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 Physics,

#5601

Olivier Guyon

#74821

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Olivier Guyon is a French-American astronomer. He is an astronomer at the Steward Observatory of the college of science and professor in the James C. Wyant College of Optical Sciences, both of The University of Arizona. He is the SCExAO Project Scientist at the Subaru Telescope. Guyon was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship "Genius Grant" in 2012.

#5602

Malcolm Haines

#117330

Overall Influence

1936 - 2013 (77 years)

Malcolm Golby Haines was a British plasma physicist known for his research on Z-pinches. He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society and was co-awarded the 2005 Hannes Alfvén Prize. Early life and career Haines studied at Imperial College London in 1953 and has remained there for the rest of his life. He obtained a Bachelor of Science and Doctor of Philosophy in 1957 and 1960 respectively. He then joined the Imperial College faculty as a lecturer in 1960, was promoted to senior lecturer in 1967 and later appointed Professor of Physics. He then retired in 2002, but was still active in r...

#5603

Nishtala Appala Narasimham

#95099

Overall Influence

1922 - 2002 (80 years)

Nishtala Appala Narasimham, shortly N. A. Narasimham was an Indian physicist and spectroscopist. He was born at Parlakimidi on 15 August 1922. He was graduated in physics from Andhra University in 1942 and M.Sc. in physics from Banaras Hindu University in 1945. He passed both the examinations with first-class. He has worked as lecturer in physics in Mrs. A.V.N. College, Visakhapatnam and at Bijapur between 1945 and 1949.

#5604

William C. Stwalley

#135062

Overall Influence

#5605

Albert Stolow

#82646

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Albert Stolow is a Canadian physicist. He is the Canada Research Chair in Molecular Photonics, full professor of chemistry & biomolecular sciences and of physics, and a member of the Ottawa Institute for Systems Biology at the University of Ottawa. He is the founder and an ongoing member of the Molecular Photonics Group at the National Research Council of Canada. He is adjunct professor of Chemistry and of Physics at Queen's University in Kingston, and a Graduate Faculty Scholar in the department of physics, University of Central Florida and a Fellow of the Max-Planck-uOttawa Centre for Extreme and Quantum Photonics.

#5606

John Arthur Davies

#135079

Overall Influence

#5607

Charlie Conroy

#135090

Overall Influence

#5608

Myron Spector

#135106

Overall Influence

#5609

Jack David Cowan

#135133

Overall Influence

#5610

Koji Nakamura

#135136

Overall Influence

#5611

Mack A. Breazeale

Mack A. Breazeale

#80518

Overall Influence

1930 - 2009 (79 years)

Mack Alfred Breazeale was an American physicist particularly known for his work in ultrasonics and physical acoustics. Breazeale is widely regarded as one of the leading acousticians of the 20th century, highly accomplished in both theory and experiment. When he died, he was a retired distinguished research professor and senior scientist at the National Center for Physical Acoustics at the University of Mississippi. Born in Leona Mines, Virginia, Breazeale grew up near Crossville, TN. Educated at Berea College, the Missouri School of Mines, and the Michigan State University, he was a tireless researcher and trained many others in the field of physics.

#5612

Dirk Bouwmeester

Dirk Bouwmeester

#74492

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Dirk Bouwmeester is a Dutch experimental physicist specializing in quantum optics and quantum information. He currently holds faculty positions at the University of California at Santa Barbara and at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

#5613

James Douglas Jorgensen

#135172

Overall Influence

#5614

Arthur M. Poskanzer

#110702

Overall Influence

1931 - 2021 (90 years)

Arthur M. Poskanzer was an experimental physicist, known for his pioneering work on relativistic nuclear collisions. Poskanzer received in 1953 his bachelor's degree in physics and chemistry from Harvard University and in 1954 his master's degree in chemistry from Columbia University. In 1957 he received his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in physical chemistry. At Harvard his undergraduate advisor was George Kistiakowsky, and at MIT his doctoral advisor was Charles Coryell.

#5615

David C. Viano

#135180

Overall Influence

#5616

Joseph E. Sokal

#135182

Overall Influence

#5617

Genda Gu

#135186

Overall Influence

Genda Gu is a condensed matter physicist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. In his research, Gu specializes in the synthesis of large, high quality crystals for the production of superconductors. He works in the Brookhaven Laboratory's crystal growth lab, and as an adjunct professor at Stony Brook University. In 2012, Gu became a fellow of the American Physical Society.

#5618

Joel S. Karliner

#135210

Overall Influence

#5619

Nadia Zakamska

#115016

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Nadia Zakamska is a Russian-American astronomer who is a professor at Johns Hopkins University. Early life and education Zakamska graduated from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology with a master's degree in theoretical physics in 2001. Zakamska then attended Princeton University for her PhD, which she received in 2005.

#5620

Frederick P. Cowan

#124998

Overall Influence

Frederick P. Cowan was an American health physicist and head of the Instrumentation and Health Physics Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Cowan grew up in the Boston, Massachusetts area. He attended Bowdoin College, then went on to Harvard University to complete his Ph.D. After Harvard, Cowan went on to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to teach. During World War II Dr. Cowan worked in radar countermeasures. This was followed by a stint at the Chrysler Corporation and finally he ended up at Brookhaven National Laboratory to lead the Health Physics Division.

