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

#1201

David Carroll

#55052

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

David Carroll is a U.S. physicist, materials scientist and nanotechnologist, Fellow of the American Physical Society, and director of the Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials at Wake Forest University. He has contributed to the field of nanoscience and nanotechnology through his work in nanoengineered cancer therapeutics, nanocomposite-based display and lighting technologies, high efficiency nanocomposite photovoltaics and thermo/piezo-electric generators.

#1202

Neelesh B. Mehta

#55108

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (50 years)

Neelesh B. Mehta is an Indian communications engineer, inventor and a professor at the Department of Electrical and Communications Engineering of the Indian Institute of Science who studies wireless networks.

#1203

Richard Victor Jones

#55156

Overall Influence

1929 - 2019 (90 years)

Richard Victor Jones was a professor of applied physics at Harvard University and a pioneer in semiconductors. He was one of the first four recruits by William Shockley to help develop technologies at Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory.

#1204

Peter Bossaerts

#55226

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Peter L. Bossaerts is a Belgian-American economist. He is considered one of the pioneers and leading researchers in neuroeconomics and experimental finance. Life Peter Bossaerts grew up in Belgium and studied at the Universitaire Faculteiten Sint-Ignatius Antwerpen from 1977 to 1982, where he obtained a Licenciate and Doctorandus in applied economics. After coursework towards a PhD in statistics at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, he earned a Ph.D. at University of California in Financial Economics under the supervision of Richard Roll.

#1205

Hon-Yim Ko

#55353

Overall Influence

Hon-Yim Ko is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado, where he held the Glenn L. Murphy Professor and Chair of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering from 2000 to 2010. He has won national renown in research and teaching in the specialties of centrifuge modeling, earthquake engineering, mechanical properties of soil and rock, constitutive modeling and soil-structure interaction. His research resulted in over 200 scholarly publications, and prestigious research awards, including the Huber Research Prize by the American Society of Civil Engineers; and the Colorado Engine...

#1206

Mathew D. McCubbins

#55362

Overall Influence

1956 - 2021 (65 years)

Mathew Daniel McCubbins was the Ruth F. De Varney Professor of Political Science and professor of law, in the Department of Political Science and School of Law at Duke University. Education McCubbins received a B.A. in political science from University of California, Irvine and an M.S. and Ph.D. in social science from the California Institute of Technology.

#1207

Roger T. Howe

#55392

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Roger Thomas Howe is the William E. Ayer Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He earned a B.S. degree in physics from Harvey Mudd College and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981 and 1984, respectively. He was a faculty member at Carnegie-Mellon University from 1984-1985, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1985-1987, and at UC Berkeley between 1987-2005, where he was the Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor. He has been a faculty member of the School of Engineering at Stanford since 2005...

#1208

Harlan Lewis

#55562

Overall Influence

1919 - 2008 (89 years)

Frank Harlan Lewis was an American botanist, geneticist, taxonomist, systematist, and evolutionist who worked primarily with plants in the genus Clarkia. He is best known for his theories of "catastrophic selection" and "saltationalal speciation", which are closely aligned with the concepts of quantum evolution and sympatric speciation. The concepts were first articulated in 1958 by Lewis and Peter H. Raven, and later refined in a 1962 paper by Lewis in which he coined the term "catastrophic selection". In 1966, he referred to the same mechanism as "saltational speciation".

#1209

Stuart C. Ray

#55568

Overall Influence

Stuart C. Ray is an American physician. He is Vice Chair of Medicine for Data Integrity and Analytics, Associate Director of the Infectious Diseases Fellowship Training Program at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and a Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases. Ray also holds appointments in Viral Oncology and the Division of Health Sciences Informatics. He is affiliated with the Institute for Computational Medicine at Johns Hopkins and is licensed to practice medicine in Maryland.

#1210

Lynn Dalgarno

#55601

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (90 years)

Lynn Dalgarno is an Australian geneticist known for the discovery of the Shine-Dalgarno sequence with his graduate student, John Shine. Early life and education The son of Frederick Leslie Roy Dalgarno and Nadine Ilma Dalgarno, Lynn Dalgarno was born at Berklea Private Hospital, Caulfield, Victoria on 13 November 1935.

#1211

Fletcher Watson

#55622

Overall Influence

1912 - 1997 (85 years)

Fletcher G. Watson was an American professor of science education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education , where he served as the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education . Watson was a founder and co-director of Harvard Project Physics.

#1212

Athena Coustenis

Athena Coustenis

#55641

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Athena Coustenis is an astrophysicist specializing in planetology. Dr. Coustenis, a French national, is director of research, Centre national de la recherche scientifique , at LESIA , at the Paris Observatory, Meudon. She is involved in several space mission projects for the European Space Agency and for NASA. Her focus is on gas giant planets Saturn, Jupiter and their moons, and she is considered a foremost expert on Saturn's moon Titan.

#1213

Laura Ferrarese

Laura Ferrarese

#55648

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Laura Ferrarese is a researcher in space science at the National Research Council of Canada. Her primary work has been performed using data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.

#1214

David Callaway

#55664

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

David James Edward Callaway is a biological nanophysicist in the New York University School of Medicine, where he is professor and laboratory director. He was trained as a theoretical physicist by Richard Feynman, Kip Thorne, and Cosmas Zachos, and was previously an associate professor at the Rockefeller University after positions at CERN and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Callaway's laboratory discovered potential therapeutics for Alzheimer's disease based upon apomorphine after an earlier paper of his developed models of Alzheimer amyloid formation. He has also initiated the study of prote...

#1215

Arthur J. Bond

#55699

Overall Influence

1939 - 2012 (73 years)

Arthur J. Bond was the dean of the School of Engineering and Technology at Alabama A&M University in Alabama, United States, and an activist in the cause of increasing black enrollment and retention in engineering and technology. He was a founding member of the National Society of Black Engineers and part of the team that fought for state funding of engineering at Alabama A&M University.

#1216

Christine Guthrie

#55776

Overall Influence

Christine Guthrie was an American yeast geneticist and American Cancer Society Research Professor of Genetics at University of California San Francisco. She showed that yeast have small nuclear RNAs involved in splicing pre-messenger RNA into messenger RNA in eukaryotic cells. Guthrie cloned and sequenced the genes for yeast snRNA and established the role of base pairing between the snRNAs and their target sequences at each step in the removal of an intron. She also identified proteins that formed part of the spliceosome complex with the snRNAs. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences i...

#1217

Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram

#55935

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Stephen Wolfram is a British-American computer scientist, physicist, and businessman. He is known for his work in computer science, mathematics, and theoretical physics. In 2012, he was named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

#1218

Rajat Mittal

#55962

Overall Influence

Rajat Mittal is a computational fluid dynamicist and a professor of mechanical engineering in the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He holds a secondary appointment in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is known for his work on immersed boundary methods and applications of these methods to the study of fluid flow problems.

#1219

Vasily Astratov

#55985

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Vasily Astratov is a full professor of Physics and Optical Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He became known for launching synthetic opals as new self-assembled photonic crystals for visible light in 1995 in his former group at Ioffe Institute in Russia . This work has resulted in a quest for inverse opals with a complete three-dimensional photonic band gap

#1220

David Joseph Singh

#56145

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

David Joseph Singh is a theoretical physicist who is a curators' professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. He was previously a corporate fellow at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory .

#1221

Anthony L. Turkevich

#56154

Overall Influence

1916 - 2002 (86 years)

Anthony Leonid Turkevich was an American radiochemist who was the first to determine the composition of the Moon's surface using an alpha scattering spectrometer on the Surveyor 5 mission in 1967. Early life and education Turkevich was born on July 23, 1916, in Manhattan, New York, at the bishop's house attached to Saint Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral. His father, Leonid Turkevich, was dean at the time, and later became the Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church in North America. He had two brothers. Turkevich studied at Dartmouth College and obtained his bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1937.

#1222

Sarah Elgin

#56194

Overall Influence

Sarah C.R. Elgin is an American biochemist and geneticist. She is the Viktor Hamburger Professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis, and is noted for her work in epigenetics, gene regulation, and heterochromatin, and for her contributions to science education.

#1223

Roy John Britten

#56204

Overall Influence

1919 - 2012 (93 years)

Roy John Britten was an American molecular biologist known for his discovery of repeated DNA sequences in the genomes of eukaryotic organisms, and later on the evolution of the genome. Early life and education Roy Britten was born in Washington, D.C. He attended Upper Canada College in Toronto, Ontario, and then went to the University of Virginia to study physics. He enrolled at Johns Hopkins University as a graduate student in physics in 1940. At the beginning of World War II, he was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project. In 1951, he received his Ph.D. from Princeton University. His Ph.D.

#1224

Dennis W. Dickson

#56228

Overall Influence

#1225

Michael Aziz

#56340

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Michael John Aziz is an American research scientist and engineer and the Gene and Tracy Sykes Professor of Materials and Energy Technologies at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is an affiliated faculty member of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, for which he served from 2009 to 2018 as the faculty coordinator for the Graduate Consortium for Energy and Environment. He is also Chief Scientist and a co-founder of Quino Energy, Inc.

#1226

Charles R. Wira

#56364

Overall Influence

Charles R. Wira is a scientist who is specialized in endocrinology and mucosal immunology. His research specifically focuses on the immune system at mucosal surfaces of the female reproductive tract.

