The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Earth Sciences,
#101
J. Marshall Shepherd
#17314
Overall Influence
James Marshall Shepherd is an American meteorologist, professor at the University of Georgia's Department of Geography, director of the university's atmospheric sciences program, and 2013 president of the American Meteorological Society . In 2020 he was awarded the AAAS Award for Public Engagement with Science. In 2021, he was elected to the U. S. National Academy of Engineering.
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İhsan Ketin
#31939
Overall Influence
1914 - 1995 (81 years)
İhsan Ketin was a Turkish earth scientist. Early years He was born in 1914 in the Central Anatolian town of Kayseri, located at the foothills of Mt. Aergus . He won a state scholarship to study natural sciences abroad, as part of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's plans of modernizing the newly formed Republic of Turkey. He started his undergraduate studies in Natural Sciences at Berlin University in 1934, and subsequently completed his doctorate at Bonn University in 1938 under the supervision of Hans Cloos, thus becoming the first native of Turkey with a doctorate degree in geology in the Republic of Turkey.
Go to Profile#103
Claire Horwell
#29686
Overall Influence
Claire Judith Horwell is a professor of Geohealth in the Department of Earth Sciences and Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience at Durham University and the founding Director of the International Volcanic Health Hazard Network . She studies the health hazards of natural and industrial mineral dusts and community protection.
Go to Profile#104
Richard A. Muller
#5279
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Richard A. Muller is an American physicist and emeritus professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was also a faculty senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In early 2010, Muller and his daughter Elizabeth Muller founded the group Berkeley Earth, an independent 501 non-profit aimed at addressing some of the major concerns of the climate change skeptics, in particular the global surface temperature record. In 2016, Richard and Elizabeth Muller co-founded Deep Isolation, a private company seeking to dispose of nuclear waste in deep boreholes.
Go to Profile#105
Cindi Katz
#9336
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Cindi Katz , a geographer, is Professor in Environmental Psychology, Earth and Environmental Sciences, American Studies, and Women's Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her work concerns social reproduction and the production of space, place and nature; children and the environment; the consequences of global economic restructuring for everyday life; the privatization of the public environment, the intertwining of memory and history in the geographical imagination, and the intertwined spatialities of homeland and home-based security. She is known for her work on social reproduction and every...
Go to Profile#106
Jani Radebaugh
#27834
Overall Influence
Jani Radebaugh is an American planetary scientist and professor of geology at Brigham Young University who specializes in field studies of planets. Radebaugh's research focuses on Saturn's moon Titan, Jupiter's moon Io, the Earth's Moon, Mars and Pluto. Radebaugh is a Science Team member of the Dragonfly mission to Titan, the IVO Io mission proposal, and the Mars Median project. She was an Associate Team Member of the Cassini-Huygens RADAR instrument from 2008 to 2017, and was a graduate student scientist for Io for the Galileo mission. She does science outreach through her work as an expert ...
Go to Profile#107
Jennifer Francis
#27647
Overall Influence
Jennifer Ann Francis is an American atmospheric scientist. She became a senior scientist at Woods Hole Research Center in 2018, after being a research professor at Rutgers University's Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences starting in 1994.
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James W. Head
#40865
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
James W. Head III is the Louis and Elizabeth Scherck Distinguished Professor of Geological Sciences at Brown University. He studies the roles of volcanism in planetary crusts as well as the geological evolution of Mars, and has served as the investigator on many major international planetary investigation missions.
Go to Profile#109
Allen J. Scott
#13677
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Allen John Scott is a professor of geography and public policy at University of California, Los Angeles. Biography Scott was born in Liverpool, England in 1938 and was raised in Carlisle. Scott graduated from St John's College, Oxford University, in 1961. He holds a Ph.D. degree from Northwestern University . He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, University College London, University of Toronto, University of Paris, University of Hong Kong, and from 1981 at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was a distinguished professor with joint appointments in the Department of Public Policy and the Department of Geography.
Go to Profile#110
David Atlas
#25800
Overall Influence
1924 - 2015 (91 years)
David Atlas was an American meteorologist and one of the pioneers of radar meteorology. His career extended from World War II to his death: he worked for the US Air Force, then was professor at the University of Chicago and National Center for Atmospheric Research , researcher at NASA and private consultant. Atlas owned 22 patents, published more than 260 papers, was a member of many associations, and received numerous honors in his field.
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Hans von Storch
#25219
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Hans von Storch is a German climate scientist. He is a professor at the Meteorological Institute of the University of Hamburg, and Director of the Institute for Coastal Research at the Helmholtz Research Centre in Geesthacht, Germany. He is a member of the advisory boards of the journals Journal of Climate and Annals of Geophysics. He worked at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology from 1986 to 1995 and headed the Statistical Analysis and Modelling research group there.
