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 Philosophy,
#11551
William Andrew Moffett
#56566
Overall Influence
1933 - 1995 (62 years)
William Andrew Moffett was a historian and librarian who was named "100 of the Most Important Leaders We Had in the 20th Century" by American Libraries in 1999. He is primarily known for aiding in the capture of a prolific library thief, James Richard Shinn, and, more famously, opening access of the Dead Sea Scrolls for scholarly use, both of which news stories made the front page of the New York Times. Moffett was also known for being a highly influential academic librarian director at Oberlin College, the 6th Librarian at the Huntington Library and for being named Academic/Research Librar...
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Prem Lata Sharma
#90549
Overall Influence
1927 - 1998 (71 years)
Prem Lata Sharma, 10-05-1927 to 05-12-1998, was an Indian musicologist. Life Prem Lata Sharma was born on 10 May 1927, in Nakodar, District Jalandhar, East Panjab. She was the only child of her parents, Pandita Lalchand sharma, Srimati, Mayadevi,. Both of them were devoted Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas and they brought up their only child, Premlata, in a serene and pious atmosphere. She received her primary and secondary training at home in Delhi along with training in vocal music and sitar. She passed her High School Examination from Panjab University in 1938 at the age of eleven. For the next two years she studied at the University of Delhi in 1940.
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Lewis Leavitt
#69113
Overall Influence
Lewis A. Leavitt is medical director of the Waisman Center on Human Development at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine. Leavitt graduated from the University of Chicago School of Medicine and is the husband of medical historian Judith Walzer Leavitt.
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Dafydd Stephens
#72375
Overall Influence
1942 - 2012 (70 years)
Dafydd Stephens was an audiological physician, holding the post of Honorary Professor of Audiological Medicine at the Cardiff University School of Medicine at Cardiff University. He was also a visiting professor at Swansea University and the University of Bristol. He previously worked as a consultant audiological physician at the Welsh Hearing Institute, University Hospital of Wales.
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France Cukjati
#134064
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
France Cukjati is a Slovenian politician, physician, theologian and a former Jesuit. Till 21 December 2011, he served as deputy speaker of the National Assembly of Slovenia. He was born in the village of Šentgotard near Trojane in central Slovenia . His father fell in World War II as a member of the Yugoslav partisan resistance, while his mother was a local schoolteacher. He studied civil engineering at the University of Ljubljana, before being drafted to the Yugoslav People's Army. In 1964, he entered the Jesuit order. In 1966, he enrolled at the University of Zagreb, where he studied philosophy.
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Wilfried Gruhn
#89499
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Wilfried Gruhn is a German violinist, musicologist, music educator, and professor emeritus at universities in Germany and abroad. His focus is the music education of small children. He founded and directed the Gordon Institute of early childhood music learning in Freiburg in 2003. He is engaged in several international organisations such as International Society for Music Education and the Internationale Leo Kestenberg Gesellschaft which published Leo Kestenberg's complete writings in six volumes.
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David E. Levy
#182722
Overall Influence
#11558
Daoud Hanania
#37437
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Daoud Anastas Hanania is a Jordanian heart surgeon. Hanania is a former Lieutenant General in the Jordanian Armed Forces and former Senator in the Jordanian Parliament. Family background and education Daoud Hanania was born into an Orthodox Christian Palestinian family originally hailed from Jerusalem, Palestine. His father, Anastas Hanania, was a lawyer and politician. The Hananias lived in West Jerusalem until 1948. In the early 1950s they permanently moved to Amman, Jordan, where Hanania's father came to hold several cabinet positions in the Jordanian government, including Foreign Minister, Minister of Justice, Minister for Refugees and Minister of Finance.
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Ewa Majewska
#175732
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Ewa Alicja Majewska is a Polish philosopher, political activist and an author. In the 1990s and early 2000s, she was involved in anarchist, anti-border, ecological and women's movements. She is a contributor to prominent international conferences, projects and published articles and essays, in journals, magazines, and collected volumes, including: e-flux, Signs, Third Text, Journal of Utopian Studies, and Jacobin.
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Maria Oliva-Hemker
#120100
Overall Influence
Maria M. Oliva-Hemker is a Cuban-American pediatrician. She is the Stermer Family Professor of Pediatric Inflammatory Bowel Disease , Director of the Division of Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition and Vice Dean for Faculty at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
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Carl E. Schneider
#123700
Overall Influence
Carl E. Schneider was an American lawyer and bioethicist. He served as Chauncey Stillman Professor of Law and as Professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan. He was educated at Harvard College and received his JD from the University of Michigan, where he served as editor-in-chief of the law review. Schneider subsequently clerked for Judge Carl McGowan of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit; he served in the same capacity for Justice Potter Stewart of the United States Supreme Court. In 1981, he joined the law faculty at the University of Michigan.
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Richard S. Potember
#65948
Overall Influence
Richard S. Potember is an American scientist and inventor. He is currently a principal systems engineer at MITRE. Prior to this he was a program manager in the Tactical Technology Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency . He has been an instructor at the Whiting School of Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University since 1987. He was a member of the principal professional staff at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland, from 1981 to 2015. He served as an adjunct professor at The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies from 1995 to 1998. H...
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Paula Jameson
#168558
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Paula Elizabeth Jameson is a New Zealand plant physiologist. Biography In1982 Jameson was awarded a PhD titled 'A study on the role of cytokinins in the development of starch accumulating structures from the University of Canterbury. After working at Otago University and serving as head of department at Massey University, Jameson moved to the University of Canterbury. Jameson is a Fellow of the New Zealand Institute of Agricultural and Horticultural Science and a life member of the New Zealand Society of Plant Physiologists.
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Sachiko Kamimura
#62355
Overall Influence
Sachiko Kamimura is a Japanese animator. She is noted for her work with Sunrise, where she was the supervising animator and character designer for the City Hunter series and several others, mentoring future several Sunrise character designers and animators, including Toshihiro Kawamoto.
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Berta Geller
#177750
Overall Influence
Berta M. Geller is an American research professor emeritus in the department of family medicine at the University of Vermont College of Medicine. She was a long time faculty member in its health promotion office.
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Natalie Kononenko
#26575
Overall Influence
Natalie Kononenko is a professor of folklore currently with the University of Alberta. Kononenko is a major contributor to the study of Ukrainian Blind Minstrels as well as in the area of witchcraft in Slavic cultures. She currently holds the Peter and Doris Kule Chair of Ukrainian Ethnography and is the head of the Slavic and East European section of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies. She attended Radcliffe College and Harvard University.
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Eddie Kramer
#23226
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Edwin H. Kramer is a South African-born recording producer and engineer. He has collaborated with several artists now in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, including Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, the Kinks, Kiss, John Mellencamp, and Carlos Santana, as well as records for other well-known artists in various genres.
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E. Andrew Balas
#81485
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
E. Andrew Balas is a Hungarian academic who is a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and elected member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. He serves as Professor at Augusta University . Balas is Vice President of the Friends of the National Library of Medicine.
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Aaron Afia
#91908
Overall Influence
Aaron Afia , also known as Affius, was a sixteenth-century Jewish ex-converso scientist, mathematician, philosopher, and physician living in Salonika. He was the teacher of Daniel ben Perachiah, whom he assisted in the translation from the Spanish into Hebrew of Abraham Zacuto's Almanach perpetuum , and Moses Almosnino, whom he assisted in his Hebrew translation of Johannes de Sacrobosco's De sphaera mundi. Almosnino's Bet Elokim—an astronomical work which draws on Georg von Peuerbach's Theorica planetarium—also contains work by Afia at the end.
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François Brousse
#167948
Overall Influence
1913 - 1995 (82 years)
François Brousse was a philosophy professor who had mainly taught in the Languedoc-Roussillon region and is the author of some 80 works including poetry, essays , novels, plays and storybooks. He was a pioneer of the philosophy cafes that were popping up almost everywhere in France at the end of the 20th century. Brousse was born in Perpignan, France and died in Clamart, France.
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Peter Manley Scott
#136450
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Peter Manley Scott is a British theologian and Samuel Ferguson Professor of Applied Theology & Director of the Lincoln Theological Institute at the University of Manchester. He is best known for his research on political theology. Scott is the Chair of the European Forum for the Study of Religion and the Environment.
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Mark S. Humayun
#32338
Overall Influence
Mark S. Humayun is a Pakistani-American ophthalmologist, engineer, scientist, inventor and academic – the only ophthalmologist elected a member of both U.S. National Academies of Medicine and Engineering. He is a university professor with joint appointments at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.
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Edward Halper
#182889
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Edward Charles Halper is an American philosopher and Distinguished Research Professor and Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor at University of Georgia. He is a former president of the Metaphysical Society of America . He specializes in ancient Greek philosophy and Hegel, and he is especially known for his multi-volume commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics.
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Tony Smith
#168727
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Tony Smith is an American philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Iowa State University. He is known for his works on capitalism, Hegel, and Marx. Books Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism: Marx and Normative Social Theory in the Twenty-First Century, Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2017Globalisation: A Systematic Marxian Account, Brill Press, 2005. [paperback: Haymarket Books, 2009.]Technology and Capital in the Age of Lean Production: A Marxian Critique of the “New Economy”, State University of New York Press, 2000.Dialectical Social Theory and Its Critics: From Hegel to Analytical Ma...
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B. Lawrence Riggs
#182893
Overall Influence
#11576
Rubén Nuñez de Cáceres
#178250
Overall Influence
Rubén Nuñez de Cáceres was a professor and the founder/director of the Centro de Valores Humanos of the Tec de Monterrey, Campus Tampico. He received his bachelor's degree in philosophy from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Italy and a bachelor's degree and master's degree in Spanish from the Comillas Pontifical University in Spain. As a professor, he taught courses in philosophy, ethics and professional values. He feels that students not only need to have access to the latest technology and knowledge but also to training to make them better professionals and human beings.
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John P. A. Ioannidis
#182905
Overall Influence
#11578
Carl F. Craver
#180391
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Carl F. Craver is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy and Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis. He is known for his works on philosophy of science and philosophy of mind.
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Paul Hasluck
#37495
Overall Influence
1905 - 1993 (88 years)
Sir Paul Meernaa Caedwalla Hasluck, was an Australian statesman who served as the 17th Governor-General of Australia, in office from 1969 to 1974. Prior to that, he was a Liberal Party politician, holding ministerial office continuously from 1951 to 1969.
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Vincent Riolo
#182940
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Vincent Riolo is a Maltese philosopher mostly interested and specialised in logic and the philosophy of language. Life Riolo was born at Mosta, Malta, in 1947. He studied philosophy at the University of Malta and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Bavaria, Germany, where he was a student of Paul Lorenzen , founder of the Erlangen School. Riolo teaches logic at various faculties of the University of Malta. At the Department of Philosophy he also teaches philosophy of science.
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Rachel Naomi Remen
#58789
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Rachel Naomi Remen although trained as a pediatrician gained fame as an author and teacher of alternative medicine in the form of integrative medicine. She is a professor at the Osher Center of Integrative Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Together with Michael Lerner, she is a founder of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, a cornerstone program at Commonweal. She is the founder of the Institute for the Study of Health & Illness. She has been featured on the PBS television series, Thinking Allowed.
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Ana Borovečki
#175828
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Ana Borovečki is a Croatian female clinical pharmacologist and toxicologist. Biography Borovečki is born in 1973 in Zagreb, where she attended Classical Gymnasium and graduated in 1998 at the School of Medicine at the University of Zagreb. She graduated in philosophy and comparative literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb in 2000 with master's thesis "Marko Marulić- 'Glasgow verses'" under the mentorship of Andrea Zlatar. She mastered bioethics in 2004 at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Borovečki earned her doctor's degree in bioethics in 2007 at ...
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Gregor Wenning
#74209
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Gregor Karl Wenning is a German neurologist best known for his clinical and scientific work in Parkinson's disease and atypical Parkinsonian disorders, particularly multiple system atrophy . In 2006 he was appointed Professor and Head of the Division of Clinical Neurobiology at the Medical University Innsbruck.
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Jonathan D. Quick
#98679
Overall Influence
Jonathan D. Quick , is a family physician and public health management specialist that focuses on global health security. He is adjunct professor of global health at Duke University in North Carolina. His book The End of Epidemics: The Looming Threat to Humanity and How to Stop It was published in 2018.
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Arthur DeBoer
#66277
Overall Influence
1917 - 2007 (90 years)
Arthur DeBoer, , was an American cardiologist specializing in cardiac surgery at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. DeBoer was one of the pioneer cardiac surgeons in Chicago and was on staff at Wesley Memorial Hospital . DeBoer was the hospital's first chief of cardiothoracic surgery, and performed the first open heart operation at Wesley Memorial Hospital in 1958. He served as Chair of Northwestern's Department of Cardiovascular Surgery until 1975. He was also a pioneer in research on congenital heart defects.
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Jasna Koteska
#131189
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Jasna Koteska is a Macedonian writer, philosopher and academic. She is a Professor in humanities at the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje. Koteska works with 19th-century philosophy, Psychoanalytic Theory, and Gender studies. She has published books on Søren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, and on a variety of topics related to psychoanalytic theory and gender studies. Her books have been published in Washington, D.C., Toronto, Ljubljana, Belgrade, Sofia and Skopje.
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Gopal Balakrishnan
#131959
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Gopal Balakrishnan was a professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, until he was fired due to allegations of sexual assault. Balakrishnan studied European intellectual history and historical sociology at UCLA during the 1990s with Perry Anderson, Robert Brenner, Rogers Brubaker, and Michael Mann. He worked on political thought, intellectual history, and critical theory. Prior to his appointment at UC-Santa Cruz, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago.
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Curt Smith
#66382
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Curt Smith is an American author, media host and columnist. In addition to work as a newspaper reporter, Smith was a political speechwriter until 1992 and a host of radio and television programs until 2002. He has written 17 books, including Voices of the Game, which covers the history of baseball broadcasting. Smith is a newspaper columnist in upstate New York and holds an academic appointment at the University of Rochester.
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Camila Alire
#65775
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Camila Alire is an American librarian and was president of the American Library Association from 2009 to 2010. She was the first Hispanic president of the ALA. She was previously the president of REFORMA, National Association to Promote Library and Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish-speaking, in 1993-1994.
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Kevin Waters
#101562
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
J. Kevin Waters S.J. is a Jesuit priest, composer, educator, and retired Academic Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences of Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. Early life John Kevin Waters was born June 24, 1933, in Seattle, WA, the third child of Thomas Waters and Eleanor Waters. He has an older sister, Maribeth, an older brother, Thomas, and a younger sister, Kathleen. He began his education at Sacred Heart School in Seattle and Showalter Grade School in Riverton Heights, WA. During high school he was a student at O'Dea High School and Seattle Preparatory School, from which he graduated in 1951.
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Cristina Possas
#77258
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Cristina Possas de Albuquerque is a Brazilian public health scientist working with infectious diseases and emerging infectious diseases from an eco-social perspective. She is a Takemi Fellow at Harvard University in Boston, where for 10 years she has been a visiting scientist and a Fulbright Fellow. She has been since 1976 a professor at FIOCRUZ in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
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Johannes Vieweg
#77268
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Johannes W. Vieweg is an American medical school dean, university professor, and physician-scientist, presently residing in the city of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Early life and education Vieweg received his medical degree from the Technical University of Munich in 1983. After relocating to the United States, in 1991, he spent three years as a post-doctoral research fellow at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY and Duke University, Durham, NC under the mentorship of Eli Gilboa, PhD, a prominent expert in retrovirology and cell therapy.
Go to Profile#11593
Robert Peter Gale
#183064
Overall Influence
#11594
Banmei Takahashi
#119072
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
is a Japanese film director. Takahashi started his career in the pink film industry, making his directorial debut in 1972 with Escaped Rapist Criminal. Due to a disagreement with his producer, Takahashi quit the film industry for a couple years. He joined pink film pioneer Kōji Wakamatsu's production studio in 1975, working as a script-writer until Wakamatsu produced Takahashi's second film, Delinquent File: Juvenile Prostitution . For the next few years Takahashi averaged five films annually at Wakamatsu's studio, until Takahashi left to start his own production company in 1979.
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Hugo Herrera
#154079
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Hugo Eduardo Herrera Arellano is a Chilean lawyer, philosopher and scholar dedicated to the Philosophy of Right. Known as the theoretician of the Chilean "social right-wing", Herrera works as a professor at the Schools of Law of the Diego Portales University and the University of Valparaíso .
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Kenneth B. Pyle
#51597
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Kenneth B. Pyle is a Japan historian and professor emeritus of History and International Studies at the University of Washington Seattle campus. He earned his BA from Harvard College in 1958. Since earning his PhD in Japanese History from Johns Hopkins University in 1965, he has become a major figure in the area of Japan studies, publishing several books on Japan and its international relations, serving as the first editor of the Journal of Japanese Studies from 1974 to 1986 and director of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington from 1978 to 1988, and appointed by President George H.
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Angela Dale
#105676
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Angela Dale is a British social scientist and statistician whose research has involved the secondary analysis of government survey data, and the study of women in the workforce. Formerly Deputy Director of the Social Statistics Research Unit of City, University of London, and Professor of Quantitative Research and Director of the Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research at the University of Manchester, she is now a professor emerita at Manchester.
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Wolfram Goessling
#114958
Overall Influence
Wolfram Goessling is a physician-scientist who specializes in oncology and gastroenterology. He is the Robert H. Ebert Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Chief of the Division of Gastroenterology at Massachusetts General Hospital. Goessling is also involved in the Harvard–MIT Program of Health Sciences and Technology , where he is co-director with Emery N. Brown.
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Józef Michał Chomiński
#113836
Overall Influence
1906 - 1994 (88 years)
Józef Michał Chomiński was a Polish musicologist of Ukrainian origin. He studied composition and conducting at Lviv Conservatory and musicology at John Casimir University in Lviv under Adolf Chybiński. From 1949 he taught in the School of Musicology of Warsaw University. From 1951 to 1968, he also worked at the State Institute of Art which became the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences in since 1959. He trained several generations of Polish musicologists.
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Wafik El-Deiry
#26552
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Wafik El-Deiry is an American physician and cancer researcher who is the Associate Dean for Oncologic Sciences at the Warren Alpert Medical School, Brown University, Director of the Cancer Center at Brown University, and the Director of the Joint Program in Cancer Biology at Brown University and its affiliated hospitals. He was previously deputy director of Translational Research at Fox Chase Cancer Center, where he was also co-Leader of the Molecular Therapeutics Program.
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