#1227

Mohammad Sajjad Alam

#56417

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Mohammad Sajjad "Saj" Alam was a Bengali Pakistani and a naturalized American particle physicist. His work focused on particle physics and computational physics. He played a significant role in several major particle physics experiments that led to new discoveries in the area of high-energy particle physics.

#1228

Frederica Darema

#56436

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Frederica Darema is a Greek American physicist. She proposed the SPMD programming model in 1984 and Dynamic Data Driven Application Systems in 2000. She was elected IEEE Fellow in 2004. Biography Darema received her BS degree from the school of physics and mathematics of the University of Athens - Greece, and MS and Ph. D. degrees in theoretical nuclear physics from the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of California at Davis, respectively, where she attended as a Fulbright Scholar and a distinguished scholar. After physics research associate positions at the University of P...

#1229

Richard L. Meier

#56496

Overall Influence

1920 - 2007 (87 years)

Richard Louis Meier was a US regional planner, systems theorist, scientist, urban scholar, and futurist, as well as a Professor in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California at Berkeley. He was an early thinker on sustainability in planning, and recognized as a leading figure in city planning and development. He is not related to the New York-based architect Richard Meier, whom he was often confused with.

#1230

Alice E. Shapley

#56567

Overall Influence

Alice Eve Shapley is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. She was one of the discoverers of the spiral galaxy BX442. Through her time at University of California, Los Angeles she has taught Nature of the Universe, Black Holes and Cosmic Catastrophes, Cosmology: Our Changing Concepts of the Universe, Galaxies, Scientific Writing, AGNs, Galaxies, *and* Writing, and The Formation and Evolution of Galaxies and the IGM. Shapley has committed herself to over a two decades of research and publication in the interest of physics and ast...

#1231

H. Jay Melosh

#56609

Overall Influence

1947 - 2020 (73 years)

H. Jay Melosh was an American geophysicist specialising in impact cratering. He earned a degree in physics from Princeton University and a doctoral degree in physics and geology from Caltech in 1972. His PhD thesis concerned quarks. Melosh's research interests include impact craters, planetary tectonics, and the physics of earthquakes and landslides. His recent research includes studies of the giant impact origin of the Moon, the Chicxulub impact that is thought to have extinguished most dinosaurs, and studies of ejection of rocks from their parent bodies. He was active in astrobiological st...

#1232

Peter B. Armentrout

#56622

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Peter B. Armentrout is a researcher in thermochemistry, kinetics, and dynamics of simple and complex chemical reactions. He is a Chemistry Professor at the University of Utah. Career Armentrout received his B.S. degree from Case Western Reserve University in 1975 and earned his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1980. During these studies he determined that much of the published information on thermodynamic states was not reliable, or was presented in differing formats. When he became a research professor he used this frustration as motivation to invent and construct the guided ion-beam tandem mass spectrometer, which provided highly accurate thermodynamic measurements.

#1233

Martin Suhm

#56700

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Martin A. Suhm , is a German chemist and spectroscopist; he completed a Ph.D. thesis on the far infrared spectroscopy at ETH Zürich in 1990; he is a professor at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the University of Göttingen since 1997 who is active in the field of intermolecular interactions studies; he was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2012.

#1234

Edward Rebar

#56741

Overall Influence

Edward John Rebar is an American biologist, and is Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Sana Biotechnology. Education Edward John Rebar earned a Bachelor of Science in biochemistry from Rutgers University. He completed a Doctor of Philosophy in biophysics and structural biology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His 1997 dissertation was titled Selection studies of zinc finger-DNA recognition. His doctoral advisor was Carl Pabo. Rebar worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.

#1235

Philip Gschwend

#56751

Overall Influence

Philip M. Gschwend is an American engineer focusing on environmental organic chemistry, currently the Ford Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#1236

Francisco Bezanilla

#56836

Overall Influence

Francisco Bezanilla is a Chilean-American scientist and professor at the University of Chicago. He is a past president of the Biophysical Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Biography Raised in Santiago, Bezanilla took an early interest in science. When Chile hosted the 1962 World Cup, it was uncommon for people to own televisions, so Bezanilla and a friend began building their own television to watch the tournament. While the rudimentary TV was not completed in time for the World Cup, Bezanilla later built a better TV with commercial parts from Argentina, and Bezanilla's...

#1237

Frank A. McClintock

#56873

Overall Influence

1921 - 2011 (90 years)

Frank A. McClintock of Concord, Massachusetts, was an American mechanical engineer in material science. A pioneer in the study of ductile fracture, McClintock was an Emeritus professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#1238

Barbara Wold

#57011

Overall Influence

Barbara J. Wold is the Bren Professor of Molecular Biology, the principal investigator of the Wold Lab at the California Institute of Technology and the principal investigator of the Functional Genomics Resource Center at the Beckman Institute at Caltech. Wold was director of the Beckman Institute at Caltech from 2001 to 2011.

#1239

Andrew S. Levey

#57091

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Andrew S. Levey is an American nephrologist who transformed chronic kidney disease clinical practice, research, and public health by developing equations to estimate glomerular filtration rate , and leading the global standardization of CKD definition and staging.

#1240

William E.M. Lands

#57121

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (95 years)

William E.M. Lands is an American nutritional biochemist who is among the world's foremost authorities on essential fatty acids. Biography Lands graduated from University of Michigan in 1951 and served on the faculty there from 1955 to 1980. He then moved to University of Illinois Chicago and subsequently the National Institutes of Health , where he served as the senior scientific advisor to the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. He was named a Fellow by the American Society for Nutrition, Society for Redox Biology and Medicine, International Society for the Study of Fatty Acids and Lipids, and American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#1241

Hidetoshi Katori

#57151

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

, is a Japanese physicist and professor at the University of Tokyo best known for having invented the magic wavelength technique for ultra precise optical lattice atomic clocks. Since 2011, Katori is also Chief Scientist at the Quantum Metrology Lab, RIKEN.

#1242

Josh Willis

#57186

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Joshua K. Willis is an oceanographer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His area of expertise is current sea level rise, as well as measuring ocean temperatures. When sea level fell from 2010 to 2011, Willis stated that this was due to an unusually large La Niña transferring more rainfall over land rather than over the ocean as usually happens. In addition, Willis is the project scientist for Jason-3.

#1243

Ellen D. Williams

#57195

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Ellen D. Williams is an American scientist, best known for her research in surface properties and nanotechnology, for her engagement with technical issues in national security, as chief scientist of BP, and for government service as director of ARPA-E.

#1244

Vishva Dixit

#57244

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Vishva Mitra Dixit is a physician of Indian origin who is the current Vice President of Discovery Research at Genentech. Early life and education Vishva Dixit was born in Kenya in 1956. His parents were both physicians, working for the British colonial authorities. Dixit was interested in science from an early age, and his parents encouraged him to pursue a career in medicine. He graduated in 1980 from the University of Nairobi with a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery, becoming a medical doctor.

#1245

Seth Marder

#57291

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Seth R. Marder is an American physical chemist best known for his development of the quantum mechanical foundations of nonlinear electro-optics in organic dyes and materials. Education Marder obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978 and doctorate from Wisconsin-Madison in 1985, after which he was a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford from 1985-1987.

#1246

Benjamin Zuckerman

#57317

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Benjamin Michael Zuckerman is an astrophysicist and an emeritus professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at UCLA. His recent work focus primarily on formation and evolution of planetary systems around various types of stars.

#1247

Michael P. McDonald

#57347

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Michael P. McDonald is an American political scientist. He is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida where he focuses on the United States elections. Early life and education McDonald earned his Bachelor of Science degree in economics from the California Institute of Technology and his PhD from the University of California, San Diego.

#1248

David Delano Clark

#57348

Overall Influence

1924 - 1997 (73 years)

David Delano Clark was a nuclear physicist best known for his work at Cornell University building nuclear reactors and using them to perform neutron activation analysis. Biography Born in Austin, Texas. He studied at the University of Texas and received his Bachelor of Arts at the University of California, Berkeley in 1948. He earned a Ph.D. in physics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1953. Dr. Clark worked at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York prior to joining Cornell in 1955. In 1961, Clark became the first director of Cornell's Ward Laboratory of Nuclear Engineering.

#1249

Charles Nicholas Hales

#57353

Overall Influence

1935 - 2005 (70 years)

Charles Nicholas "Nick" Hales was an English physician, biochemist, diabetologist, pathologist, and professor of clinical biochemistry Biography After education at King Edward VI Grammar School, Stafford, C. Nicholas Hales matriculated in 1953 at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating BA in 1956. He studied medicine at University College Hospital Medical School, graduating MB BChir in 1959. At University College Hospital he was a house physician under Max Rosenheim. Hales returned to the University of Cambridge for graduate study in biochemistry. He received in 1964 his PhD under the superv...

#1250

Michael P. Snyder

Michael P. Snyder

#57597

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Michael P. Snyder is an American genomicist and the Stanford B. Ascherman Professor, and since 2009, chair of genetics and director of genomics and personalized medicine at Stanford University. He is the former director of the Yale Center for Genomics and Proteomics. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015. During his tenure as chair of the department at Stanford, U.S. News & World Report has ranked Stanford University first or tied for first in genetics, genomics and bioinformatics under his leadership.

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