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,
#201
W. Brian Harland
#47928
Overall Influence
1917 - 2003 (86 years)
Walter Brian Harland was a British geologist at the Department of Geology, later University of Cambridge Department of Earth Sciences, England, from 1948 to 2003. He was a leading figure in geological exploration and research in Svalbard, organising over 40 Cambridge Spitsbergen Expeditions and in 1975 founded the Cambridge Arctic Shelf Programme as a research institute to continue this work. He was first secretary of the International Geological Correlation Programme from 1969 until UNESCO could take over in 1972, and was a driving force in setting criteria and standards in stratigraphy and producing 4 editions of the geological time scale in 1964, 1971, 1982 and 1989.
Go to Profile#202
Edward Relph
#34495
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Edward "Ted" Relph is a Canadian geographer, best known for the book Place and Placelessness. Career Relph grew up in Wales in the Wye Valley and studied at the Joint School of Geography at the University of London and at the University of Toronto. He is an emeritus professor of the University of Toronto, where he served from 1991 to 1999 as Chair of the Division of Social Sciences at the Scarborough campus. From 1999 to 2005 Relph was Associate Principal responsible for the expansion and redevelopment of that campus, and served again as Chair of Social Sciences from 2008 to 2010.
Go to Profile#203
David Ley
#14759
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
David Frederick Ley is a geographer and a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia. Ley was born in Swansea, Wales, earned his B.A. at Oxford University, and his M.S. and Ph.D. at Pennsylvania State University. He is known for his substantial empirical and theoretical contributions to the field of social, cultural and urban geography.
Go to Profile#204
James I. Kirkland
#31003
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
James Ian Kirkland is an American paleontologist and geologist. He has worked with dinosaur remains from the south west United States of America and Mexico and has been responsible for discovering new and important genera. He named Animantarx, Cedarpelta, Eohadrosaurus , Jeyawati, Gastonia, Mymoorapelta, Nedcolbertia, Utahraptor, Zuniceratops, Europelta and Diabloceratops. At the same site where he found Gastonia and Utahraptor, Kirkland has also excavated fossils of the therizinosaur Falcarius.
Go to Profile#205
W. G. Ernst
#52110
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
W. Gary Ernst is an American geologist specializing in petrology and geochemistry. He currently is the Benjamin M. Page Professor Emeritus in Stanford University's department of geological sciences.
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David Lowenthal
#15148
Overall Influence
1923 - 2018 (95 years)
David Lowenthal was an American historian and geographer, renowned for his work on heritage. He is credited with having made heritage studies a discipline in its own right. Biography David Lowenthal was born on 26 April 1923 in New York City to Max Lowenthal and Eleanor Mack , and was also the brother of John Lowenthal and Betty Levin.
Go to Profile#207
Erin Pettit
#38178
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Erin Christine Pettit is an American glaciologist focusing on climate change. She is an associate professor of geophysics and glaciology at Oregon State University. Her work focuses on ice-ocean interactions, ice-shelf disintegration, sea-level rise and ocean circulation changes.
Go to Profile#208
Robin Bell
#36072
Overall Influence
Robin Elizabeth Bell is Palisades Geophysical Institute Lamont Research Professor at Columbia University's Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory and a past President of the American Geophysical Union , 2019–2021. Dr. Bell was influential in co-ordinating the 2007 International Polar Year and was the first woman to chair the National Academy of Sciences Polar Research Board. She has made numerous important discoveries with regard to subglacial lakes and ice sheet dynamics, and has a ridge, called Bell Buttress, in Antarctica named after her.
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Samuel Epstein
#33636
Overall Influence
1919 - 2001 (82 years)
Samuel Epstein was a Canadian-American geochemist who developed methods for reconstructing geologic temperature records using stable isotope geochemistry. He was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1977, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1997.
