Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people

#1251

Michael Christopher Wendl

Michael Christopher Wendl

#57641

Overall Influence

Michael Christopher Wendl is a mathematician and biomedical engineer who has worked on DNA sequencing theory, covering and matching problems in probability, theoretical fluid mechanics, and co-wrote Phred. He was a scientist on the Human Genome Project and has done bioinformatics and biostatistics work in cancer. Wendl is of ethnic German heritage and is the son of the aerospace engineer Michael J. Wendl.

#1252

Benjamin C. Stark

#57646

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Benjamin "Ben" C. Stark is an American biologist and a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He grew up in a small city in mid-Michigan in the 1950s-1960s. After high school he majored in cellular biology at the University of Michigan and later he received his master and doctoral degrees from Yale University with Sidney Altman. After two postdoctoral positions, he took a faculty position at Illinois Institute of Technology, where he has worked since. He has carried out research in the area of genetic engineering and RNA biology.

#1253

Anneila Sargent

#57759

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

Professor Anneila Isabel Sargent FRSE DSc is a Scottish–American astronomer who specializes in star formation. Biography Sargent was brought up in Burntisland, Fife, and schooled at Burntisland Primary School and Kirkcaldy High School. She completed a BSc Honours degree in Physics at the University of Edinburgh in 1963, and then immigrated to the United States, first studying at the University of California, Berkeley, and then from 1967 the California Institute of Technology, where she was awarded her Ph.D in 1977. She is currently the Ira S. Bowen Professor of Astronomy, Emeritus at Caltech ...

#1254

Rohan Abeyaratne

#57771

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Rohan Abeyaratne is a Sri Lankan born American academic and engineer and the Quentin Berg Professor of Mechanics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He was the CEO & Director of the Singapore–MIT Alliance for Research and Technology , and prior to that the Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.

#1255

Daniel S. Kemp

#57778

Overall Influence

1936 - 2020 (84 years)

Daniel Schaeffer Kemp was an American organic chemist, an emeritus professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kemp's work was focused on the synthesis and conformational analysis of peptides. He developed several chemical ligation strategies and methods for templating the formation of helices and sheets. The eponymous and the reaction are among his developments. He was the author of an organic chemistry textbook. He died from COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic in Massachusetts.

#1256

Keith R. Thompson

#57804

Overall Influence

Keith Thompson was a professor at Dalhousie University with a joint appointment in the Department of Oceanography and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. Thompson was trained in the UK and obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Liverpool in 1979. His research interests focused on ocean and shelf circulation, 4D data assimilation, extremal analysis and applied time series analysis.

#1257

Alexei Borodin

#57828

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (50 years)

Alexei Mikhailovich Borodin is a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research His research concerns asymptotic representation theory, relations with random matrices and integrable systems, and the difference equation formulation of monodromy.

#1258

George M. Garrity

#58038

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

#1259

John Ruhl

#58049

Overall Influence

John Ruhl is Connecticut Professor in Physics and Astronomy at Case Western Reserve University. Education Ruhl received a BS in physics from the University of Michigan in 1987 and a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton in 1993. While a graduate student at Princeton, Ruhl, along with several other graduate students, co-authored the text Princeton Problems in Physics. His doctoral dissertation, A search for anisotropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, was supervised by Mark Dragovan.

#1260

Norman Schofield

#58072

Overall Influence

1944 - 2019 (75 years)

Norman James Schofield was a Scottish-American political scientist, the Dr. William Taussig Professor of Political Economy at the Washington University in St. Louis. Early life and education Schofield earned two bachelor's degrees from the University of Liverpool; one in physics in 1965 and the other in mathematics in 1966. Later he obtained two PhDs from Essex University: the first in government in 1976 and the second in economics in 1985.

#1261

Alan M. Portis

#58153

Overall Influence

1926 - 2010 (84 years)

Alan Mark Portis was an American solid-state physicist and founder of the Berkeley Physics Laboratory. Career Alan Portis was the dean of engineering at Berkeley as well as an engineering professor. He was an early researcher in electron paramagnetic resonance. He also founded the Berkeley Physics Laboratory. For the development of laboratory courses and curricula at UC Berkeley, he received the Millikan Medal from the American Association of Physics Teachers. Portis was the doctoral advisor of the 2000 Nobel Prize laureate in Chemistry Alan J. Heeger, as well as Nai Phuan Ong and Myron Sala...

#1262

Junko Shigemitsu

#58157

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Junko Shigemitsu is a Japanese-American physicist known for her use of lattice gauge theory and lattice QCD to calculate predicted values for decay constants and other physical quantities. She is a professor emerita of physics at Ohio State University.

#1263

Richard Gordon

#58215

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Richard "Dick" Gordon is an American theoretical biologist. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, the eldest son of Jack Gordon, a salesman and American handball champion, and artist Diana Gordon. He is married to retired scientist Natalie K Björklund with whom he co-wrote his second book and several academic publications. He has three sons, Leland, Bryson and Chason Gordon and three stepchildren Justin, Alan and Lana Hunstad. Gordon was a professor at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba from 1978 to 2011. He is retired and currently volunteers as a scientist for the Gulf Specimen M...

#1264

Stephen Kent

#58240

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Stephen B. H. Kent is a professor at the University of Chicago. While professor at the Scripps Research Institute in the early 1990s he pioneered modern ligation methods for the total chemical synthesis of proteins. He was the inventor of native chemical ligation together with his student Philip Dawson. His laboratory experimentally demonstrated the principle that chemical synthesis of a protein's polypeptide chain using mirror-image amino acids after folding results in a mirror-image protein molecule which, if an enzyme, will catalyze a chemical reaction with mirror-image stereospecificity....

#1265

Charles Archambeau

#58253

Overall Influence

Charles B. Archambeau is an American geophysicist. Life He graduated from California Institute of Technology with a PhD in 1964. He taught at University of Colorado, and California Institute of Technology.

#1266

John M. Richardson

#58271

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

John Martin Richardson, Jr. born on March 12, 1938, is an American academic who writes, lectures, and consults in applied systems analysis, international development, conflict-development linkages, and the sustainability and resilience of political-economic-social institutions. He served as visiting professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and director of outreach and projects at Residential College 4 at the National University of Singapore. He was also professor emeritus of international development at the School of International Service at American University.

#1267

Jorge López

#58433

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Jorge Alberto López is a physicist and educator and the Schumaker Professor of Physics at the University of Texas at El Paso. He is known for his work in heavy ion collision dynamics and for his outreach to the Hispanic community in the United States to increase diversity in physics, effective teaching and mentoring of undergraduate students , development of bilingual physics education programs, and building collaborations between American and Latin American universities. He is one of the founders of the National Society of Hispanic Physicists and author of books on nuclear physics, surface s...

#1268

Laurie Brown

#58504

Overall Influence

1923 - Present (102 years)

Laurie Mark Brown is an American theoretical physicist and historian of quantum field theory and elementary particle physics. Biography Brown studied at Cornell University, where in 1951 he received his Ph.D. under Richard Feynman. Since 1950 he has been on the faculty of the physics department of Northwestern University, where he became a tenured professor and eventually retired as professor emeritus. For the academic year 1952–1953 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study. For the academic years 1958–1959 and 1959–1960 he was a Fulbright Scholar in Italy. In 1966 he was an IEA professor at the University of Vienna.

#1269

Bruce E. Cain

#58545

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Bruce E. Cain is a Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. Professor Cain's fields of interest include American politics, political regulation, democratic theory, and state and local government. He has written extensively on elections, legislative representation, California politics, redistricting, and political regulation. In addition to his academic work, Cain frequently is quoted in national and international media, and regularly appears as a political expert for KGO-TV in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a member o...

