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).

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List of the most influential people in Earth Sciences,

#2301

Jack A. Wolfe

#55424

Overall Influence

1936 - 2005 (69 years)

Jack Albert Wolfe was a United States Geological Survey paleobotanist and paleoclimatologist best known for his studies of Tertiary climate in western North America through analysis of fossil angiosperm leaves.

#2302

Jean-Bernard Caron

Jean-Bernard Caron

#74739

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Jean-Bernard Caron is a French and Canadian palaeontologist currently working as a curator of invertebrate palaeontology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Caron is also cross-appointed at the University of Toronto as an associate professor in the Departments of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Earth Sciences. He is known for his work on the Burgess Shale.

#2303

Sherwood Wise

#172920

Overall Influence

Sherwood Wise is an American academic geologist and currently a Professor of Geological Science at Florida State University, he also serves as co-director of the Antarctic Marine Geology Research Facility and participates in the ANDRILL project. He is an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#2304

Patrick McTaggart-Cowan

Patrick McTaggart-Cowan

#45731

Overall Influence

1912 - 1997 (85 years)

Patrick Duncan McTaggart-Cowan, was a Canadian meteorologist and the first president of Simon Fraser University. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, he moved to North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada with his family in 1913. He received a degree in Mathematics and Physics from the University of British Columbia in 1933. A Rhodes Scholar, he received a Bachelor of Arts in Natural Science from Corpus Christi College, Oxford in 1936.

#2305

Inés Camilloni

#156960

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Inés Angela Camilloni is an Argentine climatologist, specializing in climate change in South America. She is a professor at the University of Buenos Aires and an independent researcher at the Center for Research on the Sea and Atmosphere. She is also the academic secretary of the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences of the UBA. Camilloni is a resident in the Solar Geoengineering Research Program of Harvard University and director of the Master's in Environmental Sciences at the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences of the UBA.

#2306

Robert S. Anderson

#112151

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Robert Stewart Anderson is an American geomorphologist at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. Anderson graduated from Williams College in 1974 and pursued a master's and doctoral degree from Stanford University and the University of Washington, respectively. In 2006, Anderson was named a fellow of the American Geophysical Union. The University of Colorado Boulder honored Anderson with the Hazel Barnes Prize in 2014. The next year, he received the American Geophysical Union's G. K. Gilbert Award. In 2016, Anderson was appointed a CU Distinguished Professor. He is married to Suzanne An...

#2307

Robert Uffen

#72707

Overall Influence

1923 - 2009 (86 years)

Robert James Uffen, was a Canadian research geophysicist, professor, and university administrator. He was the first dean of The University of Western Ontario Faculty of Science. Early life Born in Toronto, Ontario, Uffen served with the Royal Canadian Artillery during World War II. He received a B.A.Sc. degree in Engineering Physics in 1949 and a Master of Arts degree in Geophysics in 1950 from the University of Toronto. He received a Ph.D. in Physics in 1952 from the University of Western Ontario.

#2308

Christa Peters-Lidard

#99580

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Christa Peters-Lidard is an American hydrologist known for her work on integrating land surface modeling and data assimilation, particularly with remotely sensed measurements of precipitation. Early life Peters-Lidard grew up in Chesterfield County, Virginia where she was fascinated about nature, learned that she was good at math, and that she liked earth science. As an undergraduate at Virginia Tech she worked on a project on aquifers and groundwater flow at the United States Geological Survey and at that point she realized that she wanted to be an earth scientist at National Aeronautics and ...

#2309

Claire Freeman

#144313

Overall Influence

Claire Freeman is a New Zealand geography and urban planning academic. Career After a PhD at Leeds, Freeman worked at University of the North West, Leeds Metropolitan University and Massey University before moving to Otago University, where she's been a full professor since 2015

#2310

Jan Hoem

#71664

Overall Influence

1939 - 2017 (78 years)

Jan Michael Hoem was a Norwegian scientist in population studies. Early life On 17 April 1939, Hoem was born in Kristiansund, Norway. Hoem studied actuarial science and mathematical statistics in Oslo, and was awarded a Dr.philos. in 1969.

#2311

Louis-Edmond Hamelin

Louis-Edmond Hamelin

#37156

Overall Influence

1923 - 2020 (97 years)

Louis-Edmond Hamelin, was a Canadian geographer, professor, and author born in Saint-Didace, Quebec, Canada, best known for his studies of Northern Canada. Hamelin created the Centre for Northern Studies at the Université Laval in Québec and was rector of the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières from 1978 to 1983. He was also a member of the Northwest Territories Legislative Council.

#2312

Nancy Bertler

#95031

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Nancy Bertler is an Antarctic researcher, who has led major initiatives to investigate climate history using Antarctic ice cores, and best known for her leadership of the Roosevelt Island Climate Evolution Programme . She is a full professor at the Antarctic Research Centre at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.

#2313

Stephanie C. Werner

#161360

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Stephanie C. Werner is a German geologist and planetologist, known for her work on Mars and the Arctic. She is a professor in the Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics of the University of Oslo in Norway.

#2314

Eugene Domack

#152519

Overall Influence

1956 - 2017 (61 years)

Eugene Walter Domack was an American geologist. Born in Milwaukee to Benjamin and Vivian Domack, Eugene Domack obtained a bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and completed graduate studies at Rice University. Domack worked for Unocal Corporation before joining the faculty of University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, then left in 1985 for Hamilton College in New York, where he became Hamilton's first J.W. Johnson Family Professor of Environmental Studies. Domack moved to the University of South Florida in 2013. He died at the age of 61 on November 20, 2017. He was a fellow of ...

#2315

Tom Paradise

#86747

Overall Influence

Thomas R. Paradise is an American geomorphologist and professor of geosciences at the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Arkansas. He is known for his work on the Nabatean city of Petra in Jordan, which he has studied since the late 1980s, and has published work on the deterioration of architectural stone. He was the lead researcher and presenter on Petra: Lost City of Stone, broadcast by PBS in 2015.

#2316

David C. Evans

#102553

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

David Christopher Evans is a Canadian palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist who specializes in the evolution and paleobiology of Cretaceous dinosaurs in western North America. He received his B.Sc. from the University of British Columbia and his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. He is a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and a member of the Royal Society of Canada and currently serves as the Senior Curator and Temerty Chair of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada. He is also a faculty member in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto.

#2317

Tim Naish

#141938

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Timothy Raymond Naish is a New Zealand glaciologist and climate scientist who has been a researcher and lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington and the Director of the Antarctic Research Centre, and in 2020 became a programme leader at the Antarctic Science Platform. Naish has researched and written about the possible effect of melting ice sheets in Antarctica on global sea levels due to high CO emissions causing warming in the Southern Ocean. He was instrumental in establishing and leading the Antarctica Drilling Project , and a Lead Author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Cha...

#2318

Joan Gomberg

#169699

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Joan S. Gomberg is a research geophysicist at the United States Geological Survey. She serves as an adjunct professor at the University of Washington. She is interested in subduction zone science, and studies how earthquakes trigger each other and how faults can slip. Gomberg is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. She was the first person to demonstrate how dynamic stress associated with seismic waves can trigger other earthquakes.

#2319

Mioara Mandea

#151764

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Mioara Mandea is Head "Science Coordination" Department, Strategy Directorate at the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales. She won the 2018 European Geosciences Union Petrus Peregrinus Medal and has previously served as their General Secretary. She is Officer, National Order of Merit . She is best known for her work on geomagnetic jerks, sub-decadal changes in the Earth's magnetic field.

#2320

Doug Coombs

#167365

Overall Influence

1924 - 2016 (92 years)

Douglas Saxon Coombs was a New Zealand mineralogist and petrologist. Early life and family Born in the Dunedin suburb of St Clair on 23 November 1924, Coombs was the son of architect Leslie Douglas Coombs and Nellie Vera von Tunzelmann Coombs , and the nephew of Ken Saxon. He was educated at King's High School, and played cricket for Otago in the 1942–43 season as a right-hand batsman and leg-break bowler.

#2321

Beatrice Crona

#140335

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Beatrice Crona is an ecologist, a professor at Stockholm University, and the Executive Director of the Program on Global Economic Dynamics and the Biosphere at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 2023 she became a Science Director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

#2322

Patrick Moore

#11185

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Patrick Albert Moore is a Canadian industry consultant, former activist, an early member and past president of Greenpeace Canada. Since leaving Greenpeace in 1986, Moore has criticized the environmental movement for what he sees as scare tactics and disinformation, saying that the environmental movement "abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism". Greenpeace has criticized Moore, calling him "a paid spokesman for the nuclear industry, the logging industry, and genetic engineering industry" who "exploits long-gone ties with Greenpeace to sell himself as a speaker and p...

#2323

Ingeborg Levin

#71189

Overall Influence

Ingeborg Levin is a German professor in Geosciences at the Institute for Environmental Physics of Heidelberg University. Her work with atmospheric measurements significantly contributed to the knowledge of greenhouse gas dynamics. She set up a global network that measures radiocarbon in carbon dioxide , information that can be used to verify bottom-up estimates of emissions. She uses the concentration data of several chemical species to constrain carbon emissions and help validate global atmospheric models.

