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

#501

George Yancopoulos

#21111

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

George D. Yancopoulos is a Greek-American biomedical scientist who is the co-founder, president and chief scientific officer of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. Yancopoulos is the holder of more than 100 patents. He is a principal inventor and developer of Regeneron's ten FDA-approved or -authorized treatments, as well as of Regeneron's foundational technologies for target and drug development, such as its proprietary TRAP technology, and the VelociGene and VelocImmune antibody technologies.

#502

Rubin Braunstein

#21414

Overall Influence

1922 - 2018 (96 years)

Rubin Braunstein was an American physicist and educator. In 1955 he published the first measurements of light emission by semiconductor diodes made from crystals of gallium arsenide , gallium antimonide , and indium phosphide . GaAs, GaSb, and InP are examples of III-V semiconductors. The III-V semiconductors absorb and emit light much more strongly than silicon, which is the best-known semiconductor. Braunstein's devices are the forerunners of contemporary LED lighting and semiconductor lasers, which typically employ III-V semiconductors. The 2000 and 2014 Nobel Prizes in Physics were awarde...

#503

John Langford

#21416

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (50 years)

John Langford is a computer scientist working in machine learning and learning theory, a field that he says, "is shifting from an academic discipline to an industrial tool". He is well known for work on the Isomap embedding algorithm, CAPTCHA challenges, Cover Trees for nearest neighbor search, Contextual Bandits for reinforcement learning applications, and learning reductions.

#504

Curt Michel

#21611

Overall Influence

1934 - 2015 (81 years)

Frank Curtis "Curt" Michel was an American astrophysicist; a professor of astrophysics at Rice University in Houston, Texas; a United States Air Force pilot; and a NASA astronaut. Personal life Michel was born June 5, 1934, to parents to Frank and Viola Michel. He was married to Bonnie Hausman, a web technical specialist. He had two children, Alice and Jeff with his first wife Beverly, who preceded him in death, and three grandchildren. His hobbies were photography, tennis, handball, and baseball. Michel died at the age of 80 on February 26, 2015. He was buried with full military honors at t...

#505

Edgar Bright Wilson

#21624

Overall Influence

1908 - 1992 (84 years)

Edgar Bright Wilson Jr. was an American chemist. Wilson was a prominent and accomplished chemist and teacher, recipient of the National Medal of Science in 1975, Guggenheim Fellowships in 1949 and 1970, the Elliott Cresson Medal in 1982, and a number of honorary doctorates. He was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the United States National Academy of Sciences. He was also the Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus at Harvard University. One of his sons, Kenneth G. Wilson, was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1982.

#506

Tetsuro Matsuzawa

Tetsuro Matsuzawa

#21629

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Tetsuro Matsuzawa is a primatologist who was a past director of the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University. He graduated from Kyoto University with a B.A. degree in 1974, a Psy.M. degree in 1976 and a Ph.D. degree in Science in 1989.

#507

Jere H. Lipps

#21648

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (86 years)

Jere Henry Lipps is Professor of the Graduate School, University of California, Berkeley, and Curator of Paleontology at the University of California Museum of Paleontology. Lipps was the ninth Director of the museum and chair of the department of Integrative Biology at Berkeley . He served as president of the Paleontological Society in 1997, and the Cushman Foundation for Foraminiferal Research Inc. three times

#508

Eran Elhaik

#21670

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (45 years)

Eran Elhaik is an Israeli-American geneticist and bioinformatician, an associate professor of bioinformatics at Lund University in Sweden and Chief of Science Officer at an ancestry testing company called Ancient DNA Origins owned by Enkigen Genetics Limited, registered in Ireland. His research uses computational, statistical, epidemiological and mathematical approaches to fields such as complex disorders, population genetics, personalised medicine, molecular evolution, genomics, paleogenomics and epigenetics.

#509

Malcolm McKenna

Malcolm McKenna

#21710

Overall Influence

1930 - 2008 (78 years)

Malcolm Carnegie McKenna was an American paleontologist and author on the subject. Paleontologist McKenna began his paleontology career at the Webb School of California in Claremont, California, under noted paleontologist and teacher, Raymond Alf. He attended the California Institute of Technology and Pomona College, then graduated in paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also earned his Ph.D.

#510

Max Welling

#21718

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Max Welling is a Dutch computer scientist in machine learning at the University of Amsterdam. In August 2017, the university spin-off Scyfer BV, co-founded by Welling, was acquired by Qualcomm. He has since then served as a Vice President of Technology at Qualcomm Netherlands. He is also currently the Lead Scientist of the new Microsoft Research Lab in Amsterdam.

#511

Ira Herskowitz

#21729

Overall Influence

1946 - 2003 (57 years)

Ira Herskowitz was an American phage and yeast geneticist who studied genetic regulatory circuits and mechanisms. He was particularly noted for his work on mating type switching and cellular differentiation, largely using Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a model organism.

#512

Erdal Arıkan

#21863

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Erdal Arıkan is a Turkish professor in Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. He is known for his implementation of polar coding. Career Academic background Arıkan briefly served as a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He joined Bilkent University as a faculty member in 1987.

#513

John R. Yates

#21968

Overall Influence

John R. Yates III is an American chemist and Ernest W. Hahn Professor in the Departments of Molecular Medicine and Neurobiology at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. His work is focused on developing tools and in proteomics and he specializes in mass spectrometry. He is best known for the development of the SEQUEST algorithm for automated peptide sequencing and Multidimensional Protein Identification Technology and data independent analysis . His laboratory has made important contributions to understanding the biochemical mechanisms behind the failure of DF508 cystic fi...

#514

T. Neil Davis

#22005

Overall Influence

1932 - 2016 (84 years)

Thomas Neil Davis was a professor of geophysics from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the author of several books. Born in Greeley, Colorado, Davis received his B.S in geophysics from University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1955, an M.S. in geophysics from California Institute of Technology in 1957, and a Ph.D. in geophysics from University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1961. Davis spent most of his working career at the Geophysical Institute, pioneering the use of all-sky and low-level light cameras for the study of the aurora borealis and conducting rocket studies of the aurora. With Masahisa Sugiura he introduced the AE index now commonly used as a measure of solar-terrestrial interaction.

#515

Mamikon Mnatsakanian

#22028

Overall Influence

1942 - 2021 (79 years)

Mamikon A. Mnatsakanian was an Armenian physicist. In 1959, he discovered a new proof of the Pythagorean theorem. He received a Ph.D. in physics in 1969 from Yerevan State University, where he became professor of astrophysics. As an undergraduate he specialized in the development of geometric methods for solving calculus problems by a visual approach that makes no use of formulas, which he later developed into his system of visual calculus.

#516

Mark Kryder

#22161

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Mark Howard Kryder was Seagate Corp.'s senior vice president of research and chief technology officer. Kryder holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and physics from the California Institute of Technology.

#517

John D. Anderson

#22180

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

John D. Anderson Jr. is the Curator of Aerodynamics at the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., Professor Emeritus in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park.

#518

Norden E. Huang

#22222

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

Norden Eh Huang is a Taiwanese-American Fluid dynamist known for the Hilbert–Huang transform. Huang was born in Hubei, China in 1937. He attended National Hsinchu Senior High School in Taiwan and graduated from National Taiwan University in 1960 before earning a doctorate in fluid mechanics and mathematics from Johns Hopkins University in 1967. He completed postdoctoral research at the University of Washington, then held adjunct professorships at the University of Delaware and University of North Carolina while working for NASA. Huang returned to Taiwan and began teaching at National Central University in 2006, as K.

#519

Noel Swerdlow

#22229

Overall Influence

1941 - 2021 (80 years)

Noel Mark Swerdlow was a professor emeritus of history, astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago. He was a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology. Career Swerdlow specialized in the history of exact sciences, astronomy in particular, from antiquity through the 17th century. He earned his Ph.D. at Yale University in 1968; his doctoral dissertation, Ptolemy's Theory of the Distances and Sizes of the Planets: A Study of The Scientific Foundations of Medieval Cosmology, was supervised by Asger Aaboe.

#520

Peter K. Vogt

#22239

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (93 years)

Peter K. Vogt is an American molecular biologist, virologist and geneticist. His research focuses on retroviruses and viral and cellular oncogenes. Education and academic appointments Vogt received his undergraduate education in biology at the University of Würzburg and in 1959 was awarded his Ph.D. at the University of Tübingen for work done at the Max Planck Institute for Virology in Tübingen. From 1959 to 1962 he was Damon Runyon Cancer Research Fellow in the laboratory of Harry Rubin at the University of California in Berkeley and started to work on Rous sarcoma virus. He taught microb...

#521

Raymond Jeanloz

Raymond Jeanloz

#22253

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Raymond Jeanloz is a professor of earth and planetary science and of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. Educated at the California Institute of Technology, Amherst College and at Deep Springs College, he has contributed research fundamental to understanding of the composition of the Earth and the behavior of materials under high temperatures and pressures. He is working with colleagues to investigate the conditions inside supergiant exoplanets. Jeanloz is also a prominent figure in nuclear weapons policy, chairing the Committee on International Security and Arms Control at the National Academy of Sciences.

#522

David Todd Wilkinson

David Todd Wilkinson

#22254

Overall Influence

1935 - 2002 (67 years)

David Todd Wilkinson was an American cosmologist, specializing in the study of the cosmic microwave background radiation . Education Wilkinson was born in Hillsdale, Michigan on May 13, 1935, and earned his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Michigan under the supervision of H. Richard Crane.

#523

Stanislav Mikheyev

#22330

Overall Influence

1940 - 2011 (71 years)

Stanislav Pavlovich Mikheyev was a Russian physicist known for the discovery of the MSW effect. Education and research Stanislav Mikheyev graduated from Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University in 1965. Then he became a researcher at Lebedev Physical Institute. Since 1970 he was a researcher at the Institute for Nuclear Research of the USSR Academy of Sciences , where he earned his Ph.D. in physics in 1983.

#524

Kenneth Steiglitz

#22417

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (86 years)

Kenneth Steiglitz is a Eugene Higgins Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. He was born in Weehawken, New Jersey on January 30, 1939. He received his Doctor of Engineering Science from New York University in 1963. In 1997 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

#525

Owen Holland

#22559

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Owen Holland is professor emeritus of cognitive robotics in the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex. He was until recently a professor of computer science at the University of Essex, England. Previously, he has held faculty positions at Caltech, University of Bielefeld, Starlab and the University of the West of England.

#526

Jack Goldman

#22561

Overall Influence

1921 - 2011 (90 years)

Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman was an American physicist and former chief scientist of Xerox Corporation. He was also a faculty member at Carnegie Tech and directed the Ford Scientific Laboratory. He is especially notable for hiring physicist Dr. George Pake to create the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, which produced many seminal ideas in modern computing.

#527

Philippe Horvath

#22628

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

Philippe Horvath is a French scientist working for DuPont Nutrition and Health. His work was integral to the development of CRISPR-Cas, a versatile biochemical method for targeted genetic engineering. For this work, he was awarded the 2015 Massry Prize along with Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, as well as the 2016 Canada Gairdner International Award, with his Massry co-laureates in addition to Feng Zhang, Rodolphe Barrangou, Anthony Fauci, and Frank Plummer.

#528

Andrew M. Stuart

Andrew M. Stuart

#22631

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Andrew M. Stuart is a British and American mathematician, working in applied and computational mathematics. In particular, his research has focused on the numerical analysis of dynamical systems, applications of stochastic differential equations and stochastic partial differential equations, the Bayesian approach to inverse problems, data assimilation, and machine learning.

#529

Kenneth M. Watson

#22703

Overall Influence

1921 - Present (104 years)

Kenneth Marshall Watson was an American theoretical physicist and physical oceanographer. Life and career Watson graduated in 1943 with BS in electrical engineering from Iowa State College. From 1943 to 1946 he was a researcher at the United States Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. During his work for the U.S. Navy he went to night school at George Washington University. He graduated from the University of Iowa with Ph.D. in 1948 with thesis The polarizability of the meson-charge cloud of a neutron in an external electrostatic field. He was from 1948 to 1949 an Atomic Energy Commi...

#530

Philip Holmes

#22755

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Philip John Holmes is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. As a member of the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department, he formerly served as the interim chair until May 2007.

#531

Hasok Chang

#22844

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Hasok Chang is a Korean-born American historian and philosopher of science currently serving as the Hans Rausing Professor at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and a board member of the Philosophy of Science Association. He previously served as president of the British Society for the History of Science from 2012 to 2014.

#532

Essam Heggy

#22870

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (50 years)

Essam Heggy is an Egyptian space scientist. Heggy obtained his Ph.D. in astronomy and planetary science in 2002 with distinguished honors from the Paris-Sorbonne University in Paris. His main science interests in space and planetary geophysics covers Mars, the Moon, icy satellites and near-Earth objects. His research involves probing structural, hydrological and volcanic elements in terrestrial and planetary environments using different types of radar imaging and sounding techniques as well as measuring the electromagnetic properties of rocks in the radar frequency range. His research experti...

#533

Sharon R. Long

#22882

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Sharon Rugel Long is an American plant biologist. She is the Steere-Pfizer Professor of Biological Science in the Department of Biology at Stanford University, and the Principal Investigator of the Long Laboratory at Stanford.

#534

Mary Blue

#22891

Overall Influence

Mary Elizabeth Blue is an American neurobiologist and computational neurologist. She is an associate professor of neurology and neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a research scientist in the neuroscience laboratory at Kennedy Krieger Institute.

#535

Peter Swerling

#22907

Overall Influence

1929 - 2000 (71 years)

Peter Swerling was one of the most influential radar theoreticians in the second half of the 20th century. He is best known for the class of statistically "fluctuating target" scattering models he developed at the RAND Corporation in the early 1950s to characterize the performance of pulsed radar systems, referred to as Swerling Targets I, II, III, and IV in the literature of radar. Swerling also contributed to the optimal estimation of orbits of satellites and trajectories of missiles, anticipating the development of the Kalman filter. He also founded two companies, one of which continues hi...

#536

Harold Brown

#22919

Overall Influence

1927 - 2019 (92 years)

Harold Brown was an American nuclear physicist who served as United States Secretary of Defense from 1977 to 1981, under President Jimmy Carter. Previously, in the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations, he held the posts of Director of Defense Research and Engineering and United States Secretary of the Air Force .

#537

Kim Sung-Hou

#22992

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

Kim Sung-Hou is a Korean-born American structural biologist and biophysicist. Kim reported the first 3D structure of tRNA with A. Rich in 1973. He also published many papers on the structures of protein molecules including human Ras, human cyclin dependent kinase 2 and small heat shock protein. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1994. He is currently a professor in the department of chemistry at the U.C. Berkeley and a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory .

#538

Joseph Bogen

#23001

Overall Influence

1926 - 2005 (79 years)

Joseph E. Bogen, M.D. was a neurophysiologist who specialized in split brain research and focused on theories of consciousness. He was a clinical professor of neurosurgery at the University of Southern California, Adjunct Professor of Psychology at UCLA, and a visiting professor at Caltech.

#539

Masakazu Konishi

#23092

Overall Influence

1933 - 2020 (87 years)

Masakazu "Mark" Konishi was a Japanese neurobiologist, known for his research on the neuroscience underlying the behavior of owls and songbirds. Early life and education Konishi was born on 17 February 1933 in Kyoto, Japan, the only child of poor "Nishijin" weavers. As a child during the Second World War, he grew edible plants in his family's backyard and rooftop, and raised rabbits for food. In his spare time, he enjoyed playing with animals, including insects, fish, birds, rabbits, and dogs.

#540

Richard D. Smith

#23104

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Richard Dale Smith is a chemist and a Battelle Fellow and chief scientist within the biological sciences division, as well as the director of proteomics research at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory . Smith is also director of the NIH Proteomics Research Resource for Integrative Biology, an adjunct faculty member in the chemistry departments at Washington State University and the University of Utah, and an affiliate faculty member at the University of Idaho and the Department of Molecular Microbiology & Immunology, Oregon Health & Science University. He is the author or co-author of ap...

#541

Alastair G. W. Cameron

#23195

Overall Influence

1925 - 2005 (80 years)

Alastair G. W. Cameron was an American–Canadian astrophysicist and space scientist who was an eminent staff member of the Astronomy department of Harvard University. He was one of the founders of the field of nuclear astrophysics, advanced the theory that the Moon was created by the giant impact of a Mars-sized object with the early Earth, and was an early adopter of computer technology in astrophysics.

#542

David E. Muller

#23197

Overall Influence

1924 - 2008 (84 years)

David Eugene Muller was an American mathematician and computer scientist. He was a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of Illinois , after which he became an emeritus professor, and was an adjunct professor of mathematics at the New Mexico State University . Muller received his BS in 1947 and his PhD in 1951 in physics from Caltech; an honorary PhD was conferred by the University of Paris in 1989. He was the inventor of the Muller C-element , a device used to implement asynchronous circuitry in electronic computers. He also co-invented the Reed–Muller codes. He discovered the codes, and Irving S.

#543

Jakša Cvitanić

#23274

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Jakša Cvitanić is a Richard N. Merkin Professor of Mathematical Finance at the California Institute of Technology. His main research interests are in mathematical finance, contract theory, stochastic control theory, and stochastic differential equations.

#544

John Carlstrom

#23304

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

John E. Carlstrom is an American astrophysicist, and Professor, Departments of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and Physics, at the University of Chicago. He graduated from Vassar College with a B.A. in 1981, and from the University of California, Berkeley with a Ph.D. in 1988.

#545

Edward C. Stone

Edward C. Stone

#23358

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (89 years)

Edward Carroll Stone is an American space scientist, professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, and former director of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory . Biography Stone was born in Knoxville, Iowa. After receiving his undergraduate education at Iowa's Burlington Junior College in Iowa, Stone attended the University of Chicago where he earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics. Stone's astrophysics career goes back to his first cosmic-ray experiments on Discoverer satellites in 1961. He then joined the staff of Caltech as a research fellow, and became a full facult...

#546

Peter Hofstee

#23372

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Harm Peter Hofstee is a Dutch physicist and computer scientist who currently is a distinguished research staff member at IBM Austin, USA, and a part-time professor in Big Data Systems at Delft University of Technology, Netherlands.

#547

Abdus Suttar Khan

#23376

Overall Influence

1941 - 2008 (67 years)

Abdus Suttar Khan was a Bangladeshi scientist. He researched on aerospace for four decades with NASA, United Technology, and Alstom, a French power generation company. Khan invented more than forty different alloys for commercial application in space shuttles, jet engines, train engines and industrial gas turbines.

#548

Stefano Soatto

#23419

Overall Influence

Stefano Soatto is professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles , in Los Angeles, CA, where he is also professor of electrical engineering and founding director of the UCLA Vision Lab.

#549

Daniel Gottesman

#23437

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

Daniel Gottesman is a physicist, known for his work regarding quantum error correction, in particular the invention of the stabilizer formalism for quantum error-correcting codes, and the Gottesman–Knill theorem. He is a faculty member at the University of Maryland.

#550

Michael Weisberg

#23530

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (49 years)

Michael Craig Weisberg is an American philosopher of science, currently Bess W. Heyman President's Distinguished Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also serves as Interim Director of Perry World House, directs the Galápagos Education and Research Alliance, and is a Non-resident Senior Advisor for the International Peace Institute.

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