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 …

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List of the most influential people

#901

Ross Taylor

#39048

Overall Influence

1925 - 2021 (96 years)

Stuart Ross Taylor was a New Zealand geochemist and planetary scientist known for his studies of the geology of the Moon through lunar samples, the continental crust, tektites and the evolution of the Solar System. He was an emeritus professor and Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra. He died in Canberra on 23 May 2021 at the age of 95.

#902

Margaret T. Fuller

#39129

Overall Influence

Margaret "Minx" T. Fuller is an American developmental biologist known for her research on the male germ line and defining the role of the stem cell environment in specifying cell fate and differentiation.

#903

Daniel Tranel

#39246

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Daniel T. Tranel is an American professor of neurology at the University of Iowa. He has been recognized as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. While a graduate student at the University of Iowa, he helped establish the Iowa Neurological Patient Registry, which he currently directs. The Iowa Neurological Patient Registry includes cases of unique brain injuries, such as Patient S.M. and Patient E.V.R. Tranel also directs the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Neuroscience at the University of Iowa. He serves as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Clinical and ...

#904

Sergei B. Chernyshev

Sergei B. Chernyshev

#39270

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Sergei Chernyshev , born 4 August 1952, Bohodukhiv, Kharkiv Oblast, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic is a Russian philosopher, educator and expert in the field of organization and management science.

#905

Ian Gatley

#39296

Overall Influence

Ian Gatley was the former Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs of New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, New Jersey.He is also a Distinguished Professor of Physics in the department of Physics at the College of Science and Liberal Arts in NJIT. He is a prolific scholar well known in Astronomy and Imaging Science.

#906

José Onuchic

#39491

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

José Nelson Onuchic is a Brazilian and American physicist, the Harry C & Olga K Wiess Professor of Physics at Rice University. He does research in molecular biophysics, condensed matter chemistry, and genetic networks, and is known for the folding funnel hypothesis stating that the native state of a protein is a deep minimum of free energy for the protein's natural conditions among its possible configurations. He was the college master for Lovett College at Rice University from 2014 to 2019.

#907

Bruce Jakosky

#39522

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Bruce Martin Jakosky is a professor of Geological Sciences and associate director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has been involved with the Viking, Solar Mesosphere Explorer, Clementine, Mars Observer, Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey, Mars Science Laboratory and MAVEN spacecraft missions, and is involved in planning future spacecraft missions.

#908

Newton Howard

#39596

Overall Influence

Newton Howard is a brain and cognitive scientist, the former founder and director of the MIT Mind Machine Project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He is a professor of computational neurology and functional neurosurgery at Georgetown University. He was a professor of at the University of Oxford, where he directed the Oxford Computational Neuroscience Laboratory. He is also the director of MIT's Synthetic Intelligence Lab, the founder of the Center for Advanced Defense Studies and the chairman of the Brain Sciences Foundation. Professor Howard is also a senior fellow at the John Radcliffe Hospital at Oxford, a senior scientist at INSERM in Paris and a P.A.H.

#909

Jim Horning

#39633

Overall Influence

1942 - 2013 (71 years)

James Jay Horning was an American computer scientist and ACM Fellow. Overview Jim Horning received a PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 1969 for a thesis entitled A Study of Grammatical Inference. He was a founding member, and later chairman, of the Computer Systems Research Group at the University of Toronto, Canada, from 1969 until 1977. He was then a Research Fellow at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center from 1977 until 1984 and a founding member and senior consultant at DEC Systems Research Center from 1984 until 1996. He was founder and director of STAR Lab from 1997 ...

#910

Jeremy Mould

#39645

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Jeremy Richard Mould is an Australian astronomer currently at the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology. Mould was previously Director of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University and the American National Optical Astronomy Observatory. He is an Honorary Professorial Fellow, at the University of Melbourne.

#911

Alex Toker

#39651

Overall Influence

Alex Toker is currently a professor at the Department of Pathology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School and Chief of the Division of Signal Transduction and Associate Director of the Cancer Research Institute in the Cancer Center. His research focus on understanding mechanism of cancer including tumor cell survival, invasion and metastasis. He is currently editor-in-chief of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

#912

John Quackenbush

John Quackenbush

#39846

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

John Quackenbush is an American computational biologist and genome scientist. He is a professor of biostatistics and computational biology and a professor of cancer biology at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute , as well as the director of its Center for Cancer Computational Biology . Quackenbush also holds an appointment as a professor of computational biology and bioinformatics in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health.

#913

Maynard Olson

#39887

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Maynard Victor Olson is an American chemist and molecular biologist. As a professor of genome sciences and medicine at the University of Washington, be became a specialist in the genetics of cystic fibrosis, and one of the founders of the Human Genome Project. During his years at Washington University in St. Louis, he also led efforts to develop yeast artificial chromosomes that allowed for the study of large portions of the human genome.

#914

Peter Ordeshook

#39935

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

Peter Carl Ordeshook is an American political scientist. He is the Mary Stillman Harkness Professor of Political Science at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. He held faculty positions at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Texas at Austin , where he served as the Frank C. Erwin Jr. Centennial Chair in Government. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University from 1975 to 1976, and he was the president of the Public Choice Society from 1986 to 1988. He has been a professor at Caltech since 1987. He...

#915

J. Russell Nelson

#39952

Overall Influence

1929 - 2016 (87 years)

Jack Russell Nelson was an American educator who served as a chancellor/president of the University of Colorado Boulder and Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. Life Nelson earned his bachelor's degree in business and economics from Pacific Union College in Napa Valley, California, and a Master of Business Administration and Ph.D in finance from the University of California Los Angeles.

#916

Olin J. Eggen

#39988

Overall Influence

1919 - 1998 (79 years)

Olin Jeuck Eggen was an American astronomer. Biography Olin Jeuck Eggen was born to Olin Eggen and Bertha Clare Jeuck in the village of Orfordville located in Rock County, Wisconsin. Both of his parents were of Norwegian extraction. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1940. After serving in World War II in the OSS, he returned to the university and received his Ph.D. in astrophysics in 1948.

#917

Alfred H. Clifford

#40041

Overall Influence

1908 - 1992 (84 years)

Alfred Hoblitzelle Clifford was an American mathematician born in St. Louis, Missouri who is known for Clifford theory and for his work on semigroups. He did his undergraduate studies at Yale and his PhD at Caltech, and worked at MIT, Johns Hopkins , and later, in 1955, Tulane University .

#918

James Westphal

#40064

Overall Influence

1930 - 2004 (74 years)

James Adolph Westphal was an American academic, scientist, engineer, inventor and astronomer and Director of Caltech's Palomar Observatory from 1994 through 1997. His participation played an important role in designing the main camera for the Hubble Space Telescope.

#919

Haifan Lin

#40084

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Haifan Lin is a Chinese-born American stem cell biologist. He is the Eugene Higgins Chair Professor of Cell Biology at Yale University and the founding Director of the Yale Stem Cell Center. He previously founded and directed the Stem Cell Research Program at Duke University. Recognized for his significant contributions to stem cell research, he was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018.

#920

Josephine Webb

#40125

Overall Influence

1918 - Present (107 years)

Josephine Webb is an American electrical engineer who obtained two patents for oil circuit breaker contact design, known colloquially as "switchgear". She designed an eighteen-inch, full newspaper size fax machine with superior resolution. She co-founded Webb Consulting Company with her husband, also an electrical engineer. She is one of the first female electrical engineers, and considered a pioneer by the Society of Women Engineers. At Purdue University, she was one out of a total of five women engineers. She turned 100 in June 2018.

#921

Daniel Carleton Gajdusek

Daniel Carleton Gajdusek

#40175

Overall Influence

1923 - 2008 (85 years)

Daniel Carleton Gajdusek was an American physician and medical researcher who was the co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 for work on the transmissibility of kuru, implying the existence of an infectious agent, which he named an 'unconventional virus'.

#922

Thomas Palfrey

#40230

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Thomas Rossman Palfrey is the Flintridge Professor of Economics and Political Science at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, and Fellow of the Econometric Society. He received his Ph.D. in Social Science from Caltech in 1981.

#923

Barbara Low

#40346

Overall Influence

1920 - 2019 (99 years)

Barbara Wharton Low was a biochemist, biophysicist, and a researcher involved in discovering the structure of penicillin and the characteristics of other antibiotics. Her early work at Oxford University with Dorothy Hodgkin used X-ray crystallography to confirm the molecular structure of penicillin, which at the time was the largest molecule whose structure has been determined using that method. Later graduate work saw her study with Linus Pauling and Edwin Cohn before becoming a professor in her own right. Low's laboratory would accomplish the discovery of the pi helix, investigate the struc...

#924

James L. Gould

#40395

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

James L. Gould is an American ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and popular science writer. He has served as a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University since receiving his PhD in 1975. However, he is primarily known for the experiment he designed while an undergraduate at Caltech which proved that bees use complex dances to communicate the location of food. In addition to several technical works and textbooks, he co-wrote with his wife the popular science book The Honey Bee.

#925

Giancarlo Genta

#40421

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Giancarlo Genta is Professor of Machine Design and Construction at the Polytechnic University of Turin. His areas of professional interest include vibration, vehicle design, magnetic bearings, and rotordynamics. He has written or co-authored more than 50 articles in professional publications. He has published extensively in the field of SETI research.

#926

Igor Mezić

#40450

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Igor Mezić is a mechanical engineer, mathematician, and Distinguished Professor of mechanical engineering and mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is best known for his contributions to operator theoretic, data driven approach to dynamical systems theory that he advanced via articles based on Koopman operator theory, and his work on theory of mixing, that culminated in work on microfluidic mixer design, and mapping oil refuse from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to aid in cleaning efforts,.

#927

Gretchen Hofmann

#40538

Overall Influence

Gretchen Hofmann is professor of ecological physiology of marine organisms at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds a B.S. from the University of Wyoming, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder in Environmental, Population and Organismal Biology.

#928

Francis Albarède

#40592

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Francis Albarède is a French geochemist. He is Professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon and a member of the Academia Europaea. In January 2011, he became the first director of the Laboratory of Geology Lyon .

#929

Chia-Shun Yih

#40733

Overall Influence

1918 - 1997 (79 years)

Chia-Shun Yih was the Stephen P. Timoshenko Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan. He made many significant contributions to fluid mechanics. Yih was also a seal artist.

#930

Kathleen Howell

#40784

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Kathleen Connor Howell is an American scientist and aerospace engineer known for her contributions to dynamical systems theory applied to spacecraft trajectory design which led to the use of halo orbit in multiple NASA space missions. She is currently the Hsu Lo Distinguished Professor at Purdue University in the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics. In acknowledgment of her many achievements, Discover magazine recognized her in 2002 as one of the 50 most important women in science.

#931

Albert G. Hill

#40856

Overall Influence

1910 - 1996 (86 years)

Albert Gordon Hill was a physicist. He was a key leader in the development of radar in World War II, director of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory development of the electronic Distant Early Warning and SAGE continental air defense systems, and first chairman of The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory. He died in 1996.

#932

James W. Head

#40865

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

James W. Head III is the Louis and Elizabeth Scherck Distinguished Professor of Geological Sciences at Brown University. He studies the roles of volcanism in planetary crusts as well as the geological evolution of Mars, and has served as the investigator on many major international planetary investigation missions.

#933

Belkis Valdman

#40881

Overall Influence

1942 - 2011 (69 years)

Belkis Valdman was a Turkish born naturalised Brazilian researcher, teacher and academic chemical engineer, who worked in the field of instrumentation and process control in chemical engineering. Early life and education Belkis Valdman was born in Turkey on 5 May 1942, the daughter of Moise Dwek and Esterina Duek , one of three children, and became a naturalised Brazilian citizen in 1967.

#934

Bhanu Pratap Jena

Bhanu Pratap Jena

#40899

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Bhanu Pratap Jena is an American cell biologist and the "George E. Palade University Professor and Distinguished Professor of Physiology" at the Wayne State University School of Medicine, who discovered porosome in mid 1990s & demonstrated it to be the universal secretory machinery in Plasma Membrane.

#935

Faye Flam

#41041

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Faye Flam is an American journalist. She has written for Science Magazine and wrote two weekly columns for The Philadelphia Inquirer, including one on sex and one on evolution. Flam wrote a book on the influence of sex on human evolution and society. She teaches science writing and lectures on communication to scientific forums, and is a journalism critic for the MIT Knight Science Journalism Tracker.

#936

R. D. Middlebrook

#41043

Overall Influence

1929 - 2010 (81 years)

Robert David Middlebrook was a professor of electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology . He is most well known in the field of power electronics and as a proponent of design-oriented circuit analysis.

#937

Bruce Cork

#41064

Overall Influence

1916 - 1994 (78 years)

Bruce Cork was a physicist who discovered the antineutron in 1956 while working at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He retired from Lawrence in 1986. He died October 7, 1994, at the age of 78 after a long illness.

#938

Chris Umans

#41192

Overall Influence

Christopher Umans is a professor of Computer Science in the Computing and Mathematical Sciences Department at the California Institute of Technology. He is known for work on algorithms, computational complexity, algebraic complexity, and hardness of approximation.

#939

Nicholas Read

#41243

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Nicholas Read is an American physicist, noted for his work on strongly interacting quantum many-body systems. Biography Read was born in Britain in 1958 and did his undergraduate education at Cambridge University. He completed his PhD at the Imperial College, London after which he moved to the United States. Read worked as a post-doctoral researcher, first at Brown University, and then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined Yale University as an assistant professor in 1988, where he has been ever since.

#940

Catherine J. Murphy

#41258

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Catherine "Cathy" J. Murphy is an American chemist and materials scientist, and is the Larry Faulkner Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . The first woman to serve as the head of the department of chemistry at UIUC, Murphy is known for her work on nanomaterials, specifically the seed-mediated synthesis of gold nanorods of controlled aspect ratio. She is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.

#941

Jay Gan

#41297

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Jay Jianying Gan is an American agricultural and environmental scientist. Gan is current chair of the Department of Environmental Sciences at University of California, Riverside. Biography Gan received his B.Sc. in agronomy in 1982, M.Sc. in pesticides in 1985, and Ph.D. in pesticides in 1988, all from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou.

#942

Raoul Kopelman

#41324

Overall Influence

1933 - 2023 (90 years)

Raoul Kopelman was a scientist, inventor, and the Richard Smalley Distinguished University Professor of Chemistry, Physics, Applied Physics, Biophysics, Biomedical Engineering and Chemical Biology at the University of Michigan. Amongst other accomplishments, he was well known for developing the Hoshen-Kopelman algorithm. He was also amongst the first scientists pushing to establish the field of nanotechnology.

#943

P. P. Vaidyanathan

#41433

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Palghat P. Vaidyanathan is the Kiyo and Eiko Tomiyasu Professor of Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA, where he teaches and leads research in the area of signal processing, especially digital signal processing , and its applications. He has authored four books, and authored or coauthored close to six hundred papers in various IEEE journals and conferences. Prof. Vaidyanathan received his B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees from the Institute of Radiophysics and Electronics, Science College campus of University of Kolkata, and a Ph.D. degree ...

#944

John Doyle

#41447

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

John Comstock Doyle is the John G Braun Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems, Electrical Engineering, and BioEngineering at the California Institute of Technology. He is known for his work in control theory and his current research interests are in theoretical foundations for complex networks in engineering, biology, and multiscale physics.

#945

James F. Scott

#41470

Overall Influence

1942 - 2020 (78 years)

James Floyd Scott was an American physicist and research director at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. He is considered one of the pioneers of ferroelectric memory devices. He was elected to the Royal Society in 2008.

#946

Richard Grimsdale

#41494

Overall Influence

1929 - 2005 (76 years)

Richard Lawrence Grimsdale was a British electrical engineer and computer pioneer who helped to design the world's first transistorised computer. Early life and education Richard Lawrence Grimsdale was born on 18 September 1929 in Australia, where his father, an English engineer, was working on construction of the suburban railway system for the Metropolitan-Vickers company. The family returned to England, where he was educated at Manchester Grammar School, and then studied electrical engineering at the University of Manchester, where he earned his Bachelor of Science, his Master of Science i...

#947

Martin Roček

#41504

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Martin Roček is a professor of theoretical physics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and a member of the C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics. He received A.B. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University in 1975 and 1979. He did post-doctoral research at the University of Cambridge and Caltech before becoming a professor at Stony Brook University.

#948

Robert Helliwell

#41511

Overall Influence

1920 - 2011 (91 years)

Robert A. Helliwell was an electrical engineer and professor at Stanford University. He was one of the pioneering scientists in the study of whistlers and related ionospheric phenomena. Early life Helliwell was born in Red Wing, Minnesota, on September 2, 1920. He and his mother moved to Palo Alto, California after his father died. Helliwell and his wife, whom he knew in high school, were both undergraduates at Stanford University.

#949

John M. Hayes

#41536

Overall Influence

1940 - 2017 (77 years)

John Michael Hayes was an American oceanographer. He worked at Indiana University Bloomington, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Education Hayes was educated at Iowa State University graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1962. He completed his postgraduate education in analytical chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was awarded a PhD in 1966 for analysis of organic constituents of terrestrial and extraterrestrial samples using mass spectrometry supervised by Klaus Biemann.

#950

Mina Aganagić

#41555

Overall Influence

Mina Aganagić is a mathematical physicist who works as a professor in the Center for Theoretical Physics, the Department of Mathematics, the Department of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley.

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