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,

#7901

Ocean Mercier

#87617

Overall Influence

Ocean Ripeka Mercier is a New Zealand academic specialising in physics and Māori science. Career After a B.Sc. Mercier did a PhD at Victoria University of Wellington, in association with Industrial Research Ltd.

#7902

David H. Staelin

#162638

Overall Influence

1938 - 2011 (73 years)

David Hudson Staelin was an American astronomer, engineer, and entrepreneur. He co-discovered the Crab nebula pulsar in 1968, and was Principal Investigator for earth-remote-sensing satellite instruments. He was a co-founder of Environmental Research and Technology, Inc. and the founding chairman of PictureTel Corp., one of the first videoconferencing firms.

#7903

Cecilia Ceccarelli

#153357

Overall Influence

Cecilia Ceccarelli is an Italian astronomer known for her research on astrochemistry and the spectroscopy of protostars. She was named as the female scientist of the year in the 2006 Irène Joliot-Curie Prizes.

#7904

Tom Abel

#168208

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

#7905

Thorsteinn I. Sigfusson

#84485

Overall Influence

1954 - 2019 (65 years)

Professor Thorsteinn I. Sigfusson was an Icelandic physicist prominent in the field of energy research. He was awarded the Global Energy Prize in 2007, and was the Director of the Innovation Center Iceland at the University of Iceland, where he held the Icelandic Alloys Chair.

#7906

David J. Lane

#122630

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

David J. Lane is a Canadian astronomer at Saint Mary's University, the past president of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, director of the Burke-Gaffney astronomical observatory, owner of the Abbey-Ridge Observatory, and creator of the planetarium software entitled the Earth Centered Universe. Asteroid 117032 Davidlane is named in his honour, and the asteroid lies in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

#7907

Vasiliki Pavlidou

#161917

Overall Influence

Vasiliki Pavlidou is a Greek astrophysicst and Full Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Crete and an Affiliated Faculty at the Institute of Astrophysics - Foundation for Research & Technology - Helas. Since July 2023 she serves as an associate editor in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Astronomy & Astrophysics Her research interests focus on cosmology, high energy physics and radio astronomy.

#7908

Giorgio Kaniadakis

#134193

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Giorgio Kaniadakis a Greek-Italian physicist, is a Full Professor of Theoretical Physics at Politecnico di Torino, Italy, and is credited with introducing the concept of Kaniadakis entropy and what is known as Kaniadakis statistics.

#7909

Melanie Campbell

#109502

Overall Influence

Melanie Crombie Williams Campbell is a professor of physics at the University of Waterloo. Cross-appointed with the School of Optometry and Vision Science, she is known for the development of light activated treatments for eye disease and non-invasive imaging techniques for the detection of Alzheimer's disease through the identification of retinal amyloids.

#7910

Janet Iwasa

#39322

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Janet Iwasa is an American data visualization expert and assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Utah. Early life and education In 1978, Janet Iwasa was born to parents Mikeko and Kuni Iwasa in Bloomington, Indiana. She was the youngest of three children. Following her father joining the National Institutes of Health, she moved, with her family, to Maryland. She later went on to participate in an internship at the Institute for Genomic Research.

#7911

Nico F. Declercq

Nico F. Declercq

#91255

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Nico Felicien Declercq is a physicist and mechanical engineer. He is a professor with the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and Georgia Tech Europe in France. He is specialized in ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation of materials, propagation of ultrasonic waves in highly complex materials, in acoustics, in theoretical and experimental linear and nonlinear ultrasonics, acousto-optics, Medical Physics and Acoustic Microscopy. He has investigated the acoustics of Chichen Itza and Epidaurus. He published over 100 works in scientific journals. As a Ph.D. student , Declercq published 30 p...

#7912

Shinya Inoué

#49728

Overall Influence

1921 - 2019 (98 years)

Shinya Inoué was a Japanese American biophysicist and cell biologist, a member of the National Academy of Sciences. His research field was the visualization of dynamic processes within living cells using light microscopy.

#7913

Vladimir Pletser

Vladimir Pletser

#97977

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Vladimir Pletser is Director of Space Training Operations at Blue Abyss since 2018, where he is in charge of developing astronaut training programs. From 2016 to early 2018, he was a Visiting Professor and Scientific Adviser at the Technology and Engineering Centre for Space Utilization of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China. He supported the preparation of scientific experiments in microgravity for the Chinese Tiangong space station and for aircraft parabolic flights. He worked previously from 1985 till early 2016 as a senior Physicist Engineer at the European Space Research a...

#7914

Giulia Grancini

#123257

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (42 years)

Giulia Grancini is an Italian physicist who is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pavia. Her work considers new materials for photovoltaic devices, including perovskites and polymer-based materials. In 2020, Grancini was named the Royal Society of Chemistry Journal of Materials Chemistry Lecturer.

#7915

Leonid Biberman

#107801

Overall Influence

1915 - 1998 (83 years)

Leonid Mikhailovich Biberman was a Soviet and Russian physicist and a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences . He was one of the founders of the Thermophysics research school in the Soviet Union.

#7916

David Branch

#168330

Overall Influence

#7917

Tor Brustad

#115469

Overall Influence

1926 - 2016 (90 years)

Tor Brustad was a Norwegian biophysicist. Personal life Brustad was born in Nittedal on 20 December 1926, to schoolteacher Johan Ludvig Brustad and Aslaug Kristoffersen. He married Berte-Marie Bjørtomt in 1953.

#7918

Stephen Eales

#168379

Overall Influence

Stephen Eales is a professor of astrophysics at Cardiff University, where he is currently head of the Astronomy Group. In 2015, he was awarded the Herschel Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society for outstanding contributions to observational astrophysics. He also writes articles and books about astronomy.

#7919

Ruth Murray-Clay

Ruth Murray-Clay

#168414

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Ruth Murray-Clay is a professor at the University of California Santa Cruz who studies the formation of planetary systems. Career Murray-Clay graduated magna cum laude with an A.B. from Harvard University in 2001, then moved to the University of California, Berkeley where she earned an MA in 2004 and Ph.D. in 2008 under the supervision of Eugene Chiang. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard University Institute for Theory and Computation until 2010 when she became a lecturer at Harvard University. In September 2014 she joined University of California, Santa Barbara where she held the title of assistant professor of physics.

#7920

Mark Nelkin

#126843

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Mark Samuel Nelkin is a theoretical physicist at the Cornell University. Under the direction of Professor Hans Bethe, he received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Cornell in 1955. From 1955 to 1962 he worked in the nuclear industry for General Electric in Schenectady and General Atomic in San Diego. In 1962 he became a member of the Cornell faculty. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968. He retired from Cornell University as professor emeritus in 1993. After retirement he moved to New York City and remained active in refereeing articles for Physical Review Letters, Physical Revi...

#7921

Stephanie A. Majewski

#140610

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Stephanie A. Majewski is an American physicist at the University of Oregon researching high energy particle physics at the CERN ATLAS experiment. She worked as a postdoctoral research associate at the Brookhaven National Laboratory prior to joining the faculty at UO in 2012. She was selected for the Early Career Research Program award of the U.S. Department of Energy , one of 35 scientists in all DOE-supported fields to receive this national honor in 2014.

#7922

Charles K. Kao

#86138

Overall Influence

1933 - 2018 (85 years)

Sir Charles Kao Kuen was the second person after Narinder Singh Kapani and physicist who contributed in the development and use of fiber optics in telecommunications. In the 1960s, Kao created various methods to combine glass fibers with lasers in order to transmit digital data, which laid the groundwork for the evolution of the Internet.

#7923

Tiago P. Peixoto

#116206

Overall Influence

Tiago de Paula Peixoto is a Brazilian physicist who works in the areas of network science, statistical physics, and complex systems. He is currently an associate professor of network and data science at the Central European University.

#7924

Michael D. Cohen

#13866

Overall Influence

1945 - 2013 (68 years)

Michael Cohen was the William D. Hamilton Collegiate Professor of Complex Systems, Information and Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Early life and education Cohen received his B.A. in History at Stanford University in 1966, and his Ph.D. in Social Science at the University of California, Irvine in 1972.

#7925

Jerome Swartz

#9934

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Jerome "Jerry" Swartz is a physicist that developed early optical strategies for barcode scanning technologies in the United States and co-founded the corporation, Symbol Technologies on Long Island, New York, with physicist partner, Dr. Shelley A. Harrison in 1973. Swartz was President, becoming the Chairman and Chief Scientist in 1982. In 2006 Symbol Technologies became a wholly owned subsidiary of the multinational telecommunications manufacturer, Motorola Corporation.

#7926

Michael Kneissl

#150707

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Michael Kneissl is a German physicist and professor at the Institute of Solid State Physics at the Technical University of Berlin. Kneissl received his doctoral degree in physics from the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg in 1996. During his graduate studies, he was also a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1993. He joined the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1996. Since 2005, he has been a Full Professor and the Chair of Experimental Nanophysics and Photonics Group at the TU Berlin. He holds a joint appointment at the Ferdinand-Braun-Institut in Berlin, where he heads the GaN-Optoelectronics Lab.

#7927

Alice White

#162774

Overall Influence

Alice Elizabeth White is an American physicist. She is a professor and chair at the Boston University College of Engineering. Previously, she was Chief Scientist at Bell Labs. She is a fellow of the APS, the IEEE and the OSA.

#7928

Robert S. McMillan

#122212

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Robert S. McMillan is an astronomer at the University of Arizona, and heads the Spacewatch project, which studies minor planets. He has made various discoveries, including notably 20000 Varuna. On October 19, 2008, he discovered a short-periodic comet 208P/McMillan.

#7929

Bogdan A. Dobrescu

#123196

Overall Influence

Bogdan A. Dobrescu is a Romanian-born theoretical physicist with interests in high-energy physics associated with Fermilab. Previously he was a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University. He completed his Ph.D. in 1997 at Boston University.

#7930

Jacquiline Romero

Jacquiline Romero

#94338

Overall Influence

Mary Jacquiline Romero is a quantum physicist in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her research expertise and interests are in the field of quantum foundations and quantum information. In particular, Romero is an experimental quantum physicist studying the properties of single photons for the development of new quantum alphabets and the nature of quantum causality.

#7931

Maura Hagan

#59736

Overall Influence

Maura E. Hagan is a Professor of Physics and Dean of the College of Science at Utah State University. She is a Fellow of both the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union, and was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019.

#7932

Nikolay Sukhomlin

#94379

Overall Influence

1945 - 2010 (65 years)

Nikolay Borisovich Sukhomlin was a Russian scientist who discovered new solutions and symmetry for the Black-Scholes equation. Sukhomlin received his master's degree in physics in 1967, from the Faculty of Physical Sciences, Leningrad University in St. Petersburg, Russia. He obtained a double Ph.D. in applied mathematics and physics in 1982 from Lomonosov Moscow State University. He also holds a Ph.D. in history of arts from University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne in 1998.

#7933

Hallstein Høgåsen

#125346

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Hallstein Tormod Høgåsen is a Norwegian theoretical physicist. He was born in Nord-Fron and grew up mostly in Vågå. He finished his secondary education at Vinstra Upper Secondary School in 1955. He took the cand.real. degree at the University of Oslo in 1960 and the dr.techn. degree at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in 1964. He was appointed as a docent at the University of Oslo in 1969 and professor of theoretical physics in 1984. His main field has been elementary particle physics. Høgåsen has been affiliated to many universities and research institutes, among others Niels Bohr Insti...

#7934

John T. Gosling

John T. Gosling

#107846

Overall Influence

1938 - 2018 (80 years)

John T. Gosling was an American physicist, whose research in heliophysics focused on the large-scale structure and magnetic topology of the solar wind, coronal mass ejections, solar wind and geomagnetic disturbances, magnetic reconnection, collisionless shocks, and particle acceleration in space. Gosling most recently performed research at University of Colorado and was an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#7935

Kalobaran Maiti

#125714

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Kalobaran Maiti is an Indian physicist specialising in condensed matter physics and materials science. He obtained his MSc degree from Rajabazar Science College and PhD degree from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in 2010, the highest science award in India, in the physical sciences category for his contribution in the field of very high resolution photoelectron spectroscopy in understanding the physics of metal-insulator transition, charge density wave and Kondo systems. He is also a Fellow of the National ...

#7936

Takashi Yabe

#105502

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Takashi Yabe is a professor at the Department of Mechanical Sciences and Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology . Career Takashi Yabe graduated from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1973 and immediately became a research associate. After getting doctor degree of engineering, he moved to Osaka University as an associate professor and then returned to Tokyo Tech. as a professor in 1995.

#7937

Liguri Mosulishvili

#129357

Overall Influence

1933 - 2010 (77 years)

Liguri Mosulishvili was a Georgian physicist and Head of Biophysics Department at Andronikashvili Institute of Physics of Tbilisi State University. Biography Liguri Mosulishvili was born in 1933, in Arashenda village, Gurjaani Municipality, Georgia. He was trained as a physicist at the Tbilisi State University . In 1958 by the invitation Elephter Andronikashvili he has begun work as the junior researcher in Andronikashvili Institute of Physics.

#7938

Germano D'Abramo

#150833

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Germano D'Abramo is an Italian mathematician, physicist and discoverer of minor planets. Career In the late 1990s, he has been a collaborator of the Spaceguard Foundation which observes and studies near-Earth objects , modelling NEO-populations and maintaining the foundation's online observation platform, the Spaceguard Central Node. He is credited by the Minor Planet Center with the co-discovery of 3 minor planets he made in collaboration with astronomer Andrea Boattini at Pistoia Mountains Astronomical Observatory in April 1999.

#7939

Jens H. Gundlach

#119180

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Jens Horst Gundlach is a German physicist. Biography His father was Gerd Gundlach, a biochemistry professor in Gießen. Jens Gundlach studied physics at the University of Mainz with Vordiplom in 1982 and Diplom in 1986. After the Vordiplom he studied for a year in Seattle at the University of Washington. He received his doctorate there in 1990 under the supervision of Kurt Snover with a dissertation entitled Shapes of excited rotating medium-mass nuclei determined from giant dipole resonance decays. As a postdoc he was a research associate under the supervision of Eric Adelberger and Blayne Heckel at the University of Washington from 1990 to 1993.

#7940

Esmeralda Mallada

Esmeralda Mallada

#116018

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Esmeralda Herminia Mallada Invernizzi is a Uruguayan astronomer and professor who, for her contributions to that scientific discipline, has been honored with the designation of her name to an asteroid.

#7941

Sabine Stanley

#125304

Overall Influence

Sabine Stanley is a Canadian physicist, currently at Johns Hopkins University in the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Morton K. Blaustein Department of Earth And Planetary Sciences and the Applied Physics Laboratory. She was awarded a Bloomberg Distinguished Professorship in 2017. She was previously a Canada Research Chair of Planetary Physics at University of Toronto. She was awarded the William Gilbert Award by the AGU in 2010 and was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2011.

#7942

Michael H. Hecht

#77348

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Michael H. Hecht is a research scientist, associate director for research management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Haystack Observatory, and former deputy project director of the Event Horizon Telescope. He served as lead scientist for the Microscopy, Electrochemistry, and Conductivity Analyzer instrument on the Phoenix Mars lander, and as principal investigator for the Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment instrument on the Mars 2020 rover.

#7943

James E. Boyd

#40396

Overall Influence

1906 - 1998 (92 years)

James Emory Boyd was an American physicist, mathematician, and academic administrator. He was director of the Georgia Tech Research Institute from 1957 to 1961, president of West Georgia College from 1961 to 1971, and acting president of the Georgia Institute of Technology from 1971 to 1972.

#7944

Arturo Molina Gutiérrez

#131948

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Arturo Molina Gutiérrez is a Mexican scientist, researcher and academic. Biography Arturo Molina was born in Oaxaca, Oaxaca in 1964, he is the son of Dr. Arturo Molina Sosa. He is a Computer Systems Engineer and a Master of Computer Science from the Tec de Monterrey, Monterrey Campus. He holds a PhD in Mechanics from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics and a PhD in Manufacturing Systems from Loughborough University in England. He is currently Director of the Institute of Advanced Materials for Sustainable Manufacturing at the Tecnológico de Monterrey.

#7945

Rainer Walter Kühne

#110360

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Rainer Walter Kühne is a German theoretical physicist known for his work on Plato's Atlantis. Education and early life Rainer Walter Kühne was born in 1970 in Braunschweig, Germany. He got his diploma in physics from the University of Bonn in 1995 and the Dr. rer. nat. in 2001 from the University of Dortmund.

#7946

David Tritton

#116338

Overall Influence

1935 - 1998 (63 years)

David John Tritton was an English physicist who specialised in fluid dynamics. Tritton was born in Slough on 26 July 1935. He was educated at the University of Cambridge and obtained his PhD with a dissertation on "Experiments on Flow past Cylinders and Free Convection", supervised by Alan A. Townsend. Subsequently, he worked at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK. He was a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin when he died on 24 April 1998.

#7947

Galina Yershova

Galina Yershova

#35701

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Galina Gavrilovna Yershova, or Ershova is a Russian academic historian, linguist, and epigrapher, who specialises in the study of the ancient civilisations, cultures, and languages of the New World. As an Americanist scholar, her area of expertise is in the field of Mesoamerican studies, and in particular that of the pre-Columbian Maya civilisation, its historical literature, and its writing system. Yershova is a former student and protégé of the Russian linguist and epigrapher Yuri Knorozov, renowned for his central contributions towards the decipherment of the Maya script.

#7948

Winifred Cameron

Winifred Cameron

#98814

Overall Influence

1918 - 2016 (98 years)

Winifred Sawtell Cameron was an American astronomer. She worked at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland for most of her career, and compiled the Lunar Transient Phenomena database. She was involved in the Gemini and Apollo programs.

#7949

Stephen Fairhurst

#168810

Overall Influence

#7950

Alexios Polychronakos

#112744

Overall Influence

Alexios Polychronakos is a theoretical physicist. He studied electrical engineering at the National Technical University of Athens and did graduate work in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology under the supervision of John Preskill.

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