#1270

Jon Gjerde

#58582

Overall Influence

1953 - 2008 (55 years)

Jon Gjerde was an American historian and the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of American History and American Citizenship at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also served as dean of the Division of Social Sciences in the College of Letters and Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

#1271

Samuel Isaac Weissman

#58624

Overall Influence

1912 - 2007 (95 years)

Dr Samuel Isaac Weissman was an American chemist and professor best known for his work on the application of electron spin resonance to chemistry. Weissman was born in South Bend, Indiana in 1912. He completed a chemistry degree at the University of Chicago in 1933 and his doctorate from the same university in 1938.

#1272

M. L. Williams

#58626

Overall Influence

#1273

Jim Hall

#58649

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (90 years)

James Ellis Hall is a retired American racing driver, race car constructor, and team owner. While he is best known as a car constructor, he was one of the greatest American racing drivers of his generation, capturing consecutive United States Road Racing Championships , two Road America 500s , two Watkins Glen Grands Prix for sports cars , the 1965 Canadian Grand Prix for sports cars, the 1965 Pacific Northwest Grand Prix, and scoring a massive upset at the 1965 12 Hours of Sebring over a contingent of factory-backed Ford GTs, Shelby Daytona Coupes, and Ferrari entries. If anything Hall's acc...

#1274

Joseph Ford

#58707

Overall Influence

1927 - 1995 (68 years)

Joseph Ford was Regents' Professor of physics at Georgia Institute of Technology specializing in thermodynamics and chaos theory. Early life and education Born in Buncombe County, North Carolina, he was awarded a BS degree by the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1952 and a Ph.D in physics by Johns Hopkins University in 1956.

#1275

John R. Riordan

#58740

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

John Richard Riordan, OC is a Canadian biochemist, noted for his research into cystic fibrosis. After acquiring his bachelor's degree in 1966 from the University of Toronto, he studied and received a doctorate in biochemistry from the same university in 1970. His next three years were spent at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics in Frankfurt. He then returned to the University of Toronto, where he worked as a professor in the Biochemistry department from 1974. Prior to retiring in 2018, Riordan was a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he was a member of the Biochemistry and Biophysics Department studying the structure and function of CFTR.

#1276

Peter Franken

#58769

Overall Influence

1928 - 1999 (71 years)

Peter A. Franken was an American physicist who contributed to the field of nonlinear optics. He was president of the Optical Society of America in 1977. In 1961, Professor Peter Franken and his coworkers in the Randall Laboratory at the University of Michigan observed for the first time the second-harmonic generation. This event launched a golden age in optical physics that has led to applications in fields ranging from optical communications and biological imaging to X-ray generation and homeland security. In 1985 he contributed an oral history to the American Institute of Physics in which h...

#1277

Tilman Schirmer

#58804

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Tilman Schirmer is a structural biologist and Professor at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel. Life Tilman Schirmer studied physics at the Universities of Konstanz and Vienna, and at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In 1985 he earned his doctorate at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried. He subsequently conducted research at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. In 1989, Tilman Schirmer joined the Biozentrum, University of Basel, initially as a group leader and was appointed as Associate Professor of Structural Biology in 1997. He ...

#1278

Scott Strobel

#58912

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Scott A. Strobel is the provost of Yale University as well as a professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry. He was the vice provost for Science Initiatives and vice president for West Campus Planning & Program Development. An educator and researcher, he has led a number of Yale initiatives over the past two decades. Strobel was appointed as Yale's provost in 2020.

#1279

Sherman K. Stein

#58917

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (99 years)

Sherman Kopald Stein is an American mathematician and an author of mathematics textbooks. He is a professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis. His writings have won the Lester R. Ford Award and the Beckenbach Book Prize.

#1280

Boyce McDaniel

#58986

Overall Influence

1917 - 2002 (85 years)

Boyce Dawkins McDaniel was an American nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and later directed the Cornell University Laboratory of Nuclear Studies . McDaniel was skilled in constructing "atom smashing" devices to study the fundamental structure of matter and helped to build the most powerful particle accelerators of his time. Together with his graduate student, he invented the pair spectrometer.

#1281

M. Yousuff Hussaini

#59012

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Mohammed Yousuff Hussaini is an Indian born American applied mathematician. He is the Sir James Lighthill Professor of Mathematics and Computational Science & Engineering at the Florida State University, United States. Hussaini is also the holder of the TMC Eminent Scholar Chair in High Performance Computing at FSU. He is widely known for his research in scientific computation, particularly in the field of computational fluid dynamics and Control and optimization. Hussaini co-authored the popular book Spectral Methods in Fluid Dynamics with Claudio Canuto, Alfio Quarteroni, and Thomas Zang. H...

#1282

Michael Roukes

#59147

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Michael Lee Roukes is an American experimental physicist, nanoscientist, and the Frank J. Roshek Professor of Physics, Applied Physics, and Bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology . Education Roukes earned B.A. degrees in physics and chemistry in 1978 at University of California, Santa Cruz, with highest honors in both majors, he received his Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University in 1985. His graduate advisor at Cornell was Nobel Laureate, Robert Coleman Richardson. Roukes’ thesis research at Cornell elucidated the electron-phonon bottleneck at ultra low temperatures; the hot electron effect that is now recapitulated in texts on solid state transport physics.

#1283

Yuriy Polyakov

#59165

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (45 years)

Yuriy Sergeyevich Polyakov is a Russian-American scientist at Duality Technologies. He is best known for his work in cryptography , chemical engineering , and physics . Biography Polyakov wrote his first scientific paper when he was a freshman student at the Moscow State University of Environmental Engineering. In April 1998, he moved to the United States. Polyakov received a Bachelor of Science in computer information systems summa cum laude from Excelsior College in 2002 and Master of Science in computer science from New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2003, where he carried out scientific research in computer science and computational mathematics.

#1284

Carver Mead

#59175

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (91 years)

#1285

William G. Tifft

#59213

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

William G. Tifft was an astronomer at the University of Arizona. His main interests were in galaxies, superclusters and redshift quantization. He was influential in the development of the first redshift surveys, and was an early proponent of crewed space astronomy, conducted at a proposed moon base for example. In retirement, he was a principal scientist with The Scientific Association for the Study of Time in Physics and Cosmology .

#1286

Thomas F. Anderson

#59314

Overall Influence

1911 - 1991 (80 years)

Thomas Foxen Anderson was an American biophysical chemist and geneticist who developed crucial techniques for using electron microscopes. Anderson pioneered use of the electron microscope to study viruses. His research produced insights of how viruses infect cells, methods of their reproduction and how they alter the cells they infect.

#1287

John E. Schwarz

#59315

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (86 years)

John E. Schwarz is an American political scientist. He graduated from Oberlin College with a B.A in 1961, received his Ph.D from Indiana University in 1967, and studied at the London School of Economics and Political Science and L'Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris. He was an economic adviser to Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana in 1963, completed work for his Ph.D in Belgium and Luxembourg in 1964-66, and then went on to teach at the University of Minnesota from 1966-1970 and the University of Arizona from 1970-2004. In 2006, he became a distinguished senior fellow at Demos, a public policy ...

#1288

John E. Bercaw

#59361

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

John E. Bercaw is an American chemist and Centennial Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology. Early life and education Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Bercaw obtained his bachelor of science in 1967 from North Carolina State University and later his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1971 under the direction of Hans-Herbert Brintzinger, followed by postdoctoral research with Jack Halpern at the University of Chicago.

#1289

Anette Hosoi

#59433

Overall Influence

Anette E. "Peko" Hosoi is an American mechanical engineer, biophysicist, and mathematician, currently the Neil and Jane Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering and associate dean of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#1290

Jennifer Roizen

#59456

Overall Influence

Jennifer Lyn Roizen is an American chemist who is a professor at Duke University. Roizen studies C-H functionalization, antibiotics and selective ion channel inhibitors. She joined the International Advisory Board of Angewandte Chemie in 2021.