Go to Profile#210
William R. Hammer
#15294
Overall Influence
William Roy Hammer is an American paleontologist who is credited with the discovery of the first carnivorous dinosaur unearthed in Antarctica, Cryolophosaurus, in 1991. He was professor of geology and curator of the Frxyell Geology Museum at Augustana College in Rock Island, IL from 1981 to 2017.
Go to Profile#211
Alan Lindsay Mackay
#31900
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (98 years)
Alan Lindsay Mackay FRS is a British crystallographer, born in Wolverhampton. Mackay was educated at Wolverhampton Grammar School, Oundle School, Trinity College, Cambridge, and the University of London, where he received his doctorate. He spent his scientific career at Birkbeck College, founded by George Birkbeck, one of the Colleges of the University of London, where he was immersed in a liberal scientific atmosphere under the leadership of John Desmond Bernal.
Go to Profile#212
William Alexander Deer
#44252
Overall Influence
1910 - 2009 (99 years)
William Alexander Deer FRS was a distinguished British geologist, petrologist and mineralogist. Biography Career In 1937, after completing his PhD, Deer was appointed an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester. On the outbreak of war in 1939, Deer joined the Chemical Warfare Section of the Royal Engineers, and later transferred to the Operations Staff. He served in the Middle East, Burma and North Africa, and was appointed to the rank of lieutenant-colonel.
Go to Profile#213
Gerta Keller
#34250
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Gerta Keller is a geologist and paleontologist who contests the Alvarez hypothesis that the impact of the Chicxulub impactor, or another large celestial body, directly caused the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. Keller maintains that such an impact predates the mass extinction and that Deccan volcanism and its environmental consequences were the most likely major cause, but possibly exacerbated by the impact.
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Bruce Bolt
#17529
Overall Influence
1930 - 2005 (75 years)
Bruce Alan Bolt was an Australian-born American seismologist and a professor of earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Bolt was known as a pioneer of engineering seismology. He served for 15 years on the California Seismic Safety Commission leading public debate on earthquake safety in that state, and acted as a consultant on major projects throughout the world. As well, Bolt published a number of popular and technical books on seismology.
Go to Profile#215
William Fyfe
#32826
Overall Influence
1927 - 2013 (86 years)
William Sefton Fyfe, was a New Zealand geologist and Professor Emeritus in the department of Earth Sciences at the University of Western Ontario. He is widely considered among the world's most eminent geochemists.
Go to Profile#216
Valiya Hamza
#27067
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Valiya Mannathal Hamza is an Indian scientist credited with co-discovering, together with Elizabeth Tavares Pimentel, the large aquifer referred to as "Rio Hamza" or Hamza River, which flows deep below and parallel to the Amazon. Hamza is listed as a permanent professor in the Geophysics specialization at the Brazilian National Observatory.
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Vincent Courtillot
#16430
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Vincent E. Courtillot is an emeritus French geophysicist, prominent among the researchers who are critical of the hypothesis that impact events are a primary cause of mass extinction of life forms on the Earth. He is known for his book "La Vie en catastrophes" , translated into English as "Evolutionary catastrophes" .
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Reginald Golledge
#45223
Overall Influence
1937 - 2009 (72 years)
Reginald George Golledge was an Australian-born American Professor of Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was named Faculty Research Lecturer for 2009. During his career he wrote or edited 16 books and 100 chapters for other books, and wrote more than 150 academic papers.
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Benno Werlen
#30488
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Benno Werlen is a Swiss geographer who is known for his action-centered approach to human geography and his concept of a Geography of Everyday Regionalizations. Werlen currently holds the UNESCO-Chair on Global Understanding for Sustainability at the Friedrich Schiller University, Jena . From 1998 to 2018, he held the chair of social geography at Jena University. Werlen was a visiting professor at the Universities of Salzburg, Geneva and Nijmegen as well as a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, the London School of Economics, and the University of California, Los Angeles. He has ...
