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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School

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List of the most influential people

#1351

Moshe Abeles

#62480

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (89 years)

Moshe Abeles is an Israeli brain researcher and neurophysiologist. He is emeritus professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and at the Life Science Faculty of Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan.

#1352

Clarence L. "Ben" Coates

#62510

Overall Influence

1923 - 2000 (77 years)

Clarence Leroy “Ben” Coates was an American computer scientist and engineer known for his work on waveform recognition devices, circuit gates and accumulators. Early life He was born November 5, 1923, in Hastings, Nebraska, the son of Clarence Leroy Coates and Mildred Creighton. He earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Kansas in 1944. After completing his bachelor's degree, he served in the U.S. Navy during World War II from 1944–1946. He then returned to the University of Kansas to obtain his master's degree in electrical engineering in 1948.

#1353

Eugene P. Gross

#62661

Overall Influence

1926 - 1991 (65 years)

Eugene Paul Gross was a theoretical physicist and Edward and Gertrude Swartz professor at Brandeis University, known for his contribution to the Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook collision model used in the Boltzmann equation and in lattice Boltzmann methods and to the Gross–Pitaevskii equation which describes the ground state of a quantum system of identical bosons.

#1354

Sandra Pascoe Ortiz

#62694

Overall Influence

Sandra Pascoe Ortiz is a Mexican researcher and chemical engineer. She is a faculty member at the Universidad del Valle de Atemajac in Zapopan. Ortiz is known for developing a non-toxic, renewable, and biodegradable plastic alternative made from cactus juice.

#1355

Sarkis Mazmanian

#62717

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (53 years)

Sarkis Mazmanian is an American medical microbiologist who has served as a professor at the California Institute of Technology since 2006. He is currently the Luis & Nelly Soux Professor of Microbiology in the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, and a board member of Seed. Prior to this, Mazmanian was affiliated with Harvard Medical School and the University of Chicago. In 2012, Mazmanian was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for his pioneering work on the human microbiome.

#1356

Diane Griffin

#62730

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Diane Edmund Griffin is the university distinguished professor and a professor in the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she was the department chair from 1994-2015. She is also the current vice-president of the National Academy of Sciences. She holds joint appointments in the departments of Neurology and Medicine. In 2004, Griffin was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in the discipline of microbial biology.

#1357

Gerald Harris Rosen

Gerald Harris Rosen

#62826

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (92 years)

Gerald Rosen is an American mathematical scientist with over 280 published contributions in leading international scientific journals from 1958 to the present, in the areas of theoretical physics, mathematical biology, and aeronautical engineering. Rosen is currently the M. R. Wehr Professor Emeritus at Drexel University, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.

#1358

Allan Blaer

#62975

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

Allan Blaer is a physicist, professor emeritus and special lecturer at Columbia University in New York City. He received his undergraduate degree from Columbia University in 1964, where he was the valedictorian. He later went on to obtain his PhD in physics at the same institution. He has done research in both theoretical and experimental physics. In quantum field theory, he worked on phase transitions in low-temperature bosonic and fermionic systems, quantum field theory anomalies, dyons and magnetic monopoles in non-abelian gauge theories, and renormalization theory. In experimental physics...

#1359

Gretchen Keppel-Aleks

#62985

Overall Influence

Gretchen Keppel-Aleks is an American scientist and assistant professor at the University of Michigan in the College of Engineering's department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering. She primarily focuses on Earth's climate and the effects of greenhouse gasses on Earth's atmosphere. Keppel-Aleks has been named a Kavli Fellow by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

#1360

Merton E. Davies

Merton E. Davies

#62999

Overall Influence

1917 - 2001 (84 years)

Merton E. Davies was a pioneer of America's space program, first in earth reconnaissance and later in planetary exploration and mapping. He graduated from Stanford University in 1938 and worked for the Douglas Aircraft corporation in the 1940s. He worked as a member of RAND Corporation after it split off from Douglas in 1948 and for the remainder of his career.

#1361

Prineha Narang

#63033

Overall Influence

1989 - Present (36 years)

Prineha Narang is an American physicist and computational material scientist. She is a Professor of Physical Sciences and Howard Reiss Chair at the University of California, Los Angeles . Narang currently serves as a U.S. Science Envoy approved by the Secretary of State to identify opportunities for science and technology cooperation. Before moving to UCLA, she was first an Environmental Fellow at Harvard University Center for the Environment and then an Assistant Professor in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. Narang’s work has been recog...

#1362

Daniel I. A. Cohen

#63034

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Daniel Isaac Aryeh Cohen is an American mathematician and computer scientist who is now a professor emeritus at Hunter College. Cohen earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Princeton University in 1967 and already as an undergraduate published a research paper about Sperner's lemma, which he learned about from Hans Rademacher. He completed his doctorate in 1975 from Harvard University under the joint supervision of Andrew M. Gleason and Gian-Carlo Rota. He was a mathematician at Hunter College in 1981 when the computer science department was founded, and became one of five initial com...

#1363

Richard Davis Anderson

#63071

Overall Influence

1922 - 2008 (86 years)

Richard Davis Anderson, Sr. was an American mathematician known internationally for his work in infinite-dimensional topology. Much of his early work focused on proofs surrounding Hilbert space and Hilbert cubes.

#1364

Peter T. Wolczanski

#63104

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Peter Thomas Wolczanski is the George W. and Grace L. Todd professor of Chemistry at Cornell University. Education Wolczanski obtained his B.S. in Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976 while doing research under the direction of Mark Wrighton. He entered graduate school at the California Institute of Technology, working under John Bercaw on various chemistries of permethylzirconocene hydrides and was awarded a doctorate degree in 1981.

#1365

Michael Dickinson

#63131

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Michael H. Dickinson is an American fly bioengineer and neuroscientist, and Zarem Professor of Biology and Bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology. He studies Drosophila flight control systems and sensory processing and was dubbed the Fly Guy by The Scientist.

#1366

Niel Brandt

#63187

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

William Nielsen Brandt is the Verne M. Willaman Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics and a professor of physics at the Pennsylvania State University. He is best known for his work on active galaxies, cosmological X-ray surveys, starburst galaxies, normal galaxies, and X-ray binaries.

#1367

Ryoo Ryong

#63207

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Ryoo Ryong FRSC is a distinguished professor of chemistry at KAIST in Daejeon, South Korea. He was the head of the Center for Nanomaterials and Chemical Reactions, an Extramural Research Center of the Institute for Basic Science. Ryoo has won a variety of awards, including the Top Scientist and Technologist Award of Korea given by the South Korean government in 2005. He obtained the KOSEF Science and Technology Award in 2001 for his work on the synthesis and crystal structure of mesoporous silica.

#1368

James Kaiser

#63299

Overall Influence

1929 - 2020 (91 years)

James Frederick Kaiser was an American electrical engineer noted for his contributions in signal processing. He was an IEEE Fellow and received many honors and awards, including the IEEE Centennial Medal, the IEEE W.R.G. Baker Award, the Bell Laboratories Distinguished Technical Staff Award, and the IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal.

#1369

John V. Wehausen

John V. Wehausen

#63342

Overall Influence

1913 - 2005 (92 years)

John Vrooman Wehausen was an American applied mathematician considered to be one of the world's leading researchers and pioneers in the field of marine hydrodynamics. His contributions were in the area of ship waves, ship maneuverability, floating systems in waves, and ship-generated solitary waves. In 1960, he and Edmund V. Laitone published the comprehensive review article Surface Waves, which to this day is still an important resource for understanding the dynamics of water waves. Wehausen was emeritus professor of engineering science at the University of California, Berkeley.

