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

#1051

Eric Becklin

#47568

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Eric E. Becklin is an American astrophysicist. The primary focus of Becklin's research is infrared imaging and spectroscopy, including the search for brown dwarfs, the detection of circumstellar dust rings, the dynamics and composition of the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and the nature of luminous infrared galaxies.

#1052

Lara Mahal

#47600

Overall Influence

Lara K. Mahal is an American chemist who is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Glycomics at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. She is also a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Alberta. She is notable both for her pioneering work establishing lectin microarrays as a new technology for glycomics, her work on miRNA regulation of glycosylation and her graduate work with Carolyn R. Bertozzi on unnatural carbohydrate incorporation. Work in her laboratory focuses on understanding the role of carbohydrates in human health using systems- and chemical biology-based ap...

#1053

Morteza Gharib

#47627

Overall Influence

Morteza Gharib is the Hans W. Liepmann Professor of Aeronautics and Bio-Inspired Engineering at Caltech. Gharib was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2015 for contributions to fluid flow diagnostics and imagery, and engineering of bioinspired devices and phenomena.

#1054

Joseph A. Burns

#47642

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Joseph Burns is a professor at Cornell University with a dual appointment in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Astronomy department. His primary area of research is dynamics in planetary sciences.

#1055

Johannes Geiss

#47678

Overall Influence

1926 - 2020 (94 years)

Johannes Geiss was a German physicist. Biography Geiss was born in 1926 in modern-day Poland, the son of farmers Hans Geiss and Irene Wilk. In 1955, he married Carmen Bach. Geiss studied physics in Göttingen from 1947 to 1950. He published his doctoral thesis in 1953, titled Isotopenanalysen an „gewöhnlichem Blei“. He then conducted research on geochronology at the University of Bern and University of Chicago. From 1958 to 1959, Geiss was an associate professor at the University of Miami before returning to Bern, working there until 1991. From 1995 to 2002, he was co-director of the International Space Science Institute.

#1056

Amable Liñán

#47738

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (91 years)

Amable Liñán Martínez is a Spanish aeronautical engineer considered a world authority in the field of combustion. Biography He holds a PhD in Aeronautical Engineering from the Technical University of Madrid, advised by :es:Gregorio Millán Barbany and Degree of Aeronautical Engineer from the Caltech advised by Frank E. Marble.

#1057

E. Myles Standish

#47782

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (86 years)

Erland Myles Standish Jr. is a mathematical astronomer largely working in the field of solar system dynamics and celestial mechanics. He is a former professor at Yale University and had worked for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

#1058

Mark Borodovsky

#47796

Overall Influence

Mark Borodovsky is a Regents' Professor at the Join Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering of Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University and Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics at Georgia Tech. He has also been a Chair of the Department of Bioinformatics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in Moscow, Russia from 2012 to 2022.

#1059

Christopher Hawkesworth

#48043

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Christopher John Hawkesworth FRS FRSE is a British earth scientist, and former Deputy Principal and Vice-Principal for Research, at University of St Andrews. Biography Hawkesworth was born in Khartoum, Sudan on 18 December 1947, and was brought up in Ireland. He graduated from Trinity College, Dublin in 1970, and Oxford University at St Edmund Hall in 1974. He received his DPhil at Oxford under the supervision of Professor Ron Oxburgh.

#1060

James B. Garvin

#48081

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

James B. Garvin served as NASA's Chief Scientist from October 2004 to September 2005 and is known for his foundational work in NASA's Mars explorational programs. Garvin arrived at the Goddard Space Flight Center since 1984 where he first served as a staff scientist developing remote sensing instrumentation and has been based there or at the nearby NASA headquarters in Washington D.C. since then. His career has spanned disciplines as Earth system science, Mars Exploration, lunar exploration, Venus, asteroids, and the outer planets. He has been a co-investigator on NASA's Mars Observer, Mars Gl...

#1061

Tim Scully

#48240

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Robert "Tim" Scully is an American computer engineer, best known in the psychedelic underground for his work in the production of LSD from 1966 to 1969, for which he was indicted in 1973 and convicted in 1974. His best known product, dubbed "Orange Sunshine", was considered the standard for quality LSD in 1969. He was featured in the documentary The Sunshine Makers.

#1062

Richard McKelvey

#48287

Overall Influence

1944 - 2002 (58 years)

Richard Drummond McKelvey was a political scientist, specializing in mathematical theories of voting. He received his BS in Mathematics from Oberlin College, MA in mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis, and PhD in political science from University of Rochester. He was an Econometric Society fellow, and was the Edie and Lew Wasserman Professor of Political Science at the California Institute of Technology until his death, from cancer, in 2002.

#1063

Lucien LaCoste

#48312

Overall Influence

1908 - 1995 (87 years)

Lucien LaCoste was a physicist and metrologist. He coinvented the modern gravimeter and invented the zero-length spring and vehicle-mounted gravimeters. He was also co-founder of LaCoste Romberg, a prominent company selling gravimetric instruments.

#1064

Laura Robinson

#48366

Overall Influence

Laura Frances Robinson, born November 1976, is a British scientist who is Professor of Geochemistry at the University of Bristol. She makes use of geochemistry to study the processes that govern the climate. In particular, Robinson studies radioactive elements, as these can be analysed in geological materials. She was awarded the 2010 President's Award of the Geological Society of London.

#1065

Wallace L. W. Sargent

#48404

Overall Influence

1935 - 2012 (77 years)

Wallace Leslie William Sargent was a British-born American astronomer and the Ira S. Bowen Professor of Astronomy at California Institute of Technology. Education Sargent was born in Elsham, North Lincolnshire, the son of a gardener and a housecleaner, and grew up in Winterton, Lincolnshire. Sargent was the first person in his family to attend high school, and the first student from his high school to ever attend college. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Manchester in 1956, and his Ph.D. in 1959 from the same institution.

#1066

Benjamin Hsiao

#48462

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Benjamin S. Hsiao is an American materials scientist and educator. He served as the vice-president for research and chief research officer at Stony Brook University from May 2012 to December 2013. Education and career Born in Taipei, Taiwan, Hsiao attended the exclusive all-boys Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School . He graduated from JGHS to enroll in the National Taiwan University and pursue a B.Sc. in chemical engineering. After graduating in 1980, Hsiao entered the graduate program in Polymer Science at the Institute of Materials Science in the University of Connecticut in 1982. In 1985,...

#1067

Radhe Mohan

#48490

Overall Influence

Radhe Mohan is a medical physicist who significantly advanced radiation treatment safety for oncology patients. He is a recipient of the ASTRO Gold Medal for outstanding contributions in the field of radiation oncology.

#1068

Robert W. Bower

#48516

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (89 years)

Robert W. Bower is an American applied physicist. Immediately after receiving his Ph.D. from The California Institute of Technology in 1973, he worked for over 25 years in many different professions: engineer, scientist, professor at University of California, Davis, and as president and CEO of Device Concept Inc. He also served as the president of Integrated Vertical Modules, which focused on three-dimensional, high-density structures. His most notable contribution, however, is his field-effect device with insulated gates—also known as a self-aligned-gate MOSFET , or SAGFET. Bower patented th...

#1069

Amy Mainzer

#48597

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (51 years)

Amy Mainzer is an American astronomer, specializing in astrophysical instrumentation and infrared astronomy. She is the deputy project scientist for the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer and the principal investigator for the NEOWISE project to study minor planets and the Near Earth Object Surveyor space telescope mission.

#1070

Bernard F. Burke

#48623

Overall Influence

1928 - 2018 (90 years)

Bernard Flood Burke was an American astronomer. He co-discovered radio emission from Jupiter, and was part of the team that discovered the first Einstein ring in 1988. Early life Burke was born on June 7, 1928 in Brighton, Boston. He had two sisters, Sarah Berenson and Clare Malloy.

#1071

Massoud Pedram

#48644

Overall Influence

Massoud Pedram is an Iranian American computer engineer noted for his research in green computing, energy storage systems, low-power electronics and design, electronic design automation and quantum computing. In the early 1990s, Pedram pioneered an approach to designing VLSI circuits that considered physical effects during logic synthesis. He named this approach layout-driven logic synthesis, which was subsequently called physical synthesis and incorporated into the standard EDA design flows. Pedram's early work on this subject became a significant prior art reference in a litigation between Synopsys Inc.

#1072

Gregory Fu

#48704

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Gregory C. Fu is a Professor of organic chemistry at the California Institute of Technology and the Norman Chandler Professor of Chemistry. The current research interests of the Fu laboratory include metal-catalyzed coupling reactions and the design of chiral catalysts. In particular, the group is focused on the development of nickel-catalyzed enantioselective cross-couplings of alkyl electrophiles and on photoinduced, copper-catalyzed carbon–heteroatom bond-forming reactions. The group works in collaboration with the laboratory of Professor Jonas C. Peters.

#1073

Robert P. Dilworth

#48748

Overall Influence

1914 - 1993 (79 years)

Robert Palmer Dilworth was an American mathematician. His primary research area was lattice theory; his biography at the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive states "it would not be an exaggeration to say that he was one of the main factors in the subject moving from being merely a tool of other disciplines to an important subject in its own right". He is best known for Dilworth's theorem relating chains and antichains in partial orders; he was also the first to study antimatroids .

