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

#1301

Janice Bishop

#59802

Overall Influence

Janice Bishop is a planetary scientist known for her research into the minerals found on Mars. Education and career In 1988, Bishop earned a B.S. in chemistry and an M.S. in Applied Earth Science from Stanford University. She earned her Ph.D. from Brown University in 1994 and then was a postdoctoral associate at the German Aerospace Center in Berlin until 1997. From 1997 to 1999 she was a fellow at the National Aeronautics Space Agency Ames Research Center before becoming a research scientist at the SETI Institute. Starting in 2015 she joined the Science Council at the SETI Institute and is a...

#1302

Kuo-Fong Ma

#59822

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Kuo-Fong Ma is a Taiwanese seismologist. She is primarily known for research conducted on the Chelungpu Fault, the cause of one of the most devastating earthquakes in Taiwan, the 1999 Jiji earthquake.

#1303

Leo Brewer

#59914

Overall Influence

1919 - 2005 (86 years)

Leo Brewer was an American physical chemist. Considered to be the founder of modern high-temperature chemistry, Brewer received his BS from the California Institute of Technology in 1940 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1942. Brewer joined the Manhattan Project following his graduate work, and joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley in 1946. Leo Brewer married Rose Strugo in 1945. They had three children, Beth Gaydos, Roger Brewer, and Gail Brewer. He died in 2005 as a result of Beryllium poisoning from his work in World War II.

#1304

Satish Chandra Maheshwari

#60005

Overall Influence

1933 - 2019 (86 years)

Satish Chandra Maheshwari was an Indian botanist and a former professor at the University of Delhi. He is known for his contributions to the fields of plant physiology and plant molecular biology. Maheshwari is an elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy and the National Academy of Sciences, India. 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, in 1972, for his contributions to biological sciences.

#1305

Peter W. Fay

#60049

Overall Influence

1924 - 2004 (80 years)

Peter Ward Fay was a noted historian and authority on India and China. He was a professor at the California Institute of Technology from 1955 until his retirement in 1997. Professor Fay received his bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1947, where his studies were interrupted to serve in Italy during World War II. Afterwards, he attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and then returned to Harvard for his PhD, which he received in 1954. After a brief period teaching at Williams College, he came to Caltech, where he remained for the rest of his career. At Caltech, Fay taught a variety of ...

#1306

Zheng Zhemin

#60079

Overall Influence

1924 - 2021 (97 years)

Zheng Zhemin , also romanized as Cheng Che-Min, was a Chinese explosives engineer and physicist specializing in explosive mechanics. Biography Zheng is a native of Yin County of Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, and was born in Jinan of Shandong Province. He obtained a BS from Tsinghua University in 1947, and a MS and a PhD in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1952. His doctoral advisor was Qian Xuesen.

#1307

Martin Walt

#60085

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Martin Walt was a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. He specialized in magnetospheric physics. He was also the father of Stephen Walt, a professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

#1308

Gordon Moore

#60185

Overall Influence

1929 - 2023 (94 years)

Gordon Earle Moore was an American businessman, engineer, and the co-founder and emeritus chairman of Intel Corporation. He proposed Moore's law which makes the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years.

#1309

Pancheti Koteswaram

#60207

Overall Influence

1915 - 1997 (82 years)

Pancheti Koteswaram was an Indian meteorologist, hydrologist, atmospheric physicist and the Director-General of Observatories of Government of India. He was a professor at University of Chicago, University of Hawaii, University of Miami and Tehran University and served as a research associate at National Hurricane Research Laboratory, Miami, and the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, Colorado. A former vice-president of World Meteorological Organization , Geneva, he was an elected Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy and the Andhra Pradesh Academy of Sciences.

#1310

Steven Zimmerman

Steven Zimmerman

#60214

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Steven Charles Zimmerman is an American organic chemist who is a professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Early life He was born in Chicago in 1957, the second son of organic chemist Howard Zimmerman. He attended public schools in Madison, Wisconsin where he received a B.S. degree in 1979 working for Hans J. Reich. In 1983 he received a Ph.D. at Columbia University in New York City where he worked with Ronald Breslow on pyridoxamine enzyme analogs.

#1311

Lloyd Cross

#60217

Overall Influence

Lloyd Cross is an American physicist and holographer. As a physicist, Cross' research started in the 1950s, and focused primarily on masers and lasers at Willow Run Laboratories, at the University of Michigan. He first demonstrated maser action in a ruby crystal in 1957 and, as of 1960, Cross co-led a project group to design, build and operate a ruby maser preamplifier for a new radio telescope located at Peach Mountain, about 20 miles north of Ann Arbor. In 1968, he and Canadian sculptor Jerry Pethick, developed a simplistic stabilization system for holographic cameras, that for the first tim...

#1312

Joseph Francisco

#60223

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Joseph S. Francisco is an American scientist and the former president of the American Chemical Society from 2009 to 2010. He currently serves as the President's Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science and professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. He was the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and held the Elmer H. and Ruby M. Cordes Chair in chemistry at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln until 2018.

#1313

Jon Blundy

#60256

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Jonathan David Blundy FRS is Royal Society Research Professor at the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford and honorary professor at the University of Bristol. Education He is a graduate of University College, Oxford and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and a former Kennedy Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He was educated at St Paul's School, Brazil, Giggleswick School and Leeds Grammar School, where petrologists Keith Cox and Lawrence Wager also studied.

#1314

Alexandros Makriyannis

#60358

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (86 years)

Alexandros Makriyannis is an American biochemist and professor of chemistry and chemical biology in the department of medicinal chemistry at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, where he directs the Center for Drug Discovery and holds the George Behrakis Chair of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology. His research has focused on the biochemical basis of the endocannabinoid system and on the development of synthetic cannabinoids.

#1315

William Colglazier

William Colglazier

#60411

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

E. [Elmer] William Colglazier is an American physicist, best known as the fourth science and technology adviser to the U.S. Secretary of State. He assumed that position in July, 2011. In that role, he has written about the benefits of science diplomacy.

#1316

Brian O'Regan

#60498

Overall Influence

Brian C. O'Regan is an American chemist known for the co-invention of dye-sensitized solar cells . He was previously a Research Lecturer at Imperial College London where he conducted research on photovoltaic cells and other applications of nano-structured oxide electronic materials.

#1317

Aden Meinel

#60675

Overall Influence

1922 - 2011 (89 years)

Aden B. Meinel was an American astronomer. He retired in 1993 as a distinguished scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He also held the rank of professor emeritus at the University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences. His research interests have included upper atmospheric physics, glass technology, optical design, instrumentation and space systems.

#1318

Serena DeBeer

#60683

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (52 years)

Serena DeBeer is an American chemist. She is currently a W3-Professor and the director at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion in Muelheim an der Ruhr, Germany, where she heads the Department of Inorganic Spectroscopy. Her expertise lies in the application and development of X-ray based spectroscopic methods as probes of electronic structure in biological and chemical catalysis.

#1319

Peter Keevash

#60684

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (47 years)

Peter Keevash is a British mathematician, working in combinatorics. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Mansfield College. Early years Keevash was born in Brighton, England, but mostly grew up in Leeds. He competed in the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1995. He entered Trinity College, University of Cambridge, in 1995 and completed his B.A. in mathematics in 1998. He earned his doctorate from Princeton University with Benny Sudakov as advisor. He took a postdoctoral position at the California Institute of Technology before moving to Queen Mary...

#1320

G. Michael Bancroft

G. Michael Bancroft

#60713

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

George "G." Michael Bancroft, , is a Canadian chemist and emeritus professor at the University of Western Ontario. One of the world's leading experts in Mössbauer spectroscopy, he is also known as one of the driving forces behind the development of synchrotron science in Canada, becoming the first director of the Canadian Light Source synchrotron after a 30-year "Odyssey".

#1321

John F. Asmus

#60872

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

John Fredrich Asmus is a research physicist who has focused his work on the use of scientific techniques in art conservation. , he taught at the Institute for Pure and Applied Physical Science at the University of California, San Diego, where he began working in 1974.

#1322

Jelena Vučković

#60948

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (49 years)

Jelena Vučković is a Serbian-born American professor and Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, and a courtesy faculty member in the Department of Applied Physics at Stanford University. Vučković leads the Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics Lab, and is a faculty member of the Ginzton Lab, PULSE Institute, SIMES Institute, and Bio-X at Stanford. She was the inaugural director of the Q-FARM initiative . She is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of The Optical Society, the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electr...

#1323

Warren Buck

#60996

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Warren Wesley Buck III is an American physicist. He is credited with establishing the physics PhD program at Hampton University, a historically Black college in Hampton, Virginia, which was also the campus's first PhD program in any subject. Buck was also the first chancellor of University of Washington-Bothell and oversaw the university's transition to a four-year institution. His research focuses on nuclear and subatomic particles, including studies of the interactions between particles and anti-particles and the nature of mesons and the quark model.

#1324

David VandeLinde

#61124

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

David VandeLinde is an American electrical engineering graduate from Carnegie Tech in 1964 and was the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick from 2001 to 2006. David VandeLinde was raised in St. Albans, WV. He graduated from St. Albans High School in 1960. He played football and was an offensive end.

#1325

Philip Gaskell

#61135

Overall Influence

1926 - 2001 (75 years)

Philip Gaskell was a British bibliographer and librarian. Life He was born on 6 January 1926 in Highgate, London, the son of John Wellesley Gaskell, director of an engineering company, and his wife, Olive Elizabeth Baker, who was a Quaker. He was educated at the Dragon School, Oxford, and at Oundle School. In 1947, after army service, he went to King's College, Cambridge, and studied English under Dadie Rylands.

#1326

Mary Blade

#61150

Overall Influence

1913 - 1994 (81 years)

Mary Plumb Blade was an American engineer, director of the Green Camp from 1955 to 1972, and full-time professor of mechanical engineering in the engineering school of The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art from 1946 to 1978.

#1327

Irene Beyerlein

#61180

Overall Influence

Irene Jane Beyerlein is an American materials scientist who is the Mehrabian Interdisciplinary Endowed Chair at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a Fellow of the Materials Research Society.

#1328

Mason Hammond

#61196

Overall Influence

1903 - 2002 (99 years)

Mason Hammond was an American educator and scholar. He was a Harvard University professor, an authority on Latin and the history of Rome and its empire, and chairman of the board of trustees at St. Mark's School.

#1329

Ramarathnam Narasimhan

#61336

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Ramarathnam Narasimhan is an Indian materials engineer and a professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the Indian Institute of Science. He is known for his pioneering researches on fracture mechanics and is an elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy and the Indian National Academy of Engineering. 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 co...

#1330

Arie Bodek

#61358

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Arie Bodek is an American experimental particle physicist and the George E. Pake Professor of Physics at the University of Rochester. Bodek was awarded the 2004 American Physical Society W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics for his "broad, sustained, and insightful contributions to elucidating the structure of the nucleon, using a wide variety of probes, tools, and methods at many laboratories."

#1331

Richard B. Gallagher

#61375

Overall Influence

Richard Barclay Gallagher is a Scottish immunologist, science editor, and academic publisher. He is the president and editor-in-chief of Annual Reviews. He graduated with a doctoral degree from the University of Glasgow and was a researcher at Trinity College Dublin before he began working in academic publishing in 1989, holding positions with Elsevier and the journals Science and Nature. In the 2000s, he was the editor of the magazine The Scientist. In 2015, he became president and editor-in-chief of Annual Reviews, where he oversaw the expansion into new journal titles, launched its first on...

#1332

Sarah Hörst

#61429

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (43 years)

Sarah Hörst is an associate professor of planetary sciences at Johns Hopkins University, who focuses on understanding planetary atmospheric hazes, in particular the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan.

#1333

Virginia Louise Trimble

Virginia Louise Trimble

#61459

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Virginia Louise Trimble is an American astronomer specializing in the structure and evolution of stars and galaxies, and the history of astronomy. She has published more than 600 works in Astrophysics, and dozens of other works in the history of other sciences. She is famous for an annual review of astronomy and astrophysics research that was published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and often gives summary reviews at astrophysical conferences. In 2018, she was elected a Patron of the American Astronomical Society, for her many years of intellectual, organiz...

#1334

Elizabeth H. Field

#61548

Overall Influence

Elizabeth Hirak Field is an academic scholar and professor in the University of Iowa’s Department of Internal Medicine. Education Field received her BS degree in physics from Millersville University of Pennsylvania. She received her MD degree from Penn State's Hershey Medical Center, where she also performed her residency in internal medicine. She conducted a five-year postdoctoral fellowship in both immunology and rheumatology at Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California.

#1335

Hartmuth C. Kolb

#61631

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Hartmuth Christian Kolb is a German chemist. He is considered one of the founders of click chemistry. Early life and career After graduating from high school in Marsberg in 1983, Kolb studied at the University of Hanover. He received his doctorate as an academic student of Steven Ley at Imperial College London with a thesis on preparative organic chemistry . As a postdoctoral fellow he worked with Barry Sharpless at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. He then worked in the research department of Ciba-Geigy in Basel from 1993 to 1997 before taking up a managerial position at Coelacanth Corporation, founded by Sharpless and A.

#1336

Richard M. Murray

#61708

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

#1337

Wilhelm Schlag

#61724

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Wilhelm Schlag is a mathematician and Phillips Professor of Mathematics at Yale University. He is known for his work in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Career Schlag obtained his PhD at the California Institute of Technology in 1996 under the supervision of Thomas Wolff. Since then, he has held positions at Princeton University, California Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago where he was H. J. Livingston Professor of Mathematics before moving to Yale University in 2018. He has done extensive work in Fourier Analysis, Spectral theory and dispersive partial differential equations.

#1338

Paul Grieco

#61733

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Paul Grieco is an organic chemist at Montana State University. His research focuses on the total synthesis of natural products and the study of solvent effects in various organic reactions. He has received several awards for his work, including the American Chemical Society Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award in 1990 and the ACS Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry in 1991. Among his contributions are two name reactions: the Grieco elimination and the Grieco three-component condensation.

#1339

Aron Pinczuk

#61850

Overall Influence

1939 - 2022 (83 years)

Aron Pinczuk was an Argentine-American experimental condensed matter physicist who was professor of physics and professor of applied physics at Columbia University. He was known for his work on correlated electronic states in two dimensional systems using photoluminescence and resonant inelastic light scattering methods. He was a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

#1340

Julie Borchers

#61884

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Julie Ann Borchers is an American physicist. Education Borchers received her B.S. in physics at the University of Dayton in 1984. She completed a Ph.D. at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1990. Borcher's doctoral advisor was Myron Salamon. Her dissertation was titled Structural and magnetic properties of erbium thin films and Er/Y superlattices.

#1341

Katrina Ligett

#61932

Overall Influence

Katrina Ligett is an American computer scientist. She is Associate Professor of computer science and economics at the Hebrew University and Visiting Associate at California Institute of Technology. She is known for work on algorithmic game theory and privacy.

#1342

Lowell S. Brown

#61956

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (91 years)

Lowell S. Brown was an American theoretical physicist, a retired Staff Scientist and Laboratory Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Professor Emeritus of physics at University of Washington. He was a student of Julian Schwinger at Harvard University and a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Brown authored a book on Quantum Field Theory that has received over 5,000 citations, and he has authored or co-authored over 150 articles that have accumulated over 11,000 citations.

#1343

Willard L. Miranker

#62012

Overall Influence

1932 - 2011 (79 years)

Willard L. Miranker was an American mathematician and computer scientist, known for his contributions to applied mathematics and numerical mathematics. Raised in Brooklyn, New York, he earned Bachelor of Arts , Master of Science and Ph.D. from the Courant Institute at New York University, the latter on the thesis The Asymptotic Theory of Solutions of U + U = 0 advised by Joseph Keller. He then worked for the mathematics department at Bell Labs before joining IBM Research . After retirement from IBM, he joined the computer science faculty at Yale University as research faculty.

#1344

W. David Arnett

W. David Arnett

#62022

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

William David Arnett is a Regents Professor of Astrophysics at Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, known for his research on supernova explosions, the formation of neutron stars or black holes by gravitational collapse, and the synthesis of elements in stars; he is author of the monograph Supernovae and Nucleosynthesis which deals with these topics. Arnett pioneered the application of supercomputers to astrophysical problems, including neutrino radiation hydrodynamics, nuclear reaction networks, instabilities and explosions, supernova light curves, and turbulent convective flow in tw...

#1345

Karl Freed

#62124

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

Karl Frederick Freed is an American theoretical chemist recognized for his research in polymer physics. Freed has spent his academic career in the department of chemistry and the James Frank Institute at the University of Chicago, where he is the Henry G. Gale Distinguished Service Professor emeritus. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and was awarded the Polymer Physics Prize of the American Physical Society in 2014 and the Award in Pure Chemistry by the American Chemical Society in 1976.

#1346

Lawrence Appel

#62226

Overall Influence

Lawrence J. Appel is the C. David Molina Professor of Medicine and Director of the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology and Clinical Research at Johns Hopkins University, a joint program of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Appel is a primary care internist who holds a primary appointment in the Department of Medicine with joint appointments in the Department of Epidemiology, International Health, and Nursing. In addition, he directs the ProHealth Clinical Research Unit. The focus of his career is the conduct of clinical, epidem...

#1347

Jing-Rebecca Li

#62296

Overall Influence

Jing-Rebecca Li is an applied mathematician known for her work on magnetic resonance imaging and Lyapunov equations. She is a researcher with the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation , at their Saclay research center.

#1348

J. Morgan Kousser

#62337

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Joseph Morgan Kousser is an American historian. He is a professor of history and social sciences at the California Institute of Technology. Early life Kousser was born on October 7, 1943, in Lewisburg, Tennessee. He graduated from Princeton University with an A.B. in history in 1965 after completing a senior thesis titled "Tennessee Politics and the Negro, 1948-1964." He then received a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University in 1971 after completing a 492-page long doctoral dissertation titled "The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910" under the supervision of C.

#1349

Jerry L. Bona

#62346

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Jerry Lloyd Bona is an American mathematician, known for his work in fluid mechanics, partial differential equations, and computational mathematics, and active in some other branches of pure and applied mathematics.

#1350

Leonore Herzenberg

#62445

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (90 years)

Leonore Alderstein "Lee" Herzenberg is an American immunologist, geneticist and professor at Stanford University. Born in New York City, U.S.A., she never received a college degree but studied biology and worked as a researcher alongside her husband Leonard since he began his doctorate at the California Institute of Technology in 1952. At the time, Caltech did not accept women, but although she was registered at Pomona College nearby, Lee was allowed to audit courses and take tests at Caltech.

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