#1370

David L. Lambert

#63406

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

David L. Lambert is a British-American astronomer, who does research on stellar atmospheres, the chemical composition of stars, and the chemical evolution of the universe. Born in Ashford, Kent, England, Lambert received his PhD in 1965 from the University of Oxford. In 1967 he became an immigrant to the USA to work at the California Institute of Technology, then in 1969 at The University of Texas at Austin, where in 1974 he became a professor. From 2003 until 2014 he was the director of McDonald Observatory, part of The University of Texas at Austin.

#1371

Donald Gurnett

#63515

Overall Influence

1940 - 2022 (82 years)

Donald Alfred Gurnett was an American physicist and professor at the University of Iowa who specialized in plasma physics. Early life and education Gurnett grew up in Fairfax, Iowa. In his spare time he built and flew model airplanes with a club at the airport in Cedar Rapids. There he met the German expatriate scientist Alexander Lippisch.

#1372

Jeffrey Reimer

#63574

Overall Influence

Jeffrey Allen Reimer is an American chemist, academic, author and researcher. He is the C. Judson King Endowed Professor, a Warren and Katharine Schlinger Distinguished Professor and the chair of the chemical and biomolecular engineering department at University of California, Berkeley.

#1373

Paras N. Prasad

#63578

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Paras Nath Prasad is an Indian chemist. He is the SUNY Distinguished Professor at the University at Buffalo and holds a tenured faculty appointment in the department of Chemistry. In addition, he also holds non-tenured appointments in Physics, Medicine, and Electrical Engineering at the University at Buffalo and serves as the Executive Director of the Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics.

#1374

Walter Nance

#63608

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (92 years)

Walter Elmore Nance is Professor and Chair of the Department of Human Genetics of the Virginia Commonwealth University. He is an internationally known expert in hereditary deafness, twin studies and genetic linkage analysis of both continuous and qualitative traits.

#1375

Stuart J. Edelstein

Stuart J. Edelstein

#63637

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Stuart J. Edelstein is a biophysicist, emeritus professor from the University of Geneva, professeur extraordinaire at the École Normale Supérieure and visiting scientist at the Babraham Institute.

#1376

Morris Fiorina

#63692

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Morris P. Fiorina is an American political scientist and co-author of the book Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America with Jeremy C. Pope . Biography Fiorina received his B.A. from Allegheny College, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Rochester.Stanford University He currently serves as the Wendt Family Professor of Political Science, Stanford University and is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He was formerly the Thompson Professor of Government at Harvard University and has taught at the California Institute of Technology. He resides in Portola Va...

#1377

Neil Gehrels

#63749

Overall Influence

1952 - 2017 (65 years)

Cornelis A. "Neil" Gehrels was an American astrophysicist specializing in the field of gamma-ray astronomy. He was Chief of the Astroparticle Physics Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center from 1995 until his death, and was best known for his work developing the field from early balloon instruments to today's space observatories such as the NASA Swift mission, for which he was the principal investigator. He was leading the WFIRST wide-field infrared telescope forward toward a launch in the mid-2020s. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of A...

#1378

Ann M. Valentine

#63773

Overall Influence

Ann M. Valentine is an American bioinorganic chemist whose research focuses on biomineralization, the uptake and transport of metals and their medical applications in areas such as cancer research. She has received awards including the 2014 AICChemical Pioneer Award "for her outstanding contributions towards advancing the science of chemistry and impacting the chemical profession" and the 2009 Paul D. Saltman Award for Metals in Biology for "outstanding contributions to the field of metals in biology" and "groundbreaking work on the structures and reactions of complexes containing titanium."

#1379

Tom Lubensky

#63839

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Tom C. Lubensky is an American physicist. He is currently the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was Mary Amanda Wood professor of physics and chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

#1380

Steven D. Townsend

#63846

Overall Influence

Steven D'Wayne Townsend is a professor of organic chemistry at Vanderbilt University. He investigates the chemistry of human breast milk. In 2019 Townsend was selected as one of Chemical & Engineering News Talented 12.

#1381

Michael Kramer

#63866

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Michael Kramer is a German radio astronomer and astrophysicist. He currently serves as a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn. He is also a professor at the University of Manchester and an Honorary Professor at the University of Bonn.

#1382

Ken'ichi Nomoto

#64003

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Ken'ichi Nomoto is a Japanese astrophysicist and astronomer, known for his research on stellar evolution, supernovae, and the origin of heavy elements. Education and career Nomoto graduated in astronomy from the University of Tokyo with a BS in 1969 and a PhD in 1974. As a postdoc he was a research fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. At Ibaraki University he was an assistant professor from 1976 to 1981. At the University of Tokyo he became an assistant professor in 1982, an associate professor in 1985, and a full professor in 1993. At the Kavli Institute for the Physics...

#1383

William M. Kaula

#64012

Overall Influence

1926 - 2000 (74 years)

William M. Kaula was an Australian-born American geophysicist and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Kaula was most notable for his contributions to geodesy, including using early satellites to produce maps of Earth's gravity. The National Academies Press called Kaula "the father of space-based geodesy". The Los Angeles Times called him "one of the leading planetary physicists of the last four decades".

#1384

Karin Öberg

#64040

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (43 years)

Karin Ingegerd Öberg is a Swedish astrochemist. She is a Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University and leader of the Öberg Astrochemistry Group at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian. Her research concerns star formation, planet formation, and stellar evolution in relation to organic molecules, which are necessary to determine the origins of life on Earth and elsewhere. In April 2015, her group discovered the first complex organic molecule in a protoplanetary disk.

#1385

Debbie Leung

#64053

Overall Influence

Debbie Leung is a University Research Chair at the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, where she is also affiliated with the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization. She works in theoretical quantum information processing.

#1386

V. Srinivasan

#64254

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

V. 'Seenu' Srinivasan is an American scholar in the field of marketing science. He is the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. Srinivasan is known for his research on market research and conjoint analysis. Srinivasan received his bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He worked for two years as a production-planning engineer at Larsen & Toubro, Mumbai prior to joining Carnegie-Mellon University where he received his MS and PhD in industrial administration.

#1387

Jean Swank

#64271

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Jean Hebb Swank is an astrophysicist who is best known for her studies of black holes and neutron stars. Early life and education Swank graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics from Bryn Mawr College in 1961. Two of her physics professors at Bryn Mawr were alumni of Caltech. They influenced her decision to attend graduate school at the California Institute of Technology. Under the supervision of Steve Frautschi, she was awarded her PhD in physics in 1967. Her thesis was "Radiative Corrections to Neutrino-Electron Interactions".

#1388

Marvin D. Girardeau

#64285

Overall Influence

1930 - 2015 (85 years)

Marvin D. Girardeau was a quantum physicist, and a faculty member in the Institute for Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon, where he was hired as a professor in 1963 and worked until his retirement in 2000, after which he became a research professor at the University of Arizona. He was a mathematical physicist with an unusual nonlinear career, which culminated in a remarkable impact in the ultracold atom physics community. One of Girardeau's achievements was to predict the existence of the Tonks–Girardeau gas in 1960. A Tonks–Girardeau gas was created in 2004, and its measured ...

#1389

Yannis C. Yortsos

Yannis C. Yortsos

#64292

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Yannis C. Yortsos is a Greek-American chemical engineer and academic, currently serving as Dean of the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California. Early life Yannis Yortsos was born in 1951 in Athens, Greece. He attended the 1st Lyceum Venetokleion of Rhodes and in 1968 he enrolled in the National Technical University of Athens, where he obtained his B.S. in Chemical Engineering, graduating first in his class in 1973. He continued his studies at the Institute of Technology, earning his M.S. in Chemical Engineering in 1974 and his Ph.D. in 1979, with his doctoral ...

#1390

Wade Regehr

#64367

Overall Influence

Wade G. Regehr is a Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School's Department of Neurobiology. Early biography Born in Shaunavon, Saskatchewan, Canada, Regehr attended the University of Regina in Canada where he received the Governor General's Award, then received his Ph.D. at Caltech in applied physics with David Rutledge. His doctorate was at the interface between neuroscience and electrical engineering.

#1391

Jenny Rosenthal Bramley

#64437

Overall Influence

1909 - 1997 (88 years)

Jenny Rosenthal Bramley was a Russian-born American physicist. She holds numerous patents on Electroluminescence and Electro-optics and is cited by the IEEE as being "well known for her innovative work in lasers." She was the second woman elected as a fellow of the IEEE.

#1392

Sam Wang

#64450

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Samuel "Sam" Sheng-Hung Wang is a Taiwanese-American professor, neuroscientist, psephologist and author. He is known as the co-author of the books Welcome to Your Brain and Welcome to Your Child's Brain, as well as for the Princeton Election Consortium psephology website. Wang also gives talks about child brain development, autism, politics, and gerrymandering on television and radio, to academic audiences, and for the general public.

#1393

Joan Redwing

#64528

Overall Influence

Joan M. Redwing is an American materials scientist known for research on electronic and optoelectronic materials, including the processing of semiconductor thin films and nanomaterials by metalorganic chemical vapor deposition . Redwing is a distinguished professor of materials science and engineering and electrical engineering at Pennsylvania State University and director of the university's 2D Crystal Consortium research facility. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, and the Materials Research Society.

#1394

Russell M. Pitzer

#64626

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

Russell Mosher Pitzer is an American theoretical chemist and educator. He was born in Berkeley, California and attended public schools in this and the Washington, D.C. area. He received his B.S. in chemistry in 1959 from the California Institute of Technology, his A.M. in physics from Harvard University in 1963, and his Ph.D. in chemical physics from Harvard University in 1963.

#1395

Kay-Yut Chen

#64706

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Kay-Yut Chen is an experimental economist best known for pioneering the application of behavioral economics to business management. The experimental economics lab he founded at HP Labs was the first such lab in any company. His work at HP Labs has been featured in Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, and Scientific American.

#1396

Virgil Griffith

Virgil Griffith

#64779

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (42 years)

Virgil Griffith , is an American programmer and convicted felon. He worked extensively on the Ethereum cryptocurrency platform, designed the Tor2web proxy along with Aaron Swartz, and created the Wikipedia indexing tool WikiScanner. He has published papers on artificial life and integrated information theory. Griffith was arrested in 2019 and in 2021 pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate U.S. laws relating to money laundering using cryptocurrency and sanctions related to North Korea. On April 12, 2022, Griffith was sentenced to 63 months imprisonment for assisting North Korea with evading sa...

#1397

Tom Dame

#64783

Overall Influence

Thomas M. Dame is Director of the Radio Telescope Data Center at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian, a Senior Radio Astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, and a Lecturer on Astronomy at Harvard University. He is best known for mapping the Milky Way galaxy in Carbon Monoxide and for the discovery of both the Far 3 kpc Arm and the Outer Scutum–Centaurus Arm of the Milky Way.

#1398

Peter Lu

#64843

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (47 years)

Peter James Lu, PhD is a post-doctoral research fellow in the Department of Physics and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has been recognized for his discoveries of quasicrystal patterns in medieval Islamic architecture, early precision compound machines in ancient China, and man's first use of diamond in neolithic China.

#1399

Michael T. Bowers

#64854

Overall Influence

Michael T. Bowers is an American mass spectroscopist, a professor in the department of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara faculty. Career He studied at Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington, earning his 1962 B.S. in 1962 and then earning a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1966.

#1400

Robert Miller Hardt

Robert Miller Hardt

#65036

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Robert Miller Hardt is an American mathematician. His research deals with geometric measure theory, partial differential equations, and continuum mechanics. He is particularly known for his work with Leon Simon proving the boundary regularity of volume minimizing hypersurfaces.

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