#1074

Marjorie Constance Caserio

#48785

Overall Influence

1929 - 2021 (92 years)

Marjorie Constance Caserio was an English chemist. In 1975, she was awarded the Garvan Medal by the American Chemical Society. Early life and education Caserio was born Marjorie Constance Beckett in Cricklewood, London, England. She attended the North London Collegiate School and began studying podiatry at Chelsea College, but soon developed a preference for chemistry and graduated with honors in the subject in 1950. She was awarded a Sir John Dill Fellowship by the English-Speaking Union which allowed her to study at Bryn Mawr College in the United States, she earned an M.A. in chemistry in 1951.

#1075

Varun Grover

#48801

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Varun Grover is an American Information systems researcher, who is the George & Boyce Billingsley Endowed Chair and distinguished professor at the Walton School of Business, University of Arkansas. From 2002-17, he was the William S. Lee Distinguished Professor of Information Systems at Clemson University, where he taught doctoral seminars on methods and information systems. He is consistently in the top 3 IS researchers in the world . He has an h-index of 100, among the top 5 in his field Grover has around 52,000 citations in Google Scholar and over 13,900 citations in Web of Science.

#1076

Gordon Pettengill

#48840

Overall Influence

1926 - 2021 (95 years)

Gordon Hemenway Pettengill was an American radio astronomer and planetary physicist. He was one of the first to take radar from its original military application to its use as a tool for astronomy. He was professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#1077

Gail Hanson

#48887

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Gail G. Hanson, born 22 February 1947 in Dayton, Ohio is an American experimental particle physicist. Career Hanson received her PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1973. She spent sixteen years at SLAC, first as a research assistant and then as a permanent staff member. Whilst there, Hanson participated in the discovery of the J/psi meson and tau lepton. Her work led to the first evidence for quark jet production in electron-positron annihilation, for which she was awarded the 1996 Panofsky Prize with Roy Schwitters.

#1078

Paul Kalas

#49070

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Paul Kalas is a Greek American astronomer known for his discoveries of debris disks around stars. Kalas led a team of scientists to obtain the first visible-light images of an extrasolar planet with orbital motion around the star Fomalhaut, at a distance of 25 light years from Earth. The planet is referred to as Fomalhaut b.

#1079

Stuart L. Shapiro

#49096

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Stuart Louis Shapiro is an American theoretical astrophysicist, who works on numerical relativity with applications in astrophysics, specialising in compact objects such as neutron stars and black holes.

#1080

Albert George Wilson

#49142

Overall Influence

1918 - 2012 (94 years)

Albert George Wilson was an American astronomer and a discoverer of minor planets. He was born in Houston, Texas. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Caltech in 1947; his thesis title was Axially Symmetric Thermal Stresses in a Semi-Infinite Solid advised by Harry Bateman.

#1081

Aron Kuppermann

#49349

Overall Influence

1926 - 2011 (85 years)

Aron Kuppermann was a professor of chemical physics at California Institute of Technology. The author of more than 200 publications, he is perhaps best known for his work in the application of quantum mechanics to the solution of problems in chemical reaction dynamics and kinetics. Kuppermann and George Schatz completed the first calculation of the dynamics of a chemical reaction in a full 3-dimensional quantum model.

#1082

Chris Kyriakakis

#49378

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Chris Kyriakakis is a professor of electrical engineering, author, and inventor of audio technologies. He is the co-inventor of the Audyssey MultEQ digital room correction system. In 2004 he co-founded Audyssey Laboratories.

#1083

Paul Chaikin

#49463

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Paul Michael Chaikin is an American physicist known particularly for many significant contributions to the field of soft condensed matter physics. Education and research career After graduating from Stuyvesant High School in New York City, Paul Chaikin earned his B.S. in physics from California Institute of Technology in 1966, and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1971 working with Kondo superconductors. He joined the physics faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1972 and studied thermopower, density waves, and high field phenomena mostly in organic superconductors.

#1084

Robert P. Sharp

#49497

Overall Influence

1911 - 2004 (93 years)

Robert Phillip Sharp was an American geomorphologist and expert on the geological surfaces of the Earth and the planet Mars. Sharp served as the chairman of the Division of Geological Sciences at California Institute of Technology from 1952 to 1968. He built the modern department and especially recruited new faculty in geochemistry, tectonic geomorphology, planetary science, and field geology.

#1085

Harihar Rao

#49615

Overall Influence

1927 - 2013 (86 years)

Harihar Rao was an Indian-born American musician, noted for playing tabla and sitar. He was born into a prominent musical family in Mangalore, India. He moved to the United States in 1964, residing in Pasadena, California. Rao was a Fulbright Scholar at UCLA., He worked in the ethnomusicology department at UCLA and privately taught and mentored students of the sitar.

#1086

Lindsay Helmholz

Lindsay Helmholz

#49797

Overall Influence

1909 - 1993 (84 years)

Lindsay Helmholz was an American physicist who participated in the Manhattan Project during World War II that created the atomic bomb. He earned a PhD in chemistry at Johns Hopkins University before studying under Linus Pauling at California Institute of Technology and becoming a professor at Dartmouth College. After World War II, he joined the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis where he continued his work with X-ray diffraction and retired in 1978.

#1087

Arnold L. Rheingold

#49844

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Arnold L. Rheingold is an American chemist and Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, San Diego. Early life Rheingold was born in Chicago, Illinois on October 6, 1940. He completed his B.S. in Chemistry in 1962 and M.S. in Inorganic Chemistry in 1963 from Case Western Reserve University. From 1963 to 1965, he was a Project Manager at Glidden Company. He completed his Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry from the University of Maryland in 1969.

#1088

John Laub

#49880

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

John H. Laub is an American criminologist and Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, College Park. Education Laub received his B.A. from University of Illinois at Chicago Circle in 1975, where he majored in criminal justice and minored in history. He went on to receive his M.A. and Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Albany in 1976 and 1980, respectively.

#1089

David G. Cantor

#49911

Overall Influence

1935 - 2012 (77 years)

David Geoffrey Cantor was an American mathematician, specializing in number theory and combinatorics. The Cantor–Zassenhaus algorithm for factoring polynomials is named after him; he and Hans Zassenhaus published it in 1981.

#1090

Victor Wickerhauser

#49996

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Mladen Victor Wickerhauser was born in Zagreb, SR Croatia, in 1959. He is a graduate of the California Institute of Technology and Yale University. He is currently a professor of Mathematics and of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. He has six U.S. patents and more than 100 publications. One of these, "Entropy-based Algorithms for Best Basis Selection," led to the Wavelet Scalar Quantization image compression algorithm, used by the FBI to encode fingerprint images.

#1091

Thomas Ypsilantis

#50001

Overall Influence

1928 - 2000 (72 years)

Thomas John Ypsilantis was an American physicist of Greek descent. Ypsilantis was known for the co-discovery of the antiproton in 1955, along with Owen Chamberlain, Emilio Segrè, and Clyde Wiegand. Following this work, he moved to CERN to develop Cherenkov radiation detectors for use in particle physics.

#1092

António R. Damásio

#50021

Overall Influence

#1093

Barry H. Honig

#50122

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Barry H. Honig is an American biochemist, molecular biophysicist, and computational biophysicist, who develops theoretical methods and computer software for "analyzing the structure and function of biological macromolecules."

#1094

Robert A. Plane

#50204

Overall Influence

1927 - 2018 (91 years)

Robert Allen Plane was an American retired chemistry professor and college administrator. He served as Provost of Cornell University from 1969 to 1973 and president and chief executive officer of Clarkson University from 1974 until 1985. From 1991 to 1995, he was president of Wells College.

#1095

Ronald Collé

#50230

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Ronald Collé is a specialist in nuclear and radiochemistry, radionuclidic metrology, and the development of standards. He has worked at the National Institute of Standards and Technology from 1976 to 2003 and from 2005 to present, and currently serves as a research chemist in the Radioactivity Group of the NIST Physics Laboratory .

#1096

J. Nathan Kutz

#50244

Overall Influence

José Nathan Kutz is the Robert Bolles and Yasuko Endo Professor within the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Washington in Seattle. His main research interests involve non-linear waves and coherent structures , as well as dimensionality reduction and data-analysis techniques for complex systems.

#1097

Stanislav George Djorgovski

#50266

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Stanislav George Djorgovski is an American scientist and scholar. He obtained his B.A. in astrophysics in 1979 at the University of Belgrade. After receiving his PhD in astronomy from U.C. Berkeley in 1985, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow until 1987 when he joined the faculty at the California Institute of Technology, where he is currently a professor of astronomy and data science.

#1098

Robert G Roeder

#50361

Overall Influence

#1099

Michele Dougherty

Michele Dougherty

#50406

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

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

#1100

Colin Carter

#50433

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Colin Andre Carter is Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis. His research/teaching interests include international trade, futures markets, and commodity markets.

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