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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Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Physics,

#2751

Naoto Nagaosa

#87804

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

#2752

Kees de Jager

#67096

Overall Influence

1921 - 2021 (100 years)

Cornelis "Kees" de Jager was a Dutch astronomer who specialized in predicting solar variation to assess the Sun's impact on future climate. He was the General Secretary of the IAU from 1967 to 1973 and former director of the observatory at Utrecht. He was a fellow with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and played an important role in the European skeptical movement as the first chairman of both Stichting Skepsis and the European Council of Skeptical Organisations.

#2753

Hadiyah-Nicole Green

#33720

Overall Influence

Hadiyah-Nicole Green is an American medical physicist, known for the development of a method using laser-activated nanoparticles as a potential cancer treatment. She is one of 66 black women to earn a Ph.D. in physics in the United States between 1973 and 2012, and is the second black woman and the fourth black person ever to earn a doctoral degree in physics from The University of Alabama at Birmingham.

#2754

Jane Dyson

#50642

Overall Influence

Helen Jane Dyson is a British-born biophysicist and a professor of integrative structural and computational biology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. She also serves as editor-in-chief of the Biophysical Journal. She was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.

#2755

Karin Öberg

#64040

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (42 years)

Karin Ingegerd Öberg is a Swedish astrochemist. She is a Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University and leader of the Öberg Astrochemistry Group at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian. Her research concerns star formation, planet formation, and stellar evolution in relation to organic molecules, which are necessary to determine the origins of life on Earth and elsewhere. In April 2015, her group discovered the first complex organic molecule in a protoplanetary disk.

#2756

Hartmut Graßl

#55022

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Hartmut Graßl is a German climate scientist and a former director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. Born in Salzberg, near Berchtesgaden, Graßl studied physics and meteorology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and earned his PhD in Munich in 1970. In 1981 he became professor of theoretical meteorology at the University of Kiel, and in 1984 he became director of the Institute of Physics at the GKSS Research Centre. In 1988 he became professor at the University of Hamburg and director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. He retired in 2005.

#2757

David A. Winter

#87940

Overall Influence

#2758

Scott Sandford

#73043

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Scott Sandford is an American astronomer and NASA scientist. He has studied meteorites and other specimens that travel through outer space. Sandford has also written for the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research.

#2759

Tung-Mow Yan

#78227

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Tung-Mow Yan is a Taiwanese-born American physicist, who has specialized in theoretical particle physics; primarily in the structure of elementary particles, the standard model, and quantum chromodynamics. He is professor emeritus at Cornell University.

#2760

Fernando Quevedo

#46517

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Fernando Quevedo Rodríguez is a Guatemalan physicist and obtained his early education in Guatemala. He was the director of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics between October 2009 and November 2019.

#2761

Yehuda Levi

#28258

Overall Influence

1926 - 2019 (93 years)

Yehuda Levi was a German-born American-Israeli Haredi rabbi, physicist, writer and educator. He was Rector and Professor of Electro-optics at the Jerusalem College of Technology. Levi was best known as the author of several books on Science and Judaism, and Judaism in contemporary society, as well as on physics.

#2762

Mark Azbel

#29158

Overall Influence

1932 - 2020 (88 years)

Mark Yakovlevich Azbel was a Soviet and Israeli physicist. He was a member of the American Physical Society. Between 1956 and 1958, he experimentally demonstrated cyclotron resonance in metals, and worked out its theoretical basis.

#2763

Niels Johan Christensen

#88029

Overall Influence

#2764

Barbara Jacak

#87992

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Barbara Jacak is a nuclear physicist who uses heavy ion collisions for fundamental studies of hot, dense nuclear matter. She is director of the Nuclear Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a professor of physics at UC Berkeley. Before going to Berkeley, she was a member of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University, where she held the rank of distinguished professor. She is a leading member of the collaboration that built and operates the PHENIX detector, one of the large detectors that operated at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhave...

#2765

Matthias Wuttig

#88086

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

#2766

Leopold B. Felsen

#61794

Overall Influence

1924 - 2005 (81 years)

Leopold B. Felsen was a electrical engineer and physicist known for studies of Electromagnetism and wave-based disciplines. He had to flee Germany at 16 due to the Nazis. He has fundamental contributions to electromagnetic field analysis.

#2767

Michael F. Crommie

#71607

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Michael F. Crommie is an American physicist, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. World-renowned for his research on condensed-matter physics, he is a recipient of both the Newcomb-Cleveland Prize and the Davisson–Germer Prize in Atomic Physics. Crommie currently directs the Crommie Research Group.

#2768

Edgar Andrews

#21030

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Edgar Harold Andrews is an English physicist and engineer. He is emeritus professor of materials at Queen Mary, University of London. Education After completing a BSc degree in theoretical physics at the University of London in 1953, Andrews obtained a PhD in applied physics in 1960 and a DSc in physics in 1968.

#2769

Michał Gryziński

#77631

Overall Influence

1930 - 2004 (74 years)

Michał Gryziński was a Polish nuclear physicist specialized in plasma physics. In 1965 he developed some widely used empirical models to reproduce some of the results of electron scattering experiments.

#2770

Gibor Basri

#78120

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Gibor Basri is an African-American astrophysicist, now Professor Emeritus in the Astronomy department at U.C. Berkeley. His research focused on stellar magnetic activity, star formation, and low mass stars and brown dwarfs. He was also the founding Vice Chancellor for Equity & Inclusion at UC Berkeley.

#2771

David L. Lambert

#63406

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

David L. Lambert is a British-American astronomer, who does research on stellar atmospheres, the chemical composition of stars, and the chemical evolution of the universe. Born in Ashford, Kent, England, Lambert received his PhD in 1965 from the University of Oxford. In 1967 he became an immigrant to the USA to work at the California Institute of Technology, then in 1969 at The University of Texas at Austin, where in 1974 he became a professor. From 2003 until 2014 he was the director of McDonald Observatory, part of The University of Texas at Austin.

#2772

Edward A. Frieman

#34027

Overall Influence

1926 - 2013 (87 years)

Edward Allan Frieman was an American physicist who worked on plasma physics and nuclear fusion. He was the director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography from 1986 through 1996, and then the senior vice president of science and technology at the Science Applications International Corporation from 1996 on until his death in 2013.

#2773

Chang Kee Jung

#84843

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Chang Kee Jung is a physicist and professor at Stony Brook University. He was recognized as a State University of New York Distinguished Professor in 2015 and received a SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities in 2014.

#2774

Richard E. Berendzen

#58198

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Richard Earl Berendzen was an American scientist, professor, and president of American University, specializing in astronomy. His resignation in 1990 came following formal charges of making indecent phone calls to households in the Fairfax area over the course of several weeks that year. In 1992, he returned to American University as a full-time physics professor until his retirement in 2006.

#2775

Iraj Malekpour

#16640

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Iraj Malekpour is an born Amol Iranian university professor of space physics. He was famous in Iran for writing and preparing the annual calendar that was officially used in Iran until 2002. He holds an adjunct faculty position at Tehran University, and works at the Tehran University's Institute of Geophysics.

#2776

Bruno Bertotti

#72120

Overall Influence

1930 - 2018 (88 years)

Bruno Bertotti was an Italian physicist, emeritus professor at the University of Pavia. He was one of the last students of physicist Erwin Schrödinger. Bertotti was well known for his contributions to general relativity – particularly the Bertotti-Robinson electrovacuum, an exact solution of the Einstein field equation. He pioneered the post-Minkowskian expansion. He has also obtained a more accurate measurement of the parameter gamma of the parameterized post-Newtonian formalism, with the Cassini radioscience experiment. The PPN gamma parameter measures the curvature of space in the metric t...

#2777

Adelina Gutiérrez

Adelina Gutiérrez

#73241

Overall Influence

1925 - 2015 (90 years)

Carmen Adelina Gutiérrez Alonso was a Chilean scientist, academic and professor of astrophysics. She was the first Chilean to obtain a doctoral degree in astrophysics and the first woman to become a member of the Chilean Academy of Sciences.

#2778

Vladimir Shiltsev

#56181

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Vladimir Shiltsev is a Russian-American accelerator physicist and the Distinguished Scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. He is best known for his works on particle colliders, invention of electron lenses, leadership in operation of the Tevatron Collider Run II, and numerous contributions to accelerator physics and accelerator technology. Shiltsev led the Tevatron collider department and the Fermilab Accelerator Physics Center from 2001 to 2018 and was chair of the American Physical Society's Division of Physics of Beams in 2018.

#2779

Mohammad Aslam Khan Khalil

#21207

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Mohammad Aslam Khan Khalil, M.A.K. Khalil or Aslam Khalil is a theoretical physicist known for his leading research in atmospheric physics. Early in his career, he worked on quantum field theory of elementary particles. During the last three decades, he has worked on Global Change Science, including the physics, chemistry and biology of greenhouse gases and ozone depleting compounds. He is a professor of physics at Portland State University.

#2780

Willy Haeberli

#87865

Overall Influence

1925 - 2021 (96 years)

Willy Haeberli was a Swiss-American physicist and Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was known for his works in nuclear physics. He was a winner of the Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics and of the Humboldt Prize.

#2781

Joseph John Monaghan

#88422

Overall Influence

#2782

Gregory Scott Aldering

#84193

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Gregory Scott Aldering , also known simply as Greg Aldering is an American astronomer, discoverer of minor planets and supernovae, currently with the University of California, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

#2783

Aldert van der Ziel

#20145

Overall Influence

1910 - 1991 (81 years)

Aldert van der Ziel , was a Dutch physicist who studied electronic noise processes in materials such as semiconductors and metals. Biography Aldert van der Ziel was a pioneering researcher into the phenomenon of flicker noise in physical electronics. He published 15 books and more than 500 scientific papers. He was also a writer on Christianity, particularly the relationship between science and religion. Van der Ziel belonged to a conservative Lutheran church.

#2784

Licia Verde

#77925

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Licia Verde is an Italian cosmologist and theoretical physicist and currently ICREA Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Barcelona. Her research interests include large-scale structure, dark matter, dark energy, inflation and the cosmic microwave background.

#2785

John Mallard

#35367

Overall Influence

1927 - 2021 (94 years)

John Rowland Mallard OBE FRSE FREng was an English physicist and professor of Medical Physics at the University of Aberdeen from 1965 until his retirement in 1992. He was known for setting up and leading the team that developed the first magnetic resonance imaging full body scanner and, in particular, positron emission tomography . He was born in Kingsthorpe, Northampton, England.

#2786

Jochen Mannhart

#32333

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Jochen Mannhart is a German physicist. Biography Jochen Mannhart studied physics at the University of Tübingen, Germany, from 1980 to 1986, where he also received his PhD in 1987 and his habilitation in 1994.

#2787

Giuliano Toraldo di Francia

#42990

Overall Influence

1916 - 2011 (95 years)

Giuliano Toraldo di Francia was an Italian physicist and philosopher, known mainly for his experimental and theoretical studies in optics. Biography He was the son of the geographer and general Orazio Toraldo di Francia. After his high school studies he graduated in physics at the University of Florence in 1940 with Nello Carrara, of whom he soon became assistant at the Institute of Physics. At the same time, he carried out research activities at the National Institute of Optics in Arcetri, then directed by Vasco Ronchi. After the war, he worked at the Ducati optical research center in Bologn...

#2788

Eliot Quataert

#86573

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Eliot Quataert is an American astronomer and theoretical astrophysicist. He was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2020, Quataert moved to Princeton University to become the Charles A. Young Professor of Astrophysical Sciences.

#2789

Francisco Guinea

#88568

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

#2790

Jonathan McDowell

#51002

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Jonathan Christopher McDowell is an astronomer and astrophysicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He is a staff member at the Chandra X-ray Observatory. McDowell is the author and editor of Jonathan's Space Report, an e-mail-distributed newsletter documenting satellite launches.

#2791

Erich E. Kunhardt

#39663

Overall Influence

1949 - 2014 (65 years)

Erich E. Kunhardt Grullon was a Dominican American physicist who was Professor of applied physics at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University and a special advisor to the institute's president.

#2792

Gerald J. Toomer

#52900

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Gerald James Toomer is a historian of astronomy and mathematics who has written numerous books and papers on ancient Greek and medieval Islamic astronomy. In particular, he translated Ptolemy's Almagest into English.

#2793

Michele Dougherty

Michele Dougherty

#50406

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Michele Karen Dougherty is a Professor of Space Physics at Imperial College London. She is leading unmanned exploratory missions to Saturn and Jupiter and is Principal Investigator for J-MAG – a magnetometer for the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, due for launch in April 2023.

#2794

Eunseong Kim

#43483

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Eunseong Kim is a South Korean physicist. He is an experimental low temperature physicist. Along with his advisor Moses H. W. Chan, he saw the first phenomena which were interpreted as supersolid behavior. In 2008, Kim was awarded the Lee Osheroff Richardson North American Science Prize, from Oxford Instruments for his contributions to the understanding of solid helium.

#2795

Manson Benedict

Manson Benedict

#14432

Overall Influence

1907 - 2006 (99 years)

Manson Benedict was an American nuclear engineer and a professor of nuclear engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . From 1958 to 1968, he was the chairman of the advisory committee to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.

#2796

Daniel Kastler

#36349

Overall Influence

1926 - 2015 (89 years)

Daniel Kastler was a French theoretical physicist, working on the foundations of quantum field theory and on non-commutative geometry. Biography Daniel Kastler was born on March 4, 1926, in Colmar, a city of north-eastern France. He is the son of the Physics Nobel Prize laureate Alfred Kastler. In 1946 he enrolled at the École Normale Superieure in Paris. In 1950 he moved to Germany and became lecturer at the Saarland University. In 1953, he was promoted to associate professor and obtained a doctorate in quantum chemistry. In 1957 Kastler moved to the University of Aix-Marseille and became a full professor in 1959.

#2797

Matthew Choptuik

#26856

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Matthew William Choptuik is a Canadian theoretical physicist specializing in numerical relativity. Choptuik graduated from University of British Columbia with a master's degree in 1982 and a Ph.D. advised by William Unruh in 1986. He became an associate professor in 1995 at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1999 he became a member of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and in the same year he became a professor at University of British Columbia.

#2798

James L. Manley

#88766

Overall Influence

#2799

Gerhard Rempe

#59415

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Gerhard Rempe is a German physicist, Director at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and Honorary Professor at the Technical University of Munich. He has performed pioneering experiments in atomic and molecular physics, quantum optics and quantum information processing.

#2800

Vassilis Angelopoulos

#63855

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Vassilis Angelopoulos is a Greek American physicist. He is a specialist on space and astrophysical plasmas. Since July, 2007, he has been on the faculty of the department of earth, planetary, and space sciences and the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of California, Los Angeles . Vassilis is currently the principal investigator of the ELFIN Cubesat mission and co-investigator of ELFIN-L, leading the energetic particle detector experiment at UCLA.

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