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 Physics,

#7951

Alex K. Shalek

#88857
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Alex K. Shalek is a biomedical engineer, and a core faculty member of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science , an Associate Professor of Chemistry, and an Extramural Member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Additionally, he is a Member of the Ragon Institute and an Institute Member of the Broad Institute, an Assistant in Immunology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and an Instructor in Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard Medical School. The multi-disciplinary research of the Shalek Lab aims to create and impl...
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#7952

Daniel McKinsey

#106534
Overall Influence
Daniel Nicholas McKinsey is an American experimental physicist. McKinsey is a leader in the field of direct searches for dark matter interactions, and serves as Co-Spokesperson of the Large Underground Xenon experiment. and is an Executive Committee member of the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment. He serves as Director and Principal Investigator of the TESSERACT Project, and is also The Georgia Lee Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley.
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#7953

Luiz Pinguelli Rosa

Luiz Pinguelli Rosa
#30064
Overall Influence
1942 - 2022 (80 years)
Luiz Pinguelli Rosa was a Brazilian scientist. Life and career A nuclear physicist, researcher and professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, he was also a scientific leader. He was born in Brazil and lived in the city of Rio de Janeiro.
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#7954

Julie Grollier

#104721
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Julie Grollier is a French physicist working in the field of spintronics. Education and career Grollier studied at the French engineering school Supélec, before doing an internship in the Laboratory of Cristallography and Materials Science at the University of Caen Normandy. She then conducted her doctoral research at École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay under the supervision of Nobel prize laureate Albert Fert, working on magnetization reversal by the injection of spin-current injection. She later joined the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and then the Centre for Nanosciences and Nanotechnologies , as a postdoctoral fellow working on the magnetization dynamics of nano-magnets.
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#7955

Teresa Montaruli

#159537
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Teresa Montaruli is an Italian astronomer specializing in neutrino astronomy, and in particular in the search for high-energy neutrinos from cosmic sources. She is a professor in the particle physics department at the University of Geneva.
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#7956

Wolfgang Eisenmenger

#115989
Overall Influence
1930 - 2016 (86 years)
Wolfgang Eisenmenger was a German physicist. Fields of investigation His PhD thesis dealt with the surface tension of water and aqueous solutions. In 1964 he defended his habilitation thesis concerning experimental investigations regarding shock waves in liquids in the acoustical frequency domain. He developed from these investigations an electromagnetic shock wave generator for lithotripsy of kidney stones.
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#7957

Manfred Steiner

#145614
Overall Influence
Manfred Steiner is an Austrian-born American hematologist and physicist who taught at Brown Medical School until 2000. He completed a Ph.D. in Physics at the age of 89 in September 2021. Life Steiner was born in Vienna in 1932. He earned a medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1955 and moved to Washington, D.C. to complete his initial training in internal medicine. Steiner studied hematology at Tufts University before earning a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967.
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#7958

Julie S. Biteen

#89040
Overall Influence
Julie Biteen is a Canadian-born American chemist who is professor of chemistry and biophysics at the University of Michigan. Her research considers the development of imaging systems for biological systems. She was named the Stanford University Sessler Distinguished Alumni Lecturer in 2021.
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#7959

Christiane Koch

#79512
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Christiane P. Koch is a German physicist whose research involves quantum mechanical versions of control theory, including the use of lasers to achieve coherent control of chemical reactions. She has also performed research on efficiently testing the accuracy of quantum computing devices. She is a professor at the Free University of Berlin.
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#7960

Latha Venkataraman

#135515
Overall Influence
Latha Venkataraman is a physicist. She is a professor of applied physics and chemistry at Columbia University. Biography Venkataraman completed her BSc in Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1993, followed by Masters and PhD degrees at Harvard University. Her thesis was titled Electronic properties of one-dimensional conductors: A study of molybdenum selenide molecular wires and was completed under Charles Lieber.
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#7961

Guilaine Lagache

#168989
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
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#7962

Anna Marie Pyle

#60213
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Anna Marie Pyle is an American academic who is a Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology and a Professor of Chemistry at Yale University. and an Investigator for Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Pyle is the president of the RNA Society, the vice-chair of the Science and Technology Steering Committee at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and previously she served as chair of the Macromolecular Structure and Function A Study Section at the National Institutes of Health.
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#7963

Usha Kulshreshtha

#145193
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Usha Kulshreshtha is an Indian theoretical physicist, specializing in the Dirac's instant-form and light-front quantization of quantum field theory models, string theory models and D-brane actions using the Hamiltonian, path integral and BRST quantization methods, constrained dynamics, construction of gauge theories and their quantizaton under gauge-fixing as well as study of boson stars, and wormholes in general relativity and gravity theory.
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#7964

Michael D. Towler

#91585
Overall Influence
Michael D. Towler is a theoretical physicist associated with the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge and formerly research associate at University College, London and College Lecturer at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He created and owns the Towler Institute in Vallico di Sotto in Tuscany, Italy.
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#7965

Olaf Lechtenfeld

#142909
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Olaf Lechtenfeld is a German mathematical physicist, academic and researcher. He is a full professor at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at Leibniz University, where he founded the Riemann Center for Geometry and Physics.
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#7966

Hans Oerlemans

Hans Oerlemans
#97771
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Johannes "Hans" Oerlemans is a Dutch climatologist specialized in glaciology and sea level. He has been a professor of meteorology in the Faculty of Physics and Astronomy at Utrecht University since 1989.
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#7967

Rachel Aldred

#44688
Overall Influence
Rachel Aldred is British academic specialising in active mobility. She is a Professor in Transport at the University of Westminster and has published over 25 peer reviewed papers. She was awarded the Economic and Social Research Council's award for Outstanding Impact in Public Policy for her work on The Near Miss Project, the first UK study calculating a per-mile collision risk for cycling, and is one of the co-investigators of the Propensity to Cycle Tool, an online system for transport planners using census data to model the potential benefits of cycling infrastructure schemes in England, funded by the Department for Transport.
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#7968

Peter Williams

#75477
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Sir Peter Michael Williams, is a British physicist. Education Williams was educated at Hymers College and completed his undergraduate degree at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1966, and his PhD at Selwyn College, Cambridge, with a thesis entitled "Defect structure and luminescent properties of semiconductors" in 1969.
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#7969

Charles Radin

#102190
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Charles Lewis Radin is an American mathematician, known for his work on aperiodic tilings and in particular for defining the pinwheel tiling and, with John Horton Conway, the quaquaversal tiling. Education and career Radin did his undergraduate studies at City College of New York, graduating in 1965, and then did his graduate studies at the University of Rochester, earning a Ph.D. in 1970 under the supervision of Gérard Emch. Since 1976 he has been on the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin.
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#7970

Pascal Del'Haye

#116823
Overall Influence
Pascal Del'Haye is a German physicist specializing in integrated photonics. He is heading the Microphotonics Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light. Education Del'Haye studied physics at RWTH Aachen and LMU Munich. He completed his Ph.D. in 2011, with a dissertation in photonics at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics under the supervision of Theodor W. Hänsch and Tobias Kippenberg. He did postdoctoral work at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado from 2011 to 2015.
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#7971

S. Anantha Ramakrishna

#144433
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Subramanian Anantha Ramakrishna is a professor of physics in Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur specializing in optics and condensed matter physics. He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, India's highest prize for excellence in science, mathematics and technology, in the physical sciences category in the year 2016. Ramakrishna obtained M.Sc. degree from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1995 after pursuing the integrated 5-year M.Sc. programme and secured Ph.D. from Raman Research Institute, Bangalore, in 2001 for a thesis titled "Light transport and localization in Active and passive random media" written under the supervision of Prof.
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#7972

Asle Sudbø

#76932
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Asle Sudbø is a Professor of Physics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology . He was a co-author of two articles in The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine that were since found be based on scientific fraud and subsequently retracted in 2006. The editor of The Lancet described this as the biggest scientific fraud conducted by a single researcher ever. However, his brother finally accepted all responsibilities and claimed only he was responsible for the fraud. An official inquiry into Asle Sudbø's involvement with his brother's fabrication took place. The official c...
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#7973

Joseph Braat

#47318
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Joseph J.M. Braat is a Dutch optics engineer and scientist. Between 1973 and 1998 he worked at Philips Research Laboratories. He was professor of optics at Delft University of Technology between 1998 and 2008.
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#7974

Sarah Veatch

#155464
Overall Influence
Sarah Louise Veatch is an American biophysicist, associate professor of biophysics at University of Michigan. Early life Veatch was raised in Brookline, Massachusetts by her mother, a medical doctor, and her father, William R. Veatch, a membrane biophysicist.
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#7975

Stanley Froehner

#166076
Overall Influence
Stanley C. Froehner is an American physiologist and biophysicist currently the UW Medicine Distinguished Professor at University of Washington and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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#7976

Melanie Johnston-Hollitt

#137849
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Melanie Johnston-Hollitt is an Australian astrophysicist and professor. She has worked on the design, construction, and international governance of several radio telescopes including the Low Frequency Array , the Murchison Widefield Array and the upcoming Square Kilometre Array . She was the director of the Murchison Widefield Array until December 2020 and is a professor at the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy at Curtin University and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research. Since August 2020, Melanie Johnston-Hollitt is the director of the Curtin Institute for Data Science...
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#7977

Einar Tandberg-Hanssen

#158150
Overall Influence
1921 - 2012 (91 years)
Einar A. Tandberg-Hanssen was a Norwegian-American astrophysicist with a specialty in solar physics. Background Tandberg-Hanssen was born in Bergen, Norway. He was the son of Birger Tandberg-Hanssen and Mona Meier . He grew up in Langesund and Skien where he finished his secondary education in 1941. He took his undergraduate degree in astronomy at the University of Oslo in 1950, and after fellowships at Institut d'astrophysique de Paris, Caltech, High Altitude Observatory and the Cavendish Laboratory, he took his doctorate at the University of Oslo in 1960. His thesis was titled An Investig...
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#7978

Amaelle Landais-Israël

#64280
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Amaelle Landais-Israël is a French glaciologist and climatologist. She is research director of the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences at the French National Centre for Scientific Research .
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#7979

Ágnes Mócsy

Ágnes Mócsy
#61026
Overall Influence
Ágnes Mócsy is a Professor of Physics at the Pratt Institute who works on theoretical nuclear physics. She is also a filmmaker, science communicator and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Education and early career Mócsy grew up in the Transylvania region of Romania, where she was a part of the Hungarian minority in the region. She completed her bachelor's degree at Babeș-Bolyai University in 1989. She went on to earn a master's degree physics at the University of Bergen. She then moved to the University of Minnesota, culminating in a PhD in physics. Her thesis focused on the phase diagram of quantum chromodynamics.
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#7980

Marek Huberath

Marek Huberath
#99762
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Marek S. Huberath is a Polish professor of physics in the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and an award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer. His themes are philosophical, moral, and religious: how people become beasts or remain human in extreme circumstances. Many of his stories focus on death. Winner of the Zajdel Award in 1991 for a short story Kara większa and in 1997 for his novel Gniazdo Światów.
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#7981

Irving P. Herman

#136234
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Irving Philip Herman is an American physicist and the Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Applied Physics at Columbia University. He is an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society and of Optica, the former for "distinguished accomplishments in laser physics, notably the development and application of laser techniques to probe and control materials processing".
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#7982

Rolf Brahde

#116988
Overall Influence
1918 - 2009 (91 years)
Carl Rolf Brahde was a Norwegian astronomer. He was born in Tvedestrand as Carl Rolf Henriksen. He was the son of teacher Bredo Henriksen and Edna Lucy Brahde Davidsen . He changed his last name to Brahde in 1933. He finished his secondary education in Skien in 1937, and enrolled at the University of Oslo in the same year. His studies were interrupted by World War II. He fought in the Norwegian Campaign in 1940, and during the subsequent German occupation of Norway he was a member of the clandestine resistance group XU. He was eventually discovered, but fled to Sweden in 1944. He was decorated with the Defence Medal 1940 – 1945.
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#7983

Hermann Josef Buchkremer

#140891
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Hermann Josef Buchkremer is a German physicist and former Rector of the FH Aachen University of Applied Sciences. Life and work After completing school, Hermann Josef Buchkremer studied physics at the University of Cologne and the RWTH Aachen. After receiving his Diplom, he worked as a research associate at the Highway Research Institute of the RWTH Aachen, then at the Institute for Reactor Safety at the Jülich Research Centre.
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#7984

Jean L. Turner

#109007
Overall Influence
Jean L. Turner is an astrophysicist and distinguished professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She was lead author on research and discovery of a particular star cluster in the dwarf galaxy NGC 5253, considered 'remarkable' for being an extremely dusty gas cloud and having highly efficient star formation.
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#7985

Victor Brumberg

#137109
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Victor A. Brumberg is a Russian theoretical physicist specializing in relativistic celestial mechanics and astrometry. He worked as a chief-scientist at the Institute of Applied Astronomy, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg. He is noted for his work on general relativity applied to celestial mechanics and ephemerides. He is currently living in the United States of America.
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#7986

Ora Entin-Wohlman

#157647
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Ora Entin-Wohlman is an Israeli condensed matter physicist. She is a professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University and at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Education and career Entin-Wohlman studied mathematics and physics at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, earning a bachelor's degree in both in 1965 and a master's degree in physics in 1967. She completed her Ph.D. at Bar-Ilan University in 1973.
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#7987

Nathalie Picqué

#129029
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Nathalie Picqué is a French physicist working at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in the field Frequency Combs, where she studies ultra-high resolution spectroscopy using ultrashort pulses of light combined with Fourier-transform spectroscopy to reveal the fine chemistry of samples, in particular in the mid-infrared, demonstrating resolving power in excess of 1,000,000,000,000.
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#7988

Jane MacArthur

#131193
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Jane MacArthur FRAS is a British planetary scientist and science writer based in Leicester. Early life and education Jane MacArthur went to City of Norwich School, Norfolk, before studying Mathematics at the University of Nottingham. She completed an MSc in Planetary Sciences at University College London after taking distance learning courses in Planetary Geology, Exoplanets and Galaxies at Liverpool John Moores University. She completed several workshops and summer schools relating to geology and exoplanets, developing a considerable public profile through science festivals and media appeara...
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#7989

Björn Jonson

Björn Jonson
#169481
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
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#7990

Li Xiaowen

#74008
Overall Influence
1947 - 2015 (68 years)
Li Xiaowen was a Chinese scientist and professor at Beijing Normal University. Biography Li was born in Zigong, Sichuan, on March 2, 1947, with his ancestral home in Guichi District of Chizhou, Anhui. He graduated from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in 1968. After the Cultural Revolution, he went to United States of America to study at University of California, Santa Barbara, he earned a master's degree in geography and PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering. After graduation, he taught at Beijing Normal University, he was Deputy Dean of the Environmental Science College of Beijing Normal University.
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#7991

Fredrik Zachariasen

#101324
Overall Influence
1931 - 1999 (68 years)
Fredrik "Fred" Zachariasen was an American theoretical physicist, known for his collaborative work with Murray Gell-Mann, Sidney Drell, and others. Early life and education Fredrik Zachariasen was born in 1931 in Chicago, Illinois. His father was the physicist William Houlder Zachariasen.
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#7992

Amitava Bhattacharjee

#169525
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Amitava Bhattacharjee is a theoretical plasma physicist and a professor at Princeton University. He was awarded the 2022 James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics for his work on dusty plasmas and fundamental plasma processes such as magnetic reconnection, magnetohydrodynamic turbulence and dynamo actions, as well as his contributions in connecting laboratory plasmas to astrophysical plasmas.
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#7993

Yasmine Amhis

#123696
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Yasmine Amhis is a French-Algerian particle physicist. In 2016, she was awarded the Jacques Herbrand Prize. She is the granddaughter of the Algerian poet and writer Djoher Amhis-Ouksel. Early life and education In 1999, after high school in Algeria, Yasmine Amhis pursued undergraduate studies in France. She obtained her master's degree at the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay, then earned a thesis grant in 2006 and started her work at IJCLab Orsay under the supervision of Marie -Hélène Schune and Jacques Lefrançois. Work on her thesis introduced her to the LHCb experiment at CERN. After she o...
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#7994

Manfred Schüssler

#169537
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Manfred Schüssler is a German solar physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research. In 2017, he was awarded the George Ellery Hale Prize and the Senior Prize of the Solar Physics Division of the European Physical Society for his contributions to the study of the solar dynamo.
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#7995

Michael J. Biercuk

#107890
Overall Influence
Michael J. Biercuk is Professor of Quantum Physics and Quantum technology at the University of Sydney, and the CEO and Founder of Q-CTRL, a venture-capital-backed quantum technology company. In his academic role he is a Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems.
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#7996

Pierre Suquet

#104585
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Pierre Suquet is a French theoretician mechanic and research director at the CNRS. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences. Biography He did his preparatory classes in Grenoble then at Louis-Le Grand , to join the École Normale Supérieure to become an agrégé de Mathématiques in 1975, and Doctor in 1982.
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#7997

Bei Zeng

#117048
Overall Influence
Bei Zeng is a quantum information theorist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where she is a professor of physics, and director of the IAS Center for Quantum Technologies. As well as quantum information, her research interests include quantum computing and quantum error correction.
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#7998

Stanley Martin Flatté

#130726
Overall Influence
1940 - 2007 (67 years)
Stanley Martin Flatté was a particle physicist and expert on wave propagation in atmospheric optics, ocean acoustics, and seismology. Biography Flatté received in 1962 a B.S. in physics from California Institute of Technology and in 1966 a Ph.D. in physics from UC Berkeley. After 5 years as a research physicist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, he joined in 1971 the UC Santa Cruz faculty, where he remained until his retirement in 2004. At UCSC he was affiliated with the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics, the Institute of Marine Sciences, and the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics.
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#7999

Nicholas Harrison

Nicholas Harrison
#122461
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Nicholas Harrison FRSC FinstP is an English theoretical physicist known for his work on developing theory and computational methods for discovering and optimising advanced materials. He is the Professor of Computational Materials Science in the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College London where he is co-director of the Institute of Molecular Science and Engineering.
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#8000

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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