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Kurt Lambeck
#41157
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
#221
Michael Ghil
#28197
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Michael Ghil is an American and European mathematician and physicist, focusing on the climate sciences and their interdisciplinary aspects. He is a founder of theoretical climate dynamics, as well as of advanced data assimilation methodology. He has systematically applied dynamical systems theory to planetary-scale flows, both atmospheric and oceanic. Ghil has used these methods to proceed from simple flows with high temporal regularity and spatial symmetry to the observed flows, with their complex behavior in space and time. His studies of climate variability on many time scales have used a ...
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Steven M. Stanley
#19791
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Steven M. Stanley is an American paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He is best known for his empirical research documenting the evolutionary process of punctuated equilibrium in the fossil record.
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Essam Heggy
#22870
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Essam Heggy is an Egyptian space scientist. Heggy obtained his Ph.D. in astronomy and planetary science in 2002 with distinguished honors from the Paris-Sorbonne University in Paris. His main science interests in space and planetary geophysics covers Mars, the Moon, icy satellites and near-Earth objects. His research involves probing structural, hydrological and volcanic elements in terrestrial and planetary environments using different types of radar imaging and sounding techniques as well as measuring the electromagnetic properties of rocks in the radar frequency range. His research experti...
Go to Profile#224
Harm de Blij
#27286
Overall Influence
1935 - 2014 (79 years)
Harm J. de Blij was a geographer. He was a geography editor on ABC's Good Morning America and an editor of National Geographic magazine and the author of several books, including Why Geography Matters.
Go to Profile#225
Ekhard Salje
#47985
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Ekhard Karl Hermann Salje, FRS is an Emeritus Professor, and formerly Professor of Mineralogy and Petrology and Head of the Department of Earth Sciences, Cambridge University. Education and career Ekhard Salje completed his University Teacher’s Dissertation in 1972, and by 1983 was the Head of Department at the Institute for Crystallography and Petrology at the Leibniz University Hannover. In 1985 he moved to Cambridge where was awarded a Professorship in Mineral Physics in the Department of Earth Sciences in 1992. He worked jointly in the Department of Physics Cavendish Laboratory.
Go to Profile#226
Anders Rapp
#58684
Overall Influence
1927 - 1998 (71 years)
Anders Rapp was a Swedish geomorphologist and geographer who pioneered quantitative geomorphological approach on mass movements and erosion. He was the first to make a comprehensive study on avalanche boulder tongues. Most of Rapp's works were made in the Scandinavian mountains and Spitsbergen including the areas of Kärkevagge near Abisko and Kebnekaise.
Go to Profile#227
Klaus Dodds
#30277
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Klaus Dodds is executive dean of the School of Life Sciences and Environment and professor of geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is a visiting professor at the College of Europe in Natolin Warsaw Poland.
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Charles E. Anderson
#34085
Overall Influence
1919 - 1994 (75 years)
Charles E. Anderson was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. in Meteorology. He was a dean at University of Wisconsin, Madison. Biography Higher education and army life Anderson was born August 13, 1919, in Clayton, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. His mother and father were from Mississippi. He earned a bachelor of science degree in Chemistry in 1941, from Lincoln University and received high accolades as he graduated third in his class. Lincoln University was also the place where he met his wife-to-be, Marjorie Anderson. Upon graduating, World War II had begun and enlisted in U.S. Army Air Forces.
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Talat Ahmad
#49605
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Talat Ahmad is an Indian Earth scientist and former professor at department of Geology, University of Delhi. Currently, he is serving as Chairman of Governing body which oversees Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, Dehradun from December 2021 onwards and has taken full charge from 1 June 2022. Previously, he commenced his second stint as vice chancellor of University of Kashmir on 6 August 2018 and served the office till 20 May 2022. After serving as vice chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia , he resigned from the post a few months short of his full term. He was shortlisted by a committee constituted by the governor to shortlist a panel for the post.
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Philippe Ciais
#59463
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Philippe Ciais is a researcher of the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement , the climate change research unit of the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace . He is a physicist working on the global carbon cycle of planet Earth, climate change, ecology and geosciences.
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Yves Lacoste
#20154
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Yves Lacoste is a French geographer and geopolitician. He was born in Fez, Morocco. Life In 1976 he established the French geopolitical journal Hérodote and published a work that shook the French academy, La Géographie ça sert d'abord à faire la guerre. Its central thesis was that "geography was a form of strategic and political knowledge, central to the military strategy and the exercise of political power". Lacoste had earlier earned international renown in 1972 during the Vietnam War by publishing a spatial forensics analysis of the US bombing campaign of the Red River Delta. He agreed wi...
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Katharine Cashman
#47340
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Katharine Venable Cashman is an American volcanologist, professor of volcanology at the University of Bristol and former Philip H. Knight Professor of Natural Science at the University of Oregon. Education Cashman was educated at Middlebury College, Vermont where she was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in Geology and Biology in 1976. She continued her studies at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and then completed her PhD at Johns Hopkins University, Maryland, in 1986. Her PhD research applied theories of crystal size distributions to volcanic systems, and was supervised by ...
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Alexander Halliday
#42141
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Sir Alexander Norman Halliday is a British geochemist and academic who is the Founding Dean Emeritus of the Columbia Climate School, and Former Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He joined the Earth Institute in April 2018, after spending more than a decade at the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford, during which time he was dean of science and engineering. He is also a professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University.
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Rhodes Fairbridge
#43045
Overall Influence
1914 - 2006 (92 years)
Rhodes Whitmore Fairbridge was an Australian geologist and expert on climate change. His father was Kingsley Fairbridge. Born in Pinjarra, Western Australia, Fairbridge graduated from Queen's University in Ontario and earned his master's degree from Oxford. In 1941, he earned a doctorate in geology from the University of Western Australia.
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Jillian Banfield
#17499
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Jillian Fiona Banfield is professor at the University of California, Berkeley with appointments in the Earth Science, Ecosystem Science and Materials Science and Engineering departments. She leads the Microbial Research initiative within the Innovative Genomics Institute, is affiliated with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and has a position at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Some of her most noted work includes publications on the structure and functioning of microbial communities and the nature, properties and reactivity of nanomaterials.
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Christopher H. Scholz
#68402
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Christopher H. Scholz is an American geologist and physicist. He is Professor Emeritus of Earth and Environmental Sciences and of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University and the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory.
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Stanley Alfred Schumm
#69688
Overall Influence
#238
Alfred Kröner
#25970
Overall Influence
1939 - 2019 (80 years)
Alfred Kröner was a German Professor of Geology at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Mainz, Germany. He specialized in the Precambrian geology of Africa and geology of China but worked on many other geologic problems around the world. His research focused on the tectonics of the continental crust, geochronology, geochemistry, palaeomagnetism, structural geology, and petrology. He was especially interested in the Precambrian and Palaeozoic evolution of the continental crust.
Go to Profile#239
Arnt Eliassen
#48479
Overall Influence
1915 - 2000 (85 years)
Arnt Eliassen was a Norwegian meteorologist who was a pioneer in the use of numerical analysis and computers for weather forecasting. Career The early pioneer work was done at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, together with John von Neumann. His areas of research included free and thermally driven circulations, frontogenesis, and shear and gravitational–acoustic wave propagation in stratified media. Eliassen received the Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal in 1964 for his many important contributions to dynamical meteorology. He received the Balzan Prize in 1996 "For h...
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Joe Painter
#31049
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Joe Painter FAcSS is a British geographer and academic, specialising in political geography. As of 2023, he is a professor in the Department of Geography at Durham University, part of the Politics-State-Space, IBRU Centre for Borders Research and Urban Worlds research groups.
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Martin Bott
#40793
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Martin Harold Phillips Bott was a British geologist and Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Durham, England. Education Bott was educated at Clayesmore School in Dorset and Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a Master of Arts degree and PhD.
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Johan Rockström
#8544
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Johan Rockström is a Swedish scientist, internationally recognized for his work on global sustainability issues. He is joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, together with economist Ottmar Edenhofer. He is also Professor in Earth System Science at the University of Potsdam and Professor in Water Systems and Global Sustainability, Stockholm University.
Go to Profile#243
Everett C. Olson
#28540
Overall Influence
1910 - 1993 (83 years)
Everett Claire Olson was an American zoologist, paleontologist, and geologist noted for his seminal research of origin and evolution of vertebrate animals. Through his research studying terrestrial vertebrate fossils he identified intervals of extinction in the Permian and Triassic. He developed the concept of chronofauna, which he defined as "a geographically restricted, natural assemblage of interacting animal populations that has maintained its basic structure over a geologically significant period of time". He also proposed stratigraphic correlations between North American and Russian vertebrate-bearing strata for which additional support was found much later.
Go to Profile#244
Maria Zuber
#31388
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Maria T. Zuber is an American geophysicist who is the vice president for research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she also holds the position of the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. Zuber has been involved in more than half a dozen NASA planetary missions aimed at mapping the Moon, Mars, Mercury, and several asteroids. She was the principal investigator for the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory Mission, which was managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
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Charles R. Bentley
#27923
Overall Influence
1929 - 2017 (88 years)
Charles Raymond Bentley was an American glaciologist and geophysicist, born in Rochester, New York. He was a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Mount Bentley and the Bentley Subglacial Trench in Antarctica are named after him. In 1957, he and a handful of other scientists including Mario Giovinetto set out on an expedition across West Antarctica in tracked vehicles to make the first measurements of the ice sheet.
Go to Profile#246
William R. Cotton
#57541
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
William R. Cotton is an American cloud physicist and mesoscale meteorology educator. He is a professor emeritus in the Department of Atmospheric Science at the Colorado State University . Background Cotton earned a B.A. in mathematics at University at Albany, The State University of New York in 1964, a M.S. in meteorology at SUNY in 1966, and a Ph.D. in meteorology at Pennsylvania State University in 1970. He was appointed to the academic faculty at the CSU Department of Atmospheric Science in 1974. He assumed the position of an assistant professor in the department where he is now a tenured professor.
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Donald W. Meinig
#29744
Overall Influence
1924 - 2020 (96 years)
Donald William Meinig was an American geographer. He was Maxwell Research Professor Emeritus of Geography at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. Career Meinig studied foreign service at Georgetown University, and then earned graduate degrees in geography from the University of Washington in 1950 and 1953, under the supervision of Howard H. Martin; he was also strongly influenced by historian Carroll Quigley and Australian geographer Graham H. Lawton.
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Mike Hulme
#30809
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Michael Hulme is Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge, and also a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was formerly professor of Climate and Culture at King's College London and of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia .
Go to Profile#249
Alan Robock
#26244
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Alan Robock is an American climatologist. He is currently a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University, New Jersey. He advocates nuclear disarmament and, in 2010 and 2011, met with Fidel Castro during lecture trips to Cuba to discuss the dangers of nuclear weapons. Alan Robock was a 2007 IPCC author, a member of the organisation when it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such cha...
Go to Profile#250
Harold E. Brooks
#36251
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Harold Edward Brooks is an American meteorologist whose research is concentrated on severe convective storms and tornadoes, particularly severe weather climatology, as well as weather forecasting. Life and work Brooks began his higher education career at William Jewell College, studying physics and mathematics, achieving a B.A., summa cum laude, in 1982. While there he studied abroad at the University of Cambridge, passing Part 1 of the tripos in Archaeology and Anthropology in 1980. In 1985 he earned a M.A. and M.Phil. at Columbia University from the Atmospheric Sciences Program within the Department of Geological Sciences.
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