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.

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List of the most influential people in Chemistry,

#251

J. Andrew McCammon

#18430

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

James Andrew McCammon is an American physical chemist known for his application of principles and methods from theoretical and computational chemistry to biological systems. A professor at the University of California, San Diego, McCammon's research focuses on the theoretical aspects of biomolecular and cellular activity. In 2011 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

#252

Alexandru Balaban

Alexandru Balaban

#19163

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Alexandru T. Balaban is a Romanian chemist who made significant contributions to the fields of organic chemistry, theoretical chemistry, mathematical chemistry, and chemical graph theory. Early life and education Balaban was born in Timișoara, in the western part of Romania. His parents paid a lot of attention to Balaban's education, strongly encouraging his fascination with chemistry. In 1935 his family moved to Bucharest, where Balaban attended elementary school. After World War II, in 1945 they moved to Petroșani, where he finished high school. Alexandru Balaban enrolled the Politehnica University of Bucharest in 1949, where he was awarded a Ph.D.

#253

James Rothman

#1415

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

James Edward Rothman is an American biochemist. He is the Fergus F. Wallace Professor of Biomedical Sciences at Yale University, the Chairman of the Department of Cell Biology at Yale School of Medicine, and the Director of the Nanobiology Institute at the Yale West Campus. Rothman also concurrently serves as adjunct professor of physiology and cellular biophysics at Columbia University and a research professor at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London.

#254

Prashant V. Kamat

#26294

Overall Influence

Prashant V. Kamat is a professor of chemistry and biochemistry and a principal scientist of the radiation laboratory, University of Notre Dame. He is affiliated with the department of chemical and biomolecular engineering as a concurrent professor. He earned his master's and doctoral degree in physical chemistry from Bombay University, and carried out his postdoctoral research at Boston University and University of Texas at Austin .

#255

Irina Beletskaya

#28460

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Irina Petrovna Beletskaya is a Soviet and Russian professor of chemistry at Moscow State University. She specializes in organometallic chemistry and its application to problems in organic chemistry. She is best known for her studies on aromatic reaction mechanisms, as well as work on carbanion acidity and reactivity. She developed some of the first methods for carbon-carbon bond formation using palladium or nickel catalysts, and extended these reactions to work in aqueous media. She also helped to open up the chemistry of organolanthanides.

#256

Dieter Enders

#17644

Overall Influence

1946 - 2019 (73 years)

Dieter Enders was a German organic chemist who did work developing asymmetric synthesis, in particular using modified prolines as chiral auxiliaries. The most widely applied of his chiral auxiliaries are the complementary SAMP and RAMP auxiliaries, which allow for asymmetric alpha-alkylation of aldehydes and ketones. In 1974 he obtained his doctorate from the University of Gießen studying under Dieter Seebach and followed this with a postdoc at Harvard University studying with Elias James Corey. He then moved back to Gießen to obtain his Habilitation in 1979, whereupon he became a lecturer, soon obtaining Professorship in 1980 as Professor of Organic Chemistry at Bonn.

#257

Charles M. Lieber

Charles M. Lieber

#18233

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

#258

Henry Rapoport

#22932

Overall Influence

1918 - 2002 (84 years)

Henry Rapoport was an internationally renowned organic chemist and Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. He is widely recognized for his work in the development of the chemical synthesis of biologically important compounds and pharmaceuticals.

#259

Kirk Schulz

#11316

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Kirk Herman Schulz is an American educator, currently serving as the 11th president of Washington State University, a position he began on June 13, 2016. Prior to serving at Washington State, Schulz was the 13th president of Kansas State University.

#260

Ulf Ellervik

#29231

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Ulf Ellervik is a Swedish professor of bioorganic chemistry at Lund University. Ellervik's main research area is carbohydrates, such as eye drops against the viral disease epidemic keratoconjunctivitis and the carbohydrate xylose as the cure for cancer. Ellervik received his undergraduate training at the Faculty of Engineering where he started in 1989. He graduated as M.Sc. in Chemical Engineering in 1993 and began research in organic chemistry in 1994. After presenting his thesis in October 1998 he spent almost two years working at California Institute of Technology as a post-doctoral fellow.

#261

Julius Rebek

#8436

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Julius Rebek Jr. is a Hungarian-American chemist and expert on molecular self-assembly. Rebek was born in Beregszász, Kingdom of Hungary, , which at the time was part of Hungary, in 1944 and lived in Austria from 1945 to 1949. In 1949 he and his family immigrated to the United States and settled in Topeka, Kansas where he graduated from Highland Park High School. Rebek graduated from the University of Kansas with a Bachelor of Arts degree in chemistry. Rebek received his Master of Arts degree and his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970. There he studied peptides under D.

