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,

#9201

Yuri Lazurkin

#184270

Overall Influence

1916 - 2009 (93 years)

Yuri Semenovich Lazurkin was a Russian physicist and a founder of a new discipline DNA physics. Scientific career Lazurkin started his career in a novel field polymer physics. During World War II, he was in the Navy and worked on demagnetizing of ships.

#9202

Giorgina Madìa

#172674

Overall Influence

1904 - Present (122 years)

Giorgina Madìa was an Italian physicist and electrical engineer, specializing in electrical communications, and a member of the Italian resistance during World War II. Biography Her parents were Ernesto and Olga Ferrari.

#9203

John Prestage

#180899

Overall Influence

John D. Prestage is an American physicist currently at NASA and an Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society. He pioneered and designed several ion-trap atomic clocks including the physics package for the NASA Deep Space Atomic Clock Technology Demonstration Mission.

#9204

Ulrike Endesfelder

#181681

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (43 years)

Ulrike Endesfelder is a German physicist known for her work in Single-Molecule Microbiology and Super-resolution microscopy. She is the Group Leader of the Research Group Endesfelder and Full Professor at the Institute for microbiology and biotechnology at the University of Bonn in Bonn, Germany.

#9205

Paul Weiss

#111622

Overall Influence

1911 - 1991 (80 years)

Paul Weiss was a German and British mathematician and theoretical physicist, pioneer of canonical quantization of field theories. Biography Paul Weiss was born in Sagan in the German part of Silesia into a wealthy Jewish industrialist family. In 1929–1933 he was educated at the University of Göttingen, where he became a pupil of Max Born, with a break for the academic year 1930–31, when he worked as a school teacher; he also studied in Paris and Zurich for some time. After the Nazis came to power, Born left Germany and invited Weiss to the University of Cambridge; Weiss joined Born in the autumn of 1933 .

#9206

Richard M. Thorne

#174485

Overall Influence

1942 - 2019 (77 years)

Richard Mansergh Thorne was an American physicist and a distinguished professor in the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at UCLA. He was known for his contributions to space plasma physics. He was a fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

#9207

Joan Bernard

#83723

Overall Influence

1918 - 2012 (94 years)

Joan Constance Churchill Bernard, FRSA was Principal of Trevelyan College, University of Durham from its foundation in 1966 to 1978. During World War II, she was an officer of the Auxiliary Territorial Service and was instrumental in Britain's defence against V-1 and V-2 rockets. In later life, she was active in the Church of England.

#9208

Thierry Pauwels

#164396

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Thierry Pauwels is a Belgian astronomer from the Royal Observatory of Belgium. Between 1996 and 2008 he discovered and co-discovered 146 minor planets. This makes him one of the top 100 minor planet discoverers.

#9209

F. Eugene Yates

F. Eugene Yates

#99601

Overall Influence

1927 - 2015 (88 years)

Francis Eugene Yates was an American physiologist and a professor of medicine and medical engineering at University of California Los Angeles. Biography Eugene Yates was born in Eagle Rock, California. During World War II, Yates was in the U.S. Navy as a medical officer and attended University of Texas . He attended UCLA from 1945-6. He attended Harvard Medical School from 1946-1950 where he received an MD degree. He served in the Korean War in Guam in 1951-1953 and then went on to Stanford Medical School from 1960-1970.

#9210

Noemi Mirkin

#187257

Overall Influence

Noemi Mirkin from the University of Michigan, was awarded the status of Fellow in the American Physical Society, after they were nominated by their Forum on International Physics in 2007, for her leadership in establishing productive international collaborations, her many achievements in biological molecular physics and for her long service to the international community as an officer and Executive Committee member of the Forum on International Physics.

#9211

David Breed Beard

#173649

Overall Influence

1922 - 1998 (76 years)

David Breed Beard was a space physicist, known for "pioneering work on the shapes and structures of planetary magnetospheres, Jovian radio emissions, and comets." After serving in the U.S. Navy during WWII, Beard graduated with a bachelor's degree from Hamilton College. He spent a year as a graduate student at Caltech, but then worked at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He became a graduate student in physics at Cornell University and graduated there in 1951 with a PhD under the supervision of Hans Bethe. Beard was from 1951 to 1953 a member of the faculty of the University of ...

#9212

Sarah Matthews

#183924

Overall Influence

Sarah Anna Matthews is a British physicist. She is professor and head of solar physics at University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory . She is also chairperson of UK Solar Physics. Biography Born in London, Matthews graduated from the University of Glasgow with a first class honours BSc in 1992, and remained in Glasgow to undertake a PhD in the study of solar flares under the supervision of John Campbell Brown. After being awarded her doctorate in 1996, she joined MSSL to work on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory mission. She has remained a member of the Laboratory's sola...

#9213

Samantha Holdsworth

#147263

Overall Influence

Samantha Jane Holdsworth is a medical physicist from New Zealand. She is a lecturer in medical imaging at the University of Auckland, and a principal investigator at the Centre for Brain Research. Biography Holdsworth was born and grew up on a family farm near the small town of Te Karaka, near Gisborne, New Zealand. She initially studied engineering at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, but changed to physics and completed an honours degree in the subject. She then moved to Australia and completed a master's degree at Queensland University of Technology, followed by a doctorate at t...

#9214

Miguel Ángel Fernández Sanjuán

Miguel Ángel Fernández Sanjuán

#178748

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Miguel Angel Fernández Sanjuán is a Spanish Theoretical Physicist from Leon, Spain. He is known for his contributions in nonlinear dynamics, chaos theory, and control of chaos, and has published several scientific papers and popular news articles. He has supervised around 20 PhD students in Nonlinear Dynamics, Chaos and Complex Systems.

#9215

Linda Young

#187269

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Linda Young is a distinguished fellow at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and a professor at the University of Chicago’s Department of Physics and James Franck Institute. Young is also the former director of Argonne’s X-ray Science Division.

#9216

Mark Alford

#182035

Overall Influence

Mark G. Alford is a theoretical physicist and former chair of the Department of Physics at Washington University in St. Louis. He researches dense matter inside neutron stars. Alford received his bachelor's degree with first-class honors from Oxford in 1984 and his master's and doctoral degrees from Harvard in 1988 and 1990, respectively, under the supervision of Sidney Coleman. Afterwards he held postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Santa Barbara Institute for Theoretical Physics , Cornell's Laboratory of Nuclear Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics.

#9217

Roger Jones

#150524

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Roger D. Jones is an American physicist and entrepreneur. He currently is a Research Fellow at the European Centre for Living Technology at the University of Venice, Italy. Scientific Interests Jones, trained in physics at Dartmouth College, worked as a staff physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1979 to 1995. His primary research interests were in plasma physics, laser fusion, and machine learning. Jones's current interests are in molecular computation in biological systems and serious gaming. He is currently involved in a European-Union project to personalize treatment for diabet...

#9218

Eugene W. Beier

#186950

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Eugene William Beier is an American physicist. Beier received in 1961 his bachelor's degree from Stanford University and in 1963 his M.S. and in 1966 his Ph.D., with advisor Louis J. Koester Jr., from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign with thesis A search for heavy leptons using a differential Cherenkov counter. He became in 1967 an assistant professor and in 1979 a full professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

#9219

Jeffrey Urbach

#175931

Overall Influence

Jeffrey Urbach is an American physicist, currently focusing in biophysics of cellular dynamics and mechanics and physics of Soft Matter at Georgetown University and is an Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society.

#9220

Deborah K. Watson

#180858

Overall Influence

Deborah Kay Watson is an American physicist known for her work on the many-body problem in quantum mechanics. She is a professor emerita of physics at the University of Oklahoma. Education and career Watson is a 1972 graduate of Allegheny College and completed her Ph.D. in chemistry in 1977 at Harvard University. Her dissertation was in two parts, I. Time-dependent Hartree–Fock studies of small molecular systems and II. Adiabatic and resonance states of Li2 and dissociative recombination of Li2+, and was supervised by Alexander Dalgarno.

#9221

Carol Trager-Cowan

#182201

Overall Influence

Carol Trager-Cowan is a Scottish physicist who is a Reader in physics and Science Communicator at the University of Strathclyde. She works on scanning electron microscopy, including Electron backscatter diffraction , diffraction contrast and cathodoluminescence imaging.

#9222

Alan David White

#100680

Overall Influence

1923 - 2020 (97 years)

Alan David White was an American physicist, known primarily as one of the inventors of the visible helium-neon laser. Biography After completing his military service during World War II, White graduated due to the G.I. Bill. He earned degrees in physics and mathematics from Rutgers University and Syracuse University. From 1953 to 1983 he worked at Bell Laboratories. Then he was a scientific consultant for Tropel Corp.

#9223

Antoinette Taylor

#185988

Overall Influence

Antoinette Jane Taylor is an American physicist known for her research on metamaterials and nanophotonics including terahertz metamaterials for controlling and generating submillimeter radiation. She is Associate Laboratory Director, Physical Sciences at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

#9224

Andrea Lynn Kritcher

#79142

Overall Influence

#9225

Alan Herbert Glasser

#187586

Overall Influence

Alan Herbert Glasser is an American physicist. While working for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Glasser was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 1999, "[f]or contributions to the theory of toroidal ideal and resistive magnetohydrodynamic instabilities and their applications to plasma confinement for magnetic fusion energy research."

#9226

Robert L. Mills

#117334

Overall Influence

1916 - 2006 (90 years)

Robert Lee Mills was an American educator who was the longest-serving president of Georgetown College in Georgetown, Kentucky. Dr. Mills served for 19 years, from 1959 to 1978, as president of Georgetown College. During his presidency, the Asher Science Center, the Cralle Student Center and most of the south campus were built. He was a native of Erlanger, Kentucky and earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees at the University of Kentucky. He received an honorary degree from William Jewell College. Before his presidency at Georgetown College, Mr. Mills worked for the Kentucky Depa...

#9227

George Stranahan

#182466

Overall Influence

1931 - 2021 (90 years)

George Secor Stranahan was an American physicist and entrepreneur, best remembered for founding the Flying Dog Brewery, Stranahan's Colorado Whiskey, and the Aspen Center for Physics. His family owned the Champion Spark Plug Company, and his inheritance was used to found these ventures. He founded the Woody Creek Tavern, which was the favorite watering hole of Hunter S. Thompson, who was also Stranahan's best friend. He founded and was principal of the Aspen Community School.

#9228

Dmitry Mishin

#182805

Overall Influence

1919 - 1998 (79 years)

Dmitry Dmitriyevich Mishin was a Soviet and Russian physicist, Doctor of physical and mathematical sciences, professor, founder of the scientific school of magnetic scienсе in Tver State University.

#9229

Mar Mezcua

#187426

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (42 years)

Mar Mezcua Pallerola is a Spanish astrophysicist known for her research on black holes, and especially the intermediate-mass black holes, of masses intermediate between the stellar black holes created in supernovas, and the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. She is a staff scientist at the Institut de Ciències de l'Espai , in Barcelona.

#9230

Joseph L. Birman

#148504

Overall Influence

1927 - 2016 (89 years)

Joseph Leon Birman was an American theoretical solid-state physicist. Life Birman was the son of a salesman. He went to the Bronx High School of Science then studied at City College of New York, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1947. He next attended Columbia University, gaining a master's degree in 1950 and a PhD in theoretical chemistry in 1952. He then spent about ten years at an electronics and telecommunications research lab in New York where he studied the optical properties of semiconductors. From 1962 he was a professor at New York University and from 1974 professor at the City College of New York.

#9231

Heather Williams

#116051

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Heather Ann Williams is a British medical physicist working as a Consultant Medical Physicist for Nuclear Medicine at The Christie NHS Foundation Trust. She is also a lecturer in the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health at University of Manchester, as well as the University of Salford and University of Cumbria.

#9232

Elisabeth Gwinn

#182266

Overall Influence

Elisabeth Gwinn is a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara . Gwinn was the first woman to join the Physics faculty at UCSB. Gwinn's research team explores topics at the intersection of nanoscience, biology, and optics. She is particularly well known for her work on silver nanoclusters and bimolecular-stabilized derivatives thereof. Gwinn is a prominent advocate for boosting diverse representation in the field of physics. She has been an advocate for increasing accessibility to STEM careers more generally through mentorship opportunities for publ...

#9233

Sam Zeller

#134372

Overall Influence

Geralyn P. Zeller is an American neutrino physicist at Fermilab. At Fermilab, she is a participant in the MiniBooNE experiment, co-spokesperson for the MicroBooNE experiment, and deputy head of the Neutrino Division.

#9234

Vikram Kumar

#173952

Overall Influence

Vikram Kumar is an Indian material physicist, academic and an emeritus fellow of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. He is a former director of the Sold State Physics Laboratory of IIT Delhi and is known for his studies on semiconductor technology. He has worked on ultra thin oxide MOS structures, silicon, III-V and II—VI semiconductors which is reported to have assisted in understanding their characterization. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science a...

#9235

Tim O'Brien

#187400

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Timothy John O'Brien is a British astronomer, currently working at the University of Manchester as Professor of Astrophysics. He often appears on the BBC. Early life and education He was born in Littleborough, Greater Manchester. He grew up in Castleton, Greater Manchester in the Metropolitan Borough of Rochdale. He attended school in Rochdale. He studied Physics and Astrophysics at University College London and completed his PhD at the University of Manchester between 1985 and 1988.

#9236

Clare Yu

#187489

Overall Influence

Clare C. Yu is an American theoretical biophysicist and condensed matter physicist. She is Professor of Physics and Astronomy in the School of Physical Sciences at the University of California, Irvine . She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is also a former Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, and a current Trustee of the Aspen Center for Physics.

#9237

Shang-Fen Ren

#187871

Overall Influence

Shang-Fen Ren is a professor emerita at Illinois State University. She was appointed professor at Illinois in 1995, retiring to become professor emerita in 2011. She was awarded the status of Fellow in the American Physical Society, after she was nominated by their Forum on International Physics in 2001, "for her contributions to theoretical understanding of low-dimensional semiconductor systems, especially the vibrational properties in semiconductor superlattices, quantum wires, and quantum dots as well as for her many contributions promoting international physics."

#9238

John Robert Cary

#169165

Overall Influence

John Robert Cary is a professor of physics at the University of Colorado Boulder and CEO of Tech-X Corporation, which he co-founded in 1994. Biography and education In 1973 Cary earned a BA cum laude in physics and a BA cum laude in mathematics at the University of California, Irvine. He earned his MS in 1975 and Ph.D. in physics in 1979 at the University of California, Berkeley.

#9239

Wang Ming-chen

#170864

Overall Influence

1906 - 2010 (104 years)

Wang Ming-chen was a Chinese theoretical physicist and a professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. As one of the first few Chinese female students studying science abroad, she was best known for her work on stochastic process and Brownian motion with George Uhlenbeck as well as the first female professor of Tsinghua University according to some source.

#9240

Anne Boutet de Monvel

#81627

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Anne-Marie Boutet de Monvel is a French applied mathematician and mathematical physicist, and a professor emerita in the University of Paris, affiliated with the Institut de mathématiques de Jussieu – Paris Rive Gauche.

#9241

Lee Kong-joo

#183550

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Lee Kong-joo is a South Korean emeritus professor of pharmacy at Ewha Womans University previously served as President Moon Jae-in's Advisor for Science and Technology. Lee is one of first generation female scientists who have been active in both pioneering research and representing scientists.

#9242

Shen Ziyin

#73889

Overall Influence

1928 - 2019 (91 years)

Shen Ziyin was a Chinese biologist, physician, and medical researcher. He spent his entire career at Huashan Hospital, a teaching hospital of Shanghai Medical College of Fudan University. He was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1997.

#9243

Mark Reed

#187957

Overall Influence

#9244

Christopher Williams

#77683

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (43 years)

Christopher Leigh Williams is an American medical physicist and NASA astronaut candidate. He resides in Boston, Massachusetts. Background Williams grew up in Potomac, Maryland. He graduated Montgomery Blair High School, Silver Spring, Maryland in 2001. He graduated from Stanford University in 2005 with a bachelor’s degree in physics and a doctorate in physics from MIT in 2012, where his research was in astrophysics. Williams is a board-certified medical physicist, completing his residency training at Harvard Medical School before joining the faculty as a clinical physicist and researcher.

#9245

Michael R. Matthews

#187993

Overall Influence

#9246

Min Naiben

#133335

Overall Influence

1935 - 2018 (83 years)

Min Naiben , also known as Nai-Ben Ming, was a Chinese materials scientist, physicist, and politician. He was a Standing Committee member of the 9th Central Committee of the Jiusan Society and vice-president of the 10th and 11th Central Committee of the Jiusan Society.

#9247

Edwin W. Taylor

#100855

Overall Influence

Edwin W. Taylor is an adjunct professor of cell and developmental biology at Northwestern University. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2001. Taylor received a BA in physics and chemistry from the University of Toronto in 1952; an MSc in physical chemistry from McMaster University in 1955, and a PhD in biophysics from the University of Chicago in 1957. In 2001 Taylor was elected to the National Academy of Scineces in Cellular and Developmental Biology and Biochemistry.

#9248

Wes Sandle

#174387

Overall Influence

1935 - 2020 (85 years)

Weston James Sandle was a New Zealand physicist who specialised in the study of lasers. He was a professor at the University of Otago. Biography Born on 19 March 1935, Sandle studied at Canterbury University College, graduating Master of Science with first-class honours in 1958. He went on to study at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a Master of Arts degree, and then a PhD in physics in 1968. The title of his doctoral thesis was 19F nuclear magnetic resonance in the canted antiferromagnet KMnF3.

#9249

Irene Cruz-González

#144790

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Irene Cruz-González Espinosa is a Mexican astronomer whose research interests include the nuclear activity in galaxies, the observation of galaxies and their insterstellar medium, star formation, and optical and infrared telescope instrumentation. She is a researcher and professor in the Institute of Astronomy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico .

#9250

Ido Bachelet

#78199

Overall Influence

Ido Bachelet is an Israeli-Chilean scientist. Education Bachelet earned his Ph.D. in medical sciences from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and did two postdoctoral fellowships, engineering at M.I.T. and biologically inspired engineering at the George Church lab at Harvard University. His fields of expertise include DNA origami, synthetic biology, and biomimetics. He taught life sciences at Bar-Ilan University and industrial design at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. His research on the bio-inspired architecture was selected to represent Israel at the 16th Venice Bienn...

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