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).

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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#7601

Kathy Ensor

#84607
Overall Influence
Katherine Bennett Ensor is an American statistician specializing in numerous methods in computational and statistical analysis of time series data, stochastic process modeling, and estimation to forecast issues in public health, community informatics, computational finance, and environmental statistics.
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#7602

Pierre Dolbeault

Pierre Dolbeault
#55400
Overall Influence
1924 - 2015 (91 years)
Pierre Dolbeault was a French mathematician. Dolbeault studied with Henri Cartan and graduated in 1944 from the École Normale Supérieure. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Paris in 1955 under the supervision of Cartan, with a dissertation titled Formes différentielles et cohomologie sur une variété analytique complexe.
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#7603

Agnes Berger

#83968
Overall Influence
1916 - 2002 (86 years)
Agnes P. Berger was a Hungarian-American mathematician who served as an associate professor of biostatistics at Columbia University's School of Public Health, as well as a statistical consultant at Mount Sinai.
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#7604

O. Carruth McGehee

#164304
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
Oscar Carruth McGehee is an American mathematician, specializing in commutative harmonic analysis, functional analysis, and complex analysis. Education and career After graduation from Baton Rouge High School, McGehee matriculated at Rice University, where he received his B.A. in 1961. He became a graduate student at Yale University, where he graduated with M.A. in 1963 and Ph.D. in 1966. His doctoral dissertation was Two Problems of Fourier Analysis on Thin Sets, supervised by Yitzhak Katznelson.
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#7605

Natalia Sobczak

#66137
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Natalia Sobczak is a professor of materials engineering at the Institute of Metallurgy and Materials Science, Polish Academy of Sciences, and Vice President of the Polish Academy of Sciences in the 2023–2026 term. She specializes in the physicochemistry of metals and alloys, physical metallurgy and heat treatment, foundry engineering, and the practice and theory of metal composites.
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#7606

Ralph B. D'Agostino

#138624
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Ralph Benedict D'Agostino Sr. is an American biostatistician and professor of Mathematics/Statistics, Biostatistics and Epidemiology at Boston University. He was the director of the Statistics and Consulting Unit of the Framingham Study and the executive director of the M.A./Ph.D. program in biostatistics at Boston University. He was elected a fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1990 and of the American Heart Association in 1991.
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#7607

Kaumudi Joshipura

#110444
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Kaumudi Jinraj Joshipura is an Indian American Epidemiologist, Biostatistician, Dentist & Scientist. She is Adjunct Full Professor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University and NIH Endowed Chair and Director of the Center for Clinical Research and Health Promotion and a Full Professor at the University of Puerto Rico, Medical Sciences Campus. Her research work has been covered by global media including CNN, ABC, NBC, NHS, Newsweek, Nature, Telegraph, Japanese Journals and Japanese TV etc.
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#7608

James Renegar

#102271
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
James Milton Renegar Jr. is an American mathematician, specializing in optimization algorithms for linear programming and nonlinear programming. Biography In 1983 he received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. His Ph.D. thesis On the Computational Complexity of Simplicial Algorithms in Approximation Zeros of Complex Polynomials was supervised by Stephen Smale. After postdoc positions, Renegar joined in 1987 the faculty of the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell University and is now a full professor there.
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#7609

Ioanna Tzoulaki

#148485
Overall Influence
Ioanna Tzoulaki is a professor of Chronic Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College London. She investigates prognostic risk factors and models for chronic diseases and meta-epidemiology. In 2019 she received a Greek L’ORÉAL-UNESCO Award for Women in Science.
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#7610

William R. Newman

William R. Newman
#23645
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
William R. Newman is Distinguished Professor and Ruth N. Halls Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University. Most of Newman’s work in the History of Science has been devoted to alchemy and "chymistry," the art-nature debate, and matter theories, particularly atomism. Newman is also General Editor of the Chymistry of Isaac Newton, an online resource combining born-digital editions of Newton’s alchemical writings with multimedia replications of Newton’s alchemical experiments. In addition, he was Director of the Catapult Center for Digital Humanities and Computational Analysis of Texts at Indiana University.
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#7611

Jelte Wicherts

#39841
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (49 years)
Jelte Michiel "J.M." Wicherts is a Dutch psychologist and professor in the Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Tilburg University. His research interests include biases in decision making, as well as scientific misconduct and reproducibility. He has also researched group differences in IQ scores and the Flynn effect.
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#7612

Lewi Stone

#168371
Overall Influence
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#7613

Melvin L. Moeschberger

#148994
Overall Influence
1940 - 2019 (79 years)
Melvin Lee Moeschberger was an American biostatistician. Early life Moeschberger was a native of Berne, Indiana, born to parents Howard and Luella. He studied mathematics and chemistry at Taylor University and completed a master's degree at Ohio University before earning a doctorate in statistics from North Carolina State University, followed by postdoctoral work at the University of North Carolina. He taught biostatistics at Ohio State University for three decades, and retired from the University of Missouri after ten years. Moeschberger was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Statistical Association.
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#7614

Li Jianshu

#107390
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Li Jianshu , also known as Jian-Shu Li, is a Chinese mathematician working in representation theory and automorphic forms. He is the founding director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics at Zhejiang University and Professor Emeritus at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
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#7615

Alain A. Lewis

#109454
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Alain A. Lewis is an American mathematician. A student of the mathematical economist Kenneth Arrow, Lewis is credited by the historian of economics Philip Mirowski with making Arrow aware of computational limits to economic agency.
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#7616

Erica Moodie

#124969
Overall Influence
Erica Eleanor Margret Moodie is a Canadian biostatistician known for her work on dynamic treatment regimes. She is Canada Research Chair and Professor in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health at McGill University.
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#7617

Brian Kuttner

#118789
Overall Influence
1908 - 1992 (84 years)
Brian Kuttner was an English mathematician who worked on Fourier Series.
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#7618

Hélène Massam

#120516
Overall Influence
1949 - 2020 (71 years)
Hélène Menexia Massam was a statistician known for her research on the Wishart distribution and on graphical models. She was a professor of mathematics and statistics at York University in Canada.
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#7619

Patrick Charnay

#116077
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Patrick Charnay is a French biologist, researcher. Serving as an Emeritus research director for Inserm, he works and teaches in molecular genetics and development biology at the École normale supérieure in Paris.
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#7620

Vladimir Popov

#158036
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Vladimir Leonidovich Popov is a Russian mathematician working in the invariant theory and the theory of transformation groups. Education and career In 1969 he graduated from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University. In 1972 he received his Candidate of Sciences degree with thesis Стабильность действия алгебраических групп и арифметика квазиоднородных многообразий . In 1984 he received his Russian Doctor of Sciences degree with thesis Группы, образующие, сизигии и орбиты в теории инвариантов .
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#7621

Daniela De Angelis

#161296
Overall Influence
Daniela De Angelis is an Italian biostatistician in the area of infectious disease modelling. Her current roles are Professor of Statistical Science for Health at the University of Cambridge in the Department of Primary Care and Public Health and Deputy Director and Programme Leader at the Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit. She has published research on the development and application of statistical methods to monitor infectious diseases such as SARS COVID-19, influenza, HIV and hepatitis C. Daniela is member of scientific advisory groups such as NICE, WHO, and UNAIDS. She is a memb...
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#7622

Sybilla Beckmann

#137269
Overall Influence
Sybilla Beckmann is a Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor of Mathematics, Emeritus, at the University of Georgia and a recipient of the Association for Women in Mathematics Louise Hay Award.
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#7623

Stephen Fairhurst

#168810
Overall Influence
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#7624

Sergei Starchenko

#151862
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (38 years)
Sergei Stepanovich Starchenko is a mathematical logician who was born and grew up in the Soviet Union and now works in the USA. Starchenko graduated from the Novosibirsk State University in 1983 with M.S. and then in 1987 received his Ph.D. there. His doctoral dissertation Number of models of Horn theories was written under the supervision of Evgenii Andreevich Palyutin. Starchenko was an assistant professor of mathematics at Vanderbilt University and is now a full professor at the University of Notre Dame.
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#7625

Theodorus Dekker

#79457
Overall Influence
1927 - 2021 (94 years)
Theodorus Jozef Dekker was a Dutch mathematician. Dekker completed his Ph.D. degree from the University of Amsterdam in 1958. His thesis was titled "Paradoxical Decompositions of Sets and Spaces". Dekker invented an algorithm that allows two processes to share a single-use resource without conflict, using only shared memory for communication, named Dekker's algorithm.
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#7626

Chao Agnes Hsiung

#127420
Overall Influence
Chao Agnes Hsiung is a Taiwanese biostatistician. She is a Distinguished Investigator in the Taiwanese National Health Research Institutes , and Director of the Institute of Population Health Sciences and of the Division of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics within the NHRI.
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#7627

David P. Dobkin

#168896
Overall Influence
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#7628

