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 …

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List of the most influential people

#1401

Yusuf A. Hannun

#65044

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Yusuf Awni Hannun is an American molecular biologist, biochemist, and clinician. He is known for the discovery that sphingolipids have signaling functions. Early life Yusuf Awni Hannun was born in Saudi Arabia of Palestinian parents, Mrs. Aida Ashur-Hannun and Dr. Awni Hannun. He received his early education in Beirut at the International College and earned a Bachelor of Science at the American University of Beirut in 1977. Following his undergraduate degree, Hannun continued at the American University of Beirut, obtaining an MD with distinction in 1981 and completing his internship and a res...

#1402

B. Clark Burchfiel

#65103

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (91 years)

Burrell Clark Burchfiel is an American structural geologist. Born in Stockton, California, he earned his Ph.D. in 1961 at Yale University. His first academic appointment was to the Geology department at Rice University. He is the Schlumberger Professor Emeritus of Geology at MIT. Research interests: Origin, development, and structural evolution of the continental crust. His current work involves study of the geological history and evolution of the Tibetan plateau.

#1403

Martha Grover

#65193

Overall Influence

Martha Anne Grover is an American chemical engineer who is a professor and chair of graduate studies at the Georgia Tech School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Her research considers molecular self assembly and the emergence of biological functions.

#1404

Bruce Winstein

#65223

Overall Influence

1943 - 2011 (68 years)

Bruce Winstein was an experimental physicist and cosmologist noted for his early work in elementary particle physics, particularly work toward demonstrating a serious asymmetry between particles and their anti-particles . Later in his career, he worked in experimental cosmology, measuring polarization in the microwave background radiation whose properties date back to the early universe.

#1405

Brian Stoltz

#65348

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

Brian M. Stoltz is currently a professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. The primary focus of his research is chemical synthesis with an emphasis on expanding the scope of allylic alkylation for the preparation of complex molecules possessing unique structural, biological, and physical properties. His research involves the total synthesis of natural products such as dragmacidin F and -cyanthiwigin F, and development of synthetic reactions to access quaternary stereocenters. Specifically, he has focused on the allylic alkylation of enolates, developing an enantioselecti...

#1406

Bruce Simonson

#65464

Overall Influence

Bruce Simonson is an American planetary scientist and geologist notable for his contributions to meteoroid astronomy and glaciology. He is credited as one of the foremost experts in glacial till plains as well as one of the developers of the E-belt model. He has served as professor of geology at Oberlin College since 1979.

#1407

Hideo Mabuchi

#65531

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (54 years)

Hideo Mabuchi is a physicist and Professor of Applied Physics at Stanford University, and the head of the Mabuchi Lab. He graduated from Princeton University magna cum laude, with an A.B. in Physics in 1992, and from California Institute of Technology with a Ph.D. in Physics, in 1998, where he studied with H. Jeff Kimble.

#1408

Riki Kobayashi

#65542

Overall Influence

1924 - 2013 (89 years)

Riki Kobayashi was a chemical engineer and a long-time professor of chemical engineering at Rice University. A native of Harris County, Texas, he attended Rice University and earned the Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering at the age of 19. After serving in the U.S. Army, he went to the University of Michigan, where he earned the Master of Science degree in 1946 and the Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1951, both in chemical engineering. He became a member of the Rice faculty in 1951 and remained there until he retired in 1994. He died July 19, 2013, in Houston, Texas.

#1409

Stephen Hsu

#65562

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Stephen Dao Hui Hsu is an American physicist, who has previously worked as a tech executive and a university administrator. Early life and education Hsu was born and raised in Ames, Iowa. His father Cheng Ting Hsu , who was born in Wenling, Zhejiang, in what was then the Republic of China, was a professor of aerospace engineering at Iowa State University in Ames from 1958 to 1989. Stephen Hsu's mother was also originally from China, and Hsu had a grandfather who served as a general in the National Revolutionary Army of the Chinese Kuomintang government. At age 12, Hsu took his first college c...

#1410

Dmitry Garanin

#65637

Overall Influence

Dmitry Garanin is a Russian-American physicist known for his work in theoretical condensed matter physics. He is a professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Lehman College of The City University of New York and a faculty member in the physics department of the CUNY Graduate Center.

#1411

Ray David Owen

#65664

Overall Influence

1915 - 2014 (99 years)

Ray David Owen was a teacher and scientist whose discovery of unusual, “mixed,” red blood cell types in cattle twins in 1945 launched the fields of modern immunology and organ transplantation. Owen's 1945 findings were published in the journal Science. This observation demonstrated that self was “learned” by the immune system during development and paved the way for research involving induction of immune tolerance and early tissue grafting. When Frank Macfarlane Burnet and Sir Peter Brian Medawar were awarded their 1960 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of acquired immunological tolerance, Owen was not mentioned in the prize.

#1412

Eugene Hecht

#65736

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (94 years)

Eugene Hecht is an American physicist and author of a standard work in optics. Hecht studied at New York University , Rutgers University , Adelphi University . During his graduate study he worked at Radio Corporation of America. He became interested in optics in the 1960s and began writing about it in 1970, e.g., polarization. Adelphi University hired Hecht to teach and he became professor in 1978 and he retired in 2021.

#1413

Clarence Max Fowler

#65764

Overall Influence

1918 - 2006 (88 years)

Clarence Max Fowler was an American physicist who worked at Los Alamos between 1952 and 1996. His main contribution was on explosively pumped flux compression generators. Career From 1945 to 1952, Clarence "Max" Fowler did research, successively, at the United States Naval Academy, the University of Michigan, and Kansas State College. He began work for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1952, retiring in 1996. During this period Fowler became the highest Western authority on the research and application of explosively pumped flux compression generators. . In those years, mega-gauss technol...

#1414

Dianne Newman

#65854

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (53 years)

Dianne Newman is a molecular microbiologist, a professor in the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering and the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at California Institute of Technology. Her research interests include bioenergetics and cell biology of metabolically diverse, genetically-tractable bacteria. Her work deals with electron-transfer reactions that are part of the metabolism of microorganisms.

#1415

Norman F. Ness

#66015

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (92 years)

Norman Frederick Ness is an American geophysicist. He worked at the University of California, Los Angeles. From 1966 to 1986 he was director of the Laboratory of Extraterrestrial Physics at the Goddard Space Flight Center.

#1416

Clifford Kwan-Gett

Clifford Kwan-Gett

#66029

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (91 years)

Clifford Stanley Kwan-Gett is an Australian-born Chinese American engineer, physician, and artificial heart pioneer. Kwan-Gett was born as Clifford Gett in 1934 in Emmaville, New South Wales, a small tin mining town in the Australian bush. His father Walter Gett owned the Yow Sing & Co. General Store in Emmaville. Kwan-Gett was the eighth of ten children and the first in his family to attend college. At the University of Sydney, while a resident in Wesley College, he obtained degrees in Science and Engineering and later in Medicine. He married Joo Een Tan, then adopted his Chinese family n...

#1417

Wayne Yokoyama

#66035

Overall Influence

Wayne Yokoyama is an American biologist, currently the Sam J. Levin and Audrey Loew Levin Professor at Washington University in St. Louis and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He became a co-editor of the Annual Review of Immunology in 2013.

#1418

Michael Lesher

#66064

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Carl Michael Lesher is an American geologist. He is an authority on the geology and origin of nickel-copper-platinum group element deposits, especially those associated with komatiites, their physical volcanology and localization, the geochemistry and petrology of associated rocks, and controls on their composition.

#1419

Michael R. Hoffmann

#66091

Overall Influence

Michael R. Hoffmann is an American environmental engineer. He is currently the John S. and Sherry Chen Professor of Environmental Science at the California Institute of Technology. He is one of the most highly cited engineering researchers in the world.

#1420

Robert Dirks

#66112

Overall Influence

1978 - 2015 (37 years)

Robert Dirks was an American chemist known for his theoretical and experimental work in DNA nanotechnology. Born in Thailand to a Thai Chinese mother and American father, he moved to Spokane, Washington at a young age. Dirks was the first graduate student in Niles Pierce's research group at the California Institute of Technology, where his dissertation work was on algorithms and computational tools to analyze nucleic acid thermodynamics and predict their structure. He also performed experimental work developing a biochemical chain reaction to self-assemble nucleic acid devices. Dirks later worked at D.

#1421

Helen Vaughn Michel

#66197

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (93 years)

Helen Vaughn Michel is an American chemist best known for her efforts in fields including analytical chemistry and archaeological science, and specific processes such as neutron activation analysis and radiocarbon dating. Her work with Frank Asaro at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California is particularly noteworthy as it includes the dating of Drake's Plate of Brass as well as the Alvarez hypothesis, the hypothesis that posits the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.

#1422

Joann Stock

#66222

Overall Influence

Joann Stock is a professor at California Institute of Technology known for her research into plate tectonics, particularly on changes in plate boundaries over geological time. Education and career Stock earned her B.S. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, and went on college field trip to Greece which grabbed her interest in geology. She "liked learning things that nobody knew before" and was particularly interested in earthquakes on the sea floor. She went on to earn an M.S. and a Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology . From 1988 until 1992 she was on the Geology an...