#1291

Frans Pretorius

#59466

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (52 years)

Frans Pretorius is a South African and Canadian physicist, specializing in computer simulations in astrophysics and numerical solutions of Einstein's field equations. He is professor of physics at Princeton University and director of the Princeton Gravity Initiative.

#1292

Mohit Randeria

#59476

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Mohit Randeria is a US-based Indian condensed matter physicist and a professor of physics at Ohio State University. Known for his research on condensed matter theory and superconductivity, Randeria is an elected fellow of the American Physics Society. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards, for his contributions to physical sciences in 2002. He was awarded the 2002 ICTP Prize of the International Cent...

#1293

Anupam Mazumdar

#59588

Overall Influence

Anupam Mazumdar is a theoretical physicist at the University of Groningen specializing in cosmology and quantum gravity. Together with Sougato Bose, Mazumdar has proposed a bonafide test for the existence of the graviton in a table-top experiment, via witnessing gravitationally-mediated entanglement between two macroscopic superpositions of masses. A positive test of this phenomenon would establish experimentally that gravity is quantum mechanical in nature, and establish the existence of the graviton. The test crucially depends on the quantum nature of gravity, creating non-classical states o...

#1294

Martin Gibbs

#59590

Overall Influence

1922 - 2006 (84 years)

Martin Gibbs was an American biochemist and educator who worked in the field of carbon metabolism. The Martin Gibbs Medal, an award honoring individuals in plant sciences, is named in his honor. Career Gibbs was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and educated at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1947. Gibbs went on to work as a scientist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory that same year.

#1295

Adel F. Halasa

#59600

Overall Influence

Adel F. Halasa is an American scientist noted for his contributions to the development of rubber, particularly in the area of tire tread polymers for the Goodyear AquaTred tire. In 1997, he won the Charles Goodyear Medal, bestowed by the American Chemical Society, Rubber Division to individuals who "have been the principal inventor, innovator, or developer of a significant change or contribution to the rubber industry".

#1296

Robert Huggins

#59620

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (96 years)

Robert Alan Huggins is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the School of Engineering at Stanford University and Honorary Professor at the University of Kiel and the University of Ulm. He was previously Chief Scientist at the Center for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research in Ulm. The International Society for Solid State Ionics held a symposium in his honor in 2009, in recognition of his work on fundamental properties and behavior of materials, solid state ionic probing techniques, catalytic behavior at gas–solid interfaces, and the development of elect...

#1297

Ernest Grunwald

#59628

Overall Influence

1923 - 2002 (79 years)

Ernest Grunwald was a German-born American physical organic chemist, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the chair of the chemistry department at Brandeis University. He was also noted for his 1997 textbook Thermodynamics of Molecular Species. Awarded the ACS Award in Pure Chemistry in 1959.

#1298

Joseph B. Klemp

#59643

Overall Influence

Joseph Bernard Klemp is an American atmospheric scientist who collaborated in groundbreaking work advancing numerical simulation techniques and uncovering the dynamics of atmospheric convection, including supercell thunderstorms, tornadoes, squall lines, as well as mountain waves.

#1299

David Reitze

#59646

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

David Howard Reitze is an American laser physicist who is professor of physics at the University of Florida and served as the scientific spokesman of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory experiment in 2007-2011. In August 2011, he took a leave of absence from the University of Florida to be the Executive Director of LIGO, stationed at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California. He obtained his BA in 1983 from Northwestern University, his PhD in physics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1990, and had positions at Bell Communications Research and La...

#1300

Steven H. Low

#59656

Overall Influence

Steven H. Low is a Professor of the Computing and Mathematical Sciences Department and the Electrical Engineering Department at the California Institute of Technology. He is known for his work on the theory and mathematical modeling of Internet congestion control, algorithms, and optimization in power systems.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions