Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Physics,

#3801

Leon Balents

#106513

Overall Influence

#3802

James Pinfold

#106061

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

James Lewis Pinfold is a British-Canadian physicist, specializing in particle physics. Education and career Pinfold graduated in physics in 1972 with a B.Sc. from Imperial College London and in 1977 with a Ph.D. from the University of London. His Ph.D. thesis was on weak neutral currents, stemming from his work as part of the Gargamelle discovery team. From 1977 to 1989 he held research assistant and senior research assistant positions at CERN and Fermilab . From 1989 to 1992 he was an associate professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science. At the University of Alberta, he was from 1992 ...

#3803

Howard Brandt

#53361

Overall Influence

1939 - 2014 (75 years)

Howard Edward Brandt was a physicist with the United States Army Research Laboratory in Maryland, and was notable for his work in general relativity and quantum field theory and quantum information. He was the inventor of the turbutron.

#3804

Ross H. McKenzie

#47792

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Ross H. McKenzie is a Professor in Physics at the University of Queensland. From 2008 to 2012 he held an Australian Professorial Fellowship from the Australian Research Council. Works McKenzie works on quantum many-body theory of complex materials ranging from organic superconductors to biomolecules to rare-earth oxide catalysts. He is critical of claims that quantum effects are significant in understanding the function of biomolecules. He is author of a blog, "Condensed Concepts: Ruminations on emergent phenomena in condensed phases of matter".

#3805

George Grüner

#102605

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

George Grüner is a Hungarian-American physicist, Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, UCLA. Education and career George Grüner attended the Eötvös Loránd University, obtaining his obtaining his B.S. degree in 1967. Upon graduation he joined the Central Research Institute of Physics in Budapest as research associate. He received his Ph.D. in 1972, and from 1972 to 1973 he was a postdoctoral associate at Imperial College, London. From 1972 to 1980 he directed a research group at KFKI. In 1981 he was appointed professor of physics at UCLA and since 19...

#3806

Waltraut Seitter

#83512

Overall Influence

1930 - 2007 (77 years)

Waltraut Seitter was a German astronomer and became the first woman in Germany to hold an astronomy chair. Life and work Waltraut Carola Seitter was born in Zwickau in 1930, where her father worked as an engineer with the Horch automobile company. She went to school in Cologne, where she finished high school in 1949 , and entered the university to study physics, mathematics, chemistry and astronomy. She continued her studies at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts with a grant from the Fulbright Program, obtained her Master of Arts in physics in 1955, and became an astronomy instructor.

#3807

Kai-Ming Ho

#100323

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Kai-Ming Ho is a senior physicist at Ames Laboratory and distinguished professor in Department of Physics and Astronomy at Iowa State University. Honors 2012 Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics

#3808

Florentina Mosora

#75108

Overall Influence

1940 - 1996 (56 years)

Florentina Ioana Mosora or Florentina Stan-Mosora was a Romanian and Belgian biophysicist. In her earlier years, before 1964, she was a film actress in the Romanian film industry. Biography Mosora initially had a career in acting and was noted for her role in Dragoste la zero grade . She also starred in Sub cupola albastră , Post-restant , and Băieţii noştri . She was a graduate of the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Physics. Later she moved to Belgium, where she worked on the use of stable isotopes in medicine. She was awarded the 1979-1981 Prix Agathon de Potter for outstanding research work in physics by the Agathon de Potter Foundation and the Belgian Royal Academy.

#3809

Bruno Nachtergaele

#68163

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Bruno Leo Zulma Nachtergaele is a Belgian mathematical physicist. Nachtergaele studied physics with a licentiate degree in 1984 from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. There he was awarded in 1987 a doctorate in theoretical physics under André Verbeure with dissertation Exacte resultaten voor het spin-Boson model , written in Dutch. From 1989 to 1990 Nachtergaele was an instructor at the University of Chile. At Princeton University, where he worked with Elliott Lieb, Nachtergaele was from 1991 to 1993 an instructor and from 1993 to 1996 an assistant professor of physics. At the University of...

#3810

Renato Renner

#85671

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Renato Renner is a Swiss professor for Theoretical Physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, where he is head of the Research Group for Quantum Information Theory. His research interests include Quantum Information and Computation, the Foundations of Quantum Physics and Quantum thermodynamics.

#3811

Ina Wagner

#42185

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Ina Wagner is an Austrian physicist, computer scientist and social scientist. She is an emeritus professor of computer science at TU Wien , where she was active from 1987 until 2011. Wagner completed a doctorate in nuclear physics at the University of Vienna in 1972. In 1979 she received her habilitation in education sciences from the University of Klagenfurt, and in 1998 completed a second habilitation in "multidisciplinary design and computer-supported cooperative work" in Vienna. In 1987 she became the TU Wien's second ever female professor and the first to be appointed from outside the un...

#3812

Albert Edward Litherland

#76464

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (98 years)

Albert Edward "Ted" Litherland is a nuclear physicist, known for his pioneering work in accelerator mass spectroscopy . Education and career Litherland earned a BSc in 1949 and a PhD in 1955 from the University of Liverpool. From 1953 to 1955 he was a National Research Council Fellow and from 1955 to 1966 a career scientist at Chalk River Laboratories with Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. In 1966 he became a professor of physics at the University of Toronto and in 1979 a full professor, retiring as professor emeritus in 1993. In the academic years 1960–61 and 1972–73 he was a visiting profess...

#3813

Mary Brück

#75676

Overall Influence

1925 - 2008 (83 years)

Mary Teresa Brück was an Irish astronomer, astrophysicist and historian of science, whose career was spent at Dunsink Observatory in Dublin and the Royal Observatory Edinburgh in Scotland. Early life Mary Teresa Conway was born on 29 May 1925 in Ballivor, County Meath, Ireland, the eldest of eight children. She used the Irish form of her name, Máire Treasa Ní Chonmhidhe, while attending convent school, where she showed talents for mathematics, science and music, and at University College Dublin where she studied physics. She earned BSc and MSc degrees, in 1945 and 1946, respectively.

#3814

Preston Cloud

#23547

Overall Influence

1912 - 1991 (79 years)

Preston Ercelle Cloud, Jr. was an American earth scientist, biogeologist, cosmologist, and paleontologist. He served in the United States Navy , and led several field explorations of the U.S. Geological Survey. In academia, he was a member of the faculty of Harvard University, University of Minnesota, University of California, Los Angeles, and lastly University of California, Santa Barbara. He was best known for his work on the geologic time scale and the origin of life on Earth, and as a pioneering ecologist and environmentalist. His works on the significance of Cambrian fossils in the 1940...

#3815

Robert J. Goldston

#83258

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Robert James Goldston is a professor of astrophysics at Princeton University and a former director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Early life and education Goldston was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1950, the son of Eli Goldston, a lawyer and business executive, and Elaine Friedman Goldston, a medical social worker. He has one sister, Dian. Goldston attended public schools in Shaker Heights, Ohio, until 1962, when his father became president of Eastern Gas and Fuel Associates of Boston, Massachusetts, and the family moved to nearby Cambridge. Goldston attended Browne and Nichols, a private day school, for two years before moving to Commonwealth School for high school.

#3816

Walter Gear

#104680

Overall Influence

Walter K Gear FLSW is an astrophysicist, professor of physics and head of the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University. Dr. Gear's research is largely concerned with star formation in galaxies.

#3817

David Parry

#48057

Overall Influence

David Anthony Dougall Parry is a New Zealand biophysicist known for his work within the area of ultrastructure scleroprotein analysis. He is the former President of the International Union for Pure and Applied Biophysics and former Vice President of the International Council for Science .

#3818

Eugenio Bianchi

#62477

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Eugenio Bianchi is an Italian theoretical physicist and assistant professor at the Pennsylvania State University who works on loop quantum gravity and black hole thermodynamics. He has derived the Bekenstein-Hawking formula for the entropy of non-extremal black holes from loop quantum gravity, for all values of the Immirzi parameter.

#3819

Nicholas Krall

#89489

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Nicholas Krall is an American theoretical plasma physicist. Dr Krall has authored over 160 science publications and has contributed to the fields of electron scattering, plasma stability, high energy nuclear physics and magnetohydrodynamics. He has worked at General Atomics, the University of California, San Diego, the Naval Research Laboratory and University of Maryland.

#3820

James J. Wynne

#26188

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

James J. Wynne is an American physicist at the IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. Wynne pioneered the use of excimer lasers for medical applications, most notably LASIK. He received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation on February 2, 2013, from U.S. President Obama, together with Rangaswamy Srinivasan and Samuel Blum for their contributions to laser eye surgery.

#3821

Achim Schwenk

#106910

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Achim Schwenk is a German physicist. He became a professor at the Institute of Nuclear Physics at the Darmstadt University of Technology in 2009. Professional Activities since 2011: Editor in Chief, Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics2010-2013: Editorial Board, European Journal of Physics A: Hadrons and Nuclei

#3822

Gunnar Randers

#50367

Overall Influence

1914 - 1992 (78 years)

Gunnar Randers was a Norwegian physicist. He is known as the principal figure within Norwegian nuclear research after World War II. He was employed at the Mount Wilson Observatory from 1939 to 1940, and at the Yerkes Observatory from 1940 to 1941. From 1942 to 1945 he was a part of the Technical Committee of the Norwegian High Command, together with scientists such as Svein Rosseland, Leif Tronstad and Helmer Dahl. The Technical Committee is considered as the precursor to the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, established in 1946. Randers worked a few years at the Norwegian Defence Res...

#3823

Kenneth Nordtvedt

#69098

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Kenneth Leon Nordtvedt is an American physicist. He was born on April 16, 1939, in Chicago, Illinois. Nordtvedt graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University and was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows . Soon after witnessing the Sputnik spacecraft cross the Boston sky in fall of 1957, he became a part-time student employee for the Mars Probe project at the MIT Instrumentation Lab, and in early 1960s was staff physicist at the same Laboratory's project to develop the Apollo Mission's navigation and guidance system.

#3824

Karl Hess

#79510

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Karl Hess is the Swanlund Professor Emeritus in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign . He helped to establish the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at UIUC.

#3825

Thomas Weiland

#26881

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Thomas Weiland is a German physicist, engineer and entrepreneur. He is a professor of electrical engineering and headed the Institute of Electromagnetic Field Theory at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology of the Technical University of Darmstadt for many years. In 1988, Weiland was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. He was also named an IEEE Fellow in the year 2012, for development of the Finite Integration Technique and impact of the associated software on electromagnetic engineering.

#3826

Olivier Pfister

#102217

Overall Influence

Olivier Pfister is a US physicist, professor of Experimental Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics at the University of Virginia. He obtained his doctorate in physics in 1993 at Paris 13 University. Olivier Pfister also specializes in the fields of Quantum Fields and Quantum Information.

#3827

Wieland Kiess

#107025

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

#3828

Hideo Mabuchi

#65531

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Hideo Mabuchi is a physicist and Professor of Applied Physics at Stanford University, and the head of the Mabuchi Lab. He graduated from Princeton University magna cum laude, with an A.B. in Physics in 1992, and from California Institute of Technology with a Ph.D. in Physics, in 1998, where he studied with H. Jeff Kimble.

#3829

Veronika Hubeny

#65425

Overall Influence

Veronika E. Hubeny is an American physicist and academic who specialises in string theory and quantum gravity. Since 2015, she has been a professor in the Department of Physics of University of California, Davis. Previously, Hubeny was Professor of Physics at Durham University, where she had worked from 2005 to 2015. From January to April 2014, she was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. In 2019, she was selected as a fellow of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation.

#3830

Vera Lüth

#49125

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Vera G. Lüth is an experimental particle physicist and professor emerita at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center , Stanford University, in the United States. A senator of the Helmholtz Association, she has worked in particle physics at SLAC since 1974. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society.

#3831

Michael Perryman

#87973

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Michael Perryman is a British astronomer, known for his work leading the Hipparcos and Gaia space astrometric projects. Education Michael Perryman studied theoretical physics at Cambridge University and received his doctorate from the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge University, in 1979.

#3832

Russell J. Donnelly

#93760

Overall Influence

1930 - 2015 (85 years)

Russell James Donnelly was a Canadian-American physicist known for his work on classical and quantum fluid dynamics. He connected the fields of low temperature physics and fluid turbulence. Life Donnelly graduated from McMaster University with a bachelor's degree in 1951 and a master's degree in 1952. In 1956 he received his doctorate from Yale University, with a thesis entitled "On the hydrodynamics of liquid helium". His doctoral advisers were the noted physicists C. T. Lane and Lars Onsager. His PhD work demonstrated that the oscillations of liquid helium in a U-tube at a low temperature c...

#3833

Claude B. Sirlin

#107322

Overall Influence

#3834

Marc Buie

#38015

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Marc William Buie is an American astronomer and prolific discoverer of minor planets who works at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado in the Space Science Department. Formerly he worked at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and was the Sentinel Space Telescope Mission Scientist for the B612 Foundation, which is dedicated to protecting Earth from asteroid impact events.

#3835

France A. Córdova

France A. Córdova

#83571

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

France Anne-Dominic Córdova is an American astrophysicist and administrator who was the fourteenth director of the National Science Foundation. Previously, she was the eleventh President of Purdue University from 2007 to 2012. She now serves as President of the Science Philanthropy Alliance.

#3836

Michael Moore

#78574

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Michael Arthur Moore is a British physicist and Emeritus Professor of theoretical physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester where he has worked since 1976. Moore was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1989.

#3837

Ernest Arushanov

#61636

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Ernest Arushanov is a Soviet and Moldovan experimental physicist, academician of the Academy of Sciences of Moldova. Biography He was born and raised in Baku, where he graduated from the high school in 1958. Immediately after graduating from high school arrived in Chişinău, where he entered the Kishinev State University the Physics and Mathematics department. In 1963 after successful graduation from the university he entered the post-graduate department of the same university, resulted in the PhD thesis in the field of semiconductor compounds . In the period from 1967 to 1986 worked as a res...

#3838

John Reginald Richardson

#88241

Overall Influence

1912 - 1997 (85 years)

John Reginald Richardson was a Canadian-American physicist and one of the dominant figures in cyclotron development. His many achievements include participation in the first demonstration of phase stability, the development of the first synchrocyclotron and the first sector-focused cyclotron.

#3839

Dejan Milošević

#23382

Overall Influence

Dejan Milošević is a Bosnian theoretical physicist and a professor of theoretical physics since 1999 at the University of Sarajevo. His main areas of research are atomic processes in strong laser fields and attophysics.

#3840

Klaus G. Bensch

#107384

Overall Influence

#3841

Abdul Majid

#44368

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

For other people with the same or similar name, see Abdul Majid Abdul Majid : is a Pakistani astrophysicist and scientist in the field of space technology. He is a former chairman of Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission from 1997 to 2001. He had made significant contributions to Pakistan's space program. During his tenure as SUPARCO Administrator, Pakistan launched its two Low Earth orbit satellites, which were masterminded and developed by him. He also initiated a satellite launch vehicle project at SUPARCO. He retired from SUPARCO in 2001 as a chief scientist. Since his retireme...

#3842

Daniel Apai

#89004

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Daniel Apai is a professor and astrophysicist at The University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. He is known for his studies of astrobiology, extrasolar planets, and the formation of planetary systems. He is the principal investigator of the Earths in Other Solar Systems team of NASA's Nexus for Exoplanet System Studies and the Hubble Space Telescope Cloud Atlas Treasury program, and Project EDEN, a large survey for habitable planets in the immediate solar neighborhood. He is leading the Nautilus Space Observatory space telescope concept and co-leading the technology development underpinning it...

#3843

Mark R. Morris

#93418

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Mark R. Morris is an American astrophysicist. He earned his B.A. magna cum laude at the University of California, Riverside and his Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Chicago. He did his postdoctoral work at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory, California Institute of Technology, and was on the faculty of the Department of Physics at Columbia University. Since 1985 he has been a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles.

#3844

Vladimir Babeshko

#25786

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Vladimir A. Babeshko is a Russian physicist and the former President of Kuban State University in Krasnodar, Russia. Directions of activity In 1982, Vladimir Babeshko was elected President of Kuban State University. Having found support among the workers of the university, Babeshko started implementing the idea of improving educational process based on the priority development of science. Under his leadership Kuban State University became one of the leading institutions of higher education in Russia. In 2002, the Russian-Swiss Business Club awarded a gold medal for outstanding business reputa...

#3845

Antonella De Santo

Antonella De Santo

#48303

Overall Influence

Antonella De Santo is an Italian and British Professor of Experimental Physics and works on the ATLAS experiment. She was the first woman in the Department of Physics at the University of Sussex to be made a professor.

#3846

Smadar Naoz

#104078

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Smadar Naoz is an Israeli-American astrophysicist, and was the 2015 winner of the Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy for her scientific contributions to the fields of cosmology and planetary dynamics.

#3847

Sten von Friesen

Sten von Friesen

#88045

Overall Influence

1907 - 1996 (89 years)

Sten von Friesen was a Swedish physicist who was most known for having participated in the Swedish hit show Fråga Lund. Biography Sten von Friesen was born in Uppsala in 1907, and his father was the Swedish linguist Otto von Friesen. He was awarded his Doctor of Philosophy in 1935 at Uppsala University for his research led by Manne Siegbahn on the measurement of wavelengths in the elementss X-ray spectrum. von Friesen moved to the newly established Nobel Institute for Physics in Stockholm in 1937 along Siegbahn. Together they started the construction of Sweden's first cyclotron, but von Fries...

#3848

Tanya Zelevinsky

#78590

Overall Influence

Tanya Zelevinsky is a professor of physics at Columbia University. Her research focuses on high-precision spectroscopy of cold molecules for fundamental physics measurements, including molecular lattice clocks, ultracold molecule photodissociation, as well as cooling and quantum state manipulation techniques for diatomic molecules with the goal of testing the Standard Model of particle physics. Zelevinsky graduated from MIT in 1999 and received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2004 with Gerald Gabrielse as her thesis advisor. Subsequently, she worked as a post-doctoral research associate a...

#3849

Eric Hessels

#18615

Overall Influence

Eric A. Hessels is a Canadian physicist, currently a Canada Research Chair and Distinguished Research Professor at York University in Toronto, Ontario. In September 2019, Hessels et al. measured the Lamb shift for hydrogen to measure the radius of a proton and demonstrated that it is consistent with the value obtained for muonic hydrogen. This proved that the supposed discrepancy known as the proton radius puzzle did not exist.

#3850

Lawrence A. Crum

#107606

Overall Influence

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions