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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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 Earth Sciences,

#501

Ian Graham Gass

#84108

Overall Influence

1926 - 1992 (66 years)

Ian Graham Gass, FRS, geologist, was Professor of Earth Sciences and Head of Discipline at the Open University, Milton Keynes and he was President of the IAVCEI . He was married to Mary Pearce . At the close of the 1960s, a scientific revolution occurred changing the static Geology into a dynamic Earth Science. By showing that the Troödos Mountains, Cyprus is a remnant of seafloor spreading, Ian Gass collaborated in that transformation.

#502

Edward A. Irving

#59481

Overall Influence

1927 - 2014 (87 years)

Edward A. "Ted" Irving, was a geologist and scientist with the Geological Survey of Canada. His studies of paleomagnetism provided the first physical evidence of the theory of continental drift. His efforts contributed to our understanding of how mountain ranges, climate, and life have changed over the past millions of years.

#503

Dennis Kent

#89912

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Dennis V. Kent is an American geologist and geophysicist who is a Board of Governors Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University and an adjunct senior research scientist at Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. His research focuses on paleomagnetism, geomagnetism, rock magnetism, and their application to geologic problems, including geologic time scales, paleogeography, ancient climate, polar wander, and the long-term carbon cycle.

#504

Karna Lidmar-Bergström

#56277

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Karna Lidmar-Bergström is a Swedish geologist and geomorphologist known for her study of Pre-Quaternary landforms in Sweden and Norway. In 2004 she was elected into the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

#505

Peter Clift

#61292

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

#506

Elizabeth A. Barnes

#61313

Overall Influence

Elizabeth A. Barnes is an American climate scientist. Barnes is best known for her work and expertise on the use of statistical methods to understand the variability of Earth's short- and long-term climate. Her work is characterized by an integration of both physics and computer science approaches. She is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

#507

Don Mitchell

#21964

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Don Mitchell is Professor of Cultural Geography at Uppsala University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Geography in the Maxwell School, Syracuse University. From an academic household in California, he is a graduate of San Diego State University , Pennsylvania State University and received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1992, working with Neil Smith. He taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder before joining Syracuse in the late 1990s.

#508

Friedrich Seifert

#82333

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Friedrich Alfred Seifert is a German mineralogist and geophysicist. He is the founding director of Bayerisches Geoinstitut at University of Bayreuth. A silicate mineral, seifertite, is named after him.

#509

Jerome Namias

#47842

Overall Influence

1910 - 1997 (87 years)

Jerome Namias was an American meteorologist, whose research included El Niño. Biography Jerome "Jerry" Namias was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the second son of Joseph Namias, an optometrist, and Sadie Jacobs Namias. He was raised in Fall River, Massachusetts. On graduation from high school, Namias was offered a four-year scholarship to Wesleyan University in Connecticut; however, because of his father's illness and the Great Depression, Namias decided to stay home and try to find a job to help his family out." He took correspondence courses, which allowed him to obtain employment in meteorology-related areas.

#510

Iain Stewart

#25062

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Iain Simpson Stewart is a Scottish geologist who is currently Jordan-UK El Hassan bin Talal Research Chair in Sustainability at the Royal Scientific Society in Jordan. He is a UNESCO Chair in Geoscience and Society and formerly a member of the Scientific Board of UNESCO's International Geoscience Programme. Described as geology's "rock star", Stewart is best known to the public as the presenter of a number of science programmes for the BBC, notably the BAFTA nominated Earth: The Power of the Planet .

#511

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.

#512

Marcel Nicolet

#37442

Overall Influence

1912 - 1996 (84 years)

Marcel Nicolet was a Belgian physicist and meteorologist. Nicolet was born in , Belgium on February 26, 1912. He received a degree in physics in 1934 after writing a dissertation on the spectrum of O and B stars and his Ph.D. in astrophysics from University of Liège in 1937.

#513

Albrecht W. Hofmann

#90519

Overall Influence

#514

Giles Martin Foody

#85903

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Giles Martin Foody is a Professor of Geographical Information Science within the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Nottingham, UK. In 2013, Foody was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for contributions to the remote sensing of land cover.

#515

Nicholas Ambraseys

#24661

Overall Influence

1929 - 2012 (83 years)

Nicholas Neocles Ambraseys FICE FREng was a Greek engineering seismologist. He was emeritus professor of engineering seismology and senior research fellow at Imperial College London. For many years Ambraseys was considered the leading figure and an authority in earthquake engineering and seismology in Europe.

#516

Gary Parker

#90623

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

#517

Susan J. Smith

#60193

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Susan Jane Smith is a British geographer and academic. Since 2009, she has been mistress of Girton College, Cambridge. Smith previously held the Ogilvie Chair of Geography at the University of Edinburgh from 1990 to 2004 and until 2009 was a professor of geography at Durham University, where she played a key role in establishing the Institute of Advanced Study. On 1 October 2011, she was conferred the title of Honorary Professor of Social and Economic Geography in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge for five years, which was renewed until 2021.

#518

Simon Tett

#63649

Overall Influence

Simon Tett is a climatologist at the University of Edinburgh who was formerly with the Hadley Centre. His most-cited paper is Of it he says:All attempts at detecting and attributing climate change signals need a reliable observed data set and simulations with mechanisms that drive climate change included. In a nutshell, this paper is important because it was the first study to investigate the effect of sulphate aerosols in a general circulation model of the climate system. The experiments simulate the climate back to 1860 ... After 1970 our model with greenhouse gases alone begins to depart significantly from the observations.

#519

Jacques Lévy

#33843

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Jacques Lévy is a professor of geography and urbanism at the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne . He is the director of Chôros Laboratory and of the Doctoral Program in Architecture and Science of the City. He is the cofounder of the scientific journal EspacesTemps.net . He published in French, along with Michel Lussault, the dictionary of geography and space of societies, Dictionnaire de la géographie et de l’espace des sociétés.He has contributed to in the epistemological and theoretical reform of geography as a science of the spatial dimension of the social, open to the social sciences and philosophy.

#520

Bernice Ackerman

#63628

Overall Influence

1925 - 1995 (70 years)

Bernice Ackerman was an American meteorologist, known for being the first woman weathercaster in the U.S. and the first woman meteorologist at Argonne National Laboratory. Early life and education Born in Chicago, Ackerman was the valedictorian of her graduating class at Lake View High School. Prior to attending college, she was a weather observer and flight briefer for the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service in World War II. Ackerman attended the University of Chicago throughout her education, where she received her a bachelor's degree in meteorology and Phi Beta Kappa in 1948, h...

#521

Akin Mabogunje

#38348

Overall Influence

1931 - 2022 (91 years)

Akinlawon Ladipo "Akin" Mabogunje was a Nigerian geographer. He was the first African president of the International Geographical Union. In 1999, he was the first African to be elected as a Foreign Associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences. In 2017, he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received the Vautrin Lud Prize.

#522

Natalya Gomez

#63598

Overall Influence

Natalya Gomez is a professor, researcher, cryosphere and sea level expert whose research primarily centers around the interactions between ice sheets, sea level, and earth in the past, present and future. Gomez is a professor at McGill University, a Canada Research Chair in Geodynamics of Ice sheet - Sea level interactions, and received the AGU Cryosphere Early Career Award in 2019.

#523

Joseph Kirschvink

#84103

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Joseph L. Kirschvink is an American geologist and geophysicist. He is the Nico and Marilyn Van Wingen Professor of Geobiology at Caltech, known for contributions to paleomagnetism and biomagnetism and the Snowball Earth hypothesis. He is also Principal Investigator of Earth–Life Science Institute.

#524

Bruce Hapke

#84754

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (94 years)

Bruce William Hapke is a noted American planetary scientist, currently a professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh and a specialist in bidirectional reflectance spectroscopy. Career Born in Racine, Wisconsin, Hapke earned a B.S. in physics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1953. He was awarded his Ph.D. in engineering physics from Cornell University in 1962. Hapke was a research associate at the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research at Cornell University from 1960 to 1967. In 1967, he became a professor in the Department of Geology and Planetary Science at the University of Pittsburgh.

#525

Ann Henderson-Sellers

#53720

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Ann Henderson-Sellers is an Emeritus Professor of the Department of Environment and Geography at Macquarie University, Sydney. She was the Director of the Joint Planning Staff of the World Climate Research Programme in 2006 and 2007 and was the Director of the Environment Division at ANSTO from 1998 to 2005. She was the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology from 1996–1998. Prior to this she was the founding director of the Climatic Impacts Centre at Macquarie University where she continues to hold a Professorship in Physical Geography.

#526

Joe Farman

#18307

Overall Influence

1930 - 2013 (83 years)

Joseph Charles Farman CBE was a British geophysicist who worked for the British Antarctic Survey. Together with Brian Gardiner and Jon Shanklin, he published the discovery of the ozone hole over Antarctica, having used Dobson ozone spectrophotometers. Their results were first published on 16 May 1985.

