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.

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List of the most influential people in Earth Sciences,

#51

Mohammad Hassan Ganji

Mohammad Hassan Ganji

#13103

Overall Influence

1912 - 2012 (100 years)

Mohammad Hassan Ganji Ph.D , was an Iranian meteorologist and academic. He was born in Birjand. He is credited as being the father of modern geography in Iran. Education He completed his studies in Tehran and continued to study geography in England and the United States. He next began to teach at the University of Tehran and was the first who began to teach modern geography at universities. Ganji established the Iran Meteorological Organization in 1955 and ran the organization for several years. He is often acknowledged as the father of modern geography in Iran.

#52

Kiyoo Wadati

#17472

Overall Influence

1902 - 1995 (93 years)

Kiyoo Wadati was an early seismologist at the Central Meteorological Observatory of Japan , researching deep earthquakes. His name is attached to the Wadati–Benioff zone. It was Wadati's 1928 paper on shallow and deep earthquakes, comparing maximum below surface displacement against distance from the epicentre, which led Charles Richter to develop his earthquake magnitude scale in 1935.

#53

Peter John Wyllie

#32469

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Peter John Wyllie is a British petrologist and academic. He was Professor of Geology at the California Institute of Technology from 1983 until his retirement in 1999. Prior to this, he held positions at the University of St Andrews , Pennsylvania State University , the University of Leeds , and the University of Chicago . He is well known for his many contributions to the understanding of magmatism, particularly through his work on the experimental petrology of magmas and volatiles. In the early 1970s, Wyllie wrote two widely used textbooks; The Dynamic Earth and The Way the Earth Works which integrated the new understanding of magmatism and plate tectonics.

#54

Joanne Simpson

#18324

Overall Influence

1923 - 2010 (87 years)

Joanne Simpson was the first woman in the United States to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, which she received in 1949 from the University of Chicago. Simpson received both her undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Chicago, and did post-doctoral work at Dartmouth College. Simpson was a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and taught and researched meteorology at numerous universities as well as the federal government. Simpson contributed to many areas of the atmospheric sciences, particularly in the field of tropical meteorology. She has researched hot towers, hur...

#55

Harvey Leonard

#19503

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Harvey Leonard is a former chief meteorologist on WCVB-TV Channel 5 in Boston, Massachusetts. For 25 years, Leonard was previously best known as a meteorologist at Boston's WHDH-TV . Education Leonard earned his B.S. in Meteorology from the City College of New York in 1970 and an M.S. in Meteorology from New York University,

#56

Gerald J. Wasserburg

#17911

Overall Influence

1927 - 2016 (89 years)

Gerald J. Wasserburg was an American geologist. At the time of his death, he was the John D. MacArthur Professor of Geology and Geophysics, emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology. He was known for his work in the fields of isotope geochemistry, cosmochemistry, meteoritics, and astrophysics.

#57

Keith Beven

#25407

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Keith John Beven is a British hydrologist and distinguished emeritus professor in hydrology at Lancaster University. According to Lancaster University he is the most highly cited hydrologist. In 2017, Beven was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to the understanding of hydrological processes and development of the foundations of modern hydrological modeling.

#58

George P. L. Walker

#22876

Overall Influence

1926 - 2005 (79 years)

George Patrick Leonard Walker was a British geologist who began his career studying mineralogy and later made significant contributions to volcanology. He was widely regarded as one of the pioneers of modern quantitative volcanology.

#59

Hiroo Kanamori

#12353

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Hiroo Kanamori is a Japanese seismologist who has made fundamental contributions to understanding the physics of earthquakes and the tectonic processes that cause them. Career Kanamori and American seismologist Thomas C. Hanks developed the moment magnitude scale which replaced the Richter magnitude scale as a measurement of the relative strength of earthquakes.

#60

Bernard Wood

#17207

Overall Influence

Bernard Wood is a British geologist, and professor of mineralogy and senior research fellow at the University of Oxford. He specializes in the thermodynamics of geological systems, using experimental techniques. He is a prominent figure in the field of experimental petrology, having received multiple awards throughout his career and taught at several universities worldwide.