#262

Yoshimasa Hirata

#18810

Overall Influence

1915 - 2000 (85 years)

Yoshimasa Hirata was a Japanese organic chemist. Biography Hirata was born in Yamaguchi, Japan in 1915. He received a Bachelor of Science from the Tokyo Imperial University in 1941, and then joined the faculty there as a Lecturer of Chemistry. In 1944, he moved to Nagoya University as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry. In that same year, he was promoted Associate Professor. He received his Ph.D. from Nagoya University in 1949, and was promoted to Full Professor in 1954.

#263

Jackie Yi-Ru Ying

#17323

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Jackie Yi-Ru Ying is an American nanotechnology scientist based in Singapore. She is the founding executive director of the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology . Early life and career Ying was born in Taipei in 1966. She moved to Singapore with her family in 1973 as a child where she was a student at Rulang Primary School and Raffles Girls' School. She then went to New York City, earning a B.Eng. degree by graduating summa cum laude from Cooper Union in 1987. She then attended Princeton University, receiving her MA in 1988 and her PhD in 1991, both in chemical engineering. She spen...

#264

Calvin L. Stevens

#22768

Overall Influence

1923 - 2014 (91 years)

Calvin Lee Stevens was an American chemist. He was a professor of organic chemistry at Wayne State University, and is known for being the first to synthesize the drug ketamine. Early life and education Stevens was born in Edwardsville, Illinois, to Arthur Allen Stevens and Irma E. Ambuehl. He earned a Bachelor of Science at the University of Illinois, and in 1947 a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Wisconsin in the field of substituted ketene acetals and related orthoesters.

#265

Keith J. Laidler

#27356

Overall Influence

1916 - 2003 (87 years)

Keith James Laidler , born in England, was notable as a pioneer in chemical kinetics and authority on the physical chemistry of enzymes. Education Laidler received his early education at Liverpool College. He received his BA and MA degrees from Oxford University as a student of Trinity College. His MA was in the area of chemical kinetics under Cyril Hinshelwood. He completed his PhD in 1940 from Princeton University, with a thesis entitled: The Kinetics of Reactions in Condensed and Heterogeneous Systems, under Henry Eyring. He was a National Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow ....

#266

Tracy Hall

#15654

Overall Influence

1919 - 2008 (89 years)

Howard Tracy Hall was an American physical chemist and one of the early pioneers in the research of synthetic diamonds, using a press of his own design. Early life Howard Tracy Hall was born in Ogden, Utah in 1919. He often used the name H. Tracy Hall or, simply, Tracy Hall. He was a descendant of Mormon pioneers and grew up on a farm in Marriott, Utah. When still in the fourth grade, he announced his intention to work for General Electric. Hall attended Weber College for two years, and married Ida-Rose Langford in 1941. He went to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he received his BSc in 1942 and his MSc in the following year.

#267

Daniel Edward Koshland

#34837

Overall Influence

#268

Thomas M. Klapötke

#31276

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Thomas Matthias Klapötke is a German inorganic chemist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, studying explosives. Klapötke grew up in Berlin and studied at the Technical University of Berlin , completing his undergraduate degree in 1982, his PhD in 1986, and his habilitation in 1990. Klapötke worked as a lecturer at TU Berlin until 1995, when the University of Glasgow hired him for the Ramsay professorship. Since 1997, Klapötke has worked at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich as a professor of Inorganic Chemistry.

#269

John B. Fenn

#18938

Overall Influence

1917 - 2010 (93 years)

John Bennett Fenn was an American professor of analytical chemistry who was awarded a share of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002. Fenn shared half of the award with Koichi Tanaka for their work in mass spectrometry. The other half of the 2002 award went to Kurt Wüthrich. Fenn's contributions specifically related to the development of electrospray ionization, now a commonly used technique for large molecules and routine liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. Early in his career, Fenn did research in the field of jet propulsion at Project SQUID, and focused on molecular beam studies.

#270

Charles S. Lieber

#34931

Overall Influence

#271

James P. Collman

#28963

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

James P. Collman is an American chemist who is the George A. and Hilda M. Daubert Professor of Chemistry, emeritus at Stanford University. Collman's research focused on organometallic bioinorganic chemistry. Collman is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

#272

Charles Alfred Coulson

#35003

Overall Influence

#273

Rudolf Zahradník

Rudolf Zahradník

#29161

Overall Influence

1928 - 2020 (92 years)

Rudolf Zahradník was a Czech chemist in the field of quantum chemistry and molecular spectroscopy. He held research positions at the Institute of Occupational Medicine and went on to serve as the first director of the J Heyrovsky Institute of Physical Chemistry, president of the Czech Academy of Sciences and chairman of the Learned Society of the Czech Republic, after the Velvet Revolution. During the 1980s, he taught future German leader Angela Merkel, who was then on an internship in Czechoslovakia. He held a doctorate from the University of Chemistry and Technology, Prague.

#274

David MacMillan

#13717

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Sir David William Cross MacMillan is a Scottish chemist and the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University, where he was also the chair of the Department of Chemistry from 2010 to 2015. He shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Benjamin List "for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis". MacMillan used his share of the $1.14 million prize to establish the May and Billy MacMillan Foundation.

#275

Peter Wasserscheid

#21214

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Peter Wasserscheid is a German chemist and professor for chemical reaction engineering at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Together with Matthias Beller he won the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 2006.

#276

Neil Bartlett

#16345

Overall Influence

1932 - 2008 (76 years)

Neil Bartlett was a chemist who specialized in fluorine and compounds containing fluorine, and became famous for creating the first noble gas compounds. He taught chemistry at the University of British Columbia and the University of California, Berkeley.

#277

Ronnie Bell

#20043

Overall Influence

1907 - 1996 (89 years)

Ronald Percy Bell FRS FRSC FRSE was a leading British physical chemist who worked in the Physical Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Oxford. Life Ronald Percy Bell was the eldest child of Edwin Alfred Bell and his wife Beatrice Annie , teachers at an elementary school. He was born on 24 November 1907 at Willowfield, Court House Road, Maidenhead; he had a brother, Kenneth, and an adopted sister, Margaret.

#278

Walter H. Stockmayer

#32609

Overall Influence

1914 - 2004 (90 years)

Walter Hugo Stockmayer was an internationally known chemist and university teacher. A former member of the National Academy of Sciences, he was recognized as one of the twentieth century pioneers of polymer science. His specific interest was in theory and experiment for the structure and dynamics of polymer molecules, including various uses of the light scattering method.

#279

Mary L. Good

#18178

Overall Influence

1931 - 2019 (88 years)

Mary Lowe Good was an American inorganic chemist who worked academically, in industrial research and in government. Good contributed to the understanding of catalysts such as ruthenium which activate or speed up chemical reactions.

#280

Moungi Bawendi

#11351

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Moungi Bawendi is an American–Tunisian–French chemist. He is currently the Lester Wolfe Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bawendi is known for his advances in the chemical production of high-quality quantum dots. In 2023 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

#281

Brian Evans Conway

#29897

Overall Influence

1927 - 2005 (78 years)

Brian Evans Conway , professor emeritus in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Ottawa, was a world-renowned electrochemist, and had a long and distinguished career at the University of Ottawa that spanned five decades.

#282

Josef Paldus

#19542

Overall Influence

1935 - 2023 (88 years)

Josef Paldus, was a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Applied Mathematics at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Josef Paldus became associate professor at the University of Waterloo after emigration to Canada from Czechoslovakia in 1968. In 1975 he was promoted to full professor at this university, and he retired in 2001.

#283

Lester James Reed

#36150

Overall Influence

#284

JoAnne Stubbe

#23489

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

JoAnne Stubbe is an American chemist best known for her work on ribonucleotide reductases, for which she was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2009. In 2017, she retired as a Professor of Chemistry and Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#285

Ferdinand Bohlmann

Ferdinand Bohlmann

#34059

Overall Influence

1921 - 1991 (70 years)

Ferdinand Bohlmann was a German chemist, known for his studies of plant natural products chemistry, especially terpenoids and polyynes. Life Bohlmann studied chemistry in Göttingen from 1939 to 1944 . His studies were interrupted by military service and injury. In 1946 he received his doctorate under Hans Brockmann on chromatography of pyridine compounds. He then worked under Hans Herloff Inhoffen at the University of Marburg. Bohlmann followed Inhoffen to the TH Braunschweig and completed his habilitation there. Bohlmann became a lecturer in 1952 and an adjunct professor in 1957. In 1959 he...

#286

Jiří Čížek

#21980

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Jiří Čížek is a distinguished emeritus professor at University of Waterloo in Canada. Together with colleague Josef Paldus, in 1966 he reformulated the coupled cluster method for the study of electron correlation in atoms and molecules. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and has been honored by the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.

#287

Raymond Daudel

#28231

Overall Influence

1920 - 2006 (86 years)

Raymond Daudel was a French theoretical and quantum chemist. Trained as a physicist, he was an assistant to Irène Joliot-Curie at the Radium Institute. Daudel spent almost the entirety of his career as professor at the Sorbonne and director of a laboratory of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique . He is quoted as saying that the latter "was much better because the CNRS was very rich". This allowed Daudel to attract many co-workers from elsewhere in France and internationally.

#288

Chris Dobson

#13971

Overall Influence

1949 - 2019 (70 years)

Sir Christopher Martin Dobson was a British chemist, who was the John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Chemical and Structural Biology in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, and Master of St John's College, Cambridge.

#289

Kenneth B. Wiberg

#31766

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (97 years)

Kenneth Berle Wiberg is an American Professor Emeritus of organic chemistry at Yale University. He contributed to many aspects of organic chemistry including physical and synthetic aspects. Scholarship In the area of synthetic organic chemistry, Wiberg and his students reported the preparation of highly strained organic compounds bicyclobutane and [1.1.1]propellane:

#290

Arthur E. Martell

#35258

Overall Influence

1916 - 2003 (87 years)

Arthur E. Martell was a distinguished professor of chemistry at Texas A&M University and award-winning researcher in the field of inorganic chemistry. His research centered on metal chelate compounds, macrocyclic complexes and cryptates.

#291

David P. Craig

#23665

Overall Influence

1919 - 2015 (96 years)

David Parker Craig , an Australian chemist, was the Foundation Professor of Physical and Theoretical Chemistry and later Emeritus Professor in the Research School of Chemistry at the Australian National University in Canberra.

#292

Harry George Drickamer

#24272

Overall Influence

1918 - 2002 (84 years)

Harry George Drickamer , born Harold George Weidenthal, was a pioneer experimentalist in high-pressure studies of condensed matter. His work generally concerned understanding the electronic properties of matter.

#293

Mitsuo Sawamoto

#29594

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Mitsuo Sawamoto is a Japanese chemist specializing in the field of polymer chemistry, Emeritus Professor at Kyoto University, professor at Chubu University. He is co-recipient of the Franklin Institute Award in Chemistry in 2017 with Krzysztof Matyjaszewski, for their independent discover of Atom-transfer radical-polymerization .

#294

Neal Amundson

#17471

Overall Influence

1916 - 2011 (95 years)

Neal Russell Amundson was an American chemical engineer and applied mathematician. He was the chair of the department of chemical engineering at the University of Minnesota for over 25 years. Later, he was the Cullen Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering and Mathematics at the University of Houston. Amundson was considered one of the most prominent chemical engineering educators and researchers in the United States. The Chemical Engineering and Materials Science building at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities bears his name.

#295

Nathan Lewis

#9449

Overall Influence

Nathan S. Lewis is the George L. Argyros Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology . He specializes in functionalization of silicon and other semiconductor surfaces, chemical sensing using chemiresistive sensor arrays, and alternative energy and artificial photosynthesis.

#296

Steven V. Ley

#27447

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Steven Victor Ley is Professor of Organic Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, and is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was President of the Royal Society of Chemistry and was made a CBE in January 2002, in the process. In 2011, he was included by The Times in the list of the "100 most important people in British science".

#297

Rostislaw Kaischew

Rostislaw Kaischew

#24124

Overall Influence

1908 - 2002 (94 years)

Rostislaw Kaischew was a Bulgarian physicochemist and a member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. His most significant contributions to science were within studies of crystal growth and nucleation.

#298

Paul Anastas

#19528

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Paul T. Anastas is an American scientist, inventor, author, entrepreneur, professor, and public servant. He is the Director of Yale University's Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering, Previously he served as the Science Advisor to the United States Environmental Protection Agency as well as the Agency's Assistant Administrator for Research and Development, appointed by President Barack Obama.

#299

Thomas Ebbesen

#17228

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Thomas Ebbesen is a Franco-Norwegian physical chemist and professor at the University of Strasbourg in France, known for his pioneering work in nanoscience. He received the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience “for transformative contributions to the field of nano-optics that have broken long-held beliefs about the limitations of the resolution limits of optical microscopy and imaging”, together with Stefan Hell, and Sir John Pendry in 2014.

#300

Vil Mirzayanov

#12362

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Vil Sultanovich Mirzayanov is a Russian chemist of ethnic Tatar origin who now lives in the United States, best known for revealing secret chemical weapons experimentation in Russia. Early life Vil Sultanovich Mirzayanov was born in a village in rural Bashkortostan, the son of the village school teacher. The Mirzayanov family is Tatar, a Turkic ethnic minority in Russia. His father, a staunch Communist, broke with a 200 year old family tradition in which the oldest sons entered the Muslim clergy. In 1953, he graduated from the Dyurtyuli Tatar School No. 1 with a silver medal.

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