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

#1151

Pratim Biswas

#52576

Overall Influence

Pratim Biswas is currently the Dean of Engineering, University of Miami, since January 2021. He was the Lucy and Stanley Lopata Professor of Environmental Engineering Science, Asst. Vice Chancellor for International Programs, and Chair of the Department of Energy, Environmental and Chemical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. He is also Director of MAGEEP, the McDonnell Academy Global Energy and Environmental Partnership. He received his doctoral degree from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena in 1985, and his bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in 1980.

#1152

Kate Hutton

#52600

Overall Influence

Kate Hutton, nicknamed the Earthquake Lady, Dr. Kate, or Earthquake Kate, is a former staff seismologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, where she monitored Southern California's earthquake activity for 37 years.

#1153

Theodore A. Welton

#52821

Overall Influence

1918 - 2010 (92 years)

Theodore "Ted" Allen Welton was an American theoretical physicist best known as the co-author of the fluctuation dissipation theorem. During 1944 and 1945 he worked at Project Y in Los Alamos, New Mexico on nuclear weapons in Richard Feynman's T-4 Group after being recruited by Feynman.

#1154

SonBinh Nguyen

#52902

Overall Influence

SonBinh T. Nguyen is the McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence and the Dow Chemical Company Research Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University. He is also the former Director of the Integrated Sciences Program.

#1155

Laird A. Thompson

#52949

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Laird A. Thompson , is a professor emeritus of astronomy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Thompson graduated with a B.A. in both physics and astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1969. He received his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Arizona in 1974. He is professionally associated with the International Astronomical Union, the American Astronomical Society, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, the International Society for Optical Engineering, and has served as an adjunct member of the Center for Adaptive Optics.

#1156

David Douglass

#52983

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (93 years)

David H. Douglass is an American physicist at the University of Rochester. Background Climate change A 2005 study by Douglass and fellow University of Rochester physicist Robert S. Knox argued that global climate models underestimated the climate response to the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo. The study also contended that global temperature returned to normal much faster after the eruption than the models had predicted.

#1157

Tai-Ping Liu

#53040

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Tai-Ping Liu is a Taiwanese mathematician, specializing in partial differential equations. Liu received his bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1968 from National Taiwan University, his master's degree in 1970 from Oregon State University, and his PhD in 1973 from University of Michigan with thesis advisor Joel Smoller and thesis Riemann problem for general 2 × 2 systems of conservation laws. Afterwards Liu was a professor at University of Maryland, from 1988 at New York University and from 1990 at Stanford University, where he is now retired. Since 2000 he has been a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Academia Sinica.

#1158

Joel Tropp

#53109

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (48 years)

Joel Aaron Tropp is the Steele Family Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics in the Computing and Mathematical Sciences Department at the California Institute of Technology. He is known for work on sparse approximation, numerical linear algebra, and random matrix theory.

#1159

Allan L. Goldstein

Allan L. Goldstein

#53223

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

Allan L. Goldstein is emeritus professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine at the George Washington University School of Medicine. He chaired the department from 1978 until March 2009 and was awarded emeritus status in 2013. He is an authority on the thymus gland and the workings of the immune system, and co-discoverer of the thymosins, a family of hormone-like peptides isolated from the thymus gland.

#1160

Len Shustek

#53261

Overall Influence

Leonard J. "Len" Shustek is a founder of networking companies Nestar Systems and Network General and a former chairman of the board of trustees of the Computer History Museum located in Mountain View, California.

#1161

Richard Green

#53277

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Richard Frederick Green is an American astronomer, former director of the Kitt Peak National Observatory, UKIRT and the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory. Career He was awarded a bachelor's degree in astronomy by Harvard University in 1971 and a Ph.D. by California Institute of Technology in 1977.

#1162

William Jeffery Sandborn

#53299

Overall Influence

#1163

James D. Morrow

#53381

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

James D. Morrow is the A.F.K. Organski Collegiate Professor of World Politics at the University of Michigan and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, best known for his pioneering work in noncooperative game theory and selectorate theory.

#1164

Tayfun Tezduyar

#53479

Overall Influence

Tayfun E. Tezduyar is a mechanical engineer. He is known for his studies on the techniques of stabilizing the finite element methods. Tezduyar obtained his master's degree and doctorate at the California Institute of Technology in 1978 and 1982, respectively. He was then a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University prior to joining the University of Houston faculty in January 1983. Tezduyar assumed an associate professorship at the University of Minnesota in 1987, and was named a full professor in 1991. In 1997, Tezduyar was appointed Distinguished McKnight University Professor. He left Minnesota for the James F.

#1165

Harry Schachter

Harry Schachter

#53523

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (92 years)

Harry Schachter FRSC is a Canadian biochemist and glycobiologist, and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and the Hospital For Sick Children in Toronto, Canada. Biography Harry Schachter was born in Vienna, Austria in 1933, to Miriam Freund, a businesswoman, and to Ulrich Schachter, a dentist and medical doctor. Harry's father was the cousin of Austro-Hungarian and Romanian tenor and actor, Joseph Schmidt. The Schachter family fled the Nazis in 1938, escaping to Port of Spain, Trinidad. He attended secondary school at Saint Mary's College, placing first in Trinidad in the Cambrid...

#1166

John Vidale

#53530

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

John Emilio Vidale is an American-born seismologist who specializes in examining seismograms to explore features within the Earth. He received the American Geophysical Union's James B. Macelwane Medal in 1994.

#1167

Gerald W. Smith

#53578

Overall Influence

1929 - 2017 (88 years)

Gerald W. Smith was the American author of "Engineering Economy: Analysis of Capital Expenditures" the textbook used by several generations of Industrial Engineering college students from around the world. He is an Emeritus Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa where he was a Professor of Industrial Engineering from 1956 to 1988. He received degrees in Engineering from Iowa State University with a Bachelor of Science in 1952, Masters of Science in 1958, P.H.D. in 1961. His 1958 masters theses was entitled "The Obsolescence Allowance in Equipment Replacement Decisions" and his 1961 P.H.D.

#1168

Yannís G. Kevrekidis

#53632

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Ioannis George Kevrekidis is currently the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering within the Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University. He holds secondary appointments in the Whiting School's Department of Applied Mathematics & Statistics and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine's Department of Urology.

#1169

Vadim Kaloshin

#53672

Overall Influence

Vadim Kaloshin is a Soviet-born mathematician, known for his contributions to dynamical systems. He was a student of John N. Mather at Princeton University, obtaining a Ph.D. in 2001. He was subsequently a C. L. E. Moore instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a faculty member at the California Institute of Technology and Pennsylvania State University. Until 2020 he was the Michael Brin Chair at the University of Maryland, College Park, mathematics professor for the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences,. Now he is a chair professor...

#1170

Jack L. Koenig

#53723

Overall Influence

1933 - 2021 (88 years)

Jack L. Koenig was a chemical engineer noted for pioneering spectroscopic methods of polymer characterization. In particular, he played a significant role in developing characterization methods to provide fundamental structure-property relationships for polymers used in thermoplastic and thermoset systems.

#1171

Morten Bo Madsen

Morten Bo Madsen

#53801

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Morten Bo Madsen is a Danish physicist, associate professor at the Niels Bohr Institute. He was a co-investigator on the Phoenix Mars mission which proved the presence of water on Mars. Early career In 1989, Madsen joined the Mössbauer spectroscopy group led by Jens Martin Knudsen at the University of Copenhagen. During the 1990s, their research focused on studies of the planet Mars and, based on the ideas of "The Martian", Jens Martin Knudsen formed the Danish Mars Group. This soon spurred a sister-group, the Mars Simulation Laboratory, in Århus, an initiative by Erik Uggerhøj and Per Nørnbe...

