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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Physics,

#8251

John E. Bowers

#76654

Overall Influence

John E. Bowers is an American physicist, engineer, researcher and educator. He is the Fred Kavli Chair in Nanotechnology, the director of the Institute for Energy Efficiency and a distinguished professor in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Materials at University of California, Santa Barbara. He was the deputy director of American Institute of Manufacturing of Integrated Photonics from 2015 to 2022.

#8252

Sinéad Griffin

#95860

Overall Influence

1986 - Present (40 years)

Sinéad Majella Griffin is an Irish physicist working at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on high energy physics and condensed matter. She won the 2017 Swiss Physical Society Award in General Physics.

#8253

Lena Kourkoutis

#150461

Overall Influence

1979 - 2023 (44 years)

Lena Fitting Kourkoutis was an American physicist working in the field of electron microscopy, and a professor of applied and engineering physics at Cornell University. Her research focuses on the use of aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscope, providing atomic resolution, at cryogenic temperatures to study physical processes such as superconductivity and biological structures such as proteins.

#8254

Reina Maruyama

#135406

Overall Influence

Reina H. Maruyama is a Japanese–American experimental particle/atomic/nuclear physicist. As a professor at Yale University, Maruyama was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society for her "innovative and wide-ranging contributions to the experimental study of rare events and fundamental symmetries, especially the search for neutrinoless double beta decay, and for leadership in understanding the signature and nature of dark matter."

#8255

Elizabeth Buckley-Geer

#172952

Overall Influence

Elizabeth Jane Buckley-Geer is a particle physicist and astrophysicist at Fermilab, where she studies gravitational lensing as a collaborator on the Dark Energy Survey and Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. She is also an associate of the University of Chicago Consortium for Advanced Science and Engineering.

#8256

Catalina Curceanu

Catalina Curceanu

#139174

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Cătălina Oana Curceanu is a Romanian physicist and lead researcher at the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare. She researches low energy quantum chromodynamics. Early life and education Curceanu was born in Transylvania. She became interested in science as a child, and applied to the Mathematics and Physics Lyceum at Magurele in Bucharest. She attributes her passion for physics to her very skilled teachers. She studied physics at the University of Bucharest and graduated as a Valedictorian. She carried out her doctoral research using the Low Energy Antiproton Ring at CERN on the OBELIX experiment.

#8257

Ralph Belknap Baldwin

#172512

Overall Influence

1912 - 2010 (98 years)

Ralph Belknap Baldwin was an American planetary scientist known for his work on lunar craters, beginning in the late 1940s. His book, The Face of the Moon made the case for the impact nature of lunar craters. He published The Measure of the Moon in 1963.

#8258

Rae Robertson-Anderson

#84264

Overall Influence

Rae Marie Robertson-Anderson is an American biophysicist who is Associate Professor at the University of San Diego. She works on soft matter physics and is particularly interested in the transport and molecular mechanics of biopolymer networks. Robertson-Anderson is a member of the Council on Undergraduate Research.

#8259

Raffaella Schneider

#172356

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Raffaella Schneider is an Italian astrophysicist whose research concerns the first generations of stars, galaxies, and black holes in the early universe. She is a professor of astrophysics at Sapienza University of Rome.

#8260

Wojciech Dziembowski

Wojciech Dziembowski

#150891

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Wojciech Andrzej Dziembowski , is a Polish astronomer, member of Polish Academy of Sciences and Polish Academy of Learning. Biography He studied at the Jagiellonian University and in 1967 he defended his PhD thesis at the University of Warsaw. He received his professor's degree in 1983. Since 1989 he has been a corresponding member of Polish Academy of Sciences and since 2007 he has been a full member of the organization.

#8261

Frank Hill

#169657

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Frank Hill is an American astrophysicist who works at the National Solar Observatory. He was formerly its associate director, and currently serves as the Global Oscillations Network Group program manager.

#8262

David E. Weston

#124294

Overall Influence

1929 - 2001 (72 years)

David E. Weston was an English physicist, who worked at the Admiralty Research Establishment. During his early career he worked with A B Wood, and is best known for his contributions to underwater acoustics. He published more than 65 papers, including 32 in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, and was awarded the Rayleigh Medal by the Institute of Acoustics in 1970 and the Helmholtz-Rayleigh Interdisciplinary Silver Medal by the Acoustical Society of America in 1998. Weston was president of the UK Institute of Acoustics between 1982 and 1984.

#8263

Brian M. Salzberg

#122885

Overall Influence

Brian M. Salzberg is an American neuroscientist, biophysicist and professor. He is Professor of Neuroscience and of Physiology at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. Salzberg's research has been focused in the area of Neuroscience and Biophysics. Together with Lawrence B. Cohen, Salzberg has contributed significantly to the optical imaging revolution since the 1970s, prior to which electrophysiology was limited to direct impalement of neurons in the brain with blind probes. He pioneered the application of optical methods that he developed with Cohen to problems in cell...

#8264

Richard Latter

#154621

Overall Influence

1923 - 1999 (76 years)

Richard Latter was a theoretical physicist, who was famous for his political involvement in the United States during the Cold War, where he warned against MIRVs developed in Soviet Russia, by which arms-reduction treaties could be evaded.

#8265

Torstein Jøssang

#157103

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Torstein Kristen Fossan Jøssang is a Norwegian physicist. He was born in Jørpeland. He took the cand.real. at the University of Oslo in 1962 and took the dr.philos. degree at the same institution in 1968, following a research tenure at Ohio State University from 1963 to 1966. He has also been a guest scholar in Shenyang, Tel Aviv, Gainesville, Florida and Ponca City, Oklahoma.

#8266

Tayyaba Zafar

#170484

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (43 years)

Tayyaba Zafar is a Pakistani-born astronomer and science communicator. She is widely known to the public as the first woman from Pakistan who visited Antarctica under the Homeward Bound Program. She completed her PhD in astronomy from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark in 2011 and worked at the European Southern Observatory and Australian Astronomical Observatory. She researches how metals and dust form in distant galaxies and their effects are on star formation and other galaxy properties.

#8267

Dominique Franck Escande

#131837

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Dominique Franck Escande is a French physicist. He is known for his research in plasma physics, thermonuclear fusion by magnetic confinement, hybrid fusion-fission reactorss, Hamiltonian dynamics, and deterministic chaos.

#8268

Afërdita Veveçka Priftaj

Afërdita Veveçka Priftaj

#107361

Overall Influence

1948 - 2017 (69 years)

Afërdita Veveçka Priftaj was an Albanian physicist, associate of the Academy of Sciences of Albania and a professor at the Polytechnic University of Tirana. Her research specialized on metals, evaluating their microstructure and mechanical properties, and the effects of severe plastic deformation on nanocrystalline materials.

#8269

Nimai Mukhopadhyay

Nimai Mukhopadhyay

#131966

Overall Influence

1944 - 2000 (56 years)

Nimai Mukhopadhyay was a professor of physics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a theoretical physicist, specializing in the nuclear aspects of the weak interactions. During the early 1980s and into the mid-1990s, Nimai's research advanced the fields of photoproduction and electroproduction of baryon resonances involving pion and eta decay. His work included discoveries on the properties of the Phi_meson, Pion scattering, the theory of eta photo production and electroproduction, and approaches to perturbative results in the N-Delta Transition.

#8270

William Arthur Coles

#104034

Overall Influence

William Arthur Coles, from the University of California, San Diego, was awarded the status of Fellow in the American Physical Society, after they were nominated by their Topical Group in Plasma Astrophysics in 2006, for his major contributions to our understanding of the effect of plasma turbulence on radio wave propagation, and the use of radio propagation measurements to infer properties of remote turbulent plasmas in interplanetary space and the interstellar medium.

#8271

Naoko Yamazaki

#12904

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

is a Japanese engineer and former astronaut at JAXA. She was the second Japanese woman to fly in space. The first was Chiaki Mukai. Early life Yamazaki was born Naoko Sumino in Matsudo City. She spent two years of her childhood in Sapporo. After graduating from Ochanomizu University Senior High School in 1989, Yamazaki earned a Bachelor of Science degree with a major in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1993 and a Master of Science degree with a major in Aerospace Engineering in 1996.

#8272

Lucy Fortson

#172471

Overall Influence

Lucy Frear Fortson is an American astronomer known for her work on gamma-ray astronomy and Galaxy morphological classification and for her leadership of citizen science projects including the Galaxy Zoo and Zooniverse. She is a professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota.

#8273

Leonard Culhane

#163660

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Leonard John Celistus Culhane FRS is an Irish-born British astronomer, former director of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London. Career He commenced his academic career as a lecturer at University College, London with a short break as a researcher in Lockheed Palo Alto Laboratory, California in 1969, rising to be Reader in Physics from 1976 to 1981 and professor of physics from 1981 to 2006. During that time he was deputy director and then director of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory . On his retirement in 2006 he became emeritus professor of physics.

#8274

George Bacon

#124119

Overall Influence

1917 - 2011 (94 years)

George Edward Bacon MA ScD PhD FInstP was a British nuclear physicist, specializing in neutron diffraction. Biography The son of George H. Bacon and Lilian A. Bacon, of Derby, he was educated at Derby School and Emmanuel College, Cambridge . In 1945, he married Enid Trigg , and they had a son and a daughter.

#8275

Fabio Toninelli

#99127

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Fabio Toninelli is an Italian mathematician who works in probability theory, stochastic processes and probabilistic aspects of mathematical physics. Education He obtained his PhD in physics, in 2003, from Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.

#8276

Hai-Lung Dai

#104308

Overall Influence

Hai-Lung Dai is a Taiwanese-born American physical chemist and university administrator. He currently is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Chemistry and Vice President for International Affairs at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the United States.

#8277

Sonia Bacca

#171371

Overall Influence

Sonia Bacca is an Italian physicist known for her calculations of the interaction forces of small systems of nucleic particles. She is University Professor in Theoretical Physics at the Institute for Nuclear Physics of the University of Mainz in Germany.

#8278

Bridgette Barry

#128385

Overall Influence

Bridgette Anne Barry was an American biophysicist and biochemist. She was a professor and researcher of molecular biophysics and biochemistry in the Georgia Tech chemistry and biochemistry department from 2003 until her death. Her research focused on protein electron and oxygen evolution mechanisms.

#8279

Peter Duncumb

#74884

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Peter Duncumb is a British physicist specialising in X-ray microscopy and microanalysis. He is best known for his contribution to the development of the first electron microprobe. Early life and education Duncumb was educated at Clare College, Cambridge. He earned his PhD in 1957, under the supervision of Vernon Ellis Cosslett.

#8280

Alv Egeland

#124259

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Alv Egeland is a Norwegian physicist. He was born in Kvinesdal. He took the cand.real. degree in 1959, and his doctorate at Stockholm University in 1963. He was a professor at the University of Oslo from 1972. His fields are space research and aurora borealis research. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

#8281

Georg von Freymann

#146721

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Georg von Freymann is a German experimental physicist and professor of physics at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern and head of the "Optical Technologies and Photonics" research group there.

#8282

G. Raymond Satchler

#172102

Overall Influence

1926 - 2010 (84 years)

George Raymond "Ray" Satchler was a British-American nuclear physicist. Biography After serving from 1944 to 1948 the Royal Air Force, Satchler studied at the University of Oxford, where he graduated in 1951 with a B.A. and an M.A. and in 1955 with a doctorate in physics. His thesis advisor was John Ashley Spiers. As a postdoc Satchler was from 1956 to 1957 a research associate at the University of Michigan and from 1956 to 1959 a research fellow at Imperial Chemical Industries. He was a physicist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, from 1959 to 1996, when he retired. From 1994 to 2005 he was a professor at the University of Tennessee.

#8283

Mary O'Kane

#77984

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Mary Josephine O'Kane, AC an Australian scientist and engineer, is the Chair of the Independent Planning Commission of New South Wales . She is also a company director and Executive Chairman of O’Kane Associates, a Sydney-based consulting practice specialising in government reviews and research and innovation advice to governments in Europe, Asia and Australasia.

#8284

Amedeo Odoni

#76942

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Amedeo Odoni is currently the T. Wilson Chair Professor Emeritus of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2011 "for contributions and global leadership in air traffic control and airport systems" and to the 2004 class of Fellows of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.

#8285

Arjun Yodh

#122492

Overall Influence

Arjun Gaurang Yodh is an American physicist. He is the James M. Skinner Professor of Science at the University of Pennsylvania and former Director of the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter.

#8286

Peter Norreys

#173579

Overall Influence

Peter Norreys is professor of inertial fusion science at the University of Oxford and is an Individual Merit Fellow of the Science and Technology Facilities Council. In 2013 Norreys won the Institute of Physics Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Medal and Prize.

#8287

Werner Sandhas

#173601

Overall Influence

1934 - 2021 (87 years)

Werner Sandhas was a German physicist at the University of Bonn. Born in Berlin-Charlottenburg, he studied physics at the Free University, Berlin, gaining a Diploma in 1960 and becoming a Doctor of Science in 1963. After 2 years as a science collaborator at the Free University he was appointed assistant professor. He then moved to be assistant professor at the University of Bonn

#8288

Wang Yening

#111684

Overall Influence

1926 - 2019 (93 years)

Wang Yening , also known as Ye-Ning Wang, was a Chinese physicist. She was an educator with a specialization in condensed matter physics. She spent her entire career at Nanjing University and was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1991. She was a recipient of the State Natural Science Award and the Ho Leung Ho Lee Prize in Physics.

#8289

Leif Bjørnø

#98746

Overall Influence

1937 - 2015 (78 years)

Leif Bjørnø was born on 30 March 1937 in Svendborg, Denmark. Son of Svend Aage Valdemar and Elna Marie Jensen. Leif Bjørnø, professor and well known acoustician. Named Knight of the Order of Dannebrog, Her Majesty the Queen of Denmark 1991, recipient Gold medal Society Francaise d'Acoustique, 1995, Lord Rayleigh's Gold medal, London, 1997, The Hartmann Prize, Copenhagen, 1999, Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, a Life Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics.

#8290

Verena Meyer

#115496

Overall Influence

1929 - 2018 (89 years)

Verena Meyer was a Swiss nuclear physicist and former President of the University of Zurich. She was the first woman elected to serve as president of the Swiss Physical Society. Early life Meyer was born to academic parents in 1929. Her father, Karl Meyer, was a professor of history at the University of Zurich and her mother, Alice Meyer, was a lawyer. Her father died when she was 20 years old.

#8291

Joachim Gross

#173647

Overall Influence

#8292

Mark Armstrong

#123205

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Mark Armstrong is a British amateur astronomer, a member of the British Astronomical Association. With his wife Claire Armstrong, he works from Rolvenden, Kent, England . As of 2006, has 58 supernova discoveries to his credit in addition to two asteroids.

#8293

Alan E. Willner

#37923

Overall Influence

Alan E. Willner is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California. He was also president of the Optical Society in 2016. Willner is known for his research on optical fiber communications and free-space communications. Willner's doctoral advisor was Richard M. Osgood Jr.

#8294

Robert Cahalan

#96705

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Robert F. Cahalan is Emeritus Scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and previous Chief of the Laboratory for Climate and Radiation , Project Scientist of the Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment , and President of the International Radiation Commission of the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics during 2008–2012. His interests include climate change, energy balance, remote sensing, and solar radiation.

#8295

Angela R. Hight Walker

Angela R. Hight Walker

#167243

Overall Influence

Angela Renee Hight Walker is an American physicist. She is a project leader in the nanoscale spectroscopy group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Hight Walker's research includes advancing optical spectroscopic techniques and specifically their applicability to characterize quantum nanomaterials.

#8296

Chen Tiemei

#92779

Overall Influence

1935 - 2018 (83 years)

Chen Tiemei was a Chinese physicist and archaeologist, considered a pioneer in scientific archaeology and a founder of quantitative archaeology in China. He was a professor and Director of the Scientific Archaeology Laboratory at Peking University.

#8297

Heather Kulik

#91100

Overall Influence

Heather J. Kulik is an American computational materials scientist and engineer who is an associate professor of chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research considers the computational design of new materials and the use of artificial intelligence to predict material properties.

#8298

Waldyr Alves Rodrigues Jr.

#115024

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Waldyr Alves Rodrigues, Jr. born at Araraquara, SP, Brazil, obtained his B.Sc. in physics in 1968 at the University of São Paulo , where he has been a research student of Mário Schenberg and became an assistant professor in 1969. He then moved to Torino, Italy, where he did postgraduate studies at the Scuola di Perfezionamento in Fisica Nucleare and obtained a degree in theoretical nuclear physics in 1971. Later that year, he returned to Brazil and became an associate professor at the new Physics Institute of Campinas State University .

#8299

Sarah T. Stewart-Mukhopadhyay

#85713

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Sarah T. Stewart-Mukhopadhyay is an American planetary scientist known for studying planet formation, planetary geology, and materials science. She is a professor at the University of California, Davis in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department. She was a professor at Harvard University Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences from 2003 to 2014.

#8300

Hanna Reisler

#121249

Overall Influence

Hanna Reisler is an Israeli-American Professor of Chemistry at the University of Southern California. She is interested in the reaction dynamics of molecules and free radicals, as well as the photodissociation in the gas phase. Reisler established the University of Southern California Women In Science and Engineering program.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions