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.

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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Earth Sciences,

#2151

John Edward Lupton

#167512

Overall Influence

#2152

Jonathan C. Aitchison

#167524

Overall Influence

#2153

Lorna Dawson

#72050

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Lorna Anne Dawson CBE FRSE is professor and head of soil forensics at the James Hutton Institute, Scotland, who is an Expert witness, Chartered Scientist, and registered expert with the National Crime Agency. She won the award of Soil Forensic Expert Witness of the Year in the Corporate INTL 2021 Global Awards for her forensic research solving major criminal cases, including the World's End pub murders. She had won a special Pride of Britain Award by The Daily Mirror in 2017, for her role in solving long standing criminal cases, and her science communications. She is a Fellow of the Royal Soci...

#2154

Surajit K. De Datta

#167576

Overall Influence

#2155

Robert D. Larter

#167603

Overall Influence

#2156

Paul B. Shepson

#167697

Overall Influence

#2157

William Thomas Pennington

#167776

Overall Influence

#2158

Yaakov Ben-Tor

#125802

Overall Influence

1910 - 2002 (92 years)

Yaakov Ben-Tor was an Israeli geologist. Biography Ben-Tor was born as Kurt Winter in the Baltic city of Königsberg, East Prussia, Germany, in 1910. Winter began studying law at the University of Königsberg, continuing in Berlin and then studied Linguistics at the University of the Sorbonne in Paris, prior to leaving Europe. With the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, he emigrated to the then British Mandate of Palestine in 1933, where he later hebraicized his name.

#2159

Tony Binns

#101447

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

James Anthony Binns is the Ron Lister Professor of Geography at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Background Tony Binns was born in Prestwich and grew up in Bury, Greater Manchester, UK. He attended Stand Grammar School, Whitefield. He graduated from Sheffield University and taught geography in schools while attending the University of Birmingham . He taught geography at University of Sussex from 1975 to 2004, before moving to the University of Otago as Professor and latterly Head of Department.

#2160

Jean-Marie Robine

#20790

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Jean-Marie Robine is a French social scientist, who works in the field of demography and gerontology, and is an author and journalist, who is best known as being the co-validator of the longevity of Jeanne Calment, the oldest verified supercentenarian of all time, with whom he collaborated.

#2161

David G. Barber

#76643

Overall Influence

1960 - 2022 (62 years)

David George Barber, was a Canadian environmental scientist and academic known for his contributions to Arctic science, in particular the study of Arctic sea ice processes. He held the Canada Research Chair in Arctic-System Science at the University of Manitoba. He was an officer of the Order of Canada and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

#2162

Beryl Nashar

#82097

Overall Influence

1923 - 2012 (89 years)

Beryl Scott Nashar was an Australian geologist, academic and first female Dean at an Australian university. Early life and education She was born Beryl Scott on 9 July 1923 in Maryville, New South Wales. She grew up in the Newcastle area, the eldest of four children and attended Cardiff Public School and Newcastle Girls High School. She completed her Leaving Certificate, coming first in the state in geology. She received a scholarship to attend the University of Sydney, winning a prize each year and took her B.Sc. with Honours in 1947. Her early research looked at the geology of the Stanhope region of the Hunter Valley, near Newcastle.

#2163

John Williams

#79971

Overall Influence

John Williams is an Australian scientist whose life work has been in the study of hydrology and the use of water in the landscape and farming, including land salinity. Biography Williams grew up near Tumbarumba on a farm in the Snowy Mountains region of New South Wales. He attended school in Queanbeyan near Canberra, before graduating from the University of Sydney with a degree in agricultural science and a doctorate in soil science and hydrology.

#2164

Li Jijun

#127899

Overall Influence

1933 - 2020 (87 years)

Li Jijun was a Chinese geographer and geomorphologist. Biography Born in Pengzhou, Sichuan, Li graduated from the Geography Department of Nanjing University in 1956. In 1991, he was elected as a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences . He was a professor of Geography Department of Lanzhou University and a Dean of the Geography Department of Lanzhou University. Three of his students, Chen Fahu, Qin Dahe and Yao Tandong, were also elected academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

#2165

Alwyn Williams

#47690

Overall Influence

1921 - 2004 (83 years)

Sir Alwyn Williams was a Welsh geologist, who was Principal of the University of Glasgow from 1976 to 1988, and President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh from 1985 to 1988. Early life Williams was born in Aberdare, an industrial town in Rhondda Cynon Taf, South Wales, and attended Aberdare Boys' Grammar School. He was a keen sportsman in his youth, taking part in athletics and rugby, and had ambitions to join the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy, although these were thwarted by a bout of tuberculosis in 1939, which confined him for a time to a sanitorium. He instead won a scholarship to stu...

#2166

David Sadler

#61107

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

David Sadler is a professor and a researcher of human geography. Biography He grew up in Nottingham, where he attended Nottingham High School, and gained a Geography degree from Durham University in 1981. He was awarded a doctorate at the same institution in 1986, with a thesis entitled “Born in a steel town: class relations and the decline of the European Community steel industry since 1974”. He held academic posts at Saint David’s University College, Lampeter , and at the University of Durham, before being appointed Professor of Economic Geography at the University of Liverpool in 2002.

#2167

Robert M. Sullivan

#106004

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Robert Michael "Bob" Sullivan is a vertebrate paleontologist, noted for his work on fossil lizards and dinosaurs. Sullivan discovered the second and most complete skull of the hadrosaurid dinosaur, Parasaurophus tubicen, and skulls of the ankylosaurids Nodocephalosaurus kirtlandensis and Ziapelta sanjuanensis. He also made contributions to Late Cretaceous vertebrate faunas from the San Juan Basin, New Mexico, including establishing the Kirtlandian land vertebrate "age" for a time interval between the Judithian and younger Edmontonian "ages."

#2168

Harriet Hawkins

Harriet Hawkins

#100010

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Harriet Hawkins is a British cultural geographer. She is Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she is the founder and Co-Director of the Centre for Geo-Humanities , and the Director of the Technē AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership. As part of Research Excellence Framework 2021, she is a member of the Geography and Environmental Studies expert sub-panel. In 2016, she was winner of a Philip Leverhulme Prize and the Royal Geographical Society Gill Memorial Award. In 2019, she was awarded a five-year European Research Council grant, as part of the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

#2169

Kathleen R. Johnson

#60438

Overall Influence

Kathleen R. Johnson is an American member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians who is a geologist and paleoclimatologist. Her research focuses on reconstructing past climate change with speleothems, on active cave monitoring to understand the interaction of climate with speleotherm geochemistry, and analyzes climate and paleoclimate data to investigate natural climate variability. She earned a PhD from the University of California Berkeley in 2004 and is an associate professor at the University of California Irvine.

#2170

Eliahu Stern

#128254

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Eliahu "Eli" Stern is a professor emeritus of geography and planning, in the department of geography & environmental development at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, and former secretary of the IGU Commission of Applied Geography.

#2171

Rebekah Jones

#45837

Overall Influence

1989 - Present (37 years)

Rebekah Jones is an American geographer, data scientist, and activist. She managed the team that created the Florida Department of Health's COVID-19 dashboard using ArcGIS software. She was fired from her position in May 2020 for repeated insubordination. In May 2021, she was granted whistleblower protections while the state investigated her allegations.

#2172

Joseph Kerski

#106284

Overall Influence

Joseph Kerski is a geographer with a focus on the use of Geographic Information Systems in education. Education Kerski holds three degrees in geography--a bachelor's from the University of Colorado, a master's from the University of Kansas, and a PhD from the University of Colorado.

#2173

Tokuji Utsu

#82709

Overall Influence

1928 - 2004 (76 years)

Tokuji Utsu was a Japanese seismologist and Professor Emeritus of University of Tokyo. He graduated from the Faculty of Science at the University of Tokyo in 1951 and became a professor at the Earthquake Research Institute, University of Tokyo in 1977. Utsu was compiling "Catalog of Damaging Earthquakes in the World". He is recipients of the Medal with Purple Ribbon, the Order of the Sacred Treasure, 2nd class and so on.

#2174

Judith Bunbury

#144645

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Judith Mervyn Richardson-Bunbury, known professionally as Judith Bunbury, is a British geoarchaeologist. Bunbury is a senior tutor at St Edmund's College, Cambridge. Her work has characterised the movement of the river across the Nile valley over the last 10,000 years, and its impact on Egyptian civilisation.

#2175

Katharine Fowler-Billings

#139573

Overall Influence

1902 - 1997 (95 years)

Katharine Fowler-Billings was an American naturalist and geologist. She is commonly known for being one of the earliest female geologists. Katharine was raised in Boston, Massachusetts, she attend Bryn Mawr College for her B.A., University of Wisconsin for her M.A., and Columbia University for her PhD.