#2324

Robyn E. Hannigan

Robyn E. Hannigan

#53447

Overall Influence

Robyn Ellen Hannigan is an American academic in the field of science, and an inventor and entrepreneur. She is the 19th president of Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pa., having previously served as the provost of Clarkson University.

#2325

Elizabeth Hadly

#102181

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Elizabeth Hadly is a professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford University, and holds the Paul S. and Billie Achilles Chair of Environmental Science. Her research interests include links between ecology and evolution, and understanding of the impacts of the Anthropocene.

#2326

Rudolf Trümpy

#74674

Overall Influence

1921 - 2009 (88 years)

Rudolf Trümpy was a Swiss geologist, who was born in the small Swiss town of Glarus. He graduated from the ETH Zürich in the late 1940s with a thesis titled: “Der Lias der Glarner Alpen”. From 1947 to 1953 he spent his post-doctoral years in Lausanne before being appointed professor at ETH Zürich in 1953. He would remain there until 1986.

#2327

David Mohrig

#173633

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

David Mohrig is an American professor of geology and geomorphology whose works have been published in such journals as the Geological Society of America Bulletin, Journal of Hydraulic Engineering and many others. Currently he works at Jackson School of Geosciences of Austin, Texas.

#2328

Teamrat Ghezzehei

#134770

Overall Influence

Teamrat Afewerki Ghezzehei is an American earth scientist and the Associate Professor of Environmental Soil Physics at the University of California, Merced. He specialises in soil physics, agroecology and environmental stewardship.

#2329

Bridget Anne Emmett

#169818

Overall Influence

Bridget Emmett is a British ecologist, Professor and Science Area Head for the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. She is the President of British Ecological Society from 2024. Early life and education Emmett studied plant sciences at the University of Aberdeen. She moved to the University of Exeter as a doctoral researcher, where she studied the impact of harvesting on soil nitrogen transformation.

#2330

E Dongchen

#77777

Overall Influence

1939 - 2019 (80 years)

E Dongchen was a Chinese earth scientist and polar explorer, acclaimed as the "father of polar surveying and mapping" in China. He participated in 11 polar expeditions, including the first Chinese expeditions to Antarctica and the North Pole. He was a professor and doctoral advisor at Wuhan University, and was a recipient of the Ho Leung Ho Lee Prize in Earth Sciences.

#2331

Zoe Shipton

#78918

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Zoe Kai Shipton is a British geologist. She is a professor of Geological Engineering at Strathclyde University. In July 2014, Shipton's career in geology was featured on the BBC Radio 4 show The Life Scientific

#2332

Newsha Ajami

#75170

Overall Influence

Newsha K. Ajami is a hydrologist specializing in urban water policy and sustainable water resource management. Though trained as a scientist and engineer, her work is interdisciplinary in nature and combines science with its social counterparts. She is currently a senior scholar at Stanford University and manages the university's Urban Water program.

#2333

Patience Cowie

#103754

Overall Influence

1964 - 2020 (56 years)

Patience Anne Cowie was a Professor of Earth System Dynamics at the University of Bergen. Her research has considered fault propagation and rift basins. She was awarded the 2016 Geological Society of London Coke medal.

#2334

Alik Ismail-Zadeh

#75485

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Alik Ismail-Zadeh is a mathematical geophysicist known for his contribution to computational geodynamics and natural hazard studies, pioneering work on data assimilation in geodynamics as well as for outstanding service to the Earth and space science community. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.

#2335

David Lary

#78764

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

David J. Lary is a British-American atmospheric scientist interested in applying computational and information systems to facilitate discovery and decision support in Earth system science. His main contributions have been to highlight the role of carbonaceous aerosols in atmospheric chemistry, heterogeneous bromine reactions, and to employ chemical data assimilation for satellite validation, and the use of machine learning for remote sensing applications. He is author of AutoChem, NASA release software that constitutes an automatic computer code generator and documentor for chemically reactive systems.

#2336

Raimund Bleischwitz

Raimund Bleischwitz

#89921

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Raimund Bleischwitz is a German economist. He is the Scientific Director of the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research in Bremen, Germany. Work Bleischwitz is academic work is focused on environmental and resource economics. He worked as an policy adviser in topics of resource efficiency, circular economy, resource nexus, raw material conflicts, eco-innovation, incentive systems and policies, industry and sustainability.

#2337

Olivier Dubuquoy

Olivier Dubuquoy

#26202

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Olivier Dubuquoy is a French geographer, film director and environmental activist known for his fight against the pollution of the Mediterranean by red sludge and his fighting for an end to our dependency on fossil fuels responsible for global warming. He is the founder of the citizens' movement Nation Océan and the society for the preservation of climate and the marine environment ZEA.

#2338

Menno-Jan Kraak

#58755

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Menno-Jan Kraak is a Dutch cartographer and professor of Geovisual Analytics and Cartography at the Faculty of Geoinformation Sciences and Earth Observation at the University of Twente. He is known for his work in cartography and his activities in the International Cartographic Association.

#2339

Celeste Saulo

#174163

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Andrea Celeste Saulo is an Argentine meteorologist and educator. She has served as director of the Servicio Meteorológico Nacional since 8 July 2014, and first vice president of the World Meteorological Organization since 24 April 2018. She is the first woman to hold the latter office.

#2340

Susan van den Heever

#169947

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Susan Claire van den Heever is a South African atmospheric scientist who is a professor at Colorado State University. Her research considers cloud physics and mesoscale modelling. She is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society and an editor of the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences.

#2341

Meredith G. Hastings

#76256

Overall Influence

Meredith G. Hastings is an American atmospheric chemist and associate professor of earth, environmental, and planetary sciences at Brown University. Her research focuses on the reactive nitrogen cycle and how atmospheric chemistry affects climate. She is also the founder and president of the Earth Science Women's Network .

#2342

Karletta Chief

#94238

Overall Influence

Karletta Chief is a Diné hydrologist, best known for her work to address environmental pollution on the Navajo Nation and increase the participation of Native Americans in STEM. Education Chief earned her B.S. and M.S. in civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. She completed her PhD in hydrology and water resources at the University of Arizona in 2007, where she is now a faculty member.

#2343

Sally P. Horn

#131285

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Sally P. Horn is a professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her work in Costa Rica and other tropical regions has been featured in a number of publications, including National Geographic. She has published over 100 articles relating to paleolimnology and biogeography. She is director of the University of Tennessee Laboratory of Paleoenvironmental Research and associate director of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Science. Horn was named one of the first University of Tennessee Chancellors Professors in 2009.

#2344

Bruce Hayward

#173571

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Bruce William Hayward is a New Zealand geologist, marine ecologist, and author. He is known as a leading expert on living and fossil foraminifera. Education and career At the University of Auckland, Bruce W. Hayward graduated in geology with B.Sc. in 1971 and Ph.D. in 1975. In 1976–1977 he was a postdoc at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Hayward was from 1978 to 1991 a micropaleontologist for the New Zealand Geological Survey, Lower Hutt. In March 1991 Hayward became the curator of marine invertebrates at the Auckland Institute and Museum, after the retirement of Walter Olivier Cernohorsky.

#2345

Joan Esterle

#172475

Overall Influence

Joan Esterle is an American-Australian geologist who is an emeritus professor at school of Earth and Environmental Sciences from The University of Queensland, Australia and the chair of its Coal Geoscience Program.

#2346

Catriona Sandilands

#56965

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Catriona Sandilands is a Canadian writer and scholar in the environmental humanities. She is most well known for her conception of queer ecology. She is currently a Professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. She was a Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture between 2004 and 2014. She was a Fellow of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation in 2016. Sandilands served as president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment in 2015. She is also a past President of the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada and the Am...

#2347

Thomas Crowther

#119674

Overall Influence

1986 - Present (40 years)

Thomas Ward Crowther is a professor of ecology at ETH Zürich and co-chair of the advisory board for the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. At ETH Zürich, he started Crowther Lab, an interdisciplinary group of scientists exploring the role of biodiversity in regulating the Earth's climate. Crowther is the founder of Restor, an online platform that provides ecological data, connectivity, and transparency to conservation and restoration projects around the world. In 2021, the World Economic Forum named Crowther a Young Global Leader.

#2348

Andrea Donnellan

#135755

Overall Influence

Andrea Donnellan is a principal investigator at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She studies earthquakes using geodetic imaging. Biography She studied at Ohio State University, University of Southern California, and California Institute of Technology.

#2349

Maja Krzic

#141563

Overall Influence

Maja Krzic is a soil scientist and an associate professor in the Department of Forest & Conservation Sciences in the Faculty of Forestry with a joint appointment in the Applied Biology and Soil Sciences programs in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at the University of British Columbia. She is a founder of the Virtual Soil Science Learning Resources Group, a collaborative teaching effort among scientists, students, and multimedia experts from seven universities and three research institutions in Canada that create open access soil science educational resources. She is also the president of ...

#2350

Kennard Baker Bork

#124819

Overall Influence

Kennard Baker Bork is a retired university teacher of geology and geography from the United States. He graduated with a BA from DePauw University in 1962 then went on to obtain an MA and a PhD from Indiana University Bloomington. He ended a career stretching more than 35 years as Alumni Professor at Denison University in Granville, Ohio.

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