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,

#2651

Ian Hewson

#182113

Overall Influence

Ian Hewson is an Australian American biological oceanographer and marine ecologist who is a professor of microbiology at Cornell University. He leads the Cornell Marine Mass Mortality Laboratory, where he studies the drives of marine mass mortalities. He is leader of diversity, equity, and inclusion for the Department of Microbiology.

#2652

Philippe Pinchemel

#72766

Overall Influence

1923 - 2008 (85 years)

Philippe Pinchemel was a French geographer. He received the Lauréat Prix International de Géographie Vautrin Lud in 2004. Further reading

#2653

Arnstein Aassve

#122576

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Arnstein Aassve is a Norwegian professor in demography, current director of the PhD program in Social and Political Science and former dean of the Undergraduate School at Bocconi University. His research lies in the intersection of sociology, demography and economics and is currently focused on studying the effects of globalisation and culture on demographic outcomes and trends. He is currently leading the FutuRes project funded by the Horizon Europe program.

#2654

Brian Belcher

#175182

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Brian Belcher is a Canadian social scientist, currently a Canada Research Chair in Sustainability Research Effectiveness at Royal Roads University. From October through December 2015 he was a Fellow at the Durham University Institute of Advanced Study.

#2655

Lars Clemmensen

#176098

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Lars Bjørn Clemmensen is a Danish Professor of Sedimentology in the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, Copenhagen University. Lars was born in Valby and grew up in Hvidovre, before moving to Frederiksberg. He extensively worked with the geology of Greenland, mostly on the Late Triassic of Jameson Land, in East Greenland. He was part of 10 expeditions to Greenland. With a publication record over 100 titles that grant him an h-index of 27 mainly on sedimentology and stratigraphy. In 1997 a new mammal from the Triassic of East Greenland was named after him: Haramiyavia clemmenseni.

#2656

Osamu Ito

#184242

Overall Influence

#2657

Guy McPherson

#14797

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Guy R. McPherson is an American scientist, professor emeritus of natural resources and ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. He is known for inventing and promoting doomer fringe theories such as Near-Term Human Extinction , which predicts human extinction by 2026.

#2658

Jennifer G. Murphy

#99001

Overall Influence

Jennifer G. Murphy is a Canadian environmental chemist and an associate professor at the University of Toronto. She is known for her research how air pollutants such as increased reactive nitrogen affect the global climate.

#2659

Kirsten Zickfeld

#164672

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Kirsten Zickfeld is a German climate physicist who is now based in Canada. She is a member of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and was one of the authors on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C .Zickfeld completed a Master of Science degree in physics at the Free University of Berlin in 1998, followed by a doctorate in physics at the University of Potsdam in 2004.[7]

#2660

Noam Weisbrod

#170725

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Noam Weisbrod is a Hydrology Professor at the Department of Environmental Hydrology and Microbiology of the Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research , which is part of the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev . Weisbrod served as director of ZIWR from 2015 to 2018. In 2018 he became director of BIDR and was reelected for a second term in summer 2022.

#2661

Darla Zelenitsky

#175839

Overall Influence

Darla K. Zelenitsky is a Canadian paleontologist most notable for her research on dinosaur reproductive biology and fossils. She was a part of a team that first found evidence of feathered dinosaurs in North America, and since then has co-authored over 50 different publications. Her research primarily focuses on paleobiology and paleoenvironments, with a key look on dinosaurs using extinct taxa to detect and infer the changes seen over time.

#2662

Joseph Velikonja

Joseph Velikonja

#152206

Overall Influence

1923 - 2015 (92 years)

Joseph Velikonja was a Slovene-American geographer and professor. Personal life Velikonja was born in Ljubljana, one of 13 children of the writer Narte Velikonja and his wife Ivanka . While studying in Rome after the Second World War, Velikonja learned his father had been executed after a show trial in Slovenia. Velikonja met his future wife, Matilde Rus, a few years later in Trieste, where she was working as an English teacher. They married in Rome in 1950. He emigrated to the United States in 1955, where he briefly worked as a manual laborer before continuing his academic career. Later in his life, after retirement and extensive travels, he returned to Slovenia.

#2663

Stanley John Olsen

#126689

Overall Influence

1919 - 2003 (84 years)

Stanley John Olsen was an American vertebrate paleontologist and one of the founding figures of zooarchaeology in the United States. Olsen was also recognized as an historical archaeologist and scholar of United States military insignia, especially buttons of the American Colonial through Civil War periods. He was the father of John W. Olsen.

#2664

Ferjan Ormeling Jr.

#109131

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Ferdinand Jan Ormeling Jr. is a Dutch cartographer. He is the son of the well known cartographer Ferdinand Jan Ormeling Sr. Biography Ferjan Ormeling lived in The Hague until he was six years old. His parents Ferdinand Jan Ormeling Sr. and K.J. ten Hoopen were both geographers. In 1948 the family moved to Java, where his father set up the Geographical Institute of Batavia. In 1961 Ferjan Jr. went to study geography at the University of Groningen. He attended lectures by Willem Frederik Hermans, among others. During his entire study period, Ferjan worked at J.B. Wolters at the Bosatlas, of which his father had meanwhile become editor-in-chief.

#2665

Julie Libarkin

#179433

Overall Influence

Julie Carol Libarkin is a professor of Earth Sciences and Director of the Geocognition Laboratory at Michigan State University. Her research considers how people understand and make decision about the planet. She is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America. She also researches and addresses inequality in academia, and tracks academic sexual misconduct cases.

#2666

Robert Folinsbee

#94074

Overall Influence

1917 - 2008 (91 years)

Robert Edward Folinsbee was a Canadian geologist, whose work involved geochronology, ore deposits, and meteorites. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, he received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1938 from the University of Alberta, a Master of Science degree in 1940 and a Ph.D. in 1942 from the University of Minnesota. During World War II, he served with the Royal Canadian Air Force as a pilot.

#2667

Pan Ming Huang

#184514

Overall Influence

#2668

Cara Augustenborg

#159585

Overall Influence

Cara Aisling Augustenborg is an American and Irish environmental scientist, media pundit, assistant professor at University College Dublin and a member of Ireland's Climate Change Advisory Council and President Michael D. Higgins' Council of State.

#2669

Scott Hocknull

#71608

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Scott Hocknull is a vertebrate palaeontologist and Senior Curator in Geology at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane. He was the 2002 recipient of the Young Australian of the Year Award. He is the youngest Australian to date to hold a museum curatorship and has described and named 10 new species and four new genera.

#2670

Lawrence Alexander Hardie

Lawrence Alexander Hardie

#173818

Overall Influence

1933 - 2013 (80 years)

Lawrence Alexander Hardie was an American geologist, sedimentologist, and geochemist . Hardie was a professor at Johns Hopkins University in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. His research topics included evaporites, dolomitization, cyclical deposition of carbonate sediments, and plate tectonic driven changes in seawater chemistry. In the latter, he proposed that changes in the seafloor spreading rates at mid-ocean ridges have altered the composition of seawater throughout earth history, producing oscillations in the mineralogy of carbonate and evaporite precipitates. Specifica...

#2671

Catherine Annen

#183367

Overall Influence

Catherine Jeanne Annen is a French geologist at the Czech Academy of Sciences. Her research considers igneous bodies, volcanic eruptions. and exploration for geothermal energy. She was awarded the 2022 Geological Society of London Bigsby Medal.

#2672

Annie Souriau

#183050

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Annie Souriau is a French seismologist from the commune of Saint-Cloud Paris. She is primarily known for her research into Earth's inner and outer cores, specifically her work examining seismic activity within and around the Pyrenees mountains. Through her and her colleague's research and studies, she has made notable advances to how humans understand the inner workings of the Earth's core while also winning many awards in the process.

#2673

Wei-Ta Fang

#145084

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Wei-Ta Fang is a Taiwanese wetland scientist and Environmental educator, a Distinguished Professor, Vice Dean of the College of Science, and the Director of the Graduate Institute of Sustainability Management and Environmental Education, National Taiwan Normal University. President of the Society of Wetland Scientists Asia Chapter.

#2674

James P. Kauahikaua

#175534

Overall Influence

James Puupai Kauahikaua was an American geophysicist and volcanologist who served as the 19th Scientist-in-Charge of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory from October 2004 to March 2015. He was the first Scientist-in-Charge at the Observatory to be of Hawaiian ancestry.

#2675

Silvia Peppoloni

#181675

Overall Influence

Silvia Peppoloni is an Italian geologist, researcher in the field of natural hazards and risks, science writer, international frontline scholar on geoethics. Early life and education Silvia Peppoloni was born and lives in Rome, Italy. Since she was a child, she was fascinated by geological phenomena. For hours she used to listen astonished to her grandfather's stories about the 1944 eruption of the Vesuvius Volcano, feeling the fear and the wonder, the sense of impotence and precariousness in front of those processes, the perception of the Earth as a "living" planet. This is the origin of her...

#2676

John S. A. Green

#154550

Overall Influence

1931 - 2012 (81 years)

John Sidney Adcock Green was a British meteorologist. He was born in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire to a cabinet-maker and his wife. In 1950 he obtained employment at the National Almanac office in the Royal Greenwich Observatory, Herstmonceux, Sussex and then studied mathematics at Imperial College London graduating B.Sc. in 1955. He was awarded a PhD in 1961 for his research into baroclinic instability.

#2677

Vladimir Moskovkin

Vladimir Moskovkin

#45749

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Vladimir Mikhailovich Moskovkin is a Post- Soviet and Ukrainian geographer, economist, scientometrist, teacher, publicist. Doctor of Geographical Sciences, professor. In 1969 he finished Yalta Comprehensive School No. 6 and graduated from the Moscow State University Correspondence Mathematical School.

#2678

Sunil Bajpai

#184327

Overall Influence

Sunil Bajpai is the Chair Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology in the Department of Earth Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee. He is in service as a professor at IIT Roorkee since 1st January 1996 till September 2026. He also served as the director of the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences from January 2013 to July 2018.

#2679

Mary-Louise Timmermans

#173608

Overall Influence

Mary-Louise Elizabeth Timmermans is a marine scientist known for her work on the Arctic Ocean. She is the Damon Wells Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Yale University. Education and career Timmermans has a B.S. from the University of Victoria and an M.S. from the University of Cambridge . In 2000 she earned her Ph.D. from Trinity College, Cambridge where she worked on fluid dynamics. Following her Ph.D. she held a postdoctoral position at the University of Victoria from 2001 until 2002. She then moved to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution as a postdoctoral scholar and then joined the faculty in 2005.

#2680

Mariah Carbone

#175832

Overall Influence

Mariah Suzanne Carbone is an American geophysicist who is a professor of Geosciences at the Center for ecosystem science and society, Northern Arizona University. She studies terrestrial ecosystems and how they respond to environmental change.

#2681

Joanne Whittaker

#184861

Overall Influence

Joanne Whittaker is a marine geophysicist, from the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania, who was awarded the Dorothy Hill award in 2017, and a L'Oreal Women in Science Fellowship in 2013. Her research contributes to understanding the structure and evolution of the Earth.

#2682

Tashpolat Tiyip

#45714

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Tashpolat Tiyip is a Chinese geographer of Uyghur ethnicity who was president of Xinjiang University from 2010 to 2017. He was sentenced to death in a secret trial. Biography Tashpolat enrolled at Xinjiang University in 1978 to study geography and graduated in 1983. In 1988, he went to Japan to study for a master's degree and PhD at Tokyo University of Science, where he received a Doctorate of Engineering in Applied Geography in March 1992. In 1993, he was appointed as professor in the Department of Geography at Xinjiang University. In 1996, Tashpolat was appointed Vice President of Xinjiang ...

#2683

Peter Herlihy

#127085

Overall Influence

Peter Herlihy, University of Kansas geographer, the Associate Director and Graduate Advisor, Latin American Studies, University of Kansas and field director of the controversial U.S. DOD funded México Indígena project known as the Bowman Expeditionss, an initiative of the American Geographical Society to organize international teams of geographers to research potentially important place-based issues and restore the role of geographers as advisers to U.S. government foreign policy makers. The stated objective of the México Indígena project is to produce maps of the “digital human terrain,” of t...

#2684

Nuhu G. Obaje

#182648

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Professor Nuhu George Obaje is a professor and Director in the Centre for Applied Sciences and Technology Research at the Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University Lapai, Niger State. Biography Born and raised in Ajaka village in Igalamela local government area of Kogi state. In 1974, he attended Barewa College Zaria for his senior school leaving certificate and graduated in 1979. After-which he proceeded to study Geology at the Ahmadu Bello University Zaria graduating in 1984. By 1987, he received his M.Sc. degree and furthered for his PhD in 1994 at University of Tuebingen, Germany.

#2685

Christina Lochman-Balk

#181771

Overall Influence

1907 - 2006 (99 years)

Christina Lochman-Balk was an American geologist who specialized in the study of Paleozoic era fossils, formerly known as Cambrian Paleontology. Lochman specifically dealt with Cambrian trilobites and invertebrates. During her career, it was not very common for women to pursue degrees or careers in geology, which was studied mostly by men. Along with her research, she also served as a lecturer and professor at the universities Mount Holyoke, University of Chicago and the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. She received two degrees from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts in Geology, and her doctorate at Johns Hopkins University in 1933.

#2686

Audrey H. Sawyer

Audrey H. Sawyer

#180862

Overall Influence

Audrey Hucks Sawyer is an American hydrogeologist and Assistant Professor of Earth Science at Ohio State University. Her work has focused on quantifying the role of groundwater - surface water interactions in transporting nutrients, contaminants, and heat in rivers and coastal settings. Sawyer has won multiple awards, including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2018 and the Kohout Early Career Award in 2016.

#2687

Katja Matthes

#185240

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

#2688

Daniel Francis Merriam

#170286

Overall Influence

1927 - 2017 (90 years)

Daniel Francis Merriam was an American geologist best known for fostering the development of quantitative modeling in geology after the advent of digital computers. He first joined the Kansas Geological Survey in 1953, initially working under the direction Raymond C. Moore to have a more accurate knowledge about the geology of the state. His fascination with the new possibilities offered by computers started ten years later while working with John W. Harbaugh at Stanford University as Visiting Research Scientist. In the following seven years, he was active organizing colloquia and as editor of the Computer Contributions, who saw 50 publications in the series by pioneers in the new field.

#2689

Dominique Moran

#184089

Overall Influence

Dominique Moran is a British academic geographer. She is a professor in carceral geography at the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham. Early life and education Moran was born in Wigan in Lancashire, UK. Her father, Jo Moran was a credit draper and ornithologist, mountaineer and wildlife photographer. He was the first person to photograph the Leach's Petrel at the nest, and the first to climb the cliffs of the Noup of Noss in Shetland. Her mother Margaret was a carer for disabled people. She studied geography at Christ Church, University of Oxf...

#2690

Paweł Rowiński

#41593

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Paweł Mariusz Rowiński is a Polish hydrogeologist, hydrodynamicist, geophysicist, full professor at the Institute of Geophysics, Polish Academy of Sciences, a full member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, vice-president of the Polish Academy of Sciences .

#2691

Albert Klein Tank

#105374

Overall Influence

Professor Albert Klein Tank is head of the British Met Office's Hadley climate research centre. External links https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Albert-Klein-Tank-2114716204

#2692

Kate Brauman

#175168

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Kate A. Brauman is an American scientist who uses an interdisciplinary tool set to examine the interactions between land use change and water resources. Brauman is the lead scientist for the Global Water Initiative at University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment.

#2693

Neil Banerjee

#126554

Overall Influence

Neil R. Banerjee is a Canadian earth scientist researching the geologic history of the origins of life and also the structure of the Earth as recorded in oceanic sediments and rocks. Banerjee graduated from Dalhousie University in 1996 with a M.Sc.

#2694

Gareth Jones

#185315

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Gareth Jones is a professor of urban geography in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics , and an Associate Fellow at the Institute for the Study of the Americas in the School of Advanced Study at the University of London.

#2695

Rocco Louis Gentilcore

#182119

Overall Influence

1924 - 1993 (69 years)

Rocco Louis Gentilcore was an author and a professor of historical geography at McMaster University, in Hamilton, in what is now the School of Earth, Environment & Society. His parents were emigrants from the town of Molinara in the Campania region of Italy. He studied at the University of Toronto and obtained his PhD from the University of Maryland. His research was on the historical geography of Canada, and, in particular, settlement development in eastern Canada during the nineteenth century. He edited the second volume of the Historical Atlas of Canada, a three-volume collaborative resear...

#2696

Stephen Herrero

#67675

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Stephen Herrero is a Canadian professor emeritus of ecology at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance, which has been described as "authoritative" and "required reading" on the topic.

#2697

Jennifer Eigenbrode

#172895

Overall Influence

Jennifer Eigenbrode is an interdisciplinary astrobiologist who works at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. She specializes in organic chemistry, geology, and organic bio-geochemistry of martian and ocean-world environments.

#2698

Clare Palmer

#78013

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Clare Palmer is a British philosopher, theologian and scholar of environmental and religious studies. She is known for her work on environmental and animal ethics. She was appointed as a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Texas A&M University in 2010. She had previously held academic appointments at the Universities of Greenwich, Stirling, and Lancaster in the United Kingdom, and Washington University in St. Louis in the United States, among others.

#2699

Arturo Sanchez-Azofeifa

#99799

Overall Influence

Gerardo Arturo Sánchez-Azofeifa is a full professor at the University of Alberta, the director of the university's Center for Earth Observation Sciences, and the director of Tropi-Dry, a research group focusing on land use/policy studies in tropical dry regions of the Americas. His research is related to the study of impacts of land use/cover change on biodiversity loss and habitat fragmentation in tropical dry forest environments.

#2700

Subir Kumar Ghosh

#49341

Overall Influence

1932 - 2008 (76 years)

Subir Kumar Ghosh was an Indian structural geologist and an emeritus professor at Jadavpur University. He was known for his studies on theoretical and experimental structural geology and was an elected fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, and the Indian Academy of Sciences. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Earth, Atmosphere, Ocean, and Planetary Sciences in 197...

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