#1172

Martin M. Block

#53838

Overall Influence

1925 - 2016 (91 years)

Martin Moses Block was an American physicist, known as a co-discoverer with Aihud Pevsner of the eta meson in 1961. Biography Block was born in Newark, New Jersey. He graduated from Columbia University in 1947 with B.S., in 1948 with M.A., and in 1952 with Ph.D. supervised by William W. Havens Jr. At Columbia, Block helped to design the magnets for the Nevis cyclotron. In 1949 he married Beate Sondheim. He joined the faculty of Duke University in 1951. He attended the University of Rochester's 6th Annual Conference on High Energy Nuclear Physics, where he contributed a paper and roomed with Richard Feynman.

#1173

Martin Gruebele

Martin Gruebele

#53846

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Martin Gruebele is a German-born American physical chemist and biophysicist who is currently James R. Eiszner Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Physics, Professor of Biophysics and Computational Biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he is the principal investigator of the Gruebele Group.

#1174

William Paul Fife

William Paul Fife

#54013

Overall Influence

1917 - 2008 (91 years)

Colonel William Paul Fife USAF was a United States Air Force officer that first proved the feasibility for U.S. Air Force Security Service airborne Communications Intelligence collection and Fife is considered the "Father of Airborne Intercept". Fife was also a hyperbaric medicine specialist who was known for his pioneering research on pressurized environments ranging from high altitude to underwater habitats. Fife was a Professor Emeritus at Texas A&M University.

#1175

James H. Hurley

#54100

Overall Influence

James Hurley is a university professor known for his research into proteins. He won the 2014 Neurath Award from the Protein Society for a unique, recent contribution to basic science. Education Hurley trained in protein crystallography with Robert Stroud at the University of California, San Francisco, where he completed a PhD in biophysics in 1990. He also trained with Brian Matthews at the University of Oregon, where he was a postdoctoral fellow from 1990 to 1992.

#1176

Michael F. Brown

#54105

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Michael F. Brown is an American chemist. Since 1987, he has been a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Arizona, and since 2003 has held joint appointments as a Professor of Physics and Professor of Applied Mathematics. Prior to the University of Arizona, Brown earned tenure at the University of Virginia. His research involves the application of NMR spectroscopy and other biophysical methods to study membrane lipids, liquid crystals, and membrane proteins. Brown has particularly been a pioneer in the application of solid-state NMR spectroscopy to the study of lipid bilayer dynamics.

#1177

John Wawrzynek

#54110

Overall Influence

John Wawrzynek is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley. He holds a joint appointment with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and is the Chief Faculty Director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center. He is currently a principal researcher in multiple large research centers at UC Berkeley including Algorithms and Specializers for Provably Optimal Implementations with Resilience and Efficiency , the Parallel Computing Laboratory , and the TerraSwarm Research Center.

#1178

Swati Mohan

#54192

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (42 years)

Swati Mohan is an Indian-American aerospace engineer and was the Guidance and Controls Operations Lead on the NASA Mars 2020 mission. Early life and education Mohan was born in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, and emigrated to the United States when she was one year old. She became interested in space upon seeing Star Trek at age 9. She had originally planned to be a pediatrician but at the age of 16 took a physics class and decided to study engineering as a way to pursue a career in space exploration. She studied Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University, before completing her master's degree and Ph.D.

#1179

Frank E. Marble

#54258

Overall Influence

1918 - 2014 (96 years)

Frank Earl Marble was an American scientist who worked in the field of aerodynamics and combustion. He obtained his Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1940 and Master's degree in Applied Mathematics in 1942, both from Case Institute of Technology. He obtained an engineer's degree in 1947 and PhD in 1948 under the supervision of Theodore von Kármán and Hans W. Liepmann from California Institute of Technology.

#1180

Vernon C. Gibson

#54288

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Vernon Charles Gibson is a British scientist who served as Chief Scientific Adviser at the Ministry of Defence between 2012 and 2016. He was reappointed to the MoD CSA role in May 2023. He is visiting professor at Imperial College London and the University of Oxford, Honorary Professor at the University of Manchester. He delivered the Royal United Services Institute Prince Philip Lecture on Military Education in Nov 2023.

#1181

Bruce Rosen

#54301

Overall Influence

Bruce Rosen is an American physicist and radiologist and a leading expert in the area of functional neuroimaging. His research for the past 30 years has focused on the development and application of physiological and functional nuclear magnetic resonance techniques, as well as new approaches to combine functional magnetic resonance imaging data with information from other modalities such as positron emission tomography , magnetoencephalography and noninvasive optical imaging. The techniques his group has developed to measure physiological and metabolic changes associated with brain activatio...

#1182

Jean-Yves Bouguet

#54309

Overall Influence

Jean-Yves Bouguet was a member of the Computer Vision Research Group in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology, having graduated from the École Supérieure d'Ingénieurs en Électronique et Électrotechnique. Bouguet developed and holds a patent for a new method for 3D scanning based on dual-space geometry.

#1183

Virgil L. Sharpton

#54313

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Virgil L. Sharpton is the Associate Director for Science at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas. Prior to joining the LPI in 2011, he was Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Alaska Fairbanks . He is also the founder and former director of the Geographic Information Network of Alaska which provides access to university data and information services across the state.

#1184

John D. Baldeschwieler

John D. Baldeschwieler

#54352

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (92 years)

John D. Baldeschwieler is an American chemist who has made significant contributions in molecular structure and spectroscopy. Born on November 14, 1933, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, he was an alumnus of Cornell University and the University of California, Berkeley . He has taught at Harvard University, Stanford University and currently is the J. Stanley Johnson Professor and professor of chemistry, emeritus at Caltech.

#1185

Adrian Johns

#54354

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (60 years)

Adrian Dominic Sinclair Johns is a British-born academic. He earned a doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1992. He joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2001, and was appointed the Allan Grant Maclear Professor of History. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2012.

#1186

Gordon P. Eaton

Gordon P. Eaton

#54520

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (96 years)

Gordon Pryor Eaton was an American geologist. Eaton was born in Dayton, Ohio. Life and career Dr. Eaton graduated from Wesleyan University, with high Honors, High Distinction and Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi recognition, with a B.A. in Geology in 1951; received an M.S. in Geology from the California Institute of Technology in 1953; and a Ph.D. in Geology and Geophysics in 1957 from the California Institute of Technology. At Wesleyan he was a member of Delta Upsilon fraternity.

#1187

William Gelbart

William Gelbart

#54603

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

William Michael Gelbart is Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a member of the California NanoSystems Institute and the UCLA Molecular Biology Institute. He obtained his Bachelor of Science degree from Harvard University in 1967, his Master's and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago, and did postdoctoral work at the University of Paris and the University of California, Berkeley . After 30 years of research in theoretical physical chemistry, contributing notably to the fields of gas-phase photophysics, optical proper...

#1188

Scott J. Bolton

Scott J. Bolton

#54622

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Scott J. Bolton is an American theoretical and experimental space physicist. He is an associate vice president of the Southwest Research Institute Space Science and Engineering Division. His research area is planetary sciences with a focus on the giant planets and the origin of the solar system. Previously serving as a member of the Galileo and Cassini–Huygens missions, Bolton became the Principal Investigator of Juno, a New Frontiers program mission to Jupiter which began primary science in 2016.

#1189

Thomas Curtright

#54625

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Thomas L. Curtright is a theoretical physicist at the University of Miami. He did undergraduate work in physics at the University of Missouri , and graduate work at Caltech under the supervision of Richard Feynman.

#1190

Qaisar Shafi

#54697

Overall Influence

Qaisar Shafi is a Pakistani-American theoretical physicist and the Inaugural Bartol Research Institute Professor of Physics at the University of Delaware. Biography Shafi grew up in Karachi, Pakistan and lived there until his early teens when his family moved to London, United Kingdom. After graduating as valedictorian from Holland Park School, London, UK, he studied physics at Imperial College, London, where he received both his B.Sc. Honors and PhD. His PhD advisor was the late Nobel Laureate Professor Abdus Salam, whom he subsequently joined at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy.

#1191

Chaitan Khosla

#54730

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Chaitan Khosla is an Indian biochemist who is the Wells H. Rauser and Harold M. Petiprin Professor of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry at Stanford University. He earned his B.Tech. in chemical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 1985 and his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1990 with Jay Bailey working on the expression of the Vitreoscilla Hemoglobin gene. He did his postdoctoral work at the John Innes Centre with David Hopwood. He has been a professor at Stanford since 1992 and was the chair of the program. His research is focused on two realms, th...

#1192

Richard D. James

#54748

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Richard D. James is a mechanician and materials scientist. He is currently the Russell J. Penrose Professor and Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics at the University of Minnesota. He was educated at Brown University and received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University under the direction of J.L. Ericksen.

#1193

George C. Sih

#54763

Overall Influence

#1194

Li Zhaoping

#54799

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Li Zhaoping, born in Shanghai, China, is a neuroscientist at the University of Tübingen in Germany. She is the only woman to win the first place in CUSPEA, an annual national physics competition in China, during CUSPEA's 10-year history . She proposed V1 Saliency Hypothesis , and is the author of Understanding vision: theory, models, and data published by Oxford University Press.

#1195

Rhonda Hughes

#54808

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Rhonda Jo Hughes is an American mathematician, the Helen Herrmann Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Bryn Mawr College. Education Hughes grew up on the South Side of Chicago. She attended Gage Park High School, where she was a cheerleader and valedictorian of her class. She studied engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign for one and a half years, then left school and worked for six months before resuming her education at the University of Illinois at Chicago on an Illinois State Scholarship studying mathematics. There, she came under the mentorship of Yoram Sagher, who encouraged her to pursue graduate studies in mathematics.

#1196

Anna Chao Pai

#54832

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (90 years)

Anna Chao Pai is an American geneticist and professor emerita at Montclair State University. Biography Anna Chao was born in Beijing, China. Her maternal grandfather was the Northeast China-based warlord Zhang Zuolin, who was assassinated by the Japanese in 1928. Following the Japanese invasion of Northeast China in 1931, Chao's parents fled the region, first to Beijing where she was born, and then to the United States. They would make only one more visit to China together as a family, in 1939, and after the Communists won the Chinese Civil War in 1949, her parents had no further desire to return to their country of birth.

#1197

Martha E. Sloan

#54836

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (86 years)

Martha Ann Evans Sloan is an American electrical engineer. She taught engineering for many years at Michigan Technological University, and became the first female president of the IEEE. Her service to the profession has been honored by several society fellowships and awards.

#1198

Geoffrey Hewitt

#54872

Overall Influence

1934 - 2019 (85 years)

Geoffrey Frederick Hewitt was a British chemical engineer, and Emeritus Professor at Imperial College London, where from 1993 to 1999 he was the Courtaulds Professor of chemical engineering. Life Hewitt attended Boteler Grammar School, Warrington and earned a BSc Tech in chemical engineering at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology followed by a PhD in the same in 1957. He worked for the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority until 1985 when he joined the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London, being made Courtaulds Professor of chemical en...

#1199

C. B. Collins

#54876

Overall Influence

Christopher Barry Collins is a cosmologist who has written many papers with Stephen Hawking. He is a professor emeritus of applied mathematics at the University of Waterloo. Collins earned his Ph.D. in 1972 from the University of Cambridge under the supervision of F. Gerard Friedlander. Among his works with Hawking is a 1973 paper that uses the anthropic principle to provide a solution to the flatness problem.

#1200

Milton Van Dyke

Milton Van Dyke

#54937

Overall Influence

1922 - 2010 (88 years)

Milton Denman Van Dyke was Professor of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University. He was known for his work in fluid dynamics, especially with respect to the use of perturbation analysis in aerodynamics. His often-cited book An Album of Fluid Motion presents a collection of about 400 selected black-and-white photographs of flow visualization in experiments, received – on his request – from researchers all over the world.

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