#61

Jean Coulomb

#15658

Overall Influence

1904 - 1999 (95 years)

Jean Coulomb was a French geophysicist and mathematician, and one of the early members of the Bourbaki group of mathematicians. Biography From April 1935 to 1937, he was a member of the Bourbaki group of mathematicians.

#62

William Garrison

#12437

Overall Influence

1924 - 2015 (91 years)

William Louis Garrison was an American geographer, transportation analyst and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. While at the Department of Geography, University of Washington in the 1950s, Garrison led the "quantitative revolution" in geography, which applied computers and statistics to the study of spatial problems. As such, he was one of the founders of regional science. Many of his students went on to become noted professors themselves, including: Brian Berry, Ronald Boyce, Duane Marble, Richard Morrill, John Nystuen, William Bunge, Michael Dacey, Arthur Getis, and Waldo Tobler.

#63

Chaim L. Pekeris

#8623

Overall Influence

1908 - 1993 (85 years)

Chaim Leib Pekeris was an Israeli-American physicist and mathematician. He made notable contributions to geophysics and the spectral theory of many-electron atoms, in particular the helium atom. He was also one of the designers of the first computer in Israel, WEIZAC.

#64

Roger A. Pielke

Roger A. Pielke

#20076

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Roger A. Pielke Sr. is an American meteorologist with interests in climate variability and climate change, environmental vulnerability, numerical modeling, atmospheric dynamics, land/ocean – atmosphere interactions, and large eddy/turbulent boundary layer modeling. He particularly focuses on mesoscale weather and climate processes but also investigates on the global, regional, and microscale. Pielke is an ISI Highly Cited Researcher.

#65

Kiyoo Mogi

#21203

Overall Influence

1929 - 2021 (92 years)

Kiyoo Mogi was a prominent seismologist. He was regarded as Japan's foremost authority on earthquake prediction and was a chair of the Japanese Coordinating Committee for Earthquake Prediction . Mogi was also a director of the University of Tokyo's Earthquake Research Institute, was a professor at Nihon University and was professor emeritus at Tokyo University. Due to the seismic activity in Japan, Mogi also took an interest in safety of nuclear power in Japan.

#66

Karl Hugo Strunz

#16651

Overall Influence

1910 - 2006 (96 years)

Karl Hugo Strunz was a German mineralogist. He is best known for creating the Nickel-Strunz classification, the ninth edition of which was published together with Ernest Henry Nickel. Biography Strunz was born on 24 February 1910 in Weiden in der Oberpfalz . He attended the 'Goethe-Oberrealschule Regensburg', a high school with a strong scientific background in Regensburg. In 1929 he began his studies in natural sciences at the University of Munich and specialized in Mineralogy. He received his doctorate degree in philosophy in 1933 from the University of Munich and two years later his doctor...

#67

Celâl Şengör

#12244

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Ali Mehmet Celâl Şengör is a Turkish geologist. He is retired from the faculty at Istanbul Technical University, Department of Geological Engineering. Şengör is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the United States National Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He is a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Science. He is a recipient of Gustav-Steinmann-Medaille — the highest distinction of the Geologische Vereinigung e.V.

#68

Erik Swyngedouw

#6695

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Erik Achille Marie Swyngedouw is professor of geography at the University of Manchester in the School of Environment, Education and Development and a member of the Manchester Urban Institute. Background Born in Dutch-speaking Belgium and fluent in Dutch, English, French, and Spanish, he graduated from Sint-Jozefscollege, Hasselt in 1974. He graduated with an MSc in Agricultural Engineering from the Catholic University of Leuven in 1979, with a thesis focussed on agrarian change in the community of Heers. His 1985 Master in Urban and Regional Planning was also from Leuven. He earned his PhD wi...

#69

John H. Seinfeld

#25807

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

John Hersh Seinfeld is an American chemical engineer and pioneering expert in atmospheric science. His research on air pollution has influenced public policy, and he developed the first mathematical model of air quality, which has influenced air pollution tracking and research across the United States. He has spent his career at the California Institute of Technology, where he is currently the Louis E. Nohl Professor of Chemical Engineering.

#70

Brian Berry

#9952

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Brian Joe Lobley Berry is a British-American human geographer and city and regional planner. He is Lloyd Viel Berkner Regental Professor in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas. His urban and regional research in the 1960s sparked geography’s social-scientific revolution and made him the most-cited geographer for more than 25 years.

#71

Victor Vacquier

#19035

Overall Influence

1907 - 2009 (102 years)

Victor Vacquier, Sr. was a professor of geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. Vacquier was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 1920, Vacquier escaped the Russian Civil War with his family, taking a horse-drawn sleigh across the ice of the Gulf of Finland to Helsinki, then moving to France and to the United States. He received a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1927 from the University of Wisconsin, and a master's degree in physics in 1929, but never earned a Ph.D. He worked for Gulf Research Laboratories, the research arm of Gulf Oi...

#72

Manuel Berberian

Manuel Berberian

#28507

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Manuel Berberian is an Iranian-Armenian earth scientist. He was born on the 27th of October, 1945 into an immigrant Armenian family in Tehran. He specializes in earthquake seismology, active faulting and folding, active tectonics, continental tectonics, historical seismicity, archaeoseismicity, earthquake hazard minimization, geological mapping, and environmental science and engineering.

#73

Frederick Vine

#17941

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Frederick John Vine FRS is an English marine geologist and geophysicist. He made key contributions to the theory of plate tectonics, helping to show that the seafloor spreads from mid-ocean ridges with a symmetrical pattern of magnetic reversals in the basalt rocks on either side.

#74

Rustum Roy

#11789

Overall Influence

1924 - 2010 (86 years)

Rustum Roy was a physicist, born in India, who became a professor at Pennsylvania State University and was a leader in materials research. As an advocate for interdisciplinarity, he initiated a movement of materials research societies and, outside of his multiple areas of scientific and engineering expertise, wrote impassioned pleas about the need for a fusion of religion and science and humanistic causes.

#75

Walter Alvarez

#3521

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Walter Alvarez is a professor in the Earth and Planetary Science department at the University of California, Berkeley. He is most widely known for the theory that dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid impact, developed in collaboration with his father, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Luis Alvarez.

#76

Roger Tomlinson

Roger Tomlinson

#4015

Overall Influence

1933 - 2014 (81 years)

Roger Frank Tomlinson was an English-Canadian geographer and the primary originator of modern geographic information systems , and has been acknowledged as the "father of GIS." Biography Roger Tomlinson was a native of Newmarket, England, and prior to attending university, he served in the Royal Air Force from 1951–1954 as a pilot and flying officer.

#77

Hope Jahren

#10127

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Anne Hope Jahren is an American geochemist and geobiologist at the University of Oslo in Norway, known for her work using stable isotope analysis to analyze fossil forests dating to the Eocene. She has won many prestigious awards in the field, including the James B. Macelwane Medal of the American Geophysical Union.

#78

John Nye

#31175

Overall Influence

1923 - 2019 (96 years)

John Frederick Nye was a British physicist and glaciologist. He was the first to apply plasticity to understand glacier flow. Career His early work was on the physics of plasticity, spanning ice rheology, ice flow mechanics, laboratory ice flow measurements, glacier surges, meltwater penetration in ice, and response of glaciers and ice sheets to seasonal and climatic changes. Later in his long career, he worked extensively in optics, publishing his last paper on electromagnetic wave polarization only a few days before his death.

#79

Richard Lindzen

Richard Lindzen

#10312

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

#80

Gilbert F. White

#19300

Overall Influence

1911 - 2006 (95 years)

Gilbert Fowler White was a prominent American geographer, sometimes termed the "father of floodplain management" and the "leading environmental geographer of the 20th century" . White is known predominantly for his work on natural hazards, particularly flooding, and the importance of sound water management in contemporary society.

#81

Donald L. Turcotte

#29237

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Donald Lawson Turcotte is an American geophysicist most noted for his work on the boundary layer theory of mantle convection as part of the theory of plate tectonics. He works at the University of California, Davis.

#82

Doreen Massey

#9487

Overall Influence

1944 - 2016 (72 years)

Doreen Barbara Massey was a British social scientist and geographer. She specialized in Marxist geography, feminist geography, and cultural geography, as well as other topics. She was Professor of Geography at the Open University.

#83

Anne Buttimer

#17735

Overall Influence

1938 - 2017 (79 years)

Anne Buttimer was an Irish geographer. She was emeritus professor of geography at University College, Dublin. Background Buttimer grew up in Ireland with strong Catholic convictions. She studied at University College Cork and the National University of Ireland . After this, she joined the Dominican Order and moved to Seattle. She remained in the order for 17 years.

#84

William M. Gray

William M. Gray

#32028

Overall Influence

1929 - 2016 (87 years)

William "Bill" Mason Gray was emeritus professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University , and the head of the Tropical Meteorology Project at CSU's Department of Atmospheric Sciences. He is widely regarded as a pioneer in the science of tropical cyclone forecasting and one of the world's leading experts on tropical storms. After retiring as a faculty member at CSU in 2005, Gray remained actively involved in both climate change and tropical cyclone research until his death.

#85

Richard Arculus

#28424

Overall Influence

Richard John Arculus is an Australian petrologist and volcanologist, formerly a professor of the School of Earth Sciences at the Australian National University. His research interests and areas of expertise include inorganic geochemistry, igneous petrology, metamorphic petrology, volcanology, and chemical oceanography.

#86

William R. Dickinson

William R. Dickinson

#26904

Overall Influence

1931 - 2015 (84 years)

William Richard Dickinson was a professor emeritus of geoscience at the University of Arizona and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Prior joining the University of Arizona, Dickinson was a professor at Stanford University. He joined the U of A faculty in 1979.

#87

Rinchen Barsbold

#9702

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Rinchen Barsbold is a Mongolian paleontologist and geologist. He works with the Institute of Geology, at Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. He is an expert in vertebrate paleontology and Mesozoic stratigraphy. Barsbold has been instrumental in the discovery and recovery of one of the largest dinosaur collections in the world. His work has helped to form a more modern understanding of the later stages of dinosaur evolution in Eurasia.

#88

Brian Hoskins

#21912

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Professor Sir Brian John Hoskins, CBE FRS, is a British dynamical meteorologist and climatologist based at the Imperial College London and the University of Reading. A mathematician by training, his research has focused on understanding atmospheric motion from the scale of fronts to that of the Earth, using a range of theoretical and numerical models. He is perhaps best known for his work on the mathematical theory of extratropical cyclones and frontogenesis, particularly through the use of potential vorticity. He has also produced research across many areas of meteorology, including the Indi...

#89

Arthur H. Robinson

Arthur H. Robinson

#11312

Overall Influence

1915 - 2004 (89 years)

Arthur H. Robinson was an American geographer and cartographer, who was professor in the Geography Department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1947 until he retired in 1980. He was a prolific writer and influential philosopher on cartography, and one of his most notable accomplishments is the Robinson projection of 1961.

#90

Wilbur Zelinsky

#21713

Overall Influence

1921 - 2013 (92 years)

Wilbur Zelinsky was an American cultural geographer. He was most recently a professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University. He also created the Zelinsky Model of Demographic Transition. Background and education An Illinoisan by birth, but a "northeasterner by choice and conviction", Zelinsky received his Bachelor's Degree and his Master's Degree from the University of Madison, Wisconsin. He earned a PhD at University of California, Berkeley, where he was a student of Carl Sauer.

#91

Joshua Wurman

#20464

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Joshua Michael Aaron Ryder Wurman is an American atmospheric scientist and inventor noted for tornado, tropical cyclone, and weather radar research. Life and career Education Joshua Wurman's father is noted architect and founder of the TED conferences, Richard Saul Wurman. He attended Radnor High School in suburban Philadelphia. He earned a S.B. in physics and interdisciplinary science in 1982, a S.M. in meteorology in 1982, and a Sc.D. in meteorology in 1991, all from MIT. His masters thesis was The Long Range Dispersion of Radioactive Particulates and his doctoral dissertation was Forcing Mechanisms of Thunderstorm Downdrafts.

#92

Roger G. Barry

#34920

Overall Influence

1935 - 2018 (83 years)

Roger Graham Barry was a British-born American geographer and climatologist. He earned a doctorate from the University of Southampton in 1965 and began teaching at the University of Colorado three years later. While leading the National Snow and Ice Data Center from 1976 to 2008, Barry received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982, was granted a fellowship of the American Geophysical Union in 1999, and taught at Moscow State University as a Fulbright Scholar in 2001. Before leaving Russia, Barry was named a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. In 2007, Barry was awarded a Founder's Medal from the Royal Geographical Society.

#93

Gregory S. Forbes

#26789

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Gregory Stanley Forbes is The Weather Channel's long-time severe weather expert and has a significant research background in the areas of severe convective storms and tornadoes. Born and raised near Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Forbes earned a B.S. degree in meteorology at Pennsylvania State University . He studied tornadoes and severe thunderstorms at the University of Chicago, where he obtained his M.S. and Ph.D. There, Forbes studied under tornado scientist Ted Fujita and his thesis was regarding the 1974 Super Outbreak where he and Fujita did aerial and ground investigations documenting tornado paths and furthering ideas of the tornado family and of multiple-vortex tornadoes.

#94

Lonnie Thompson

#27112

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Lonnie Thompson , is an American paleoclimatologist and university professor in the School of Earth Sciences at Ohio State University. He has achieved global recognition for his drilling and analysis of ice cores from ice caps and mountain glaciers in the tropical and sub-tropical regions of the world. He and his wife, Ellen Mosley-Thompson, run the ice core paleoclimatology research group at the Byrd Polar Research Center.

#95

Vijay Pratap Singh

#44448

Overall Influence

#96

John A. Agnew

#12794

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

John A. Agnew, FBA is a prominent British-American political geographer. Agnew was educated at the Universities of Exeter and Liverpool in England and Ohio State in the United States. Life and career From 1975 until 1995, he was a professor of geography at Syracuse University in New York. Agnew taught courses on political geography, the history of geography, European cities, and the Mediterranean World. He moved to University of California, Los Angeles in 1995 and he chaired the Department of Geography at UCLA from 1998 to 2002. Agnew is currently Distinguished Professor of Geography and Ita...

#97

John W. Miles

#17527

Overall Influence

1920 - 2008 (88 years)

John Wilder Miles was a research professor emeritus of applied mechanics and geophysics at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. He was well regarded for his pioneering work in theoretical fluid mechanics, and made fundamental contributions to understanding how wind energy transfers to waves.

#98

Roger Brunet

#14160

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Roger Brunet is a French geographer. Life Born in Toulouse, Brunet attended the University of Toulouse, where he earned his PhD in 1965. He was subsequently professor at the University of Reims from 1966 to 1976, where he founded IATEUR. He was a director of research at CNRS from 1976 to 1981, and from 1981 to 1984 served advisory and research roles in various French government ministries. In 1984, he founded the public interest group RECLUS, which he headed until 1991.

#99

Akiho Miyashiro

#33074

Overall Influence

1920 - 2008 (88 years)

Akiho Miyashiro was a Japanese geologist. Career Miyashiro was known for his contributions to metamorphic and igneous petrology. He also made contributions to the study of tectonics and meteorites. In the 1960s he introduced the concept of paired metamorphic belts. In 1973 Miyashiro challenged the common conceptions of ophiolites and proposed an island arc origin for the famous Troodos Ophiolite in Cyprus. This was done arguing that numerous lavas and dykes in the ophiolite had calc-alkaline chemistries.

#100

Mojib Latif

#21984

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Mojib Latif is a German meteorologist and oceanographer of Pakistani descent. Latif graduated with a Diplom in meteorology in 1983. He took a position as scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in 1985. In 1987 he earned a Ph.D. in oceanography from the University of Hamburg. In 2003 he became professor at IFM-GEOMAR, Kiel, the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences. Latif is a regular guest at TV discussions about global warming.

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