Go to Profile#112
Jane M. Jacobs
#47699
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Jane Margaret Jacobs is an Australian academic, currently serving as Professor of Social Sciences at Yale-NUS College and formerly as Professor of Cultural Geography, in the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh. She was previously at the University of Melbourne. Jacobs' work has focused on Postcolonialism; indigenous rights and identity; race and racism; cultural politics of urban space; high-rise housing and modernity; and the politics of cultural heritage. Jacobs has published several books, many book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed international scholarly journals. I...
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James A. Jackson
#34253
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
James Anthony Jackson CBE FRS is Professor of Active Tectonics and head of Bullard Laboratories, Department of Earth Sciences, Cambridge University. He made his name in geophysics, using earthquake source seismology to examine how continents are deformed. His central research focus is to observe the active processes shaping our continents.
Go to Profile#114
Harmon Craig
#48336
Overall Influence
#115
Cesare Emiliani
#11141
Overall Influence
1922 - 1995 (73 years)
Cesare Emiliani was an Italian-American scientist, geologist, micropaleontologist, and founder of paleoceanography, developing the timescale of marine isotope stages, which despite modifications remains in use today.
Go to Profile#117
Richard Alley
#28304
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
#118
John Gater
#20567
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
John Gater is a British archaeological geophysicist who featured regularly on the Channel 4 archaeological television series Time Team. He was educated at the University of Bradford and graduated with a BSc Archaeological Sciences in 1979. He worked with British Gas , the Ancient Monuments Laboratory and Bradford University Research. In 1983 he became a member of the Institute of Field Archaeologists and is now also an associate editor for the Journal of Archaeological Prospection. In 1986 he founded Geophysical Surveys of Bradford , an independent consultancy in geophysics for archaeology, ...
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Noel Castree
#26436
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Noel Castree FAcSS is a British geographer whose research has focused on capitalism-environment relationships and, more recently, on the role that various experts play in discourses about global environmental change. He is currently the editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal Progress in Human Geography.
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Howard Bluestein
#38775
Overall Influence
Howard Bruce Bluestein is a research meteorologist known for his mesoscale meteorology, severe weather, and radar research. He is a major participant in the VORTEX projects. A native of the Boston area, Dr. Bluestein received his Ph.D. in 1976 from MIT. He has been a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma since 1976.
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J. William Schopf
#14902
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
James William Schopf is an American paleobiologist and professor of earth sciences at the University of California Los Angeles. He is also Director of the Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life, and a member of the Department of Earth and Space Sciences, the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, and the Molecular Biology Institute at UCLA. He is most well known for his study of Precambrian prokaryotic life in Australia's Apex chert. Schopf has published extensively in the peer reviewed literature about the origins of life on Earth. He is the first to discover Precam...
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Ted Ringwood
#32513
Overall Influence
1930 - 1993 (63 years)
Alfred Edward "Ted" Ringwood FRS FAA was an Australian experimental geophysicist and geochemist, and the 1988 recipient of the Wollaston Medal. The mineral ringwoodite is named after him. Early life and study Ringwood was born in Kew, only child of Alfred Edward Ringwood. He attended Hawthorn West State School where he played cricket and Australian Rules football. In 1943 he was successful in gaining a scholarship to Geelong Grammar School where he boarded. On matriculation, he enrolled in Geology a science degree at the University of Melbourne where he held a Commonwealth Government Scholarship, and was awarded a resident scholarship at Trinity College.
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Linda McDowell
#17342
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Linda Margaret McDowell is a British geographer and academic, specialising in the ethnography of work and employment. She was Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford from 2004 to 2016. Early life and education McDowell studied for her PhD as a part-time student at the Bartlett School of Planning, where she had previously earned a master's degree. Supervised by Peter Cowan, she researched housing change in London.
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Jean Gottmann
#16908
Overall Influence
1915 - 1994 (79 years)
Jean Gottmann was a French geographer who was best known for his seminal study on the urban region of the Northeast megalopolis. His main contributions to human geography were in the sub-fields of urban, political, economic, historical and regional geography. His regional specializations ranged from France and the Mediterranean to the United States, Israel, and Japan.
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Luna Leopold
#19162
Overall Influence
1915 - 2006 (91 years)
Luna Bergere Leopold was a leading U.S. geomorphologist and hydrologist, and son of Aldo Leopold. He received a B.S. in civil engineering from the University of Wisconsin in 1936; an M.S. in physics-meteorology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1944; and a Ph.D. in geology from Harvard University in 1950.
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Richard Peet
#11101
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
J. Richard Peet is a retired professor of human geography at the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University in Worcester MA, USA. Peet received a BSc from the London School of Economics, an M.A. from the University of British Columbia, and moved to the USA in the mid-1960s to complete a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley. He began teaching at Clark University shortly after completing his PhD from Berkeley, and has remained there with secondments in Australia, Sweden and New Zealand.
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Peter Hall
#10179
Overall Influence
1932 - 2014 (82 years)
Sir Peter Geoffrey Hall was an English town planner, urbanist and geographer. He was the Bartlett Professor of Planning and Regeneration at The Bartlett, University College London and president of both the Town and Country Planning Association and the Regional Studies Association. Hall was one of the most prolific and influential urbanists of the twentieth century.
Go to Profile#128
Robert R. Coats
#44374
Overall Influence
1910 - 1995 (85 years)
Robert Roy Coats was an American geologist known for his studies of the Aleutian Islands and his exhaustive report of Elko County, Nevada. He was born in Toronto, Canada, and grew up in Marshalltown, Iowa and Seattle, Washington. He graduated valedictorian of his high school class in Seattle at the age of 16, and attended the University of Washington, where he received both a B.S. and M.S. degree in Geology and Mining . He continued graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving his doctorate in 1938, with a thesis on the ore bodies of the Virginia City mining district in Nevada.
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Donald B. Dingwell
#39598
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Donald Bruce Dingwell is a Canadian geoscientist who is the director of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Ordinarius for Mineralogy and Petrology of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He is also currently vice-president of the Academia Europaea. From September 2011 to December 2013 he was the third and last secretary general of the European Research Council where he embarked on a global participation campaign for the ERC. He is also a past-President of the European Geosciences Union and the current past-president of the International Association of Volcanology ...
Go to Profile#130
Bahram Akasheh
#15724
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Bahram Akasheh is an Iranian geophysicist and seismologist and Professor of Geophysics at University of Tehran. He is considered one of Iran's leading experts on earthquakes and seismic activity. Dr. Akasheh has done much work in Iran to encourage scientific research and study into earthquakes and possible mitigation measures as a response. He is a strong advocate of urban development which is coordinated with the tight regulations imposed in the 1989 seismic code in Iran by the International Institute of Earthquake Engineering and Seismology. He has also expressed a disagreement and disappro...
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Sankar Chatterjee
#11728
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Sankar Chatterjee is a paleontologist, the Paul W. Horn Professor of Geosciences at Texas Tech University and Curator of Paleontology at the Museum of Texas Tech University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Calcutta in 1970 and was a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution from 1977-1978.
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Masaaki Kimura
#37145
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Masaaki Kimura is a Japanese geologist and a professor emeritus from the Faculty of Science of the University of the Ryukyus, Okinawa, Japan. Biography Masaaki Kimura graduated in science at the Faculty of Fisheries of the University of Tokyo and obtained a Doctorate in marine geology . He has worked for the University of Tokyo's Ocean Research Institute, the Geological Survey of Japan, the Agency of Industrial Science and Technology of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry of Japan, and Columbia University's Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory. He taught at the University of the Ryukyus from 1977 to 2002.
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Devendra Lal
#21170
Overall Influence
1929 - 2012 (83 years)
Devendra Lal FRS was an Indian geophysicist. Life He was born in Varanasi, India. He graduated from Banaras Hindu University. He graduated from Bombay University; his thesis was on cosmic ray physics; his thesis adviser was Bernard Peters.
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Adam Dziewonski
#20190
Overall Influence
1936 - 2016 (80 years)
Adam Marian Dziewoński was a Polish-American geophysicist who made seminal contributions to the determination of the large-scale structure of the Earth's interior and the nature of earthquakes using seismological methods. He spent most of his career at Harvard University, where he was the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science.
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Hermann Flohn
#37678
Overall Influence
1912 - 1997 (85 years)
Hermann Flohn was a climatologist. Flohn was professor at the University of Bonn and head of the department at the Institute of Meteorology of Bonn University. He produced about 360 publications. Flohn was member in numerous scientific societies such as the Bavarian Academy, the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Academy of Belgium.
Go to Profile#136
Kevin C. A. Burke
#40360
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Kevin C. A. Burke was a geologist known for his contributions in the theory of plate tectonics. In the course of his life, Burke held multiple professorships, most recent of which was the position of professor of geology and tectonics at the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Science, University of Houston. His studies on plate tectonics, deep mantle processes, sedimentology, erosion, soil formation and other topics extended over several decades and influenced multiple generations of geologists and geophysicists around the world.
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Eric Sheppard
#17568
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Eric Sheppard is a British and American geographer, and Professor of Economic geography at UCLA. Background Sheppard grew up in Cambridge, England, and studied geography at the University of Bristol under Peter Haggett before moving to Canada and completing his Ph.D in Geography in 1976 at the University of Toronto. He taught for most of his career at the University of Minnesota before moving to UCLA. He served as president of the Association of American Geographers .
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Kevin E. Trenberth
#26049
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Kevin Edward Trenberth was part of the Climate Analysis Section at the US NCAR National Center for Atmospheric Research. He was appointed Distinguished Scholar at NCAR in 2020. He is also an honorary faculty member in the Physics Department at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He was a lead author of the 1995, 2001 and 2007 IPCC Scientific Assessment of Climate Change and served on the Scientific Steering Group for the Climate Variability and Predictability program. He chaired the WCRP Observation and Assimilation Panel from 2004 to 2010 and chaired the Global Energy and Water Exchanges scientific steering group from 2010 to 2013 .
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Leon Knopoff
#32758
Overall Influence
1925 - 2011 (86 years)
Leon Knopoff was an American geophysicist and musicologist. He received his education at Caltech, graduating in 1949 with a PhD in physics, and came to UCLA the following year. He served on the UCLA faculty for 60 years. His research interests spanned a wide variety of fields and included the physics and statistics of earthquakes, earthquake prediction, the interior structure of the Earth, plate tectonics, pattern recognition, non-linear earthquake dynamics and several other areas of solid Earth geophysics. He also made contributions to the fields of musical perception and archaeology.
Go to Profile#140
Veerabhadran Ramanathan
#22441
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Veerabhadran "Ram" Ramanathan is Edward A. Frieman Endowed Presidential Chair in Climate Sustainability Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. He has contributed to many areas of the atmospheric and climate sciences including developments to general circulation models, atmospheric chemistry, and radiative transfer. He has been a part of major projects such as the Indian Ocean Experiment and the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment , and is known for his contributions to the areas of climate physics, Climate Change and atmospheric aerosols research. He is now...
Go to Profile#141
Peter J. Taylor
#21523
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Peter James Taylor is an English geographer. Born in Calverton in Nottinghamshire, he was Professor of Political Geography at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne between 1970 and 1996, before joining Loughborough University as Professor of Geography Since 2010, he has worked at Northumbria University. He is the co-founding editor of the journal Political Geography, and is the founder and director of the Globalization and World Cities Research Network and is the author of over 300 publications, of which over 60 have been translated into other languages. In September 2010, he became a Profes...
Go to Profile#142
Gerald Schubert
#43346
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Gerald Schubert is a geophysicist and Professor Emeritus of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences at UCLA. His research has broadly dealt with modeling the structure and dynamics of the interiors and atmospheres and Earth and other planets.
Go to Profile#143
Drew Shindell
#22463
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Drew Shindell is a physicist and a climate specialist and professor at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment. He is listed as an ISI Highly Cited Researcher. He was a chapter lead of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change October 8, 2018 Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C as well as on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment Report in 2013. He has testified on climate issues before both houses of the US Congress, at the request of both parties. His research concerns natural and human drivers of climate change, linkages between air quality and climate change, and the interface between climate change science and policy.
Go to Profile#144
Meinrat Andreae
#38008
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Meinrat O. Andreae, born in 1949 in Augsburg, is a German biogeochemist. Since 1987, he has worked as Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz. Biography Meinrat O. Andreae studied chemistry, mineralogy, and geochemistry at the Universities of Karlsruhe and Göttingen. In his diploma thesis, he studied the chemical composition and isotope geochemistry of highly metamorphic rocks of southern Norway. In 1977, he completed his PhD in oceanography from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego. In his doctoral thesis, he examined the chemical speciation of arsenic in the ocean.
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Tim Cresswell
#22609
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Tim Cresswell is a British human geographer and poet. Cresswell is the Ogilvie Professor of Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh having formally served as the Dean of the Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut.
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Thomas J. Ahrens
#43616
Overall Influence
1936 - 2010 (74 years)
Thomas Julian Ahrens was a Professor of Geophysics at Caltech who was known for his study of the terrestrial planets and impact processes on planetary surfaces. Ahrens died on November 24, 2010, at the age of 74.
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Clive Oppenheimer
#39924
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
#148
Frank Hawthorne
#35771
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Frank Christopher Hawthorne is a Canadian mineralogist, crystallographer and spectroscopist. He works at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and is currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus. By combining Graph Theory, Bond-Valence Theory and the moments approach to the electronic energy density of solids he has developed Bond Topology as a rigorous approach to understanding the atomic arrangements, chemical compositions and paragenesis of complex oxide and oxysalt minerals.
Go to Profile#149
Thomas H. Jordan
#13193
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Thomas H. Jordan is an American seismologist, and former director of the Southern California Earthquake Center at The University of Southern California. He was formerly the head of the Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
Go to Profile#150
Pedro A. Sanchez
#26083
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Pedro Sanchez is the director of the Agriculture & Food Security Center, senior research scholar, and director of the Millennium Villages Project at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Sanchez was director general of the World Agroforestry Centre headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya from 1991-2001, and served as co-chair of the UN Millennium Project Hunger Task Force. He is also professor emeritus of soil science and forestry at North Carolina State University, and was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
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