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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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List of the most influential people in Earth Sciences,

#2451

Allison Steiner

#160196
Overall Influence
Allison Steiner is a scientist who specializes in atmosphere-biosphere interactions, regional climate modeling, and chemistry climate interactions. Steiner has received countless awards for her contributions to the field, and was invited by the National Research Council and National Science Foundation to serve on a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine panel. She has also contributed to the geoscience community by founding the Earth Science Women’s Network, a non-profit organization that works to further the geosciences while also supporting and connecting women in the fiel...
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#2452

Richard D. Law

#178241
Overall Influence
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#2453

Harriet Presser

Harriet Presser
#80060
Overall Influence
1936 - 2012 (76 years)
Harriet B. Presser was a sociologist and demographer. Having served on the faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park, for more than 30 years, at the time of her death she was a Distinguished University Professor. She was elected president of the Population Association of America for the year 1989. In addition, she was awarded the Jessie Bernard Award from the American Sociological Association in 2010, and was elected as a Fellow to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2002. As a scholar, she studied the intersection of gender, work and family, and pioneered the sociological specialization in that area.
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#2454

Joy Crisp

#74497
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Joy A. Crisp is a planetary geologist specializing in Mars geology. She is noted for her work on NASA missions to Mars, including the Mars Exploration Rovers and Mars Science Laboratory. Early life and education Crisp was born in Colorado Springs, CO. She earned a bachelor's degree in geology from Carleton College in 1979, and both a Master's and a PhD from Princeton University. Subsequently, Crisp was a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA for more than two years. Her studies involved investigating rocks from the Canary Islands under conditions similar to those within volcanoes.
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#2455

Holly Barnard

#111043
Overall Influence
Holly René Barnard is an American geographer and Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. She studies how vegetation impacts the dynamics and pathways of streams. In 2020 Barnard was awarded a $7 million National Science Foundation grant to set up a Critical Zone Observatory at the University of Colorado Boulder.
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#2456

Whitney Maria Behr

#177087
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Whitney Maria Behr is an American Earth Scientist known for her contributions to understanding mechanics and kinematics of deformation in Earth's lithosphere. She was educated in the United States following which she held academic positions there. Since 2018, she has been the chair of the Structural Geology & Tectonics Group in the Geological Institute at ETH Zürich.
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#2457

Richard Samson Odingo

#86927
Overall Influence
1935 - 2021 (86 years)
Richard Samson Odingo was a Kenyan scientist who was the vice chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change when it was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 2007 with Al Gore. He had held this position for more than 20 years prior. He was awarded full Professorship at the University of Nairobi in Geography in 1987. He has been a consultant of several international agencies including multiple United Nations Agencies and has taught for many years at the University of Nairobi.
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#2458

Jacques Lemaire

#178305
Overall Influence
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#2459

William M. Furnish

#174198
Overall Influence
1912 - 2007 (95 years)
William Madison Furnish was an American paleontologist. He taught at the University of Iowa. In 1938, he described the conodont genus Acanthodus from the Prairie du Chien beds of the upper Mississippi valley.
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#2460

Roger Cooper

#148214
Overall Influence
1939 - 2020 (81 years)
Roger Alan Cooper was a New Zealand paleontologist, known as a leading expert on the fossil zooplankton of the early Paleozoic and the paleobiology of Zealandia. Biography Roger A. Cooper, the second of his parents' five children, grew up in Eastbourne, New Zealand. He became a geology student at Victoria University of Wellington and in his second year went in January 1961 as a field assistant on a trip lasting almost three months. The purpose of the trip, with four people, three pack horses, two-way radios, and rifles, was geological mapping of New Zealand's Marlborough Region. Nearly a yea...
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#2461

Valerie Harwood

#178391
Overall Influence
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#2462

Beth L. Parker

#177602
Overall Influence
Beth L. Parker is a hydrogeologist and professor at the University of Guelph who has made exceptional contributions to the science and practice of Contaminant Hydrogeology and the protection of groundwater from contamination, that have been adopted internationally to protect water supplies in Guelph and many other communities.
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#2463

Justin McCarthy

#25585
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Justin A. McCarthy is an American demographer, former professor of history at the University of Louisville, in Louisville, Kentucky. He holds an honorary doctorate from Boğaziçi University , was awarded the Order of Merit of Turkey , and is a board member of the Institute of Turkish Studies and the Center for Eurasian Studies . His area of expertise is the history of the late Ottoman Empire.
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#2464

Danny Hilman Natawidjaja

#98942
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Danny Hilman Natawidjaja is an Indonesian geologist specializing in earthquake geology and geotectonics at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences Research Center for Geotechnology. In Indonesia, Natawidjaja has contributed to research on local tectonic plates. Since 2000, he has made predictions regarding the earthquake on the west coast of Sumatra Island.
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#2465

Colin G. Pooley

#178526
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Colin G. Pooley is a specialist in transport and migration studies who is professor emeritus of social and historical geography at the University of Lancaster where he worked from 1975 until 2012. Background Pooley was born in Lincolnshire and moved to Liverpool in 1969. He attended the University of Liverpool, graduating with an honours degree in Geography in 1972 and PhD in Geography in 1979 . He began teaching at Lancaster University in 1975, remaining until retirement and occupying several administrative roles including head of the former Department of Geography. He was associated with ...
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#2466

John M. Mogey

#165064
Overall Influence
1915 - 2005 (90 years)
John MacFarlane Mogey was a British geographer and sociologist whose career was based on his study of conditions in Northern Ireland. Career In 1939, Mogey broadcast with Emyr Estyn Evans on "Who Are The Irish?" for the BBC Northern Ireland service. He also gave radio talks in 1946 and 1947.
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#2467

Yehua Dennis Wei

#128656
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Yehua Dennis Wei is a Chinese-American geographer. He is a professor in the Department of Geography and a senior scholar in the Institute of Public and International Affairs at the University of Utah. His research has been funded by the NSF, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, National Geographic Society, Ford Foundation and Natural Science Foundation of China . He has received awards for research excellence from the NSFC , Association of American Geographers' China, Asian and Regional Development and Planning Specialty Groups, and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.RESEARCH INTERESTS: Economi...
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#2468

Sergei Scherbov

#130990
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Sergei Scherbov is a demographer specializing in demographic analysis and population projection. He is Deputy Program Leader with the World Population Program at IIASA since 2013 and Leader of the Population Dynamics and Forecasting Group at the Vienna Institute of Demography of the Austrian Academy of Sciences since 2002.
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#2469

Bruce S. Lieberman

#129861
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Bruce Smith Lieberman is an American paleontologist. Lieberman received his A.B 1988 summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard University and Stephen Jay Gould was his undergraduate advisor. He received a Master's in 1991 and a Doctorate in 1994 from Columbia University, and Niles Eldredge was his graduate advisor. During graduate school he was based at the American Museum of Natural History. He did a 2-year post-doctoral fellowship with Elisabeth Vrba at Yale University and a 2-year post-doctoral fellowship with Andrew Knoll at Harvard University. Since 1998 he has been on the faculty ...
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#2470

Michael Bruse

#150137
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Michael Bruse is a German geographer and professor for geoinformatics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. He specializes in research on urban microclimate/climatology with a methodical focus on numerical simulation. Besides his scientific work he developed the micro-climate model ENVI-met. and is founder of the company ENVI-met GmbH. ENVI-met is a holistic three-dimensional non-hydrostatic model for the simulation of surface-plant-air interactions not only limited to, but very often used to simulate urban environments and to assess the effects of green architecture visions.
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#2471

Wendy Lawson

#100299
Overall Influence
Wendy Julia Lawson is a New Zealand glaciology academic. She is currently a full professor at the University of Canterbury. Academic career After an undergraduate at the University of Manchester and a 1990 PhD titled 'The structural evolution of Variegated Glacier, Alaska.' at the University of Cambridge, she moved to the University of Canterbury, rising to full professor and Pro-Vice Chancellor of Science.
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#2472

Carolina Lithgow-Bertelloni

#178113
Overall Influence
Carolina Raquel Lithgow-Bertelloni is a geophysicist known for her research on the role of subsurface processes in shaping the Earth. She was elected a fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2021.
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#2473

Alan Lester

#68733
Overall Influence
Alan Lester is a British historian, historical geographer and author who has worked for Sussex University since 2000. He is known for his research on imperial networks, colonial humanitarianism and imperial governance. Lester gave the Distinguished Historical Geographer Lecture at the 2022 Association of American Geographers annual conference. He is co-editor of the Manchester University Press Studies in Imperialism research monograph series. He has been described as “the pioneer of the idea” of “a key concept much used in recent ‘new imperial history’ writing … that of the imperial network” ...
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#2474

Mary Gordon Calder

Mary Gordon Calder
#108407
Overall Influence
1906 - 1992 (86 years)
Mary Gordon Calder was a Scottish paleobotanist. She is known for her work on Carboniferous fossil plants and Jurassic conifers. Early years Mary Gordon Calder was born in Uddingston, South Lanarkshire, Scotland to William Calder, a general manager of a warehouse. She contracted poliomyelitis as a child, requiring her to wear leg braces for the rest of her life.
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#2475

Robert L. Fischman

Robert L. Fischman
#89001
Overall Influence
Robert L. Fischman is the George P. Smith, II Distinguished Professor of Law at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law in Bloomington, Indiana. He is also an adjunct professor at the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs.
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#2476

Petr Dostál

#125934
Overall Influence
1947 - 2021 (74 years)
Petr Dostál was a Czech geographer and professor at Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem and Charles University. His work addressed cultural, political and economic aspects of social change in the European Union, post-communist Europe and specifically in the Czech Republic itself. He was also interested in the development of geographical systems in the context of risk processes.
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#2477

Kristín Vala Ragnarsdóttir

Kristín Vala Ragnarsdóttir
#91421
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Areas of Specialization: Sustainability Science Krístin Vala Ragnarsdóttir was born in Iceland. She is Professor of Sustainability Science with the Institute of Earth Sciences and the Institute of Sustainability Studies at the University of Iceland. She also served as the University of Iceland’s Dean of the School of Engineering and Natural Sciences from 2008 until 2012. Vala was the first woman to serve as Dean of a School at the University. Ragnarsdóttir obtained her bachelor’s degree in 1979 from the University of Iceland, her master’s degree in 1981 from Northwestern University, and her PhD in 1984, also from Northwestern.
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#2478

Alison Criscitiello

#178181
Overall Influence
Alison Criscitiello is an American ice core scientist, National Geographic Explorer, Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, and Director of the Canadian Ice Core Lab at the University of Alberta. In addition to her academic work, she is a co-founder of Girls on Ice Canada and an avid adventurer and mountain climber. She led the first all-women ascent of Lingsarmo and has received numerous American Alpine Club grants for her pioneering expeditions.
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#2479

Brian Lees

#130991
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Brian Lees is an Australian geographer and was the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Geographical Information Science. Lees started off as Regional Editor for the Western Pacific in 1997 and took over as Editor-in-Chief in 2007. He handed over to Professor May Yuan in January 2017. He is an emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales, School of Physical, Environmental & Mathematical Sciences, where he was appointed professor of geography in February 2006.
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#2480

Jan Lundqvist

#177148
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
Jan Lundqvist is a Swedish geologist. He is son of Gösta Lundqvist and brother of Thomas Lundqvist, both of whom are geologists. Jan Lundqvist worked at Geological Survey of Sweden from 1951 to 80 and obtained a Ph.D. degree in Quaternary geology at Stockholms högskola in 1958, becoming in also a teacher in that institution. Jan Lundqvist is considered among the foremost authorities on the Quaternary geology of Fennoscandia.
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#2481

James Franklin

James Franklin
#169918
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
James Louis Franklin is a former weather forecaster encompassing a 35-year career with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration . He served as the first branch chief of the newly formed Hurricane Specialist Unit before his retirement in 2017.
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#2482

Gail Krantzberg

#166696
Overall Influence
Gail Krantzberg is a Professor of Engineering and Public Policy at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Her research has focused on plastic pollution in the Great Lakes, and includes detecting COVID-19 in municipal water supplies. In 2001 she was selected to be the director of the International Joint Commission's Great Lakes Office in Windsor, Ontario, a post she held until 2005. In 2021, it was announced that she would co-chair the IJC's Science Priority Committee.
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#2483

Greta Gaard

#4563
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Greta Gaard is an ecofeminist writer, scholar, activist, and documentary filmmaker. Gaard's academic work in the realms of ecocriticism and ecocomposition is widely cited by scholars in the disciplines of composition and literary criticism. Her theoretical work extending ecofeminist thought into queer theory, queer ecology, vegetarianism, and animal liberation has been influential within women's studies. A cofounder of the Minnesota Green Party, Gaard documented the transition of the U.S. Green movement into the Green Party of the United States in her book, Ecological Politics. She is currentl...
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#2484

Christie D. Rowe

#172416
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Christie D. Rowe is a Professor of Geology at McGill University. She holds a Canada Research Chair in Earthquake Geology and was awarded the 2017 Geological Association of Canada W. W. Hutchison Medal.
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#2485

Dieter Korn

#99356
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Dr. Dieter Korn is a German scientist and paleontologist specializing in research on ammonites and goniatites. He received his Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Tübingen and is employed by the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, Germany, in the Leibniz Institute for Research on Evolution and Biodiversity . Dr Korn has published or coauthored over 100 papers since 1979, including the description of numerous new species of cephalopods.
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#2486

Liu Guangding

#164527
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Liu Guangding was a Chinese geophysicist best known for his work in geophysics, marine geology and petroleum geology. He had been hailed as "Father of Chinese marine geology". He was a member of the 8th and 9th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.
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#2487

Claudia Wagner-Riddle

#176607
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Claudia Wagner-Riddle is a Canadian agrometeorologist. She is a professor in Agrometeorology in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of Guelph and Editor-In-Chief of the journal Agricultural and Forest Meteorology. In 2020, Wagner-Riddle was appointed Director of the North America regional chapter of the International Nitrogen Initiative and elected a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society.
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#2488

John Call Cook

John Call Cook
#58527
Overall Influence
1918 - 2012 (94 years)
John Call Cook was an American geophysicist who played a crucial role in establishing the field of ground-penetrating radar and is generally regarded as contributing the fundamental research to develop the field. Cook is also known for demonstrating that aerial surveys can map surface radioactivity to enable much more efficient prospecting for uranium ore, for inventing electrostatic detection of hazardous ice crevasses, and for developing other novel techniques in remote sensing.
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#2489

Rebecca Lunn

#88139
Overall Influence
Rebecca Jane Lunn is a Professor and Head of the Centre for Ground Engineering and Energy Geosciences at the University of Strathclyde. I Lunn studies flow and transport systems in the shallow crust in an effort to characterise uncertainty in nuclear waste disposal,.
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#2490

Barbara Wohlfarth

#168480
Overall Influence
Barbara Wohlfarth is a Swedish, German and Swiss Quaternary geologist and paleoclimatologist active at Stockholm University. In 2012, she was elected into the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
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#2491

John Shepherd

#118934
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
John Graham Shepherd CBE FRS is a British Earth system scientist, Emeritus Professor at University of Southampton, and a former director of the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton. He has worked on a wide range of environment-related topics, including the transport of chemical tracers in the atmospheric boundary layer and in the deep ocean, the management of marine fish stockss, and the dynamics of the Earth system. More recently he led a comprehensive review of geoengineering for the Royal Society.
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#2492

Hans-Peter Kohler

#77005
Overall Influence
Hans-Peter Kohler is a German-American demographer and sociologist. He is the Frederick J. Warren Professor of Demography, Professor of Sociology, and co-director of the Population Aging Research Center at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2005, he received the Clifford C. Clogg Award for Early Career Achievement from the Population Association of America, and in 2018, the Association named him an honored member. He previously served as a fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters from 2006 to 2007 and as president of the Society for Biodemography and Social Biology from 2007 to 2012.
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#2493

Line Gordon

Line Gordon
#127616
Overall Influence
Line Gordon is a Swedish sustainability scientist whose transdisciplinary research combines food, water, and the benefits people receive from nature. Gordon is the director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and a professor at Stockholm University, Sweden. She is also on the board of the EAT foundation, and often participates in public discussions of food and climate in Sweden.
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#2494

Laura J. Crossey

#177595
Overall Influence
Laura J. Crossey is an American hydrologist and geochemist and Distinguished Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of New Mexico . Crossey is part of UNM's Sustainable Water Resources Grand Challenge team, which studies water and climate in New Mexico and other arid regions. She has studied springs and groundwater in areas including the Western Desert of Egypt, Australia's Great Artesian Basin, Tibet, the Middle Rio Grande Basin and the Grand Canyon.
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#2495

Seita Emori

#96449
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Seita Emori is a Japanese environmental scientist whose most noted work focuses upon the worldwide effects of Global Warming. He completed his Doctorate at the University of Tokyo in 1997 and thereafter joined the National Institute for Environmental Studies, where he is currently the Chief of the Climate Risk Assessment Research Section at the Center for Global Environmental Research. Emori was a contributing author of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a member of the IPCC Steering Committee for the "Expert Meeting on New Sce...
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#2496

Ian D. Whyte

#176547
Overall Influence
1948 - 2019 (71 years)
Ian D. Whyte was a British geographer and Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Lancaster. He was the author of many books, including Migrants, Emigrants and Immigrants: A Social History of Migration , Climatic Change and Human Society and Scotland's Society and Economy in Transition .
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#2497

Ana Mijic

#93795
Overall Influence
Ana Mijic is an associate professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Imperial College London who works in systems water management. She has expertise in advanced modelling of integrated water systems, as well as the analysis of processes, planning, resilience and economics.
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#2498

Marta Torres

#120314
Overall Influence
Marta E. Torres is a marine geologist known for her work on the geochemistry of cold seeps and methane hydrates. She is a professor at Oregon State University, and an elected fellow of the Geochemical Society and the Geological Society of America.
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#2499

Graeme T. Swindles

#106511
Overall Influence
Graeme Swindles is a geoscientist from Northern Ireland, currently a Professor of Physical Geography at Queen's University Belfast. Career Swindles was Associate Professor of Earth System Dynamics at the University of Leeds and lecturer in Physical Geography and Archaeology at the University of Bradford. He is an earth system scientist with broad research interests in past-present-future climate change. His main research foci include peatland ecosystems, climate change and human-environment relations.
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#2500

Wilma Subra

#32182
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Wilma Subra is an American environmental scientist. She is President of the Subra Company, an environmental consulting firm. Subra was born in Morgan City, Louisiana, and was raised there and in nearby Bayou Vista. Her father was a chemist, and her grandfather an oyster fisherman. She obtained a bachelor's degree in microbiology and chemistry in 1965 from the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette, and her master's a year later.
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