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 Philosophy,
#15651
Matthew Stuart
#174899
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Matthew Stuart is an American philosopher and a professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College. His primary work is in the field of Early Modern Philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics and focuses on the philosophy of John Locke. He is the author of Locke’s Metaphysics in which he takes a unique approach to John Locke's work "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" to view it as a strong Metaphysical text, rather than just that of epistemology. Some ideas approached in his book focus on "Locke's denial that bodies can be co-located", that "empty spaces within a body are not parts of...
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Ludwig Babenstuber
1660 - 1726 (66 years)
Ludwig Babenstuber was a German philosopher and theologian and vice-chancellor of the University of Salzburg. He was born in 1660 at Teining in Bavaria. Having completed his early studies he entered the novitiate of the Order of St. Benedict at Ettal Abbey in 1681, made his religious profession in 1682, and thereafter devoted the greater part of his life to teaching.
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Jeffrey Brown
#72209
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Jeffrey Brown is an American cartoonist born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Biography Early life and education After growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Brown moved to Chicago in 2000 to pursue an MFA at the School of the Art Institute. By the time he finished his studies, Brown had abandoned painting and started drawing comics seriously.
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Samra Turajlic
#172319
Overall Influence
Samra Turajlic is a medical oncologist and cancer researcher. She leads the cancer dynamics lab at the Francis Crick Institute in London, which focuses on understanding how cancers evolve, as well as working as an oncologist at the Royal Marsden.
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Alexander Victorovich Fedorov
#30786
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Alexander Victorovich Fedorov is a Russian scientist, teacher, media education specialist, film critic. He completed his Ph.D. dissertation about media education at the Russian Academy of Education .
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P. Adams Sitney
#111100
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
P. Adams Sitney , is a historian of American avant-garde cinema. He is known as the author of Visionary Film, one of the first books on the history of experimental film in the United States. Life Sitney attended Yale University, where he received an A.B. in classics in 1967 and a Ph.D. in comparative literature in 1980. He co-founded the Anthology Film Archives in 1970 and, along with Jonas Mekas, Peter Kubelka, Ken Kelman, and James Broughton, served as one of the members of the Anthology Film Archives Essential Cinema film selection committee. He is currently Professor of Visual Arts at the ...
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John Lawrence Hill
#177611
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
John Lawrence Hill is an American philosopher and law professor. Hill obtained a J.D. and Ph.D. in philosophy from Georgetown University. In 2003, he joined the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law where he is currently R. Bruce Townsend Professor of Law and adjunct professor of philosophy. He has published articles in the Cornell Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Iowa Law Review and the New York University Law Review.
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André Ungar
#159963
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
André Ungar was a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor, doctor of philosophy, liturgist, social activist, and rabbi who lived in England, South Africa and the United States. Life Ungar was born and raised in a prosperous Orthodox family in Budapest. The family survived the Holocaust by going into hiding under pseudonyms in a non-Jewish quarter of the city. In January 1955 he arrived to take up an appointment as rabbi of the Jewish Reform Congregation in Port Elizabeth. He considered Jewish opposition to apartheid was mandatory in terms of what they themselves had experienced during the Holocaust.
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Mike Youle
#99561
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Michael Simon Youle is a British doctor and clinical researcher specializing in HIV treatment. He publicised the concept of pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV and has studied the health economics of HIV therapy. In 1995, he was listed as one of 40 influential gay men by The Independent.
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Anthony Lane
#53997
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Anthony Lane is a British journalist who is a film critic for The New Yorker magazine. Career Education and early career Lane attended Sherborne School, graduating with a degree in English from Trinity College, Cambridge where he also did graduate work on T. S. Eliot. After graduation, he worked as a freelance writer and book reviewer for The Independent, where he was appointed deputy literary editor in 1989. In 1991, Lane was appointed film critic for The Independent on Sunday.
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Michel Hugo
#54029
Overall Influence
1930 - 2010 (80 years)
Michel Hugo was a French-American cinematographer and academic. His film and television credits included Dynasty, Melrose Place and Mission: Impossible. In 2001, Hugo became a professor at the film department of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
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Niccolò Perotti
1429 - 1480 (51 years)
Niccolò Perotti, also Perotto or Nicolaus Perottus was an Italian humanist and the author of one of the first modern Latin school grammars. Born in Sassoferrato , Marche, Perotti studied with Vittorino da Feltre in Mantua in 1443, then in Ferrara with Guarino. He also studied at the University of Padua. At the age of eighteen he spent some time in the household of the Englishman William Grey, later Lord High Treasurer, who was travelling in Italy and was a student of Guarino. He transcribed texts for Grey and accompanied him to Rome when he moved there. He was a secretary of Cardinal Basilius...
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Helen Boucher
#25770
Overall Influence
Helen Boucher is Dean of Tufts University School of Medicine and Chief Academic Officer of Tufts Medicine, the parent health system for Tufts Medical Center in Boston. Prior to this, she served as Chief of the Division of Geographic Medicine and Infectious Diseases at Tufts Medical Center, a Professor of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, and Director of the Stuart B. Levy Center for Integrated Management of Antimicrobial Resistance at Tufts.
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Jane Anderson
#82990
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Jane Anderson is a British physician who specialises in the management of HIV/AIDS. She has served as an expert advisor for Public Health England and is Chair of the National AIDS Trust. Early life and education Anderson was born in Swindon, Wiltshire on 23 December 1952. She originally trained as a nutritionist at Queen Elizabeth College. In an interview with The BMJ Anderson revealed that as a teenager she had underperformed in her A-levels and had initially not secured a place at medical school. Eventually she was accepted as a mature student to St Mary's Hospital Medical School. She started work as a research assistant in a metabolic unit.
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Clarisse Coignet
1824 - 1916 (92 years)
Clarisse Coignet was a French moral philosopher, educator, and historian. She was also associated with the social and political movement called La Morale independante, which advanced the idea that morality is independent from science and religion.
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Irving D. Kaplan
#173188
Overall Influence
Irving David Kaplan is an American radiation oncologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston Massachusetts and an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School. Kaplan attended Medical School at Stanford University School of Medicine in 1985, interned at Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Internal Medicine at Santa Barbara in 1986. He Completed his residency in Radiation Oncology at Standard in 1989.
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John Mitchell
1711 - 1768 (57 years)
John Mitchell was a colonial American physician and botanist. He created the most comprehensive and perhaps largest 18th-century map of eastern North America, known today as the Mitchell Map. First published in 1755, in conjunction with the imminent Seven Years' War, the map was subsequently used during the Treaty of Paris to define the boundaries of the newly independent United States and has been resolving border disputes since.
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E. E. Ericksen
1882 - 1967 (85 years)
Ephraim Edward Ericksen was an American philosopher and Mormon scholar who taught philosophy at the University of Utah for 30 years. He was a president of the American Philosophical Association, and is known as an influential figure in LDS intellectual history. The University of Utah E. E. Ericksen Chair of Philosophy was established in his honor in 1965.
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Pauline Byakika
#125598
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Pauline Byakika–Kibwika , is a Ugandan specialist physician, internist, epidemiologist, academic and researcher, who serves as an Associate Professor of Medicine at Makerere University College of Health Sciences. From 2017 until 2019, she served as the Vice President of the Uganda Medical Association, a professional industry association, that champions medical doctors' interests in the county.
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Vincent T. DeVita
#55840
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Vincent Theodore DeVita Jr. is the Amy and Joseph Perella Professor of Medicine at Yale Cancer Center, and a Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health. He directed the Yale Cancer Center from 1993 to 2003. He has been president of the American Cancer Society . He is internationally recognized as a pioneer in the field of oncology for his work on combination-chemotherapy treatments.
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Margaret Moore
#79061
Overall Influence
Margaret Moore is a Canadian political theorist, academic and scholar. She is a Professor of Political Studies and Philosophy at Queen's University at Kingston. Moore has written on territorial and global distributive justice, just war theory, historical injustice, nationalism, multiculturalism, immigration, and place-related interests. Moore has authored four books including Foundations of Liberalism, The Ethics of Nationalism, A Political Theory of Territory, and Who Should Own Natural Resources?.
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Carrie L. Byington
#53401
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Carrie L. Byington is a Mexican–American clinician and pediatric infectious disease specialist. In 2016, she became the first Hispanic woman to serve as Dean of a United States medical school upon her appointment at the Texas A&M University.
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John Dodge
#158224
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
John Ashton Dodge, CBE, FRCP, FRCPE, FRCPI, FRCPCH was a British paediatrician, specialising in cystic fibrosis. After his retirement in 1997, he became Emeritus Professor of Child Health at the Queen's University, Belfast, and Honorary Professor of Child Health at the University of Wales at Swansea.
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Ernie Fletcher
#43973
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Ernest Lee Fletcher is an American physician and politician who was the 60th governor of Kentucky from 2003 to 2007. He previously served three consecutive terms in the United States House of Representatives before resigning after elected governor. A member of the Republican Party, Fletcher was a family practice physician and a Baptist lay minister and is the second physician to be elected Governor of Kentucky; the first was Luke P. Blackburn in 1879. He was also the first Republican governor of Kentucky since Louie Nunn left office in 1971.
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Anton Ludwig Ernst Horn
1774 - 1848 (74 years)
Anton Ludwig Ernst Horn was a German physician who was a native of Braunschweig. In 1797 he received his doctorate from the University of Göttingen, and later worked as a physician at the clinical institute in Braunschweig. For a short period of time he was a professor of medicine at the Universities of Wittenberg and Erlangen , and in 1806 went to work at the medical hospital at the Charité in Berlin. One of his well-known students was Moritz Heinrich Romberg .
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James Balfour
1705 - 1795 (90 years)
James Balfour of Pilrig JP was a Scottish advocate and philosopher. Life He was born on 20 August 1705 at Pilrig House, midway between Leith and Edinburgh. He was one of the 16 children of Louisa Hamilton and her husband, James Balfour . His father had acquired the estate of Pilrig from the Gilbert family, which had lost a fortune in the Darien Expedition. His father built the current Pilrig House around 1705.
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Aida Habtezion
#104812
Overall Influence
Aida Habtezion is an Eritrean physician and immunologist. In 2021, Habtezion took a leave of absence from Stanford University to become the Chief Medical Officer of Pfizer and head of Worldwide Medical and Safety within Worldwide Research, Development, and Medicine.
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Ran Lahav
#159519
Overall Influence
Ran Lahav is an Israeli-born American philosopher who developed philosophical activities for the general public. Since the early 1990s he has given workshops and retreats around the world, and published books and articles. Since the early 2010s he has been developing formats of philosophical contemplation, known as Deep Philosophy.
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Martinus Richter
#136970
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Martinus Richter is a German orthopaedic surgeon, and Associate Professor at the Hannover Medical School and Head of the Department for Foot and Ankle Surgery Nuremberg and Rummelsberg at the Hospital Rummelsberg and Sana-Hospital Nuremberg.
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Charles Wilkins Short
1794 - 1863 (69 years)
Charles Wilkins Short was an American botanist. He primarily worked in the state of Kentucky. Short discovered several species of plants and has six species of plants named after him. He attended Transylvania University and the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to being a botanist, he practiced medicine and taught materia medica. Short also owned a sizable herbarium. Short retired from teaching in 1849.
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Richard Harris
#23518
Overall Influence
Richard Harris, , is an Australian anaesthetist and cave diver who played a crucial role in the Tham Luang cave rescue. He and Craig Challen were jointly awarded 2019 Australian of the Year as a result of that rescue.
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Dafydd Williams
#7821
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Dafydd "David" Rhys Williams is a Canadian physician, public speaker, author and retired CSA astronaut. Williams was a mission specialist on two Space Shuttle missions. His first spaceflight, STS-90 in 1998, was a 16-day mission aboard Space Shuttle Columbia dedicated to neuroscience research. His second flight, STS-118 in August 2007, was flown by Space Shuttle Endeavour to the International Space Station. During that mission he performed three spacewalks, becoming the third Canadian to perform a spacewalk and setting a Canadian record for total number of spacewalks. These spacewalks combin...
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Wilhelm Sohn
1830 - 1899 (69 years)
Johann August Wilhelm Sohn was a German genre painter and art professor. Life Johann August Wilhelm Sohn was born 29 August 1829, in Berlin, Germany. In 1847, he went to Düsseldorf, where he studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Rudolf Wiegmann, Theodor Hildebrandt, Wilhelm von Schadow and his uncle, Karl Ferdinand Sohn. After that, he supplemented his studies by traveling extensively. In 1861, he married his cousin, Sophie Emilie Sohn, making Karl Ferdinand his uncle and father-in-law. In keeping with the spirit of the Düsseldorf school of painting, he began by painting Biblical history scenes; notably "Christ on the Stormy Waters".
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Herbert Morris
#168421
Overall Influence
1928 - 2022 (94 years)
Herbert Morris was an American philosopher, legal scholar, and literary critic, who spent his career at the University of California, Los Angeles. Education and career Herbert Morris was born in New York City in 1928. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of California, Los Angeles 1951; Bachelor of Law, Yale, 1954; Doctor of Philosophy, Oxford, 1956. He joined the UCLA Philosophy Department in 1956 and beginning in 1962 he accepted a joint appointment with the UCLA School of Law.
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P. Anthony Di Sant’agnese
#181383
Overall Influence
#15686
Samuel Epstein
#74952
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Samuel Seymour Epstein was a physician and, at the time of his death, professor emeritus of environmental and occupational health at the School of Public Health of the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is known for his contributions on avoidable causes of cancer, for which he was given the Right Livelihood Award in 1998. His papers are held at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.
