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,

#8651

Z. Jane Wang

#170167

Overall Influence

Zheng Jane Wang is a Chinese and American physicist known for her research on insect flight. She is a professor of physics and of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University. Education and career Wang studied physics at Fudan University, graduating in 1989, and completed a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Chicago in 1997.

#8652

Sandra Chapman

#177776

Overall Influence

Sandra C. Chapman CPhysis FInstP FRAS a British astrophysicist who is Professor of Astrophysics and Director of the Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics at the University of Warwick. Her research considers nonlinear physics and planetary magnetospheres. She was awarded the 2022 Royal Astronomical Society Chapman Medal.

#8653

Daniel S. Koltun

#173584

Overall Influence

1933 - 2014 (81 years)

Daniel Scherwin Koltun was an American theoretical physicist, specializing in nuclear physics. Koltun graduated in 1955 from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree and in 1961 from Princeton University with a Ph.D. in physics with thesis New methods of spectroscopy applied to the nuclear 1-p shell. He became in 1962 a member of the University of Rochester's physics faculty and retired there in 2004 as professor emeritus.

#8654

Chia-Seng Chang

#172827

Overall Influence

Jason Chia-Seng Chang is a Taiwanese physicist. Chang earned a bachelor's degree in physics from National Tsing Hua University in 1978. He subsequently obtained a master's degree in the subject from Marquette University in 1983, followed by a doctorate at Arizona State University in 1988. Chang remained at ASU as a postdoctoral researcher before joining Academia Sinica's in 1991. He later served as director of the Institute of Physics. Chang holds a joint appointment as a professor within National Taiwan University's department of physics.

#8655

Song Yoo-geun

#93199

Overall Influence

1997 - Present (29 years)

Song Yoo-geun is a South Korean person who gained recognition as a child prodigy in South Korea since 2004. After graduating college in 2009, he was involved in a number of controversies during his ultimately unsuccessful doctorate program at Korean University of Science and Technology , including one involving his paper in October 2015 written with his advisor, Park Seok-jae. The paper, entitled "Axisymmetric, Nonstationary Black Hole Magnetospheres: Revisited" appeared in the Astrophysical Journal . However, the paper was soon retracted due to concerns that it plagiarized a 2002 book chapte...

#8656

Albéric Boivin

#114520

Overall Influence

1919 - 1991 (72 years)

Albéric Boivin was a Canadian physicist known for his work in optics. Early life Boivin began his studies at Université Laval in 1940; in 1944, he became one of the university's first four graduates in physics, and began teaching that year.

#8657

Richard Neutze

#146914

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Richard Neutze is a biophysicist from New Zealand, now a Professor of Biochemistry in the Department of Chemistry & Molecular Biology at Gothenburg University in Gothenburg, Sweden. He has made fundamental contributions to X-ray crystallography of biomolecules, including proposal of the idea of diffract before destroy along with Janos Hajdu and others, which in part led to the invention of serial femtosecond crystallography.

#8658

Robert M. L. Baker Jr.

#121513

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

Robert M. L. Baker Jr. is an American physicist. He earned a bachelor's degree in physics at UCLA summa cum laude, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and earned a master's degree in physics and a Ph.D. in engineering at UCLA. The Ph.D. in engineering, with a specialization in aerospace, was, according to UCLA officials, the first of its kind to be granted in the United States. Baker was a lecturer and assistant professor at UCLA, in astronomy and the Department of Engineering and Applied Science . During that time he was also a lecturer at the United States Air Force Academy.

#8659

Alexander Pechen

#159377

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Alexander Nikolayevich Pechen is a Russian physicist and mathematician. In 2009 he became a laureate of the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists , in 2016 was elected to Professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences among about 500 top Russian researchers aged under fifty.

#8660

John L. Phillips

#179273

Overall Influence

#8661

Gianni Bellocchi

#108483

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Gianni Bellocchi is a researcher in agricultural and related sciences. He is credited with the development of approaches and tools in validation of estimates and measurements. Introduction of fuzzy logic in the context of validation is often considered to be the most significant contribution to the field of model and method validation.

#8662

Zhong Wanxie

#44275

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Zhong Wanxie , also known as Wan-Xie Zhong, was a Chinese civil engineer and physicist. He was a professor at the Dalian University of Technology who specializes in computational mechanics and engineering mechanics. He pioneered computational mechanics in China and served as the founding Chairman of the Chinese Association for Computational Mechanics and an executive committee member of the International Association for Computational Mechanics. He was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1993.

#8663

Ilaria Pascucci

#126379

Overall Influence

Ilaria Pascucci is an Italian-American astrophysicist and planetary scientist known for her research on exoplanets, protoplanets, the formation of planets, and protoplanetary disks, using a combination of theory, simulation, and observation. Pascucci is a professor and associate department head in the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona.

#8664

Isabella M. Gioia

Isabella M. Gioia

#162728

Overall Influence

Isabella M. Gioia is an Italian astrophysicist. She is currently a Research Associate at INAF in Bologna, Italy. Career While a visiting astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, she was a member of the Chandra Science Center. As of 2012, she had been a member of the American Astronomical Society for 25 years. She was included in the 1996-1997 edition of Who's Who in Science and Engineering. She was listed in ISI's 1120 World's Most Cited Physicists with 65 articles, 2397 citations, and an average of 36.88 citations per article as of the time of publication.

#8665

Paul B. Weisz

#73351

Overall Influence

1919 - 2005 (86 years)

Paul Burgan Weisz was a Czechoslovak-born American chemist, noted for his work on solid catalysts which had a major impact on petroleum refining. Life Weisz was born July 2, 1919, in Plzeň, Czechoslovakia, the son of Alexander and Amalia Weisz: they moved to Berlin and finally emigrated to the United States in 1939. He married, and was survived by his wife, Rhoda, and his son, Randy and daughter, Ingrid. He died September 25, 2012, in State College, Pennsylvania.

#8666

Montserrat Calleja Gómez

#151914

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Montserrat Calleja Gómez is a Spanish physicist who specializes in Bionanomechanics. She is currently a research professor at the Institute of Micro and Nanotechnology in Madrid, Spain. Early life and career Montserrat was born in the Spanish Province of Ourense, Galicia, Spain. She obtained her degree in Physics from University of Santiago de Compostela in 1998. She finished her Master's Degree in 2000 with the thesis "Optimizing the AFM dynamic mode for nanolithograph". She obtained her doctoral degree from the same University in 2002, after working under the supervision of Ricardo García at the Micro and Nanoelectronics Institute of Madrid specializing in nanotechnology and biosensors.

#8667

Kane

#179330

Overall Influence

#8668

Michael Kotschenreuther

#179331

Overall Influence

Michael Thomas Kotschenreuther is an American physicist. Kotschenreuther earned a doctorate at the Princeton University, where he authored the thesis The effect of small-scale fluctuations on several plasma processes. He subsequently joined the Institute for Fusion Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1998, Kotschenreuther was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society "[f]or fundamental contributions to the self-consistent theory of magnetic island formation, for the implementation of the delta f numerical technique, and for developing theoretical techniques that quantitati...

#8669

Shantanu Basu

#179343

Overall Influence

Shantanu Basu is an American astrophysicist and Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the Canadian University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario. Career Basu received his PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1993, and held academic positions at Michigan State University and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, in Toronto, before joining Western in 1999. Basu has made contributions to understanding the fragmentation of interstellar molecular clouds, the role of magnetic fields and angular momentum in gravitational collapse ...

#8670

David Hogg

#179352

Overall Influence

#8671

Seiji Ogawa

#179353

Overall Influence

#8672

Barbara Cooper

#178942

Overall Influence

1953 - 1999 (46 years)

Barbara Hope Cooper was an American physicist. She was the first female professor on the physics faculty at Cornell University. Early life and education Cooper was born in Lancaster in 1953. She was raised in Newark. She attended Newark High School and graduated in 1971. Her father, Charles Burleigh Cooper, was an emeritus professor of physics at the University of Delaware. She completed her undergraduate degree in 1976 at Cornell University. When she started at Cornell, she intended to apply to medical school. When she injured her back in her second year, she took a break from her studies to...

#8673

Christine Erbe

#174201

Overall Influence

Christine Erbe is a German-Australian physicist specializing in underwater acoustics. She is a professor in the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences and director of the Centre for Marine Science and Technology —both at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, Australia. Erbe is known for her research on acoustic masking in marine mammals, investigating how man-made underwater noise interferes with animal acoustic communication.

#8674

Gary Bold

#151139

Overall Influence

1938 - 2018 (80 years)

Gary Edward John Bold was a New Zealand physicist, an Honorary Associate Professor in physics at the University of Auckland. After gaining a PhD in 1961, Bold became a lecturer who taught across all courses in the physics department at the University. His research areas included underwater acoustics and application of physics theory to understanding human consciousness. He was highly regarded as a teacher and won the Prime Minister's Supreme Award at the 2004 Tertiary Teaching Excellence Awards. Bold had an interest in amateur radio and as an active member of the New Zealand Association of R...

#8675

Kimberlee J. Kearfott

#155195

Overall Influence

Kimberlee Jane Kearfott is a professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The American Nuclear Society recognised her notable contributions to the field of radiation protection in 2017.

#8676

Sylvie Roke

#166606

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Sylvie Roke is a Dutch chemist and physicist specialized in photonics and aqueous systems. As a full professor she holds Julia Jacobi Chair of Photomedicine at EPFL and is the director of the Laboratory for fundamental BioPhotonics.

#8677

Pascuala García Martínez

Pascuala García Martínez

#160454

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Pascuala García Martínez is a Spanish physicist and Professor of Optics at the University of Valencia, where her research specialises in developing new optical and digital techniques for pattern recognition and imaging applications. She is a Fellow of the International Society for Optics and Photonics .

#8678

Carolina Ödman-Govender

#168643

Overall Influence

1974 - 2022 (48 years)

Carolina Ödman-Govender was a Swiss physicist and academic who was Professor of Astrophysics at South Africa's University of the Western Cape. She was awarded the 2018 International Astronomical Union Special Executive Committee Award for Astronomy Outreach, Development and Education.

#8679

Meers Oppenheim

#172722

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Meers Oppenheim is an American physicist who is Professor of Astronomy at Boston University. His primary research interests include computational and theoretical space plasma physics, dynamics of the ionosphere and solar atmosphere, particle-wave interactions in plasmas, and the physics of meteor trails.

#8680

Ronald Lampman Watts

#71809

Overall Influence

1929 - 2015 (86 years)

Ronald Lampman Watts was a Canadian academic, who served as the 15th Principal and Vice-chancellor of Queen's University from 1974 until 1984. Born in Karuizawa, Japan, to Canadian missionary parents. Educated at the Yokohama International School immediately prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. Watts received his Bachelor of Arts from Trinity College in the University of Toronto in 1952, and then went to Oriel College, Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship where he had Kenneth Wheare as his mentor. He was a Brother of the Toronto Chapter of the Alpha Delta Phi. He received a BA at Oxford in 1954, an MA in 1959, and a D.

#8681

A. Keith Dunker

#179477

Overall Influence

#8682

P. Chris Hammel

#179484

Overall Influence

Peter Chris Hammel is an American physicist. Hammel earned a bachelor of arts degree in physics from the University of California, San Diego in 1977 and completed doctoral study in the subject at Cornell University in 1984. He began postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under John S. Waugh and transferred to Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1986. Hammel formally joined the Los Alamos staff in 1989, and remained affiliated with the institution until 2002, when he began teaching at Ohio State University. Hammel was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society i...

#8683

Shin-Tson Wu

#88072

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Shin-Tson Wu, is an American physicist and inventor of Taiwanese origin. He is currently a Pegasus professor at CREOL, The College of Optics and Photonics, University of Central Florida. Wu's contributions to liquid-crystal research and the resulting patent portfolio for next-generation liquid crystal displays , adaptive optics, laser-beam steering, biophotonics, and new photonic materials, have had a major impact on display technology worldwide.

#8684

Robert A. Gross

#81390

Overall Influence

1927 - 2018 (91 years)

Robert A. Gross was an American physicist. Gross attended the University of Pennsylvania, and earned a doctorate in applied physics from Harvard University. He subsequently worked for the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation. In 1960, Gross joined the Columbia University faculty, where he later became the Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Professor of Applied Physics. He was named founding chair of Columbia's department of applied physics and nuclear engineering. Gross then led the department of mechanical engineering, and from 1982 to 1990, served as dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

#8685

Michael Dickinson

#63131

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Michael H. Dickinson is an American fly bioengineer and neuroscientist, and Zarem Professor of Biology and Bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology. He studies Drosophila flight control systems and sensory processing and was dubbed the Fly Guy by The Scientist.

#8686

Daniel B. Kim‐shapiro

#179492

Overall Influence

#8687

David Phillips

#179497

Overall Influence

#8688

Judy Karpen

#178187

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Judith Tobi Karpen is an American astrophysicist who works for NASA as chief of the Space Weather Laboratory at the Goddard Space Flight Center. She is known for her research on solar prominences and the solar wind, including the use of the Solar Dynamics Observatory to observe the fine structure of plumes in the solar corona.

#8689

Mikio Yamamoto

#137967

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

is a Japanese scientist. His fields are physics, atomic physics, radiation science, medical imaging, life information science and human potential science. He received his Medical Ph.D. from Tohoku University and his Engineering Ph.D. from University of Electro-Communications.

#8690

Gabriel B. Mindlin

#169574

Overall Influence

Gabriel B. Mindlin is a Professor of physics at the University of Buenos Aires and a scientist whose research focuses on the physical mechanisms underlying the production of songs by songbirds. His research has produced mathematical and computer models which realistically reproduces songs of several species. He has published three books and over 100 original research papers in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings which have received over 2400 citations.

#8691

Sophie Brasselet

#135196

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Sophie Brasselet is a French optical physicist whose research interests include nonlinear optics, the optical and fluorescent properties of biomolecules, the optical manipulation of molecules, and the development of instrumentation for biological imaging, over scales ranging from single molecules to multi-cellular tissues. She is a director of research for the French National Centre for Scientific Research , and the director of the Institut Fresnel in Marseilles, also affiliated with the Mosaic advanced photonics group within the institute.

#8692

H. H. Wieder

#151539

Overall Influence

1919 - 2018 (99 years)

Herman "Harry" Wieder was a Romanian-born American physicist. He was born Bistrița, Romania, and moved to the United States in 1937. Four years later, Wieder naturalized as an American citizen and joined the army in the midst of World War II, serving with the 2nd Armored Division. After earning a bachelor's degree in applied physics from the University of California, Los Angeles, Wieder worked for the National Bureau of Standards and later the Naval Weapons Center, before moving to the Navy Electronics Laboratory. After a stint at the Naval Ocean Systems Center, Wieder returned to academia, teaching at the University of California, San Diego from 1981 to 1993.

#8693

Sinyan Shen

#173558

Overall Influence

1949 - 2016 (67 years)

Sinyan Shen was a Singaporean physicist and classical composer. Life Born in Singapore to the parents of Shanghai background, Sinyan Shen studied music at a very early age and mastered the vertical fiddle family of instruments. His dual career in music and physics culminated in the development of cultural acoustics, a discipline addressing scientifically the cultural molding of our ears and brain to music. Shen's life work centered on the essence of music.

#8694

Jose Boedo

#176494

Overall Influence

Jose A. Boedo is a Spanish plasma physicist and a researcher at University of California, San Diego. He is an Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society, which was awarded in 2016 for "his ground-breaking contributions to the studies of plasma drifts and intermittent plasma transport in the peripheral region of tokamaks".

#8695

Kenneth Standley

#175872

Overall Influence

1920 - 2002 (82 years)

Prof Kenneth Jack Standley FRSE FIP FPS was a 20th-century Scottish physicist. Life In 1941 he was commissioned into the Royal Army Ordnance Corps during the Second World War. He completed his studies in Physics at Oxford University graduating MA then gaining a postgraduate doctorate .

#8696

David F. Bacon

#179689

Overall Influence

#8697

René Moreau

#173948

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

René Moreau is a French scientist and professor emeritus at the Institut national polytechnique de Grenoble . He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences. Biography René Moreau is Professor Emeritus at Grenoble-INP, where he directed the ENSHMG from 1982 to 1987 and where he taught fluid mechanics at all levels. His research has focused on the magneto-hydrodynamics of liquid metals, including turbulence that tends to become two-dimensional in the presence of a relatively strong magnetic field, as well as various applications of MHD in metallurgical processes. He has also participated in...

#8698

Marc Seigar

#79309

Overall Influence

Marc S. Seigar is an astrophysicist, academic and author. He is the Dean of the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, and a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Toledo. Seigar has published over 140 articles on topics related to galaxy structure and dynamics, galaxy morphology, and spiral structure. He is the author of 2 books entitled Dark Matter in the Universe and Spiral Structure in Galaxies, and has edited a volume on Structure and Dynamics of Disk Galaxies.

#8699

Jay Fineberg

#179482

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Jay Fineberg is an Israeli physicist. He is a professor at the Racah Institute of Physics of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is known for his work on various aspects of nonlinear physics, mainly in the fields of fracture and friction . He is an elected fellow of the American Physical Society and the Israel Physical Society.

#8700

Takao Kobayashi

#56061

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Takao Kobayashi is a Japanese amateur astronomer and an outstanding discoverer of minor planets who currently works at the Ōizumi Observatory. The asteroid 3500 Kobayashi is named after him. Career Kobayashi has discovered more than 2000 asteroids using CCD technology, including the Amor asteroids 7358 Oze, , and about nine Trojan asteroids. He also discovered the periodic comet P/1997 B1 , which he originally reported as an asteroid.

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