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,

#2601

Luisa Cifarelli

#79715
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Luisa Cifarelli FInstP is a Professor of Experimental Particle Physics at the University of Bologna. She is the Director of the La Rivista del Nuovo Cimento. Early life and education Cifarelli was born in Rome in 1952, daughter of Michele Cifarelli, an Italian politic and magistrate. She studied physics at the University of Bologna and graduated in 1975. She worked as a researcher in at the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare and CERN. She edited the collection of scientific studies for the publication QCD at 200 TeV. In 1988 she was made an associate professor at L'Università degli Studi d...
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#2602

Peter Theodore Landsberg

#84997
Overall Influence
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#2603

Steven Giddings

#79605
Overall Influence
Steven B. Giddings is an American physicist. Giddings earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Utah and a doctorate from Princeton University. He is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Giddings was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2012, "[f]or his wide ranging contributions to gravitational physics at its intersection with elementary particle physics, especially his work on the quantum properties of black holes in the universe and in accelerators".
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#2604

Carl Sebastian Wagner

#85029
Overall Influence
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#2605

Kalle-Antti Suominen

#51019
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Kalle-Antti Suominen is a Finnish physicist, professor of physics in the department of physics of University of Turku in Finland, vice-rector for research at the University of Turku, and chair of the physics and astronomy section of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters.
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#2606

William M. Hartmann

William M. Hartmann
#64501
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
William M. Hartmann is a noted physicist, psychoacoustician, author, and former president of the Acoustical Society of America. His major contributions in psychoacoustics are in pitch perception, binaural hearing, and sound localization. Working with junior colleagues, he discovered several major pitch effects: the binaural edge pitch, the binaural coherence edge pitch, the pitch shifts of mistuned harmonics, and the harmonic unmasking effect. His textbook, Signals, Sound and Sensation, is widely used in courses on psychoacoustics. He is currently a professor of physics at Michigan State Univ...
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#2607

Rusi Taleyarkhan

Rusi Taleyarkhan
#16795
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Rusi P. Taleyarkhan is a nuclear engineer and former academic fraudster who has been a faculty member in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Purdue University since 2003. Prior to that, he was on staff at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He obtained his Bachelor of Technology degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1977 and MS and PhD degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1978 and 1982 respectively. He also holds an MBA from RPI.
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#2608

John F. Gunion

#83096
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
John "Jack" Francis Gunion is an American physicist, specializing in theoretical high energy physics. Gunion received in 1965 his bachelor's degree from Cornell University and in 1970 his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. As a postdoc he was from 1970 to 1972 at SLAC and from 1972 to 1973 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1973 to 1975 he was an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1978 he moved to the University of California, Davis and remained there, retiring in 2017 as professor emeritus.
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#2609

Pilar Ruiz-Lapuente

#84016
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Pilar Ruiz-Lapuente is an astrophysicist working as a professor at the University of Barcelona. Her work has included research on type Ia supernovae. In 2004, she led the team that searched for the companion star to the white dwarf that became supernova SN 1572, observed by Tycho Brahe, among others. Ruiz-Lapuente's research on supernovae contributed to the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.
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#2610

Alfred Yi Summit Cho

#85153
Overall Influence
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#2611

Qaisar Shafi

#54697
Overall Influence
Qaisar Shafi is a Pakistani-American theoretical physicist and the Inaugural Bartol Research Institute Professor of Physics at the University of Delaware. Biography Shafi grew up in Karachi, Pakistan and lived there until his early teens when his family moved to London, United Kingdom. After graduating as valedictorian from Holland Park School, London, UK, he studied physics at Imperial College, London, where he received both his B.Sc. Honors and PhD. His PhD advisor was the late Nobel Laureate Professor Abdus Salam, whom he subsequently joined at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy.
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#2612

Gordon F. Newell

#62367
Overall Influence
1925 - 2001 (76 years)
Gordon Frank Newell was an American scientist, known for his contributions to applied mathematics, in particular traffic flow analysis and queueing theory. Newell authored over one hundred articles and wrote several books. The Gordon–Newell theorem is named after him and his colleague William J. Gordon. Their algorithms helped form the basis of most modern automatically controlled and networked traffic-light control systems.
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#2613

Theodore H. Geballe

#39053
Overall Influence
1920 - 2021 (101 years)
Theodore Henry Geballe was an American physicist who was a professor of applied physics at Stanford University. He was known for his work on the synthesis of novel materials of interest to several areas of physics and many interdisciplinary sciences.
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#2614

