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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Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Earth Sciences,

#2201

Sergey Goldin

#115348

Overall Influence

1936 - 2007 (71 years)

Dr Sergey Vasilyevich Goldin was a Soviet and Russian geophysicist, Academician of RAS, member of European Academy of Science and American Geophysical Union, director of Institute of Geophysics in Sibiria Branch of RAS .

#2202

Nadia Lapusta

#116557

Overall Influence

Nadia Lapusta is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Geophysics at the California Institute of Technology. She designed the first computational model that could accurately and efficiently simulate sequence of earthquakes and interseismic slow deformation on a planar fault in a single consistent physical framework.

#2203

Tim Dyson

#27710

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Tim Dyson is a British demographer with a focus on India's population. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Population Studies at the London School of Economics. He was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2001.

#2204

Geert Jan van Oldenborgh

#109292

Overall Influence

1961 - 2021 (60 years)

Geert Jan van Oldenborgh was a Dutch climatologist and physicist. Through his career he studied climate modelling of adverse weather events and was known as a pioneer of attribution science, driving public awareness of how climate change is linked to extreme weather events. He was also the creator of a digital platform, Climate Explorer, an online meteorological data repository and platform for climate data analysis.

#2205

Lawrence A. Frakes

#127033

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

Lawrence Austin Frakes is an American-born geologist and paleoclimatologist residing in Australia since 1973. He holds the Douglas Mawson Professor of Geology chair, at the University of Adelaide, in South Australia. Mount Frakes, a shield volcano in the Crary Mountains of Antarctica, is named for him.

#2206

Emily Klein

#127231

Overall Influence

Emily M. Klein is a professor of geology and geochemistry at Duke University. She studies volcanic eruptions and the process of oceanic crust creation. She has spent over thirty years investigating the geology of mid-ocean ridges and identified the importance of the physical conditions of mantle melting on the chemical composition of basalt.

#2207

Jean Bahr

#107462

Overall Influence

Jean Marie Bahr is a hydrogeologist who examines how the physical and chemical composition of groundwater and how that controls the mass transportation of groundwater. She currently is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison in the department of geosciences.

#2208

Jane Falkingham

#79353

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Jane Cecelia Falkingham is a Professor of Demography and International Social Policy at the University of Southampton. She is also Vice-President at the University of Southampton, and Director of the ESRC Centre for Population Change and Principal Investigator of ESRC Connecting Generations. She is Chair of Population Europe. She was President of the European Association of Population Studies between 2018 and 2020, and was President of the British Society for Population Studies between 2015 and 2017.

#2209

Kirstie Fryirs

#165058

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Kirstie Fryirs is an Australian geomorphologist researching fluvial geomorphology and river management. Early life and education Fryirs is originally from Sydney, Australia. She has a Bachelor of Science and PhD from Macquarie University for her 2001 thesis titled "A geomorphic approach for assessing the condition and recovery potential of rivers application in Bega Catchment, South Coast, New South Wales, Australia".

#2210

Robert Hunter

#26701

Overall Influence

1941 - 2005 (64 years)

Robert Lorne Hunter was a Canadian environmentalist, journalist, author and politician. He was a member of the Don't Make a Wave Committee in 1969, and a co-founder of Greenpeace in 1971 and its first president. He led the first on-sea anti-whaling campaigns in the world, against Russian and Australian whalers, which helped lead to the ban on commercial whaling. He campaigned against nuclear testing, the Canadian seal hunt and later, climate change with his book Thermageddon: Countdown to 2030. He was named by Time as one of the "Eco-Heroes" of the 20th century.

#2211

Charles David Curtis

#77274

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Charles David Curtis is a British geologist who has served as president of the Geological Society of London from 1992 to 1994. He is an emeritus professor of geochemistry at the University of Manchester. Curtis read chemistry and geochemistry at Imperial College and the University of Sheffield.

#2212

Chen Fahu

#131194

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Chen Fahu is a Chinese geographer, geologist and climatologist who has served as Director of the Institute of Tibet Plateau Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences since 2018. He formerly served as professor and Vice President of Lanzhou University, and Dean of the university's College of Earth and Environment Sciences. He is an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and The World Academy of Sciences.

#2213

Ken Cumberland

#128516

Overall Influence

1913 - 2011 (98 years)

Kenneth Brailey Cumberland was a New Zealand geography academic and local-body politician. Academic career After a bachelor's in geography at Nottingham University College and a MSc at University College, London, Cumberland emigrated to Canterbury College, Christchurch immediately before the outbreak of World War II. After the war he moved to Auckland University College . In each place he played a key role in the establishment of teaching of physical geography. After retiring in 1978 he made and narrated a television series, Landmarks, on the geography of New Zealand.

#2214

Sherilyn C. Fritz

#157555

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Sherilyn Fritz is known for her research on paleoclimate and paleoecology, with a particular focus on the use of diatoms to reconstruct past environmental conditions. Education and career Fritz earned a B.A. in Biology from Macalester College in 1974 and an M.S. in Biology from Kent State University in 1979. In 1985, she earned a Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of Minnesota. From 1985 to 1994, Fritz was a research associate at the University of Minnesota, and then she moved to Lehigh University where she remained until 1998. Fritz moved to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1999 and wa...

#2215

Arthur Wilson

#96071

Overall Influence

1914 - 1995 (81 years)

Arthur James Cochran Wilson, FRS was a Canadian-British crystallographer known for his work on the statistical aspects of X-ray crystallography. Education and career He was born in Springhill, Nova Scotia. He was educated at King's Collegiate School, Windsor, Nova Scotia and Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia where he was awarded a BSc in 1934 and an MSc in 1936. He then proceeded to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his first PhD in 1938 on the anomalous thermal behaviour of the ferro-electric Rochelle salt.

#2216

John Nielsen-Gammon

#110384

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

John Nielsen-Gammon is an American meteorologist and climatologist. He is a Professor of Meteorology at Texas A&M University, and the Texas State Climatologist, holding both appointments since 2000. His research group uses a combination of observational and computational techniques to study the characteristics, dynamics, and forecasting of certain weather phenomena. Much of his recent work has involved air pollution meteorology. He writes a popular online column on climate science for the Houston Chronicle. He wrote,My goal is to be completely honest, fair, and intelligent in my public outreach, thereby guaranteeing that there’s at least one of us.

#2217

Hans Dirk de Vries Reilingh

#92243

Overall Influence

1908 - 2001 (93 years)

Hans Dirk de Vries Reilingh was a Dutch geographer and professor. Personal life Hans Dirk de Vries Reilingh, often shortened to Reilingh, was born into a family of doctors in Groningen. His father and his grandfather were both postgraduate doctors. After the death of his father, Reilingh moved to The Hague. This was where he completed his HSB-b final exams. He then enrolled in social geography studies at the University of Amsterdam. In 1932 he earned his master's degree. His friend, Hendrick van der Wielen asked him to teach c courses at Allardsoog, the first Volkshogeschool in the Netherlan...

#2218

Serita Frey

#167911

Overall Influence

Serita D. Frey is an American academic and ecologist, who serves as Professor of Environmental Science at the University of New Hampshire. Her research considers how human activities impact terrestrial ecosystems.

#2219

Shannon Boyd-Bailey McCune

Shannon Boyd-Bailey McCune

#50871

Overall Influence

1913 - 1993 (80 years)

Shannon Boyd-Bailey McCune was an American geographer. Early life and education Shannon Boyd-Bailey McCune was born in Sonchon, in what is now North Korea, as the son of Presbyterian educational missionaries George McCune and Helen McAfee. His older brother was George M. McCune. He also had two sisters. After receiving his elementary education in Korea, the younger McCune moved to the United States for college, graduating with a bachelor's degree from the College of Wooster in 1935. He earned a master's degree from Syracuse University. After receiving his Ph.D. in geography from Clark University in 1939, McCune taught at Ohio State University.

#2220

Gerald Blake

#91091

Overall Influence

Gerald Henry Blake is a retired British academic and geographer. He is Professor Emeritus of Geography at Durham University. He was Principal of Collingwood College, Durham from 1987 to 2001. He attended Monkton Combe School from 1949 to 1954. A former student of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, Blake was appointed Professor of Geography in 1995.

#2221

James Daniel Lee White

#169974

Overall Influence

#2222

James H. Dieterich

#103743

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

James H. Dieterich is an American geophysics professor emeritus at University of California, Riverside . Early life and education Born in Seattle, Washington, Dieterich studied geology at the University of Washington before going on to graduate work at Yale University. He earned his Ph.D in 1968. His doctoral thesis discussed the "Sequence and mechanics of folding in the area of New Haven, Westport, and Naugatuck, Connecticut." He then went to work for the USGS.

#2223

Peter E. Baker

#124437

Overall Influence

1937 - 2008 (71 years)

Peter Edward Baker was a notable British volcanologist, professor emeritus of Igneous Petrology in the School of Earth Sciences , University of Leeds. Life Baker graduated in Geology from University of Sheffield in 1960. He then became a PhD research student and later a research fellow at Oxford University. Baker was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Leeds and later reader . He was appointed Professor of Geology at the University of Nottingham from 1978 to 1989. Following the Oxburgh review of Earth Science departments, Baker returned to Leeds. He retired in 1998.

#2224

David J. Varricchio

#133918

Overall Influence

#2225

Verena Winiwarter

#42939

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Verena Winiwarter is an Austrian environmental historian. She has held the office of Dean of the Faculty for Interdisciplinary Studies at the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt since 2010. Her research focus is on the environmental history of agrarian societies and on Austrian environmental history, as well as the philosophy of science of inter- and transdisciplinary research.

#2226

William Easterling

#130786

Overall Influence

William Easterling is a Professor of Geography and former Dean of the Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. He is currently the assistant director for the Directorate for Geosciences at the National Science Foundation.

#2227

Jan Lambooy

#93943

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Johannes Gerard Lambooy is a Dutch social geographer and Emeritus professor Economic geography and Urban economics at the University of Amsterdam. Biography Born in Pajeti, Central Sumba Regency, Indonesia, Lambooy studied at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. He received his MA in social geography in 1962, and his PhD in 1969 for the thesis "De agrarische hervorming in Tunesië: proeve van een sociaal-geografisch onderzoek."

#2228

R. Paul Young

#119214

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

R. Paul Young, FREng, FRSC, is a geophysicist and Professor who works in rock mechanics using induced seismicity to monitor fractures and rock damage for engineering applications in mining and radioactive waste management.

#2229

Frederik J. Simons

#157337

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Frederik J. Simons is a Flemish Belgian geophysicist. He is a professor at Princeton University in the Department of Geosciences. From 2010 to 2013, Simons was the Dusenbury University Preceptor of Geological & Geophysical Sciences. From 2004 to 2006, he was a lecturer in the Department of Earth Sciences at University College London. Between 2002 and 2004 he was a Harry H. Hess Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geosciences and a Beck Fellow with the Council on Science and Technology, also at Princeton University.

#2230

John McCraw

#138924

Overall Influence

1925 - 2014 (89 years)

John Davidson McCraw was a New Zealand pedologist, academic, and local historian, particularly of the Central Otago area. The McCraw Glacier in Antarctica is named for him. Biography Born in Dunedin in 1925, McCraw was interested in science from an early age, becoming a member the junior group of the Otago branch of the Royal Society of New Zealand when he was 10 years old. He attended the University of Otago, from where he graduated with a Master of Science with second-class honours in geology in 1948.

#2231

John A. Day

#115781

Overall Influence

1913 - 2008 (95 years)

John A. Day was an American meteorologist, educator, and sky-watching evangelist. He charted new Pan American Airways air routes throughout the Asia Pacific region in the era before weather satellites and computer-generated instant data. A photographer of nature and atmospheric phenomenon, he published numerous books, articles, atlases and cloud charts that explained the importance of weather. Popularly known as “The Cloudman” during his decades as both a college professor and lay advocate for cloud appreciation.

#2232

Christopher M. Reddy

#40105

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Christopher Michael Reddy is a Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the Department of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry. Reddy's research spans from the source, fate and transport of combustion-derived materials, PCBs, and DDT to the environmental chemistry of oil spills, biofuels, plastics, nanoparticles, as well as developing environmentally friendly products.

#2233

Jon Nese

#147206

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Jon Nese is a Teaching Professor and Associate Head of Undergraduate Programs in the Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science at The Pennsylvania State University. Nese was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and raised in Steubenville, Ohio, and attended Penn State as a student in the 1980s earning his B.S., M.S. and PhD., all in meteorology. Nese worked as a faculty member at the Penn State Beaver and Hazleton campuses from 1989–1998, and returned to the University Park campus in 2005.

#2234

Mostafa Kamal Tolba

Mostafa Kamal Tolba

#38710

Overall Influence

1922 - 2016 (94 years)

Mostafa Kamal Tolba was an Egyptian scientist who served for seventeen years as the executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme . In that capacity he led development of the Montreal Protocol, which saved the ozone layer and thus millions of lives from skin cancer and other impacts.

#2235

Gundolf Ernst

#169460

Overall Influence

1930 - 2002 (72 years)

Gundolf Ernst was a German geologist and mineralogist. Gundolf Ernst was the son of Wilhelm Ernst, geologist at Hamburg University, and his wife Elisabeth, née Thüme. He grew up in Ahrensburg and came in contact with the archaeologist Alfred Rust while still a boy. After his graduation he studied geology at Hamburg University and finished his doctoral thesis in the field of mineralogy in 1961. He became a specialist in the study of the Cretaceous, especially fossilized sea urchins of this period. From 1964 to 1976 he worked as a paleontologist at the Braunschweig University of Technology. In 1976 he became a professor at the Free University of Berlin, where he continued until retirement.

#2236

Kirsty Duncan

#90934

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Kirsty Ellen Duncan is a Canadian politician and medical geographer from Ontario, Canada. Duncan has been the Member of Parliament for the Toronto riding of Etobicoke North since 2008, and she served as deputy leader of the government in the House of Commons from 2019 to 2021. Duncan has previously served as minister of science and minister of sport and persons with disabilities. She has published a book about her 1998 expedition to uncover the cause of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic.

#2237

Brandon Plewe

#121429

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Brandon S. Plewe is a geographer and Associate Professor of geography at Brigham Young University. Education and field Plewe earned his Ph.D. in geography from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1997. He specializes in Historical geography and historical GIS, applying it to research on topics such as the history of Utah and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Plewe was an early contributor to the body of literature surrounding web mapping and web GIS, and has participated in projects that have had tremendous influence on the discipline of Geographic Information Scienc...

#2238

Louis L. Jacobs

#100524

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Louis Leo Jacobs is an American vertebrate paleontologist who discovered Malawisaurus while on an expedition in Malawi. Much of his research concerns the interrelationships of biotic and abiotic events through time. In recent years he has focused on the middle portion of the Cretaceous and the Cenozoic, especially with respect to terrestrial ecosystems.

#2239

Mogens Herman Hansen

#18812

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Mogens Herman Hansen FBA is a Danish classical philologist and classical demographer who is one of the leading scholars in Athenian Democracy and the Polis. Academic career Hansen finished his masters at University of Copenhagen in 1967. The following year he was engaged to work at the same university. He has written many books about the Athenian Democracy. From 1993 to 2005 he was the director of the Copenhagen Polis Centre.

#2240

Matthew Falder

#91023

Overall Influence

1988 - Present (38 years)

Matthew Alexander Falder is an English convicted serial sex offender and blackmailer. From a period of time between 2009 and 2017, he coerced his victims online into sending him degrading images of themselves or into committing crimes against a third person such as rape or assault. He managed this by making threats to the victim by saying he would send their family or friends degrading information or revealing pictures of them if they did not comply with his commands. Falder hid behind anonymous accounts on the web and then re-posted the images to gain a higher status on the dark web. Investigators said that he "revelled" in getting images to share on hurtcore websites.

#2241

David Loper

#170602

Overall Influence

David E. Loper is an American geologist, having been Distinguished Research Professor and the George W. DeVore Professor of Geological Science at Florida State University .

#2242

Russell Kirkpatrick

Russell Kirkpatrick

#102448

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Russell Kirkpatrick is a New Zealand novelist, geography lecturer, mapmaker and photographer. He has contributed to a number of notable atlases, and since 2004 has completed two fantasy trilogies. He is a three-time winner of the award for best novel at New Zealand's Sir Julius Vogel Awards. His books were first published in Australia and in the mid-2010s he moved to Canberra, where he now lectures at the University of Canberra.

#2243

Bill Murphey

#169859

Overall Influence

Bill Murphey is an American meteorologist and the state climatologist of Georgia, as well as the chief meteorologist for the Environmental Protection Division of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.

#2244

Christina Hicks

#107023

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Christina Chemtai Hicks is a British Kenyan environmental social scientist who is a Professor in the Political Ecology group at Lancaster University. She is interested in the relationships between individuals, societies and nature. She was awarded the 2019 Philip Leverhulme Prize for Geography.

#2245

Stanislav I. Braginsky

#119885

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (100 years)

Stanislav I. Braginsky was a Research Geophysicist at UCLA. In 1964 he contributed to models of the geodynamo with his theory of the "nearly symmetric dynamo", published 1964. He emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States in 1988.

#2246

Hervé Le Treut

#52417

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Hervé Le Treut , is a French climatologist specialized in climate numerical simulation. He is member of the French Academy of Sciences and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and was director of the Pierre-Simon-Laplace Institute .

#2247

Daniel Sui

#161074

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Daniel Sui is a Chinese American geographer/GIScientist and currently serves as the senior president and chief research & innovation officer at Virginia Tech. Sui previously served as vice chancellor for research & innovation at the University of Arkansas – Fayetteville and division director for social & economic sciences at the U.S. National Science Foundation.

#2248

Baerbel Lucchitta

#170990

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Baerbel Kösters Lucchitta is a scientist emeritus at the Astrogeology Science Center at the USGS and one of the first women in the field of Astrogeology. She was one of the people responsible of making lunar maps for the Apollo 11 mission. During her career, she was dedicated to mapping the Moon, Mars, Europa and the Galilean Satellites, and Antarctica. The Lucchitta Glacier is named after her work in Antarctica, and the Asteroid 4569 Baerbel is named after her work in planetary geology.

#2249

Kendrick Taylor

#100670

Overall Influence

Kendrick Cashman Taylor, Jr. is a climate change researcher working with ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica. While a Research Professor at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada, he was the Chief Scientist for the Siple Dome and WAIS Divide ice core projects in Antarctica. He has also done work on near shore clarity at Lake Tahoe and teaching World Vision how to use geophysics to find favorable locations for shallow water wells in West Africa. His ResearcherID is A-3469-2016 and ORCID is 0000-0001-8535-1261.

#2250

Jessica Tierney

#119529

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (44 years)

Jessica E. Tierney is an American paleoclimatologist who has worked with geochemical proxies such as marine sediments, mud, and TEX86, to study past climate in East Africa. Her papers have been cited more than 2,500 times; her most cited work is Northern Hemisphere Controls on Tropical Southeast African Climate During the Past 60,000 Years. Tierney is currently an associate professor of geosciences and the Thomas R. Brown Distinguished Chair in Integrative Science at the University of Arizona and faculty affiliate in the University of Arizona School of Geography, Development and Environment T...

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