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L.D. Britt
#40672
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Lunzy Delano "L. D." Britt FACS, FCCM is an American physician and is the Brickhouse Professor of Surgery at the Eastern Virginia Medical School, former President of the American College of Surgeons, and former President of the Southern Surgical Association. Britt was the first African American in the United States to receive an endowed chair in surgery at a major American medical school.
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Charles Hampden-Turner
#14609
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Charles Hampden-Turner is a British management philosopher, and Senior Research Associate at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge since 1990. He is the creator of Dilemma Theory and co-founder and Director of Research and Development at the Trompenaars-Hampden-Turner Group, in Amsterdam.
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Filippo Beroaldo
1453 - 1505 (52 years)
Filippo Beroaldo, sometimes called "the Elder" to distinguish him from his cousin Filippo Beroaldo the Younger, and also known as Philip or Philippus Beroaldus was an Italian humanist active as a professor at the University of Bologna.
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Jack Westrup
1904 - 1975 (71 years)
Sir Jack Westrup, FBA was an English musicologist, writer, teacher and occasional conductor and composer. Biography Jack Allan Westrup was the second of the three sons of George Westrup, insurance clerk, of Dulwich, and his wife, Harriet Sophia née Allan. He was educated at Dulwich College, London 1917–22, and at Balliol College, Oxford. He first read classics in which he gained first class honours in moderations and second class honours in literae humaniores . He gained his B.Mus. degree in 1926, and a Master of Arts in 1929. He took an active part in music in the university as a keyboard and brass player.
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Stacy Tessler Lindau
#169871
Overall Influence
Stacy Tessler Lindau is an American gynecologist and practicing OB-GYN. She is a Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Medicine-Geriatrics at the University of Chicago and director of the Program in Integrative Sexual Medicine at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
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Talbot Brewer
#139418
Overall Influence
Talbot Brewer is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia. He is known for his works on moral philosophy. Philosophy Brewer is known for his idea of "dialectical activity," arguing that contemporary moral philosophy is hindered by a production-oriented conception of human agency and action. He tries to retrieve a different "dialectical" conception of human agency drawing on classical moral philosophy . He believes that our ritual activities show our presence in and to the world. Christopher Cordner provided a criticism of Brewer's idea and argued that...
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George Rupp
#181425
Overall Influence
#15694
Fatima Cody Stanford
#71850
Overall Influence
Fatima Cody Stanford is an American obesity medicine physician, internist, and pediatrician and an associate professor of medicine and pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. She is one of the most highly cited scientists in the field of obesity. She is recognized for shifting the global perception of obesity as a chronic disease.
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Malcolm Perry
#44951
Overall Influence
1929 - 2009 (80 years)
Malcolm Oliver Perry II was an American physician and surgeon. Perry was one of the doctors who attended to President John F. Kennedy at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963 after Kennedy was shot. Two days later, he attended to Kennedy's assassin Lee Harvey Oswald after he was shot.
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Chow Chung-cheng
#52563
Overall Influence
1908 - 1996 (88 years)
Chow Chung-cheng was a Chinese artist known for her finger painting and autobiographical books. Early life and education Zhou was born the 4th child in a family of two girls and three boys . Her father, Zhou Xuehui, the youngest son of Zhou Fu, was a successful businessman who ran many of his brother Zhou Xuexi's enterprises. She was born Zhou Lianquan , but later changed her name to Zhongzheng.
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Phyllis Richmond
#169838
Overall Influence
1921 - 1997 (76 years)
Phyllis Allen Richmond was a historian of science and librarian recognized for her work in classification and cataloging. Her dissertation "Americans and the Germ Theory of Disease" was a leading theory of history of medicine for nearly 40 years and she later published seminal work in classification theory.
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Malek Shojaee
#175033
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Malek Shojaee Joshoghani is an Iranian philosopher and assistant professor of philosophy at Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies. He is known for his expertise on contemporary European philosophy. Shojaee is the editor-in-chief of Philosophy & Theology & Mysticism Quarterly Book Review.
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John Ruckdeschel
#168174
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
John C. Ruckdeschel is an American oncologist who has written 160 peer reviewed articles. He obtained his bachelor's degree from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and later on got his medical degree from Albany Medical College. He received training at Johns Hopkins University and Beth Israel Hospital where he was a resident. He was a fellow of the National Cancer Institute and a decade later became faculty member of the second alma mater. In 1991 he became the director and CEO of Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa where he worked with Terrance Albrecht. and ten years later held the same position at the Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit, Michigan.
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David A. Hamburg
#31841
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
David Allen Hamburg was an American psychiatrist. He served as president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York from 1982 to 1997. He also served as the President of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He had also been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1998. He was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He had previously been chair of the department of psychiatry at Stanford. His wife, Beatrix Hamburg, followed a similarly successful career path.
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