Kameshwar C. Wali

Kameshwar C. Wali
#31252
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Kameshwar C. Wali was an Indian-born American theoretical physicist who was the Distinguished Research Professor of Physics Emeritus at Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences. He was a specialist in high energy physics, particularly symmetries and dynamics of elementary particles, and the author of Chandra: A Biography of S. Chandrasekhar and Cremona Violins: a physicist's quest for the secrets of Stradivari.
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#2615

Edward Belbruno

Edward Belbruno
#21011
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Edward Belbruno is an artist, mathematician and scientist whose interests are in celestial mechanics, dynamical systems, dynamical astronomy, and aerospace engineering. His artistic media is paintings, and his artwork in the NASA collection, Charles Betlach II collection, and exhibited in Paris, Rome, Los Angeles, Washington DC, New York City, Minneapolis, Shanghai, WeiHai, and Princeton.
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#2616

Eli Barkai

Eli Barkai
#74582
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Eli Barkai is a professor of physics at Bar-Ilan University, located in Ramat-Gan, Israel. Education Barkai studied physics in Tel Aviv University, completing his Ph.D. in 1998. He then joined Bob Silbey at MIT for his post-doctoral studies. In 2002 he joined the faculty of Notre Dame University and in 2004 returned to Israel to Bar Ilan University where he became a full professor in 2010.
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#2617

Adam Burrows

#78192
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Adam Burrows is a noted professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University. Education Burrows received his undergraduate degree in physics from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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#2618

Maria Strømme

Maria Strømme
#51691
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Maria Strømme, is a Norwegian physicist who lives and works in Sweden. Career She became a professor in nanotechnology at Uppsala University in 2004. She became Sweden's youngest professor in a technical subject. Strømme holds a master of science degree in engineering physics, and completed her doctoral thesis in solid state physics in 1997 at Uppsala University. She became a scientist at Naturvetenskapliga forskningsrådet. Between 2002 and 2007, she worked as an academy physicist and she was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. She is also a member of the Norwegian Academy of Te...
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#2619

Ian Walmsley

#27431
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Ian Alexander Walmsley FRS is Provost of Imperial College London where he is also Chair of Experimental Physics. He was previously pro-vice-chancellor for research and Hooke Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Oxford, and a professorial fellow at St Hugh's College, Oxford. He is also director of the NQIT hub within the UK National Quantum Technology Programme, which is led by the University of Oxford. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America.
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#2620

Michael Stephen Feld

#61828
Overall Influence
1940 - 2010 (70 years)
Michael S. Feld was an American physicist, who was best known for his work on quantum optics, and medical applications of lasers. Biography Michael S. Feld received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of laser pioneer Ali Javan. He remained at MIT throughout his career, where he was a faculty member from 1968 to 1976. He was the director of the George R. Harrison Spectroscopy Laboratory at MIT.
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#2621

Marc A. Kastner

#45769
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Marc A. Kastner is an American physicist and Donner Professor of Science and the former dean of the School of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Currently he is president of the Science Philanthropy Alliance.
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#2622

A A Mamun

#27995
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Abdullah Al Mamun is a Bangladeshi physicist who is a professor of physics at Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Early life and education A A Mamun was born in Dhamrai Upazila, Dhaka, East Pakistan on 31 December 1966, and he passed the Secondary School Certificate and Higher Secondary Certificate examinations, respectively, from Kushura Abbas Ali High School  and  Government Science College in 1981 and 1983, respectively. Mamun  attended Jahangirnagar University, and passed Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in physics in 1986 and 1987 , respectively.  On the  basis of...
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#2623

Ivor Robinson

#38759
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Ivor Robinson was a British-American mathematical physicist, born and educated in England, noted for his important contributions to the theory of relativity. He was a principal organizer of the Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics.
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#2624

John M. Greene

#42693
Overall Influence
1928 - 2007 (79 years)
John Morgan Greene was an American theoretical physicist and applied mathematician, known for his work on solitons and plasma physics. Education After several successes as a high school student in the state mathematical competitions of Kansas, he received a Pepsi Cola scholarship at Caltech, where he earned a B. S. in 1950. In 1956 he received a PhD from the University of Rochester in nuclear physics under David Feldman with a thesis entitled "High-Order Corrections to the Nucleon-Nucleon Potential in Change-Symmetric Pseudoscalar Theory."
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#2625

Adrian Kent

#32950
Overall Influence
Adrian Kent is a British theoretical physicist, Professor of Quantum Physics at the University of Cambridge, member of the Centre for Quantum Information and Foundations, and Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. His research areas are the foundations of quantum theory, quantum information science and quantum cryptography. He is known as the inventor of relativistic quantum cryptography. In 1999 he published the first unconditionally secure protocols for bit commitment and coin tossing, which were also the first relativistic cryptographic protocols.
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#2626

Thomas A. Matthews

#52954
Overall Influence
Thomas A. Matthews is an American astronomer. He is credited with being one of the discoverers of the first quasar, 3C 48, in 1960 using a new interferometer at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory, along with Allan Sandage.
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#2627

Jeremy O'Brien

#41803
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Jeremy O'Brien is a physicist who researches in quantum optics, optical quantum metrology and quantum information science. He co-founded and serves as CEO of the quantum computing firm PsiQuantum. Formerly, he was Professorial Research Fellow in Physics and Electrical Engineering at the University of Bristol, and director of its Centre for Quantum Photonics.
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#2628

Rhett Allain

Rhett Allain
#36039
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Rhett Allain is an American associate professor of physics at Southeastern Louisiana University and the author of the Wired magazine science blog Dot Physics. He received his Ph.D. from North Carolina State University in 2001 and works in the field of physics education research.
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#2629

Christopher L. Eisgruber

#13353
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Christopher Ludwig Eisgruber is an American academic and legal scholar who is serving as the 20th President of Princeton University, where he is also the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Public Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values. He is also an expert on constitutional law, with an emphasis on law & religion and federal judicial appointments.
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#2630

Keith Burnett

Keith Burnett
#25742
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Sir Keith Burnett, CBE, FRS FLSW FINSTP is a British physicist and President Elect of the Institute of Physics. He is Chair of the Nuffield Foundation — an independent charitable trust with a mission to advance educational opportunity and social well-being, founding Chair of the Academic Council the Schmidt Science Fellows, and a member of the Board of international education providers Study Group.
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#2631

Asantha Cooray

#70439
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Asantha R. Cooray is a professor and a chancellor's fellow at University of California, Irvine, California, US, and a member of the research faculty at the California Institute of Technology. His research expertise is in the field of space science, cosmology, astrophysics and is a member of several space-based and NASA sounding rocket experiments and instrumentation aimed at understanding the early universe, first stars, and galaxies. He is a member of the ESA's Herschel Space Observatory-SPIRE Instrument Team and several NASA astrophysics missions planned for this decade, including the Inflation Probe.
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#2632

David W. Allan

David W. Allan
#40318
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
David Wayne Allan is an American atomic clock physicist and author of the Allan variance, also known as the two-sample variance, a measure of frequency stability in clocks, oscillators and other applications. He worked for the National Bureau of Standards in Colorado.
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#2633

Gary Hinshaw

#76134
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Gary F. Hinshaw is a cosmologist and physics professor at the University of British Columbia. Hinshaw worked on the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe whose observations of Cosmic Microwave Background have provided significant insights into cosmology. He holds both US and Canadian citizenship.
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#2634

Martin M. Block

#53838
Overall Influence
1925 - 2016 (91 years)
Martin Moses Block was an American physicist, known as a co-discoverer with Aihud Pevsner of the eta meson in 1961. Biography Block was born in Newark, New Jersey. He graduated from Columbia University in 1947 with B.S., in 1948 with M.A., and in 1952 with Ph.D. supervised by William W. Havens Jr. At Columbia, Block helped to design the magnets for the Nevis cyclotron. In 1949 he married Beate Sondheim. He joined the faculty of Duke University in 1951. He attended the University of Rochester's 6th Annual Conference on High Energy Nuclear Physics, where he contributed a paper and roomed with Richard Feynman.
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#2635

Lawrence Dade Lunsford

#85590
Overall Influence
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#2636

David States

#23818
Overall Influence
David J. States is an American biophysicist who is Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Michigan. His research group is using computational methods to understand the human genome and how it relates to the human proteome. He is the Director of the Michigan NIH Bioinformatics Training Progra] and a Senior Scientist in the National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics.
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#2637

Toshiki Tajima

#81134
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
is a Japanese theoretical plasma physicist known for pioneering the laser wakefield acceleration technique with John M. Dawson in 1979. The technique is used to accelerate particles in a plasma and was experimentally realized in 1994, for which Tajima received several awards such as the Nishina Memorial Prize , the Enrico Fermi Prize , the Robert R. Wilson Prize , the Hannes Alfvén Prize and the Charles Hard Townes Award .
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#2638

Robert M. Stroud

#77443
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Robert Michael Stroud is a British biophysicist. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2003. Early life and education Robert Michael Stroud was born in Stockport, England in 1942. He had an early interest in astronomy and would stargaze through his telescope in his garden. He worked with his father, an engineer, to design and build electronic devices. He attended Cambridge University where he studied in physics and mathematics, graduating in 1964. For his graduate studies he attended J.D.Bernal's laboratory at Birkbeck College in London, where he occupied the desk that had been Rosalind Franklin's desk during her time as a researcher there.
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#2639

Amy Barger

#67484
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Amy J. Barger is an American astronomer and Henrietta Leavitt Professor of Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is considered a pioneer in combining data from multiple telescopes to monitor multiple wavelengths and in discovering distant galaxies and supermassive black holes, which are outside of the visible spectrum. Barger is an active member of the International Astronomical Union.
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#2640

Muhammad Sharif

Muhammad Sharif
#41385
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Muhammad Sharif , TI, FPAS, is a Pakistani professor, specialised in mathematical physics and cosmology. He worked as the chairman of the department of Mathematics, University of the Punjab , Lahore for six years, i.e., from 2013 to 2019. Now, Sharif has been appointed as Dean, Faculty of Science at University of the Punjab. He is a Higher Education Commission Distinguished National Professor. He has been awarded with the Izaz-Fazeelat and Tamgha-i-Imtiaz by the government of Pakistan.
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#2641

James R. Graham

#67414
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
James R. Graham is an Irish astrophysicist who works primarily in the fields of infrared astronomy instrumentation and adaptive optics. Biography Graham pursued physics as his undergraduate major at Imperial College London, graduated with a BSc in 1982. He went on at Imperial College London to receive his PhD in physics in 1985. After receiving his PhD, Graham first held a research position at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, followed by a position at the California Institute of Technology. Since 1992, he has been a professor of astronomy at University of California, Berkeley.
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#2642

Peter Lund

#85771
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
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#2643

Victor Ninov

#28828
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Victor Ninov is a Bulgarian physicist and former researcher who worked primarily in creating superheavy elements. He is known for the co-discoveries of elements 110, 111, and 112 . Ninov also claimed the creation of elements 116 and 118; however, an investigation concluded that he had falsified the evidence. The repercussions of the affair had an impact on the guidelines of conduct for several research institutions.
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#2644

Silvan S. Schweber

#58873
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Silvan Samuel Schweber was a French-born American theoretical physicist and historian of science. In 1944 Schweber began to study chemistry at the City College of New York and in 1947 moved to the University of Pennsylvania as a physics major, where he studied with Walter Elsasser and Herbert Jehle. After obtaining his master's degree in 1949, he went to Princeton University, where he studied with David Bohm and Eugene Wigner. In 1952 he received his doctorate under Arthur Wightman.
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#2645

Amri Wandel

Amri Wandel
#75510
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Amri Wandel is a senior scientist in Astrophysics at the Racah Institute of Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Wandel is an expert in astrobiology and chairman of the Israeli Association of Astrobiology and Early Life. He is also president of the International Academy of Sciences San Marino.
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#2646

Moshe Kaveh

Moshe Kaveh
#19572
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Moshe Kaveh is an Israeli physicist and former President of Bar-Ilan University. Biography Kaveh was born in Tashkent, Uzbek SSR, Soviet Union where his parents sought safety after fleeing from Poland. All of his father 's ten siblings perished in the Holocaust. The Kaveh family made aliyah to Israel in 1950.
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#2647

Louis J. Lanzerotti

#37681
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Louis John Lanzerotti is an American physicist. He is a Distinguished Research Professor of physics in the Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research at New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, New Jersey.
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#2648

Robert Leigh

#52051
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Robert Leigh is a Canadian physicist working on string theory. Biography Leigh obtained his B.Sc. degree from the University of Guelph in 1986, and his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1991, working with Joe Polchinski. After postdoctoral positions at Santa Cruz and Rutgers, he has been a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 1996. Since 2007, he has been a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
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#2649

Harvey Brooks

#35456
Overall Influence
1915 - 2004 (89 years)
Harvey Brooks was an American physicist, "a pioneer in incorporating science into public policy", notable for helping to shape national science policies and who served on science advisory committees in the administrations of Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. Brooks was also notable for his contributions to the fundamental theory of semiconductors and the band structure of metals. Brooks was dean of the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences of the Harvard University.
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#2650

Jedidah Isler

#78032
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Jedidah C. Isler is an American astrophysicist, educator, and an active advocate for diversity in STEM. She became the first African-American woman to complete her PhD in astrophysics at Yale in 2014. She is currently an assistant professor of astrophysics at Dartmouth College. Her research explores the physics of blazars and examines the jet streams emanating from them. In November 2020, Isler was named a member of Joe Biden's presidential transition Agency Review Team to support transition efforts related to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
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