Michael Frame

#133527
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Michael Frame is an American mathematician and retired Yale professor. He is a co-author, along with Amelia Urry, of Fractal Worlds: Grown, Built, and Imagined. At Yale, he was a colleague of Benoit Mandelbrot and helped Mandelbrot develop a curriculum within the mathematics department.
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#7629

George Dassios

George Dassios
#148406
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
George Dassios is a Greek mathematician, scholar and corresponding member of the Academy of Athens. Biography Dassios was born in 1946, in Patras, Greece, where he attended primary and secondary education. He received his Bachelor's degree from the Department of Mathematics of the University of Athens in 1970 and continued his postgraduate studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he received his Master of Science in 1972 and his Ph.D. in 1975 in applied mathematics.
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#7630

Fang Kaitai

#154037
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Fang Kaitai , also known as Kai-Tai Fang, is a Chinese mathematician and statistician who has helped to develop generalized multivariate analysis, which extends classical multivariate analysis beyond the multivariate normal distribution to more general elliptical distributions. He has also contributed to the design of experiments.
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#7631

Veronica Czitrom

#125288
Overall Influence
Veronica A. Czitrom is a Mexican-American statistician known for her applications of statistics to the quality control of semiconductor manufacturing. Education and career Czitrom is originally from Mexico City. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a bachelor's degree in physics, continued at Berkeley for a master's degree in engineering, and became a professor of systems engineering and applications at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Subsequently, she returned to graduate study in mathematics and statistics at the University of Texas at Austin. Her 198...
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#7632

Joan Hu

#129171
Overall Influence
Xiaoqiong Joan Hu is a Chinese and Canadian statistician. Her research has involved pseudolikelihood, estimating functions, missing data, and varied applications of statistics. She is a professor of statistics at Simon Fraser University.
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#7633

Deborah A. Nolan

#122206
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Deborah A. Nolan is an American statistician and statistics educator. She is a professor of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where she chairs the department of statistics. Education and career Nolan graduated from Vassar College in 1977; she gained her first experience in statistics in a summer job at Vassar, doing statistical analyses for author Caroline Bird. After graduating, she began working as an applications programmer for IBM. Needing to learn more statistics for her work, she studied at Columbia University for a year, and then entered full-time graduate study in statistics at Yale University.
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#7634

Karla Hoffman

#94730
Overall Influence
Karla Leigh Hoffman is an American operations researcher, and the former president of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. She is a professor of systems engineering and operations research in the Volgenau School of Engineering of George Mason University. Her research has focused on practical applications of operations research and optimization to problems including transportation scheduling, airport landing slot allocation, spectrum auctions, and telecommunications budgeting.
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#7635

Dennis Harper

#56897
Overall Influence
Dennis O. Harper is an American educator and the founder of Generation YES, a nonprofit technology education organization founded in 1999. He is an active advocate for the transformative power of technology in education and for student leadership as change agents in schools.
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#7636

Helen Abbey

#106540
Overall Influence
1915 - 2001 (86 years)
Helen Abbey was an American biostatistician known for her research on the health effects of radiation and on infections among Native Americans, and for her prolific mentoring of students in statistics. She was affiliated with Johns Hopkins University for over 50 years.
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#7637

B. L. S. Prakasa Rao

#61678
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Bhagavatula Lakshmi Surya Prakasa Rao is an Indian statistician. He was born on 6 October 1942 in Porumamilla, Andhra Pradesh. He completed his B.A. course in Mathematics from Andhra University in 1960 and moved to the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, where he completed his M.Stat in Statistics in 1962. He graduated with a Ph.D in Statistics in 1966 from Michigan State University under Herman Rubin. He won the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in Mathematical Sciences in 1982 from the Government of India, the Outstanding Alumni award from the Michigan State University in 1996, and the National Award in memory of P V Sukhatme in 2008 from the Government of India.
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#7638

Ben Baumer

#121447
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (47 years)
Benjamin Strong Baumer is a statistician and sabermetrician. He is a professor of statistical and data sciences at Smith College, and was formerly the statistical analyst for the New York Mets. Life Baumer grew up in Northampton, Massachusetts. His parents are Polly Baumer and Don Baumer, a former magazine owner and professor of government at Smith College.
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#7639

Ivy Liu

#110598
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Ivy I-Ming Liu is a Taiwanese and New Zealander statistician specializing in categorical and ordinal data. She works as an associate professor and as head of the School of Mathematics and Statistics at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.
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#7640

Charmaine Dean

Charmaine Dean
#129522
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Charmaine B. Dean is a statistician from Trinidad. She is the vice president for research at the University of Waterloo, a professor of statistical and actuarial sciences at both Waterloo and Western University, the former president of the Western North American Region of the International Biometric Society, the former President of the Statistical Society of Canada. Her research interests include longitudinal studies, survival analysis, spatiotemporal data, heart surgery, and wildfires.
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#7641

Anatoli Vitushkin

#161680
Overall Influence
1931 - 2004 (73 years)
Anatoli Georgievich Vitushkin was a Soviet mathematician noted for his work on analytic capacity and other parts of mathematical analysis. Early life Anatoli Georgievich Vitushkin was born on 25 June 1931 in Moscow. He was blind.
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#7642

Helmar Frank

Helmar Frank
#25138
Overall Influence
1933 - 2013 (80 years)
Helmar Gunter Frank was a German mathematician and pedagogist. He was among the first scientists to apply mathematical methods in teaching and psychology. He established a method to measure intelligence on an absolute and homogeneous scale rather than by comparison between individuals.
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#7643

Katrina Sharples

#87860
Overall Influence
Katrina Jane Sharples is a New Zealand biostatistician. She is full professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Otago, and head of statistics at Otago. Sharples completed a Ph.D. in statistics at the University of Washington in 1989. Her dissertation, Regression Analysis of Correlated Binary Data, was supervised by Norman Breslow.
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#7644

Rinad Yulmukhametov

#65684
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Rinad Salavatovich Yulmukhametov is a Russian mathematician. Biography Yulmukhametov was born in the village Urge Atkol in Ishimbaysky District, now in Bashkortostan. He graduated from the Department of Mathematics of Bashkir State University and defended his doctoral thesis in 1987. 1995-2009 he is the head of the Department of Programming and Economic Informatics.
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#7645

Erez Lapid

#84266
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Erez M. Lapid is an Israeli mathematician, specializing in automorphic forms, L-functions, representation theory, and the Selberg–Arthur trace formula. In 1989 Lapid received from Tel Aviv University a B.Sc. and an M.Sc. in mathematics with M.Sc. advisor Aldo Lazar and thesis Compact actions on C*-algebras. In 1989–1994 he performed military service in the Israeli Defense Forces. In 1998 he received a Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science under Stephen Gelbart with thesis Multiplicities of cuspidal representations of SL and period integrals of truncated Eisenstein series. In the academic year 1998–1999 he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study.
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#7646

Rachel M. Harter

#66947
Overall Influence
Rachel Margaret Harter is an American statistician and an expert in small area estimation and survey methodology. She works at RTI International as a senior research statistician and as director of the Behavioral Statistics Program.
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#7647

Peter Orno

#157611
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (51 years)
Beginning in 1974, the fictitious Peter Orno appeared as the author of research papers in mathematics. According to Robert Phelps, the name "P. Orno" is a pseudonym that was inspired by "porno", an abbreviation for "pornography". Orno's short papers have been called "elegant" contributions to functional analysis. Orno's theorem on linear operators is important in the theory of Banach spaces. Research mathematicians have written acknowledgments that have thanked Orno for stimulating discussions and for Orno's generosity in allowing others to publish his results. The Mathematical Association of...
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#7648

Jon T. Pitts

#169626
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Jon T. Pitts is an American mathematician working on geometric analysis and variational calculus. He is a professor at Texas A&M University. Pitts obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1974 under the supervision of Frederick Almgren, Jr., with the thesis Every Compact Three-Dimensional Manifold Contains Two-Dimensional Minimal Submanifolds.
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#7649

Maria Silvia Lucido

#152760
Overall Influence
1963 - 2008 (45 years)
Maria Silvia Lucido was an Italian mathematician specializing in group theory, and a researcher in mathematics at the University of Udine. Life, education and career Lucido was originally from Vicenza, where she was born on 22 April 1963. After working for a bank and a travel agency, she entered mathematical study at the University of Padua in 1986, graduating in 1991. Already as an undergraduate she began research into the theory of finite groups, and wrote an undergraduate thesis on the subject under the supervision of Franco Napolitani. She completed a Ph.D. at Padua in 1996 with the disse...
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#7650

Serafim Kalliadasis

#151399
Overall Influence
Serafim Kalliadasis is an applied mathematician and chemical engineer working at Imperial College London since 2004. Career Serafim Kalliadasis earned a five-year undergraduate degree in chemical engineering at the Polytechnic School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. He graduated in 1989. In 1990 he started his PhD studies at the University of Notre Dame, USA. His doctoral thesis was in the general of fluid dynamics and was supervised by Prof. H.-C. Chang.
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