#2176

Terence Miller

#31987

Overall Influence

1918 - 2015 (97 years)

Terence George Miller was a British academic and professor of geology. He was appointed Principal of the University of Rhodesia in 1967. During this period, his political views brought him hate mail and he rapidly came into conflict with the government. When in 1969 Rhodesia declared itself a republic, with a racist constitution, Prof. Miller resigned his position and returned to the UK, joining the University of Reading as visiting professor, before being appointed Director of the newly formed Polytechnic of North London in 1971.

#2177

Liz Bentley

#135103

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Liz Bentley is a British meteorologist who is the chief executive at the Royal Meteorological Society and a Professor of Meteorology at the University of Reading. Early life and education Bentley was born in Huddersfield and grew up in Yorkshire, which is where she first became interested in weather. She was particularly interested in the weather changes over the Pennines. She studied mathematics at Newcastle University graduating in 1990 before moving to Manchester for graduate studies, where she researched applied mathematics for her PhD.

#2178

Karen Bakker

#150879

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Karen Bakker was a Canadian author, researcher, and entrepreneur known for her work on digital transformation, environmental governance, and sustainability. A Rhodes Scholar with a DPhil from Oxford, Bakker was a professor at the University of British Columbia. In 2022–2023 she was on sabbatical leave at Harvard, as a Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow. She was the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Stanford University's Annenberg Fellowship in Communication, Canada's "Top 40 Under 40", and a Trudeau Foundation Fellowship.

#2179

Stuart Monro

#124643

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Stuart Kinnaird Monro OBE, FRSGS, FRSE is a Scottish geologist and science communicator. Early life Monro graduated in Geology from Aberdeen University in 1970 and then received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh while embarking upon a lengthy career with the British Geological Survey, making a number of distinguished contributions to the understanding of the geology of central Scotland and the application of geology to environmental issues.

#2180

Ashok Kumar Singhvi

#38905

Overall Influence

Ashok Kumar Singhvi is an Indian geoscientist and former Dean of Physical Research Laboratory. His field of expertise is Geophysics, Quaternary Sciences and Quantitative Geomorphology. Career Singhvi graduated with an MSc from Jodhpur University, Rajasthan. He earned a PhD from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur for studies on hyperfine interaction, Mossbauer spectroscopy and nuclear reactions. He then joined the Geosciences Group at the Physical Research Laboratory , Ahmedabad, India in 1976 as a Postdoctoral Fellow, where he began applying mineral spectroscopy to study paleoclimates. From 1977 to 1978, he worked with Dr.

#2181

Ernest Henry Rutter

#150099

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Ernest Henry Rutter is a British geologist and geophysicist. He is known for his research on structural geology and the physics of natural rock deformation. Education and career Rutter received a bachelor's degree in 1967 and a doctorate in 1970 from Imperial College London . His doctoral thesis is entitled An experimental study of the factors affecting the rheological properties of rock in simulated geological environments. While still a graduate student, he was put in charge of developing Imperial College London's Rock Deformation Laboratory, where he worked closely with the mechanical technician Robert Holloway.

#2182

Daniela Jacob

#168834

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Daniela Jacob is a German climate scientist. She heads the Climate Service Center Germany and is a visiting professor at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg. Biography Jacob studied meteorology from 1980 to 1986 at the Technical University of Darmstadt and received her doctorate in 1991 from the University of Hamburg.

#2183

John E. Sanders

#168838

Overall Influence

#2184

Enrique Vivoni

#148367

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Enrique R. Vivoni is a Puerto Rican scientist and engineer specializing in hydrology who studies the interactions of water throughout the atmosphere, biosphere, and lithosphere. His research is focused on the southwestern United States and Mexico for the purpose of improving water management in urban and rural settings.

#2185

Ibrahim Sirkeci

Ibrahim Sirkeci

#30149

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

İbrahim Sirkeci is a British Turkish social scientist, currently Director of International Business School, Manchester, UK. Previous he was the Head of Enterprise Subject Group at Salford Business School, University of Salford, Manchester, UK. He served as a Professor at various British universities including his 16 years long service at the European Business School London, Regent's University London, and was the Director of Regent's Centre for Transnational Studies.

#2186

María T. Martelo

#150016

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

María T. Martelo is a Venezuelan climatologist. Martelo works in Caracas in a research center attached to the Directorate for Hydrology and Meteorology of the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources. Extreme weather events are a focus of her work.

#2187

John Castagna

#91934

Overall Influence

John Castagna is an American geophysicist, known for the Mudrock line, currently the Margaret S. and Robert E. Sheriff Endowed Faculty Chair in Applied Seismology at Universidad Politécnica del Centro and formerly the Edward L. McCullough Chair.

#2188

James G. Anderson

#168947

Overall Influence

#2189

Donald Fraser

#110154

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Donald Gordon Fraser is Emeritus Professor at the Department of Earth Sciences at Oxford University, aFellow of Worcester College, Oxford, and in 2008-09 held the office of Senior Proctor within the University.

#2190

Hans Ramberg

#122114

Overall Influence

1917 - 1998 (81 years)

Hans Ramberg was a Norwegian-Swedish geologist. The mineral rambergite was named after him. He was a pioneer in tectonic modelling with a centrifuge. Biography He received his Ph.D from the University of Oslo in 1946. He subsequently worked at the University of Chicago and at the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution for Science at the Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto and for the rest of his career at the University of Uppsala , where he established the Hans Ramberg Laboratory. Together with his assistants and students, he simulated a variety of tectonic models with the centrifuge, which are summarized in his second book: Gravity; deformation and the Earth's crust.

#2191

Björn-Ola Linnér

#43414

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Björn-Ola Linnér is a Swedish climate policy scholar and professor at Linköping University. He is program director of Mistra Geopolitics, a research programme that critically examines and explores the interplay between the dynamics of geopolitics, human security, and global environmental change. He is also affiliated at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at Oxford University and the Stockholm Environment Institute.

#2192

Brian K. Horton

#169013

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Brian K. Horton is an American geologist, currently the Alexander Deussen Professor of Energy Resources at the Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas at Austin. He studies sedimentary geology and tectonics, with emphasis on foreland basins and fold and thrust belts. His research addresses nonmarine depositional systems , sediment provenance, river catchment evolution, and mountain building along convergent plate margins , with a focus on the evolution of the Andes Mountains and Amazon Basin. Horton received the Geological Society of America Donath Medal in 2004, an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation fellowship in 2005-2006, and the Society for Sedimentary Geology William R.

#2193

Sandra Arlinghaus

#65912

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Sandra Lach Arlinghaus is an American educator who is adjunct professor in the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan. Her research concerns mathematical geography.

#2194

Ann Brower

#79050

Overall Influence

Ann Brower is an environmental geographer from New Zealand. A survivor of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, she successfully lobbied for a law change to the Building Act, which was passed in 2016 as the Brower Amendment. Brower was promoted to full professor at the University of Canterbury in December 2021. In 2022 she won the Charles Fleming Award for Environmental Achievement.

#2195

Gavin Jones

#161043

Overall Influence

1940 - 2022 (82 years)

Gavin Willis Jones was an Australian demographer. He was one of the world's leading scholars on family demography and was one of the most cited scholars on the demography of Asia. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 1983.

#2196

Celina A. Suarez

#113156

Overall Influence

Celina A. Suarez is an American geologist. She is known for her research on using trace element and stable isotope geochemistry of fossil vertebrates and invertebrates to understand paleoecology, paleoclimatology, and taphonomy of ancient terrestrial ecosystems. She is an associate profession in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Arkansas. The dinosaur Geminiraptor suarezarum is named after Suarez and her twin sister, Marnia Suarez, co-discovers of the site on which it was found.

#2197

Petar Gburčik

#133380

Overall Influence

1931 - 2006 (75 years)

Petar Gburčik was a Serbian scientist and a professor of meteorology at the University of Belgrade. He was the author of mathematical models of numerical weather prediction, which were used operationally in the Weather Service of Yugoslavia from 1970 to 1977. In the same period he began modelling the atmospheric diffusion of air pollution and created the first model of the spatial distribution of air pollution. The output of this model was used for the elaboration of the urban plan of Pančevo. For the actual research of the three-dimensional distribution of wind energy he applied the integr...

#2198

Hugh Iltis

#72356

Overall Influence

1925 - 2016 (91 years)

Hugh Iltis was a professor of botany and director of the herbarium at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. While he is most noted as a scientist for his role in the discovery of perennial teosinte , a wild diploid relative of modern maize , he is also remembered as an outspoken environmental conservationist.

#2199

Jean Palutikof

#61798

Overall Influence

Jean P. Palutikof is a climate scientist and is founding director of the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. She has held this position since 2008. Prior to this, Palutikof was based at the UK Met Office during which time she managed the production of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report for Working Group II .

#2200

Serge Legendre

#127763

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Serge Legendre is a research scientist in the field of paleobiology with the Institute of Paleoenvironment & PaleoBiosphere, University of Lyon and editor-in-chief of Geobios, a scientific journal published bi-monthly.

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