Connett is a prominent water fluoridation critic, executive director of the Binghamton, New York based Fluoride Action Network , one of the largest organizations opposing water fluoridation worldwide. The Fluoride Action Network is funded, at least in part, by Joseph Mercola. Joseph Mercola has been identified by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate as the leading COVID disinformationist.

#1316

Cliff Addison

#72293

Overall Influence

1913 - 1994 (81 years)

Cyril Clifford Addison, FRS was a British inorganic chemist. Career Addison was a member of the Chemical Inspection Department, Ministry of Supply from 1939 to 1945. He was Lecturer, Reader and Professor of Inorganic Chemistry, University of Nottingham from 1946 to 1978, and Leverhulme Emeritus Professor from 1978 to 1994.

#1317

Malcolm H. Chisholm

Malcolm H. Chisholm

#82543

Overall Influence

1945 - 2015 (70 years)

Malcolm Harold Chisholm was a British inorganic chemist who worked mainly in North America, a Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Distinguished University Professor of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at Ohio State University who contributed to the synthesis and structural chemistry of transition metal complexes.

#1318

Timothy P. Lodge

#72259

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Timothy P. Lodge is an American polymer scientist. Lodge is a Regents Professor , an Institute of Technology Distinguished Professor , and a Distinguished McKnight University Professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota where he has been a faculty member since 1982. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of the American Chemical Society journal Macromolecules for 17 years and as the founding editor of ACS Macro Letters .

#1319

Gerrit Berkhoff

Gerrit Berkhoff

#29308

Overall Influence

1901 - 1996 (95 years)

Gerrit Berkhoff was a Dutch chemist and the first rector magnificus of the University of Twente in The Netherlands. Education The son of primary school principal Gerrit Berkhoff and Martha Severs , Berkhoff studied chemistry at Leiden University where he obtained, in 1929, a doctor's degree with his PhD dissertation "Osmose van ternaire vloeistoffen" . As a student, he worked for four years as a laboratory assistant for inorganic chemistry.

#1320

Lawrence Que Jr.

#83663

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Lawrence Que Jr. is a chemist who specializes in bioinorganic chemistry and is a Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He received the 2017 American Chemical Society Award in Inorganic Chemistry for his contributions to the field., and the 2008 ACS Alfred Bader Award in Bioinorganic Chemistry.

#1321

Babatunde Ogunnaike

#21130

Overall Influence

1956 - 2022 (66 years)

Babatunde Ayodeji Ogunnaike was an American chemical engineer of Nigerian descent and the William L. Friend Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Delaware . He was the former dean of UD's college of engineering. He died on February 20, 2022. He had waged a long battle with cancer.

#1322

Robin Clark

#85675

Overall Influence

1935 - 2018 (83 years)

Robin Jon Hawes Clark was a New Zealand-born chemist initially noted for research of transition metal and mixed-valence complexes, and later for the use of Raman spectroscopy in determining the chemical composition of pigments used in artworks.

#1323

Abbas Shafiee

#29455

Overall Influence

1944 - 2016 (72 years)

Abbas Shafiee was an Iranian pharmaceutical chemist. He was the president of faculty of pharmacy at Tehran University. He published more than 350 scientific articles in peer reviewed international journals.

#1324

George Kauffman

George Kauffman

#67266

Overall Influence

1930 - 2020 (90 years)

George Bernard Kauffman was an American chemist. Life Kauffman was born in Philadelphia, the son of Laura and Joseph Philip Kauffman. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and Ph.D. from the University of Florida. Kauffman was a professor of chemistry at California State University, Fresno. He wrote over 17 books and over 2,000 articles.

#1325

Derek Lowe

#21862

Overall Influence

Derek Lowe is a medicinal chemist working on preclinical drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry. Lowe has published a blog about this field, "In the Pipeline", since 2002 and is a columnist for the Royal Society of Chemistry's Chemistry World.

#1326

Susan Trumbore

#34986

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Susan E. Trumbore is an earth systems scientist focusing on the carbon cycle and its effects on climate. She is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry and a Professor of Earth System Science at University of California, Irvine. She is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Medal.

#1327

Anthony L. Turkevich

#56154

Overall Influence

1916 - 2002 (86 years)

Anthony Leonid Turkevich was an American radiochemist who was the first to determine the composition of the Moon's surface using an alpha scattering spectrometer on the Surveyor 5 mission in 1967. Early life and education Turkevich was born on July 23, 1916, in Manhattan, New York, at the bishop's house attached to Saint Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral. His father, Leonid Turkevich, was dean at the time, and later became the Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church in North America. He had two brothers. Turkevich studied at Dartmouth College and obtained his bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1937.

#1328

T. Mark Harrison

#76102

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

T. Mark Harrison is an isotope geochemist based in California. He is Distinguished Professor of Geochemistry in the Department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences, University of California – Los Angeles.

#1329

Isaac R. Kaplan

#88762

Overall Influence

#1330

Robert G. Griffin

#72640

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

Robert Guy Griffin is a Professor of Chemistry and director of the Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He is known for his work in nuclear magnetic resonance and developing high-field dynamic nuclear polarisation for the study of biological solids. He has contributed many different methods and approaches now widely used in solid-state NMR spectroscopy, in particular in context of magic-angle-spinning NMR. For example, this extends to methods for resolution enhancement via heteronuclear decoupling, as well as techniques for polarisation transfer betwe...

#1331

Steven M. George

#86935

Overall Influence

Steven M. George from the University of Colorado, Boulder, was awarded the status of Fellow in the American Physical Society, after they were nominated by their Division of Chemical Physics in 1997, for "advancements in our understanding of gas-surface energy transfer dynamics, surface kinetics and diffusion processes, environmental chemistry at gas-surface interfaces, heterogeneous catalysis, and chemically controlled eptiaxy of novel thin film materials."

#1332

Takeo Ozawa

#88844

Overall Influence

#1333

Christie G. Enke

#68143

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (92 years)

Christie G. Enke is a United States academic chemist who made pioneering contributions to the field of analytical chemistry. Life and career Chris Enke was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on July 8, 1933. His parents were Alvin Enke and Mae Nichols. He graduated from Central High School in Minneapolis in 1951. He received a BA degree from Principia College in 1955 and a PhD from the University of Illinois in 1959. His thesis, concerning the anodic formation of surface oxide films on platinum electrodes, was performed under the guidance of Herbert Laitinen. While at Illinois, he also worked with...

#1334

Moshe Levy

#38308

Overall Influence

1927 - 2015 (88 years)

Moshe Levy was an Israeli professor of chemistry at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Birth and education Moshe Levy was born on December 8, 1927, in Thessaloniki, Greece. In 1933 his father, Eliyahu, decided to immigrate to Palestine, then under British occupation. He grew up in the southern part of Tel-Aviv and attended the Alliance Elementary School and the Balfour High School. After graduating from high school, he went to work as a laboratory assistant at the Zeiff Institute in Rehovot. There, with the help of Chaim Weizmann he obtained a scholarship to attend the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

#1335

Bruce H. Lipshutz

#38135

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Bruce H. Lipshutz is an American chemist. He is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Biography Lipshutz received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from Binghamton University in 1973. His graduate work was supervised by Harry H. Wasserman at Yale. After a PhD degree in 1977, he spent two years at Harvard as a post-doctoral researcher in the group of Nobel Laureate E. J. Corey. Soon after, he accepted a position of Assistant Professor at UCSB rising to the ranks of Professor in 1987. He has received the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship and the Camille & Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award.

#1336

Robert Logan Hill

#88950

Overall Influence

#1337

Carol K. Hall

#29564

Overall Influence

Carol Klein Hall is an American chemical engineer, the Camille Dreyfus Distinguished University Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at North Carolina State University. Her research involves biomolecule simulation, self-assembly of soft materials, and the design of synthetic peptides.

#1338

A. Welford Castleman Jr.

#83911

Overall Influence

1936 - 2017 (81 years)

Albert Welford Castleman Jr. was an American physicist and chemist who was the Eberly Family Distinguished Chair of Science at Eberly College of Science, Pennsylvania State University. He was elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, both in 1998. In 2010, Castleman was awarded the Irving Langmuir Award.

#1339

Gerhard L. Closs

#88786

Overall Influence

1928 - 1992 (64 years)

Gerhard Ludwig Closs was an American chemist specializing in physical organic chemistry, member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, chairman of the chemistry department at the University of Chicago. Closs made seminal contributions in research of the magnetic properties of the intermediate compounds formed in chemical reactions. He is also credited with the discovery that certain reactions polarize atomic nuclei. The National Academies Press called him "one of the outstanding chemists of the post-World War II era". He was also an early leader in the field of carbene chemistry.

#1340

Steven Suib

#87768

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Steven L. Suib is an American inorganic chemist, academic and researcher. He is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at University of Connecticut. He is a director of the Institute of Materials Science and of the Center for Advanced Microscopy and Materials Analysis.

#1341

Tamio Hayashi

#89092

Overall Influence

#1342

Keith E. Gubbins

Keith E. Gubbins

#65753

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

Keith E. Gubbins is a British-born American chemical engineer who is the W.H. Clark Distinguished University Professor of Chemical Engineering at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. He is perhaps best known as one of the originators of statistical associating fluid theory .

#1343

Jeanette Grasselli Brown

#60137

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (97 years)

Jeanette Grasselli Brown is an American analytical chemist and spectroscopist who is known for her work with Standard Oil of Ohio as an industrial researcher in the field of spectroscopy. Spectroscopy is a technique used to measure the interaction of electromagnetic radiation with matter. Her areas of expertise encompass fields such as vibrational spectroscopy, combined instrumental techniques, computerized spectroscopy, and environmental spectroscopy. She developed new techniques to solve problems like identifying contaminants in gasoline, analyzing the makeup of new plastics, and analyzing...

#1344

Ryoo Ryong

#63207

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Ryoo Ryong FRSC is a distinguished professor of chemistry at KAIST in Daejeon, South Korea. He was the head of the Center for Nanomaterials and Chemical Reactions, an Extramural Research Center of the Institute for Basic Science. Ryoo has won a variety of awards, including the Top Scientist and Technologist Award of Korea given by the South Korean government in 2005. He obtained the KOSEF Science and Technology Award in 2001 for his work on the synthesis and crystal structure of mesoporous silica.

#1345

Charlotte Williams

#74498

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Charlotte Williams is a Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the synthesis of novel catalysts with an expertise in organometallic chemistry and polymer materials chemistry.

#1346

Lloyd M. Smith

#53697

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Lloyd M. Smith is a professor of chemistry and the founder of Third Wave Technologies. Early life Smith spent his formative years in Berkeley, California, where his parents worked as professors of physics and mathematics. He majored in biochemistry at the University of California in 1976, performing research with Wayne Hubbell, and subsequently obtained his PhD from Stanford University for his work on membrane diffusion with Harden M. McConnell.

#1347

Frank Asaro

#24519

Overall Influence

1927 - 2014 (87 years)

Frank Asaro was an Emeritus Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory associated with the University of California at Berkeley. He is best known as the chemist who discovered the iridium anomaly in the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary layer that led the team of Luis Alvarez, Walter Alvarez, Frank Asaro, and Helen Michel to propose the Asteroid-Impact Theory, which postulates that an asteroid hit the Earth sixty-five million years ago and caused mass extinction during the age of the dinosaurs.

#1348

Dan Luss

#71130

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

Dan Luss is an American chemical engineer, who is the Cullen Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Houston. He is known for his work in chemical reaction engineering, complex reacting systems, multiple steady-states reactor design, dynamics of chemical reactors, and combustion.

#1349

Donald J. Darensbourg

#86666

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Donald J. Darensbourg is an American inorganic chemist. He is a distinguished professor of chemistry at Texas A&M University. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022. Education Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1941, Darensbourg obtained a BS from California State University in 1964, followed by a PhD from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1968 under the guidance of Theodore L. Brown.

#1350

John B. Neilands

#89259

Overall Influence

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