#5621

Harold Clark Fritts

#135253

Overall Influence

#5622

Jorge V. José

#60695

Overall Influence

Jorge V. José is a Mexican/American physicist born in Mexico City. Currently the James H. Rudy Distinguished Professor of Physics at Indiana University. He has made seminal contributions to research in a variety of disciplines, including condensed matter physics, nonlinear dynamics, quantum chaos, biological physics, computational neuroscience and lately precision psychiatry. His pioneering work on the two-dimensional x-y model has been exceedingly influential in many areas of physics and has garnered many citations. He edited the book on the “40 Years of Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless Theory”, on two-dimensional topological phase transitions in 2013.

#5623

David Ginger

#107286

Overall Influence

David S. Ginger is an American physical chemist. He is the B. Seymour Rabinovitch Endowed Professor of Chemistry at the University of Washington. He is also a Washington Research Foundation distinguished scholar, and chief scientist of the University of Washington Clean Energy Institute. In 2018, he was elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences for his work on the microscopic investigation of materials for thin-film semiconductors. He was elected a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2012, and was a 2016 National Finalist of the Blavatnik Awards for Y...

#5624

Cristiane de Morais Smith

#116150

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Cristiane de Morais Smith Lehner is a Brazilian theoretical physicist and professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Utrecht, where she leads a research group studying condensed matter physics, cold atoms and strongly-correlated systems. In 2019, the European Physical Society awarded Morais Smith its Emmy Noether Distinction.

#5625

Thomas Martinetz

#83530

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Thomas Martinetz is a German physicist and neuro-informatician. Life Thomas Martinetz studied mathematics and physics at the Technical University of Munich, where he earned his doctorate in theoretical biophysics under Klaus Schulten in 1992 after several years as a guest at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After working in the central research and development department of Siemens AG, in 1996 he moved to a professorship at the Institute for Neuroinformatics of the Ruhr University Bochum and took over the management of the Center for Neuroinformatics GmbH. In 1999 he accepted a call to the University of Lübeck as director of the Institute for Neuro- and Bioinformatics.

#5626

Philip J. Morrison

#95636

Overall Influence

Philip J. Morrison is an American professor in physics at the Institute for Fusion Studies at the University of Texas. He attended the University of California, San Diego, receiving a B.S. in 1972, M.S. in 1974. He received his Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. William Thompson at the University of California, San Diego in 1979.

#5627

Alfons Penzkofer

#135298

Overall Influence

#5628

Laurel L. Wilkening

#34545

Overall Influence

1944 - 2019 (75 years)

Laurel L. Wilkening was an American planetary scientist and college professor. She was chancellor of the University of California, Irvine from 1993 to 1998. Early life Wilkening was born in Richland, Washington, and raised in Socorro, New Mexico. Her mother, Ruby Alma Barks Wilkening, was a teacher; her father, Marvin H. Wilkening, was an atomic scientist during World War II, and a physics professor at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. She earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry at Reed College in 1966. She completed doctoral studies in chemistry at the University of California, San Diego in 1970, under advisor Hans Suess.

#5629

Nikole Lewis

#107399

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Nikole Lewis is an astrophysicist and an assistant professor of Astronomy at Cornell University. Career Her major research interests include observational and theoretical techniques for probing exoplanet atmospheres. She co-led a spectroscopic survey of the TRAPPIST-1 system in 2018 using the Hubble Space Telescope, which was the first such survey for Earth-sized exoplanets. She also took part in the original announcement of the TRAPPIST-1 system in 2017 by helping describe the system and the importance of detecting atmospheres to search for biosignatures.

#5630

Maitree Bhattacharyya

#78444

Overall Influence

Maitree Bhattacharyya is an Indian physicist who is Professor and the Director of Jagadis Bose National Science Talent Search , Kolkata. Education Bhattacharyya graduated from Presidency College, Kolkata with Honours in Physics and obtained M.Sc. degree from the Science College campus of University of Calcutta. She started her research career in the Department of Biophysics and Molecular Biology, University of Calcutta with a PhD degree in 1991. She worked as a research associate at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and in 1994 joined University of Calcutta as an assistant professor.

#5631

John Wilson Moore

#50569

Overall Influence

1920 - 2019 (99 years)

John Wilson Moore was an American biophysicist who pioneered the emergent power of computers, beginning in the 1950s, to reveal how signals are generated, integrated, and then travel in neurons. He is well known for his discovery , that the puffer fish toxin tetrodotoxin causes death by blocking the sodium ion channels that are responsible for nerve activity. Moore was emeritus professor of Neurobiology at Duke University Medical School where he had been a member of the faculty since 1961. Moore's NEURON simulator software, begun with and now carried forward by Michael Hines, is used worldwide.

#5632

Colin Sheppard

#40191

Overall Influence

Colin James Richard Sheppard, usually cited as C. J. R. Sheppard, is senior scientist at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa, Italy. His areas of research are in optics, microscopy and imaging, including confocal and multiphoton microscopy, diffraction, 3D imaging and reconstruction, superresolution, beam propagation, and pulse propagation.

#5633

Hilmi Volkan Demir

#36176

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Hilmi Volkan Demir is a Turkish scientist, best known for his works on white light generation. Biography Hilmi Volkan Demir was born on July 4, 1976, in Kars, Turkey. He received his B.Sc. degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, in 1998, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University, California, in 2000 and 2004, respectively. He received his Docent title in Optics and Photonics from the Turkish Council of Higher Education in 2007. Since September 2004, he has been working as a faculty member at Bilkent Univ...

#5634

Luis Herrera Cometta

Luis Herrera Cometta

#106858

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Luis Alfredo "Gaucho" Herrera Cometta is a Venezuelan relativity physicist, whose research focuses on the study of anisotropy, the extended thermodynamics, exact and semi numeric solutions, axial symmetric solutions, alternative approaches to detect gravitational radiation using gyroscopes and recently about the relevance of super energy and super Poynting in General Relativity. Herrera is Emeritus Professor in the Escuela de Física at Universidad Central de Venezuela and currently is Visiting Professor at the Instituto Universitario de Fisica Fundamental y Matematicas, Universidad de Salaman...

#5635

Ennio Arimondo

#135400

Overall Influence

#5636

Jason Steffen

#97550

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Jason Hyrum Steffen is an American astrophysicist and assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas . He is also a member of the science team for NASA's Kepler mission. He worked at Fermilab and Northwestern University for a decade before joining the UNLV faculty. He is known for his work on the discoveries of several exoplanets. He has also developed an alternative method for boarding passengers onto commercial aircraft, known as the Steffen Boarding Method. It has been found to be significantly faster than the "back-to-front" method used by most commercial airlines.

#5637

Guillem Anglada-Escudé

#108272

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Guillem Anglada-Escudé , is a Catalan astronomer. In 2016, he led a team of astronomers under the Pale Red Dot campaign, which resulted in the confirmation of the existence of Proxima Centauri b, the closest potentially habitable extrasolar planet to Earth, followed by the publication of a peer-reviewed article in Nature. In 2017, Anglada-Escudé was named amongst the 100 most influential people according to Time, and one of Natures top 10 scientists of the year 2016. He is currently a research fellow at Institut de Ciències de l'Espai.

#5638

Jean‐loup Bertaux

#135460

Overall Influence

#5639

Masatoshi Imada

#135471

Overall Influence

#5640

Robert J. Gould

#135484

Overall Influence

#5641

Gilles Horowitz

#135508

Overall Influence

#5642

James Ricker Wilson

#105749

Overall Influence

1922 - 2007 (85 years)

James "Jim" Ricker Wilson was an American theoretical physicist, known for his pioneering research in numerical relativity and numerical relativistic hydrodynamics. Biography After graduating in 1942 with a B.S. degree in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley , he served in the U.S. Army, working in a minor role on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. After working at Los Alamos from 1944 to 1946 he returned as a graduate student in physics to UC Berkeley. There he received his Ph.D. in 1952. His Ph.D. thesis entitled Some problems in meson theory was supervised by Roland Hamilton Good , who was elected in 1958 a fellow of the American Physical Society .

#5643

Yew Kam Ho

#135531

Overall Influence

#5644

Gregory S. Boebinger

#80081

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Gregory Scott Boebinger was the director of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida, and is currently a professor of physics at Florida State University. Biography Boebinger was born June 29, 1959, in Cincinnati, Ohio, one of four sons of a minister and an elementary school teacher. He is a 1977 graduate of North Central High School in Indianapolis. He married his high-school sweetheart; they have three children.

#5645

Tilman Spohn

#135552

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

#5646

Richard Penty

#73186

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Richard Vincent Penty, FREng is a British engineer and academic. He is the current Master of Sidney Sussex College and Professor of Photonics at the University of Cambridge. Early life Penty was born on 9 September 1964 in Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, England. He is the oldest of three sons of two Uttoxeter medical practitioners, Peter and Patricia Janet Penty. He was educated at Repton School, an independent school in Repton, Derbyshire. He studied engineering and electrical science at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and graduated from the University of Cambridge with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1986.

#5647

Roger Falcone

#99276

Overall Influence

Roger Wirth Falcone is an American physicist at University of California, Berkeley where he is a professor of physics. He is an Elected Fellow at The Optical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he currently serves as the president of the American Physical Society. He is the former director of the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He serves on the board of directors of the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation and is the chair of the International Scientific Advisory Committee of the Extreme-Light-Infrastructure.

#5648

Theodore Stathopoulos

#135676

Overall Influence

#5649

Hassan Jawahery

#77753

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Hassan Jawahery is an Iranian-American physicist and former spokesperson for the BaBar Collaboration. He received his B.S. in Physics from Tehran University in Iran and his Ph.D. in Physics from Tufts University. He is a professor of Physics at the University of Maryland and has worked on OPAL, CLEO, BaBar, SuperB, LHCb and the PDG.

#5650

Pierre Berini

#135693

Overall Influence

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