#527

Cristiano Dal Sasso

Cristiano Dal Sasso

#36993

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (60 years)

Cristiano Dal Sasso is an Italian paleontologist. Biography He was born in Monza, Italy and has been working since 1991 for the Milan Natural History Museum where he is the curator of fossil reptiles and birds. He was the technical coordinator of the excavations of Besano, which brought to light the complete skeleton of a Middle Triassic marine reptile of the order of Ichthyosaurs, the Besanosaurus with embryos in the belly, published in 1996 along with Giovanni Pinna.

#528

Tim Ball

#26510

Overall Influence

1938 - 2022 (84 years)

Timothy Francis Ball was a British-born Canadian public speaker and writer who was a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Winnipeg from 1971 until his retirement in 1996. Subsequently Ball became active in promoting rejection of the scientific consensus on global warming, giving public talks and writing opinion pieces and letters to the editor for Canadian newspapers.

#529

Oren Yiftachel

#18252

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Oren Yiftachel is an Israeli professor of political and legal geography, urban studies and urban planning at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Beersheba. He holds the Lynn and Lloyd Hurst Family Chair in Urban Studies.

#530

Gail Ashley

#64170

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Gail Ashley, née Mowry, is an American sedimentologist. She is known for her studies of the Olduvai Gorge sediments, focused on the water supplies available to hominids and the paleoclimate of the region. She has participated in multi-disciplinary projects that include meteorology, oceanography, paleoanthropology, and archaeology. She has served in professional organizations in the fields of sedimentology and geology, including the presidency of the Geological Society of America, the second woman to hold that post.

#531

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose

#84789

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose is a professor of economic geography at the London School of Economics and Political Science and former head of its Department of Geography and Environment . Biography He was president of the Regional Science Association International .

#532

Graeme Hugo

#49416

Overall Influence

1946 - 2015 (69 years)

Graeme John Hugo was an Australian demographer, academic, and geographer. Hugo, a professor of geography at University of Adelaide, was considered one of Australia's leading demographers. He served as the director of the Australian Migration and Population Research Centre at the University of Adelaide. Some of his most recent studies focused on discrimination against job-seekers from non-English speaking families and backgrounds. He was elected a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 1987. In 2012, Hugo was honoured as an Officer of the Order of Australia for his work ...

#533

Oleg Fisunenko

#67233

Overall Influence

1930 - 2003 (73 years)

Oleg Petrovych Fisunenko was a Ukrainian geologist, a scientist in the field of theoretical stratigraphy and paleobotany, Doctor of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences , Professor , and an active member of the New York Academy of Sciences .

#534

Neil D. Opdyke

#76172

Overall Influence

1933 - 2019 (86 years)

Neil D. Opdyke was an American geologist. He was the Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida, United States. He was previously with Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory of Columbia University, including a stint as Director. He was well known for his groundbreaking research in the 1950s on paleoclimate and continental drift, with Keith Runcorn, and later in Africa and Australia with Mike McElhinny and others. Back the U.S. in the mid-1960s he worked on the documentation of magnetic reversals in deep-sea se...

#535

Mike Crang

#63522

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Michael A. Crang is the Head of Department in the Department of Geography at Durham University. He is a Professor in cultural geography, with his main research areas relating to the relationship between social memory and identity, theories on space and human perception of space as well as critical theories.

#536

Jennifer Wolch

#35163

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Jennifer R. Wolch is a professor of Urban Planning, Geography and former dean of the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design. Before accepting the dean position, Wolch was the Founder and Director of the Center for Sustainable Cities at the University of Southern California. She received her Ph.D in Urban Planning from Princeton University, her dissertation focusing on Urban Social Policy and Planning, Human-Animal Relations, Cultural Diversity and Attitudes Toward Animals and Urban Sustainability.

#537

Gordon L. Clark

Gordon L. Clark

#70294

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Gordon L. Clark, FBA FAcSS is a geographer and academic. He is former Director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford. with cross appointments in the Saïd Business School and the School of Geography and the Environment. As part of his responsibilities as Director of the Smith School, he is an advisor to companies on issues such as long-term environmental performance. With Towers Watson, he led a team of Oxford academics on a year-long consultation with 25 of the world’s leading investment houses as regards the nature and scope of investment in the context of long-term environmental change.

#538

Patrick Cordier

#83136

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Patrick Cordier is a mineralogist who uses experimental and numerical approaches to study the plasticity of geological materials. He has authored or co-authored over 200 articles in international scientific journals. He received the Dana Medal from the Mineralogical Society of America in 2016, and is currently a chief editor of the European Journal of Mineralogy. and a member ofInstitut Universitaire de France.

#539

Tim O'Riordan

#54938

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

Tim O'Riordan OBE DL FBA is a British geographer who is Emeritus Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia and a prominent British environmental writer and thinker. Background O'Riordan grew up in the north of England, and was educated at the University of Edinburgh , Cornell University , and King's College, Cambridge .

#540

Raymond L. Bryant

#20157

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Raymond L. Bryant is a British-Canadian geographer and Professor Emeritus of Political Ecology at King's College London. He is known for his founding contributions to the interdisciplinary field of political ecology.

#541

Christopher Anne Suczek

#90817

Overall Influence

1942 - 2014 (72 years)

Christopher Anne Suczek was a sedimentary geologist who specialized in sedimentary petrology and plate tectonics. She received her bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1972 and later went on to get her PhD in Geology from Stanford University in 1977. She is best known for her contribution in determining the correlation between sedimentary deposits and plate tectonics. By the 1980s the exploration of hydrocarbons and a continuation of tectonic studies in the Pacific Northwest area of the United States led to a need of increased knowledge of the Tertiary sedimentary ...

#542

Charles Driscoll

#84566

Overall Influence

Charles Thurston Driscoll Jr. is a University Professor of Environmental Systems and distinguished Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering in the College of Engineering and Computer Science at Syracuse University. He is known for his work on environmental chemistry, biogeochemistry, environmental engineering, aquatic chemistry, and water quality modeling.

#543

Bjørn G. Andersen

Bjørn G. Andersen

#55184

Overall Influence

1924 - 2012 (88 years)

Bjørn Grothaug Andersen was a Norwegian professor of Quaternary geology and glaciology who made foundational contributions to glacial geology and the understanding of climate change. Life and career Andersen was the son of Knut Severin Andersen b. Grothaug , from Hornindal in Nordfjord, who was a gardener in Stavanger, and Elise Andersen b. Rafoss from Stavanger . Because his father was a gardener they had a car, which was rare at the time, and using this they went on skiing in the winter and fishing in the summer. He enjoyed going for long skiing tours in the mountains in Stavanger, when h...

#544

Robert D. Cess

#51520

Overall Influence

1933 - 2022 (89 years)

Robert Donald Cess was a professor of atmospheric sciences at Stony Brook University. He was born in Portland, Oregon. Cess earned his bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from Oregon State University and his master's degree from Purdue University in Indiana in 1956. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1959. He is a recognized leader in the fields of climate change and atmospheric radiation transfer. His research interests involve modeling of climate feedbacks that can either amplify or diminish global climate change, and interpreting surface and satellite...

#545

Johannes Lelieveld

#82335

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Johannes "Jos" Lelieveld is a Dutch atmospheric chemist. Since 2000, he has been a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and director of the Atmospheric Chemistry Department at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz. He is also professor at the University of Mainz and at the Cyprus Institute in Nicosia.

#546

M. Gordon Wolman

#48630

Overall Influence

1924 - 2010 (86 years)

Markley Gordon Wolman was an American geographer, son of Abel Wolman. He was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He attended Haverford College before being drafted into the U.S. Navy during World War II. After the war, he returned to Baltimore and graduated from the Johns Hopkins University in 1949 with a degree in Geography. He earned a doctorate in Geology from Harvard University in 1953.

#547

James A. Jensen

James A. Jensen

#24976

Overall Influence

1918 - 1998 (80 years)

James Alvin Jensen , was an American paleontologist. His extensive collecting program at Brigham Young University in the Utah-Colorado region which spanned 23 years was comparable in terms of the number of specimens collected to that of Barnum Brown during the early 20th century. He was given the name "Dinosaur Jim" during the media coverage of his activities. Perhaps his most significant contribution to paleontology was to replace the 19th-century web of external metal struts, straps and posts that had been used to mount dinosaurs with a system of supports which were placed inside of bones, ...

#548

Robert Houze

#91728

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Robert A. Houze, Jr., is an American atmospheric scientist, researcher, author, and Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington where he led a research team known as the Mesoscale Group for 46 years. He and his group participated in international field projects around the world and global satellite programs employing weather radar and aircraft in the tropics and midlatitudes, in projects sponsored by NSF, NASA, DOE, and NOAA. Houze has been on the science teams for three NASA satellites for the global study of clouds and precipitation. The predominant areas of hi...

#549

Wes Hildreth

#58469

Overall Influence

Edward Wesley Hildreth III, is an American field geologist and volcanologist employed by the United States Geological Survey . He is a fellow of both the Geological Society of America , and the American Geophysical Union . Hildreth was described as "one of the great volcanologists/petrologists of our time" in the magazine Wired.

#550

Eero I. Pukkala

#92671

Overall Influence

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