#1423

Elizabeth Hoffman

#66225

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Celia Elizabeth Hoffman was executive vice president and provost of Iowa State University from 2007 to 2012, where she remains as professor of economics. From 2000 to 2005, she was president of the University of Colorado System, where she is president emerita. She is also a senior distinguished fellow at the Searle Center on Law, Regulations, and Economic Growth at Northwestern University School of Law, and serves on numerous for-profit and non-profit Boards. She served on the National Science Board from 2002 to 2008. Her published research is in the areas of Experimental economics, Cliom...

#1424

Mark Thompson

#66226

Overall Influence

Mark E. Thompson is a Californian chemistry academic who has worked with OLEDs. Career Mark E. Thompson graduated with honors from the University of California, Berkeley, earning his B.S. in chemistry in 1980. He earned a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry working under the guidance of Prof. John E. Bercaw. He conducted research at a Smithsonian Environmental Research Center as a Research Fellow in an Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at Oxford University. There, Thompson worked with Prof. Malcolm L. H. Green investigating specific properties of organometallic materials.

#1425

Barbara Imperiali

#66242

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Barbara Imperiali is a Professor of Biology and Chemistry at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Affiliate Member of the Broad Institute. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

#1426

Tim Callahan

#66304

Overall Influence

Timothy J. Callahan is an associate professor of geology and environmental geosciences at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. He is director of the college's Master of Environmental Studies program and has interests in hydrogeology, wetlands and water resources.

#1427

Michael E. Phelps

#66320

Overall Influence

#1428

William T. L. Cox

William T. L. Cox

#66368

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (41 years)

William Taylor Laimaka Cox is an assistant scientist in the department of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is an experimental cognitive scientist specializing in stereotyping, prejudice, and learning. His work explores the cultural and cognitive mechanisms that perpetuate stereotypes and prejudices and applies the understanding of those mechanisms to effective evidence-based interventions to reduce bias.

#1429

Stafford Tavares

#66394

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Stafford Emanuel Tavares is a Canadian cryptographer, professor emeritus at Queen's University. His notable work includes the design of the block ciphers CAST-128 and CAST-256. He also helped organize the first Selected Areas in Cryptography workshop in 1994. Since 2003, SAC has included an invited lecture in his honor, the Stafford Tavares Lecture.

#1430

Anthony M. Johnson

#66422

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Anthony Michael Johnson is an American experimental physicist, a professor of physics, and a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County . He is the director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Photonics Research , also situated on campus at UMBC. Since his election to the 2002 term as president of the Optical Society, formerly the Optical Society of America, Johnson has the distinction of being the first and only African-American president to date. Johnson's research interests include the ultrafast photophysics and nonlinear o...

#1431

Patricia Thiel

#66434

Overall Influence

1953 - 2020 (67 years)

Patricia Ann Thiel was an American chemist and materials scientist who served as a distinguished professor of chemistry at Iowa State University. She was known for her research on atomic-scale structures and processes on solid surfaces.

#1432

Julie A. Leary

#66447

Overall Influence

Julie A. Leary is a emeritus professor in the department of molecular and cellular biology at University of California, Davis and the department of chemistry. Early life and education Leary obtained a PhD in Chemistry Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985, under the direction of Klaus Biemann.

#1433

Sitaram Rao Valluri

#66502

Overall Influence

1924 - 2019 (95 years)

Sitaram Rao Valluri was an engineer and scientist noted for his work in metal fatigue. He completed his doctorate in 1954 at Caltech with a dissertation under Ernest Sechler and stayed thereafter to continue his research work. In 1963, he won the Wright Brothers Medal with George Bockrath and James Glassco for a paper on the relationship between crack propagation and fatigue in metals. He later returned to India and joined the Applied Mechanics Department of Indian Institute of Technology, Madras where he distinguished himself as a teacher, an outstanding researcher and a pre-eminent authority in the field of metal fatigue.

#1434

Michael Gaster

#66656

Overall Influence

Michael Gaster FRS is a British aerospace engineer, and Professor of Experimental Aerodynamics, at City University, London. Gaster was awarded the Ludwig-Prandtl-Ring from the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Luft- und Raumfahrt for "outstanding contribution in the field of aerospace engineering" in 2010.

#1435

Tung Hua Lin

#66726

Overall Influence

1911 - 2007 (96 years)

Tung Hua Lin was a Chinese-American aerospace and structural engineer best known for designing China's first twin engine aircraft during World War II. Early life and career Lin was born in Chungking in May 1911. His grandfather was head of the local telegraph agency. In 1914, his family moved to Beijing. He enrolled in Huiwen High School in 1924, graduating in 1928. After graduation, he entered Yenching University, majoring in physics, but the following year transferred to Chiaotung University's Tangshan, Hebei campus , graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1933. He then won a Chinese National Fellowship to study in the United States in 1933.

#1436

Thomas H. Maren

#66788

Overall Influence

1918 - 1999 (81 years)

Thomas H. Maren was an American professor of medicine at the University of Florida. He was the founding father for the University of Florida College of Medicine, and he invented Trusopt to help people with glaucoma.

#1437

Louis W. Roberts

#66874

Overall Influence

1913 - 1995 (82 years)

Louis Wright Roberts was an American microwave physicist. In the 1960s, he was the chief of the Microwave Laboratory at NASA's Electronics Research Center. In the 1970s and 1980s he worked at the United States Department of Transportation's John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, beginning in senior research positions and ultimately becoming the director of the center. His research focused on optics and microwave engineering.

#1438

Richard M. Murray

Richard M. Murray

#66881

Overall Influence

Richard M. Murray is a synthetic biologist and Thomas E. and Doris Everhart Professor of Control & Dynamical Systems and Bioengineering at Caltech, California. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2013 for "contributions in control theory and networked control systems with applications to aerospace engineering, robotics, and autonomy". Murray is a co-author of several textbooks on feedback and control systems, and helped to develop the Python Control Systems Library to provide operations for use in feedback control systems. He was a founding member of the Department of D...

#1439

David Kirk

#66935

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

David Blair Kirk is a computer scientist and former chief scientist and vice president of architecture at NVIDIA. As of 2019, he is an independent consultant and advisor. Kirk holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the California Institute of Technology. From 1989 to 1991, Kirk was an engineer for Apollo Systems Division of Hewlett-Packard. From 1993 to 1996, Kirk was Chief Scientist and Head of Technology for Crystal Dynamics, a video game manufacturing company. From 1997 to 2009...

#1440

Alexandre Obertelli

#66955

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (47 years)

Alexandre Obertelli is a French experimental nuclear physicist and Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Experimental Nuclear Structure Physics at the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Technische Universität Darmstadt.

#1441

Barry Dean Karl

#67054

Overall Influence

1927 - 2010 (83 years)

Barry Dean Karl was an American educator. Education He received a bachelor's degree from the University of Louisville in 1949, a master's from the University of Chicago in 1951, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1961.

#1442

Paul Weiss

#67081

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Paul S. Weiss is a leading American nanoscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. He holds numerous positions, including UC Presidential Chair, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Bioengineering, and of Materials Science and Engineering, and founder and editor-in-chief of ACS Nano. From 2019–2014, he held the Fred Kavli Chair in NanoSystems Sciences and was the director of the California NanoSystems Institute. Weiss has co-authored over 400 research publications and holds over 40 US and international patents.

#1443

Richard D. Braatz

#67087

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Richard D. Braatz is the Edwin R. Gilliland Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology known for his research in control theory and its applications to chemical, pharmaceutical, and materials systems.

#1444

Derek M. Yellon

#67093

Overall Influence

Derek Miles Yellon is a South African-British researcher in the biomedical sciences, known for his work in cardiovascular medicine. He is a professor of molecular and cellular cardiology at University College London, and is director of the Hatter Cardiovascular Institute at University College London Hospitals and Medical School.

#1445

Mark O. Robbins

#67162

Overall Influence

Mark Owen Robbins was an American condensed matter physicist who specialized in computational studies of friction, fracture and adhesion, with a particular focus on nanotribology, contact mechanics, and polymers. He was a professor in the department of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University at the time of his death.

#1446

Chiara Mingarelli

#67175

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Chiara Mingarelli is an Italian-Canadian astrophysicist who researches gravitational waves. She is an assistant professor of physics at Yale University since 2023, and previously an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut . She is also a science writer and communicator.

#1447

Stanton J. Peale

#67188

Overall Influence

1937 - 2015 (78 years)

Stanton Jerrold Peale was an American astrophysicist, planetary scientist, and Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include the geophysical and dynamical properties of planets and exoplanets.

#1448

David M. Gilbert

#67241

Overall Influence

David M. Gilbert is an American molecular biologist, known for work in DNA replication. He is an investigator at the San Diego Biomedical Research Institute. Gilbert was formerly a professor of molecular biology in the Department of Biological Science and was co-founder and a director of the Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine at Florida State University.

#1449

Larry Curtiss

#67347

Overall Influence

Larry A. Curtiss is an American chemist and researcher. He is a distinguished fellow and group leader of the Molecular Materials Group in the Materials Science Division at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory. In addition, Curtiss is a senior investigator in the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research , a DOE Energy Storage Hub, and was the deputy director of the Center for Electrochemical Energy Science, a DOE Energy Frontier Research Center.

#1450

Andrew Goodwin

#67354

Overall Influence

Andrew L. Goodwin FRS is a university research professor and professor of materials chemistry at the University of Oxford. Education Goodwin was educated at Sydney Boys High School and represented Australia at the International Chemistry Olympiad in 1996, winning a gold medal.

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