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

#951

Hu Ning

#41689

Overall Influence

1916 - 1997 (81 years)

Hu Ning was a Chinese physicist and writer. Biography Hu was born in Suqian, Jiangsu, China on 11 February 1916. From 1928 to 1934, Hu studied at the Zhenjiang High School in Zhenjiang, and Suzhou High School in Suzhou. In 1935, Hu studied at the physical department of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. From 1935 to 1937, Hu studied in the department of physics at Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he graduated in 1938.

#952

Heinz-Otto Kreiss

#41761

Overall Influence

1930 - 2015 (85 years)

Heinz-Otto Kreiss was a German mathematician in the fields of numerical analysis, applied mathematics, and what was the new area of computing in the early 1960s. Born in Hamburg, Germany, he earned his Ph.D. at Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan in 1959. Over the course of his long career, Kreiss wrote a number of books in addition to the purely academic journal articles he authored across several disciplines. He was professor at Uppsala University, California Institute of Technology and University of California, Los Angeles . He was also a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. At the time of his death, Kreiss was a Swedish citizen, living in Stockholm.

#953

Robley D. Evans

#41789

Overall Influence

1907 - 1995 (88 years)

Robley Dunglison Evans was an American nuclear physicist and pioneer of nuclear medicine. He was the president of the Health Physics Society in 1972–1973. Biography His father Manley Jefferson Evans and mother Alice Jennie Turner married in August 1905 in O'Neill, Nebraska. Manley J. Evans was a professor at Nebraska Wesleyan University. Robley D. Evans was their only child. He is named in honor of Admiral Robley D. Evans, but there is no immediate family connection. In 1912 the family moved to Los Angeles County. Manley J. Evans taught at Hollywood High School for 32 years. At Hollywood High School, Robley D.

#954

Guozhen Lu

#41876

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Guozhen Lu is a professor of mathematics at the University of Connecticut. He is known for his contributions to harmonic analysis, geometric analysis, and partial differential equations. Education and career Lu graduated from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China in 1983 and earned his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1991. He was a Bateman Research Instructor in the Department of Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology from 1991 to 1993, an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Wright State University from 1993 to 1997, and an associate professor of the same department from 1997 to 2000 before he moved to Wayne State University.

#955

Victoria Orphan

#41881

Overall Influence

Victoria J. Orphan is a geobiologist at the California Institute of Technology who studies the interactions between marine microorganisms and their environment. As of 2020, she is the Chair for the Center of Environmental Microbial Interactions.

#956

Daniel L. Stein

#41969

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Daniel L. Stein is an American physicist and Professor of Physics and Mathematics at New York University. From 2006 to 2012 he served as the NYU Dean of Science. He has contributed to a wide range of scientific fields. His early research covered diverse topics, including theoretical work on protein biophysics, biological evolution, amorphous semiconductors, quantum liquids, topology of order parameter spaces, liquid crystals, neutron stars, and the interface between particle physics and cosmology. His primary focus, however, has been on quenched randomness in condensed matter and on stochastic processes in both irreversible and extended systems.

#957

Robert Tycko

#41975

Overall Influence

Robert Tycko is an American biophysicist whose research primarily involves solid state NMR, including the development of new methods and applications to various areas of physics, chemistry, and biology. He is a member of the Laboratory of Chemical Physics in the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, USA. He was formerly a member of the Physical Chemistry Research and Materials Chemistry Research departments of AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. His work has contributed to our understanding of geome...

#958

Malvin Ruderman

#42038

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (98 years)

Malvin Avram Ruderman is an American physicist and astrophysicist. Education Mal Ruderman received his A.B. degree from Columbia University in 1945. His MS degree and PhD are from the California Institute of Technology under the supervision of Robert Jay Finkelstein.

#959

S. Lawrence Zipursky

#42162

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

S. Lawrence Zipursky is an American neuroscientist, currently Distinguished Professor of Biological Chemistry at University of California, Los Angeles and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Zipursky studies brain development. His research focuses on how neural circuits are formed during development. His laboratory has provided insights into various aspects of circuit assembly, including the molecular basis of neuronal identity through their work on the Dscam1 locus in Drosophila. Zipursky was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998 and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2009.

#960

Heidi Hammel

#42190

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Heidi B. Hammel is a planetary astronomer who has extensively studied Neptune and Uranus. She was part of the team imaging Neptune from Voyager 2 in 1989. She led the team using the Hubble Space Telescope to view Shoemaker-Levy 9's impact with Jupiter in 1994. She has used the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Telescope to study Uranus and Neptune, discovering new information about dark spots, planetary storms and Uranus' rings. In 2002, she was selected as an interdisciplinary scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope.

#961

Carl Morris

#42250

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

Carl Neracher Morris was a professor in the Statistics Department of Harvard University and spent several years as a researcher for the RAND Corporation working on the RAND Health Insurance Experiment.

#962

Alwyn Van der Merwe

#42268

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (98 years)

Alwyn van der Merwe is an American theoretical physicist. He is Emeritus Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Denver. Life and career As a young man, Alwyn van der Merwe graduated at the top of his class every year throughout his high school and university studies.

#963

Pamela J. Bjorkman

Pamela J. Bjorkman

#42310

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Pamela Jane Bjorkman NAS, AAAS is an American biochemist. She is the David Baltimore Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at the California Institute of Technology , Her research centers on the study of the three-dimensional structures of proteins related to Class I MHC, or Major Histocompatibility Complex, proteins of the immune system and proteins involved in the immune responses to viruses . Bjorkman is most well known as a pioneer in the field of structural biology.

#964

Douglas Erwin

#42360

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Douglas Hamilton Erwin is a paleobiologist, Curator of Paleozoic Invertebrates at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and Chair of the Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. He is a member of the Editorial Board for Current Biology.

#965

Tor Hagfors

#42364

Overall Influence

1930 - 2007 (77 years)

Tor Hagfors was a Norwegian scientist, radio astronomer, radar expert and a pioneer in the studies of the interactions between electromagnetic waves and plasma. In the early 1960s he was one of a handful of pioneering theorists that independently developed a theory that explained the scattering of radio waves by the free electrons in a plasma and applied the result to the ionosphere. He became founding director of the new EISCAT facilities that were then under construction in 1975, by which time he already been director at most of the other incoherent scatter radar facilities in the world. Th...

#966

Martin Summerfield

#42421

Overall Influence

1916 - 1996 (80 years)

Martin Summerfield was an American physicist and rocket scientist, a co-founder of Aerojet, head of Princeton University propulsion and combustion laboratory. Life and career Summerfield received B.S. degree in physics from Brooklyn College. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at California Institute of Technology in 1937 and 1941, respectively. He was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1979.

#967

Kevin Hand

#42489

Overall Influence

Kevin Hand is an astrobiologist and planetary scientist at JPL. He is also the founder of Cosmos Education and was its president until 2007. He was working at NASA Ames when he was inspired to form Cosmos Education in 1999 after getting a grant from the Earth and Space Foundation to tour African schools to talk about how education relates to space research.

#968

Anthony Zador

#42526

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Anthony M. Zador is an American neuroscientist and the Alle Davis Harris Professor of Biology and Chair of Neuroscience at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He is a co-founder, in 2004, of the Computational and Systems Neuroscience conference, and of the NAISYS meeting about the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Dr. Zador's research has focused on understanding the circuits of the auditory cortex in rodents. More recently, he has pioneered a new approach to connectome mapping using the methods of molecular biology, which may dramatically decrease the cost and improve t...

#969

Ian R. Gibbons

#42542

Overall Influence

1931 - 2018 (87 years)

Ian Read Gibbons, was a biophysicist and cell biologist. He discovered and named dynein, and demonstrated energy source as ATP is sufficient for dynein to walk on microtubules. In 2017, he and Ronald Vale received the Shaw Prize for their research on microtubule motor proteins.

#970

David Snoke

#42544

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

David W. Snoke is a physics professor at the University of Pittsburgh in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society "for his pioneering work on the experimental and theoretical understanding of dynamical optical processes in semiconductor systems." In 2004 he co-wrote a controversial paper with prominent intelligent design proponent Michael Behe. In 2007, his research group was the first to report Bose-Einstein condensation of polaritons in a trap. David Snoke and theoretical physicist Jonathan Keeling recently published an article...

#971

Robert N. Clayton

#42579

Overall Influence

1930 - 2017 (87 years)

Robert Norman Clayton was a Canadian-American chemist and academic. He was the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the University of Chicago. Clayton studied cosmochemistry and held a joint appointment in the university's geophysical sciences department. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was named a fellow of several academic societies, including the Royal Society.

#972

John M. Greene

#42693

Overall Influence

1928 - 2007 (79 years)

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

#973

Andrew Ingersoll

Andrew Ingersoll

#42852

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Andrew Perry Ingersoll is a professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology. Ingersoll was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997. He received the lifetime achievement award in planetary science, the Gerard P. Kuiper Prize, in 2007. He proposed the runaway greenhouse effect and is known for his research on planetary atmospheres and climate.

#974

Charles Kennel

#42882

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (86 years)

Charles F. Kennel is an American plasma physicist and former Associate Administrator of NASA. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and won the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics in 1997. In 2009, he was advertised by NASA Watch as a potential pick by Barack Obama as the next NASA Administrator.

#975

Martin Lo

#43092

Overall Influence

Martin Wen-Yu Lo is a spacecraft trajectory expert currently working at the NASA-owned Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Martin Lo is well known for discovering the Interplanetary Superhighway, also known as the Interplanetary Transport Network. The superhighway is created by combined gravitational forces of several planets that connects planets by a network of “tunnels” and is the most efficient way to navigate the solar system. This continues to be his main area of research.

#976

Gretar Tryggvason

#43277

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Gretar Tryggvason is Department Head of Mechanical Engineering and Charles A. Miller Jr. Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University. He is known for developing the front tracking method to simulate multiphase flows and free surface flows. Tryggvason was the editor-in-chief of Journal of Computational Physics from 2002–2015.

#977

Charles C. Steidel

#43285

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Charles C. Steidel is an American astronomer, and Lee A. DuBridge Professor of Astronomy at California Institute of Technology. Life He graduated from Princeton University with an AB in Astrophysical Sciences, and from California Institute of Technology with a PhD in Astronomy, in 1990. On November 7, 1987, he married Sarah Nichols Hoyt.

#978

David A. Spencer

David A. Spencer

#43300

Overall Influence

David A. Spencer is the Mars Sample Return Campaign Mission Manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. As an aerospace engineer, Spencer designs and operates planetary spacecraft. Education Spencer received B.S. and M.S. degrees in aeronautics and astronautics from Purdue University in W. Lafayette, Indiana. He earned his Ph.D. from the Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, completing a dissertation on automated proximity operations using relative orbital elements.

#979

Conrad Longmire

Conrad Longmire

#43302

Overall Influence

1921 - 2010 (89 years)

Conrad Lee Longmire was an American theoretical physicist who was best known as the discoverer of the mechanism behind high-altitude electromagnetic pulse. In 1961, Longmire was awarded the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award "for continued and original theoretical contributions, requiring unusual insight, to the development of nuclear weapons and the progress of plasma physics." In 2004 he was awarded the Los Alamos Medal, the nuclear laboratory's highest award.

#980

Gerald Schubert

#43346

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (86 years)

Gerald Schubert is a geophysicist and Professor Emeritus of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences at UCLA. His research has broadly dealt with modeling the structure and dynamics of the interiors and atmospheres and Earth and other planets.

#981

Eunseong Kim

#43483

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (54 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.

#982

Anne L. Peters

#43543

Overall Influence

Anne Peters is a endocrinologist, diabetes expert, and professor of clinical medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. She runs diabetes centers in well-served Beverly Hills and under-resourced East Los Angeles. She teaches physicians and people with diabetes around the world how to better treat the condition, through lifestyle, medications and technology.

#983

David A. Tirrell

#43593

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

David A. Tirrell is an American chemist and the Ross McCollum-William H. Corcoran Professor and professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology . A pioneer in the areas of polymer synthesis and protein biosynthesis, his research has a wide range of applications, including coatings, adhesion, lubrication, bioengineering and biomedical intervention. From 2012 to 2018, Tirrell was the director of the Beckman Institute at Caltech. , he serves as Caltech's Provost. He is one of very few American scientists to have been elected to all three branches of the ...

#984

Harold S. Johnston

#43610

Overall Influence

1920 - 2012 (92 years)

Harold S. "Hal" Johnston was an American scientist who studied chemical kinetics and atmospheric chemistry. After beginning his teaching career at Stanford University, he was a faculty member and administrator at the University of California, Berkeley for nearly 35 years. In 1971, Johnston authored a paper suggesting that environmental pollutants could erode the ozone layer.

#985

Thomas J. Ahrens

#43616

Overall Influence

1936 - 2010 (74 years)

Thomas Julian Ahrens was a Professor of Geophysics at Caltech who was known for his study of the terrestrial planets and impact processes on planetary surfaces. Ahrens died on November 24, 2010, at the age of 74.

#986

Warren Elliot Henry

Warren Elliot Henry

#43641

Overall Influence

1909 - 2001 (92 years)

Warren Elliot Henry was an American physicist, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his work in the fields of magnetism and superconductivity. He made significant contributions to the advancement of science and technology and education, training and mentoring several generations of physicists.

#987

Markus W. Covert

#43690

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (52 years)

Markus W. Covert is a researcher and professor of bioengineering at Stanford University who led the simulation of the first organism in software. Covert leads an interdisciplinary lab of approximately 10 graduate students and post-doctoral scholars.

#988

Dennis A. Dougherty

#43709

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Dennis A. Dougherty is the George Grant Hoag Professor of Chemistry at California Institute of Technology. His research applies physical organic chemistry to systems of biological importance. Dougherty utilizes a variety of approaches to further our understanding of the human brain, including the in vivo nonsense suppression methodology for incorporating unnatural amino acids into a variety of ion channels for structure-function studies.

#989

James G. Anderson

#43711

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

James Gilbert Anderson is the Philip S. Weld Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry at Harvard University, a position he has held since 1982. From 1998 to 2001, he was the chairman of Harvard's department of chemistry and chemical biology. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Geophysical Union, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. His awards include the 1993 Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award, the 1996 Arthur L. Day Prize and Lectureship and the 2021 Dreyfus Prize in the Chemical Sciences.

#990

Robert Kraft

#43723

Overall Influence

1927 - 2015 (88 years)

Robert Paul Kraft was an American astronomer. He performed pioneering work on Cepheid variables, stellar rotation, novae, and the chemical evolution of the Milky Way. His name is also associated with the Kraft break: the abrupt change in the average rotation rate of main sequence stars around spectral type F8.

#991

F. Burton Jones

#43774

Overall Influence

1910 - 1999 (89 years)

Floyd Burton Jones was an American mathematician, active mainly in topology. Jones's father was a pharmacist and local politician in Shackelford County, Texas. As the valedictorian of his high school class, Jones earned a Regents' Scholarship to The University of Texas, intending to study law eventually. Jones soon discovered that he had a poor memory for dates and history, and thus changed his major to chemistry.

#992

Elizabeth Turtle

#43779

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Elizabeth "Zibi" Turtle is a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Education Turtle earned her B.S. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989. She earned her Ph.D. in planetary science from the University of Arizona in 1998.

#993

Michael Hochberg

#43794

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (45 years)

Michael Hochberg is an American physicist. He’s authored over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, has founded several companies, and has been an inventor on over 60 patents. Hochberg's research interests include silicon photonics and large-scale photonic integration. He has worked in a number of application areas, including data communications, biosensing, quantum optics, mid-infrared photonics, optical computing, and machine learning. Much of his work in silicon photonics has been the product of a longstanding series of collaborations with Thomas Baehr-Jones.

#994

Chiang C. Mei

#44006

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (90 years)

Chiang Chung "CC" Mei is Ford Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known for his contributions in fluid mechanics with applications to civil, environmental, and coastal engineering.

#995

Philip Power

#44085

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Philip Patrick Power is a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Davis. He has contributed to the synthesis, structure, and physical and chemical characterization of inorganic and organometallic compounds. His research focuses on low-coordinate main group and transition metal compounds. Much of this work hinges on the use of sterically crowded ligands to stabilize unusual geometries.

#996

Donald J. DePaolo

#44105

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Donald James DePaolo is an American professor of geochemistry in the department of earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley and associate laboratory director for energy and environmental sciences at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

#997

Johnson Cann

#44108

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

Johnson Robin Cann FRS is a British geologist. Early life and education Cann was educated at St Albans School, Hertfordshire and at St John's College, Cambridge, where he gained a first class BA in 1959 and an MA in 1961. He received a PhD at the Department of Earth Sciences at Cambridge in 1962, where he studied with Cecil Edgar Tilley. He subsequently remained at St John's College as a postdoctoral Research Fellow, but also had periods of study in the United States Office of Naval Research and as a Senior Scientific Officer in the Department of Mineralogy at the Natural History Museum, Lo...

#998

Marianne Walck

#44126

Overall Influence

Marianne C. Walck is the Chief Research Officer at the Idaho National Laboratory. She previously served as Vice President of the Sandia National Laboratories, where she led nuclear weapons stewardship.

#999

Sally Dawson

#44221

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Sally Dawson is an American physicist who deals with theoretical elementary particle physics. Education and career Dawson studied mathematics and physics at Duke University with a bachelor's degree in 1977 and at Harvard University with a master's degree in 1978 and a doctorate in 1981 with thesis advisor Howard Georgi and thesis Radiative Corrections to sin2θW. She was a postdoc at Fermilab and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory . From 1986 she was at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where she became a senior scientist in 1994 and a group leader in 1998. From 2001 to the present, she is an adjunct professor at the C.

#1000

Malabika Pramanik

#44249

Overall Influence

Malabika Pramanik is a Canadian mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at the University of British Columbia. Her interests include harmonic analysis, complex variables, and partial differential equations.

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