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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Chemistry,

#1601

Yuk Ling Yung

#97419

Overall Influence

#1602

Robert L. Letsinger

#63916

Overall Influence

1921 - 2014 (93 years)

Robert Lewis Letsinger was an American biochemist and was a professor of chemistry at Northwestern University. He was best known for his research and development of chemical synthesis of DNA. Life Letsinger earned his B.S. in 1943 his Ph.D. in 1945, both at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1946, he joined the department of chemistry at Northwestern University. He retired from teaching in 1991 as the emeritus Clare Hamilton Hall Professor.

#1603

C. David Gutsche

#90832

Overall Influence

1921 - 2018 (97 years)

Carl David Gutsche was an American chemist. Gutsche was raised in La Grange Park, Illinois. He studied at Oberlin College and later earned a doctorate in organic chemistry from the University of Wisconsin. University taught at Washington University in St. Louis from 1947 to 1989, when he was appointed Robert A. Welch Professor of Chemistry at Texas Christian University. Upon retirement in 2002, Gutsche moved to Tucson, Arizona and became a visiting scholar at the University of Arizona.

#1604

Robert E. Blankenship

#83156

Overall Influence

Robert E. Blankenship is an American chemist. Blankenship earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Nebraska Wesleyan University in 1970, and obtained a doctorate in the subject at University of California, Berkeley in 1975. Upon completing postdoctoral research at the University of Washington in 1979, Blankenship began his teaching career as an assistant professor at Amherst College in 1979. He assumed an associate professorship at Arizona State University in 1985, and was promoted to full professor in 1988. Blankenship chaired the ASU Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry from 2002 to his retirement from the university in 2006, when he was granted emeritus status.

#1605

Marie-Paule Pileni

#47826

Overall Influence

Marie-Paule Pileni is a French physical chemist who was born in Tananarive, Madagascar. She is an Emeritus Professor at Sorbonne University and a Senior Member, since 1999, and administrator of the Institut Universitaire de France.

#1606

Giuseppe Resnati

#54932

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Giuseppe Resnati is an Italian chemist with interests in supramolecular chemistry and fluorine chemistry. He has a particular focus on self-assembly processes driven by halogen bonds and chalcogen bonds.

#1607

Samuel Isaac Weissman

#58624

Overall Influence

1912 - 2007 (95 years)

Dr Samuel Isaac Weissman was an American chemist and professor best known for his work on the application of electron spin resonance to chemistry. Weissman was born in South Bend, Indiana in 1912. He completed a chemistry degree at the University of Chicago in 1933 and his doctorate from the same university in 1938.

#1608

Kam W. Leong

#97623

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

#1609

Michael A Kamm

#97624

Overall Influence

#1610

Frank Harmsworth Allen

#97652

Overall Influence

#1611

Christopher N. Bowman

#74373

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Christopher N. Bowman is an American chemical engineer, and the James and Catherine Patten Endowed Chair at University of Colorado Boulder. He earned a bachelor's degree and doctorate from Purdue University. Bowman began teaching at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1992, and was named a distinguished professor in 2012. He became a member of the National Academy of Medicine in 2018 and received the Roy W. Tess Award in Coatings from the American Chemical Society's Division of Polymeric Materials: Science and Engineering that same year. He became a member of the National Academy of Enginee...

#1612

Lucas Andrew Staehelin

#96763

Overall Influence

1939 - 2022 (83 years)

Lucas Andrew Staehelin was a retired Swiss-American cell biologist. He was professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder. He developed cryofixation methods and pioneered their use for preserving cellular structures for electron microscope studies. Application of these methods to the analysis of plant, animal and bacterial cells brought insights into the nanoscale architecture and functional organization of membranous organelles and cytoskeletal systems. Staehelin taught undergraduate and graduate courses in cellular and molecular biology at the University of Colorado Boulder.

#1613

Erik Hauri

#93930

Overall Influence

1966 - 2018 (52 years)

Erik Harold Hauri was an American geochemist at the Carnegie Institution for Science. He researched the movement of matter inside planets and how volatile compounds such as water originated on Earth and other planetary bodies, and their effects on volcanic systems.

#1614

Hermann Esterbauer

#97790

Overall Influence

#1615

Gerard Parkin

#87154

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Gerard "Ged" F. R. Parkin is a professor of chemistry at Columbia University. Biography Gerard Parkin attended the English Martyrs School and Sixth Form College before working under Malcolm Green during both his undergraduate and graduate studies at Queens College of Oxford University. His work involved exploring the chemistry of tungsten phosphine derivatives. He obtained a post-doctoral position at the California Institute of Technology working with Professor John Bercaw on tungstenocene reactivity. In 1988, Ged joined the faculty at Columbia University, where he currently investigates a...

#1616

Eugene Terentjev

#81562

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Eugene M. Terentjev is professor of Polymer physics at the University of Cambridge, and fellow of Queens' College where he is the Director of Studies in Natural Sciences. Terentjev earned his MSc in Physics from Moscow State University, and his PhD from Institute of Crystallography, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. He then carried out postdoctoral research at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, before moving to Cambridge in 1992. Terentjev's h-index is over 60, with over 16000 citations to his articles. His most notable contributions are in the scientific field of liquid...

#1617

Gunda Georg

#75961

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Gunda I. Georg is a chemist who is currently the Professor and Head of the Department of Medicinal Chemistry, Regents Professor, McKnight Presidential Chair, Robert Vince Endowed Chair at University of Minnesota and a former Co-Editor-in-Chief of American Chemical Society's Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. Her research interests are total synthesis and semisynthesis as well as evaluating biologically active agents. A cited expert in her field, she was elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1996 and inducted in the Medicinal Chemistry Hall of Fame in 2017. In 2019,...

#1618

Peter Brimblecombe

#35825

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Peter Brimblecombe is an Australian-born, British atmospheric chemist, currently emeritus professor of atmospheric chemistry at the University of East Anglia and National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan. In a five-decade research career, he has written or co-authored seven books and around 350 peer-reviewed papers on air pollution and its effects on human health and the environment, but is probably best known as the author of The Big Smoke, which has been described as a definitive history of air pollution.

#1619

Petra Gastmeier

#98002

Overall Influence

#1620

Hartmut Bärnighausen

#85341

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (92 years)

Hartmut Bärnighausen is a German chemist and crystallographer. He is known for establishing the Bärnighausen trees which describe group-subgroup relationships of crystal structures. Life Bärnighausen studied Chemistry at Leipzig University and received his diploma after a diploma thesis with Leopold Wolf in 1955. In May 1958, he flew from East Germany to University of Freiburg, where he worked with Georg Brauer. He finished his doctorate in the group of Georg Brauer in 1959. In 1967, he received his habilitation. From 1967 to 1998, he was a professor for inorganic chemistry at the University ...

#1621

Gerhard Lagaly

#86506

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

Gerhard Lagaly is a German chemist and retired university professor. Life and work In 1957, Lagaly started his chemistry studies at the Heidelberg University, receiving his degree as "Diplom-Chemiker" in 1962. He conducted his doctorate studies at the Institute for Inorganic Chemistry at the same institution under Armin Weiss, and was awarded his Doctor degree in 1967 with the work "Untersuchung von Quellungsvorgängen in n-Alkylammonium-Schichtsilicaten". From 1965 he worked as an Assistant at the Institute for Inorganic Chemistry of the Munich University where he concluded his Habilitation in 1971 and then was employed as lecturer .

#1622

Alexander Boldyrev

#97587

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Alexander I. Boldyrev was a Russian-American computational chemist and R. Gaurth Hansen Professor at Utah State University. Professor Boldyrev is known for his pioneering works on superhalogens, superalkalis, tetracoordinated planar carbon, inorganic double helix, boron and aluminum clusters, and chemical bonding theory, especially aromaticity/antiaromaticity in all-metal structures, and development of the Adaptive Natural Density Partitioning method.

#1623

Douglas H. Turner

Douglas H. Turner

#67441

Overall Influence

Douglas "Doug" H. Turner is an American chemist and Professor of Chemistry at the University of Rochester. Early life Turner grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Education Turner attended Harvard College, where he graduated cum laude in Chemistry and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army. He did his graduate work in the Chemistry Departments of Columbia University and Brookhaven National Labs, where he worked with George Flynn and Norman Sutin to develop the Raman laser temperature jump method for measuring kinetics on a nanosecond time scale. During this period, he also spent three months in Anniston, Alabama taking the Officer's Basic Course of the Army's Chemical Corp.

#1624

Kenichiro Itami

#73416

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (54 years)

Kenichiro Itami is a Japanese chemist. He is a professor at Nagoya University in the Department of Chemistry, Graduate School of Science, director of Institute of Transformative Bio-Molecules , Nagoya University and the Research Director of the Itami Molecular Nanocarbon Project . He received his Ph.D in Engineering from the Department of Synthetic Chemistry and Biological Chemistry from Kyoto University.

#1625

R. H. Miller

#98188

Overall Influence

#1626

Ralph Norman Adams

#98197

Overall Influence

#1627

Jin-Quan Yu

#53799

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Jin-Quan Yu is a Chinese-born American chemist. He is the Frank and Bertha Hupp Professor of Chemistry at Scripps Research, where he also holds the Bristol Myers Squibb Endowed Chair in Chemistry. He is a 2016 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. Yu is a leader in the development of C–H bond activation reactions in organic chemistry, and has reported many C–H activation reactions that could be applicable towards the synthesis of drug molecules and other biologically active compounds.

#1628

Vinayak P. Dravid

#98298

Overall Influence

#1629

Rainer Haag

#98304

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Rainer Haag is a German chemist and Chair Professor of Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry at the Free University of Berlin. He conducts research together with his working group on preventing aggressive pathogens and viruses from entering the body's cells using nanotechnology. He heads a team composed of biochemists, physicians, biologists and physicists.

#1630

Ayusman Sen

#95713

Overall Influence

Ayusman Sen is a professor of chemistry at Pennsylvania State University. His specialties are nanomotors, catalysis, and new materials. He received a $25,000 award in 1984 from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

#1631

Matthew Tirrell

Matthew Tirrell

#56964

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

#1632

Charles R. Martin

#83259

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Charles R. Martin is an American Distinguished Professor of chemistry at University of Florida. He is a Nanotechnology expert and a pioneer of membrane-based template synthesis of nanomaterials. He is listed as one of the World's Top 100 Chemists of the past decade by Thomson Reuters. He is also a musician and songwriter in Gainesville, Florida.

#1633

Brian Arthur Hemmings

#98369

Overall Influence

#1634

Chau-Chyun Chen

#83824

Overall Influence

Chau-Chyun Chen is an American engineer and a department of Chemical Engineering chairman at Texas Tech University. Education In 1973, Chen received a BS degree in chemistry from National Taiwan University. In 1977, Chen received a MS degree in Chemical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1980, Chen received a Sc.D degree in Chemical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#1635

Antonio M. Echavarren

#40678

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Antonio M. Echavarren Pablos is a Spanish chemist who has contributed to the recent advances in gold and palladium chemistry. He obtained his PhD at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in 1982. Since 1992 he is a full professor at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, where he heads the Research Group on Organometallic Chemistry Directed Towards Organic Synthesis. Since 2004 he is working as Group Leader at the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia .

#1636

Ri Sung-gi

#35686

Overall Influence

1905 - 1996 (91 years)

Ri Sung-gi, also often spelled Lee Sung-ki, Lee Seung-gi or Yi Sung-gi , was a North Korean chemist. He is best remembered as the inventor of Vinalon. He has also been accused of involvement in North Korea's chemical and nuclear weapons programs.

#1637

Zvi. Rappoport

#98463

Overall Influence

#1638

Arthur Carty

#62550

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Arthur J. Carty, , is a Canadian academic and former National Science Advisor to the Government of Canada. Carty was the inaugural director of the Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology at the University of Waterloo, special advisor to the President on international science and technology collaboration and research professor in the department of chemistry. From 2004-08, he served as Canada's first national science advisor to the prime minister and to the Government of Canada. Prior to his appointment as national science advisor, he was president of the National Research Council, Canada's leadi...

#1639

Mark M. Green

#84977

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

Mark Mordecai Green is an American chemist, writer and professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering. He is best known for his extensive work on an aspect of stereochemistry involved in cooperative chirality and also for his book Organic Chemistry Principles in Context: A Story Telling Historical Approach, which can be used in teaching organic chemistry in an unprecedented way.

#1640

Ib Chorkendorff

#98500

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

#1641

Brian O'Regan

#60498

Overall Influence

Brian C. O'Regan is an American chemist known for the co-invention of dye-sensitized solar cells . He was previously a Research Lecturer at Imperial College London where he conducted research on photovoltaic cells and other applications of nano-structured oxide electronic materials.

#1642

Philip Kraft

#93642

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Philip Kraft is a German organic chemist. Since 1996 he has been employed by Givaudan, a leading Flavor and Fragrance company, where he designs captive odorants for use in perfumes. He has lectured at the University of Bern, the University of Zurich, and the ETH Zurich.

#1643

Claudio Luchinat

Claudio Luchinat

#84167

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Claudio Luchinat is an Italian chemist. He is author of about 550 publications in Bioinorganic Chemistry, NMR and Structural Biology, and of four books. According to Google scholar, his h-index is 90 and his papers have been quoted more than 33,000 times .

#1644

Takeo Saegusa

#98590

Overall Influence

#1645

Arnold Burgen

#23974

Overall Influence

1922 - 2022 (100 years)

Sir Arnold Stanley Vincent Burgen FRS was a British physician, pharmacologist, academic and university administrator. He was Master of Darwin College, Cambridge, from 1982–89, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of The University of Cambridge from 1985–89, and founding President of the Academia Europæa.

#1646

Miguel Valcárcel

#98633

Overall Influence

#1647

Elmer Lucille Allen

#54863

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (94 years)

Elmer Lucille Allen is a ceramic artist and chemist who graduated from Nazareth College in 1953. Both her father and brother were named Elmer and the family chose to name her Elmer Lucille. She became the first African-American chemist at Brown-Forman in 1966.

#1648

Michael B. Hall

#83980

Overall Influence

Michael B. Hall is an American inorganic and theoretical chemist. He obtained his B.S. degree in chemistry from Juniata College in 1966, and his Ph.D. with Richard F. Fenske at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1971. Hall is currently a professor at Texas A&M University.

#1649

David Mangelsdorf

#81142

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

David J. Mangelsdorf is an American biologist and chemist, currently the Alfred J. Gilman Distinguished Chair in Pharmacology, Raymond and Ellen Willie Distinguished Chair in Molecular Neuropharmacology at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. In 2008, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He, along with Steven Kliewer, identified the ligands and physiologic functions of a number of orphan nuclear receptors that then discovered two new signaling pathways mediated by the endocrine factors FGF19 and FGF21, which has become a significant accomplishment in the field. He re...

#1650

Ernst Otto Fischer

#98729

Overall Influence

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions