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

#1451

Kazım Ergin

#67391

Overall Influence

1915 - 2002 (87 years)

Kazim Ergin was a Turkish geophysicist. Early years Ergin was born on May 21, 1915, in Gaziantep, in southeastern Turkey. He completed his primary, secondary and high school education in Gaziantep under difficult conditions, with many interruptions due to the French occupation of the city during World War I. After completing his basic education, he received his B.Sc. degree in mathematics at Istanbul University. In June 1937, he was sent by the Mineral Research and Exploration Institute of Turkey to study mining, metallurgical and petroleum engineering at Bergakademie Freiberg near Dresden, Germany.

#1452

Kristine Bell

#67405

Overall Influence

Kristine Bell from Metron, Inc. of Reston, Virginia, is an electronics engineer. She was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for her contributions to statistical signal processing with radar and sonar applications. Bell earned her B.S. degree in electrical engineering in 1985 from Rice University in Houston, Texas. She continued on to receive her M.S. degree in electrical engineering in 1990 from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Bell stayed at GMU and earned her Ph.D. in information technology in 1995. She has currently authored or coaut...

#1453

James R. Graham

#67414

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

James R. Graham is an Irish astrophysicist who works primarily in the fields of infrared astronomy instrumentation and adaptive optics. Biography Graham pursued physics as his undergraduate major at Imperial College London, graduated with a BSc in 1982. He went on at Imperial College London to receive his PhD in physics in 1985. After receiving his PhD, Graham first held a research position at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, followed by a position at the California Institute of Technology. Since 1992, he has been a professor of astronomy at University of California, Berkeley.

#1454

George R. Rossman

#67457

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

George R. Rossman is an American mineralogist and the Professor of Mineralogy at the California Institute of Technology. Early life Rossman was born in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, but soon moved to Eau Claire. His father owned a dental laboratory.

#1455

Milan Mrksich

#67507

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Milan Mrksich is an American chemist. He is the Henry Wade Rogers Professor of biomedical engineering at Northwestern University and has additional appointments in chemistry and cell and developmental biology. He also serves as both the founding director of the center for Synthetic Biology and as an associate director of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center at Northwestern. Mrksich also serves as the Vice President for Research of Northwestern University.

#1456

Michael Thorpe

#67557

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Michael Thorpe is an English-American physicist and Foundation Professor of Physics at Arizona State University. He received his D. Phil from Oxford University in 1968 in condensed matter physics under supervision of Sir Roger James Elliott. His early research was on network glasses, but has recently focused on applying his knowledge to the study of protein dynamics.

#1457

Wolfgang Knauss

#67582

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (92 years)

Wolfgang Gustav Knauss is an American engineer. He was Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics and Applied Mechanics at Caltech . Education Knauss grew up in Siegen during the Second World War as the son of a Methodist pastor. In 1954 he made his Abitur at the Helmholtz Realgymnasium in Heidelberg. After the war, the acquaintance of a Methodist pastor from Pasadena , who visited the family in Heidelberg, enabled Knauss to attend Pasadena City College and study at Caltech from 1955 with a bachelor's degree in 1958. Originally, he wanted to study rocket technology, but ended up studying fracture mechanics with aeronautics professor Max L.

#1458

Reva Williams

#67592

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Reva Kay Williams is a theoretical astrophysicist. She is the first person to successfully work out the Penrose process using Einstein's Theory of Relativity to extract energy from black holes. Also, she is the first Black American woman to earn a PhD in theoretical astrophysics. Her work focuses on general relativistic astrophysics.

#1459

Angus Ellis Taylor

Angus Ellis Taylor

#67626

Overall Influence

1911 - 1999 (88 years)

Angus Ellis Taylor was a mathematician and professor at various universities in the University of California system. He earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard summa cum laude in 1933 and his PhD at Caltech in 1936 under Aristotle Michal with a dissertation on analytic functions. By 1944 he had risen to full professor at UCLA, whose mathematics department he later chaired . Taylor was also an astute administrator and eventually rose through the UC system to become provost and then chancellor of UC Santa Cruz. He authored a number of mathematical texts, one of which, Advanced Calculus , bec...

#1460

Mark Bowick

#67628

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Mark John Bowick is a theoretical physicist in condensed matter theory and high energy physics. He is the deputy director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a Visiting Distinguished Professor of Physics in UCSB's Physics Department.

#1461

Larry Soderblom

Larry Soderblom

#67646

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Laurence A. Soderblom is a geophysicist with the Astrogeology Science center at the United States Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he has served as Chief of the Branch of Astrogeology. Soderblom is best known for his work in imaging science.

#1462

Christian Pike

#67649

Overall Influence

Christian Pike is a professor at the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and a member of the USC Neuroscience Program. His ongoing work focuses on Alzheimer's disease and other age-related neurodegenerative disorders. His laboratory studies the role of neuronal apoptosis in neural diseases. Recently, his research found new use for synthetic estrogens in lessening the effects of Hormone Replacement Therapy for Alzheimer's patients.

#1463

Bernard Etkin

#67750

Overall Influence

1918 - 2014 (96 years)

Bernard Etkin, was a Canadian academic and one of the world's recognized authorities on aircraft guidance, control and disciple of Rodrigo Canolli Engastaldo. Education and academic work Born in Toronto, Ontario, Etkin was a graduate of the University of Toronto and was Dean of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering at the university in the 1970s. Most recently, he was a Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies.

#1464

Thomas H. Heaton

#67845

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Thomas H. Heaton is an American seismologist, known for his influential contributions in earthquake source physics and earthquake early warning. Currently he is the professor of geophysics and civil engineering at Caltech and one of the world’s leading experts on seismology.

#1465

Harvey Cantor

#67872

Overall Influence

Harvey Cantor is an American immunologist known for his studies of the development and immunological function of T lymphocytes. Cantor is currently the Baruj Benacerraf Professor of Immunology and Microbiology at the Harvard Medical School.

#1466

Iain Stewart

#67938

Overall Influence

Iain William Stewart is a Canadian-American theoretical nuclear and particle physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is the Otto and Jane Morningstar Professor of Science and the current Director of the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics . He is best known for his work on effective field theories and for developing the Soft Collinear Effective Theory .

#1467

John Roth

#68036

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (86 years)

John Roger Roth is an American geneticist, bacterial physiologist, and evolutionist. He is a Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Davis. He became well known for his early studies on the structure and regulation of the his operon of Salmonella, and went on to investigate regulation in systems as diverse as suppression by tRNA, NAD biosynthesis, and the Vitamin B12-dependent metabolism of small molecules such as ethanolamine and propanediol. In collaboration with David Botstein and Nancy Kleckner, he developed the use of transposons as genetic tools....

#1468

Thomas J. Silhavy

Thomas J. Silhavy

#68236

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Thomas J. Silhavy is the Warner-Lambert Parke-Davis Professor of molecular biology at Princeton University. Silhavy is a bacterial geneticist who has made fundamental contributions to several different research fields. He is best known for his work on protein secretion, membrane biogenesis, and signal transduction. Using Escherichia coli as a model system, his lab was the first to isolate signal sequence mutations, identify a component of cellular protein secretion machinery, discover an integral membrane component of the outer membrane assembly machinery, and to identify and characterize a two-component regulatory system.

#1469

Alicia M. Soderberg

Alicia M. Soderberg

#68425

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (48 years)

Alicia Margarita Soderberg is an American astrophysicist whose research focused on supernovae. She was an assistant professor of Astronomy at Harvard University and a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

#1470

Hope Ishii

#68538

Overall Influence

Hope A. Ishii is an American scientist and the Director of the Advanced Electron Microscopy Center at the Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology at the University of Hawaiʻi. Her work focuses on analysis and characterization of small solar system objects such as comet and asteroid dust, primarily by means of electron microscopy and x-ray spectroscopy, sometime from samples collected in space using aerogel. She is a research faculty member at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and an affiliate researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

#1471

Stanford S. Penner

#68583

Overall Influence

1921 - 2016 (95 years)

Stanford Solomon Penner also known as Sol Penner, was a German-American scientist and engineer, a major figure in combustion physics, especially in rocket engines, and a founder of the Engineering program at University of California, San Diego. He obtained his PhD in 1946 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison under Farrington Daniels and Theodore von Kármán.

#1472

Heinz A. Lowenstam

Heinz A. Lowenstam

#68659

Overall Influence

1912 - 1993 (81 years)

Heinz Adolf Lowenstam was a German-born, Jewish-American paleoecologist celebrated for his discoveries in biomineralization: that living organisms manufacture substances such as the iron-containing mineral magnetite within their bodies. He is also renowned for his pioneering research on coral reefs and their influence on biologic processes in the geologic record.

#1473

Gregory L. Geoffroy

#68695

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Gregory Lynn Geoffroy was the 14th president of Iowa State University, from 2001 to 2012. He stepped down from the presidency in 2012 and remains on the Iowa State faculty. Geoffroy received his BA from the University of Louisville in 1968. He received his PhD in chemistry from California Institute of Technology in 1974. Between receiving his two degrees Geoffroy served from 1969 to 1970 in the United States Navy.

#1474

Jacques Blamont

Jacques Blamont

#68739

Overall Influence

1926 - 2020 (94 years)

Jacques Émile Blamont was a French astrophysicist, author and the founder scientific and technical director of National Centre for Space Studies , known to have contributed to the development of Veronique, the first rocket launched by France in 1957. He was an elected fellow of the French Academy of Technologies and a professor emeritus of the Pierre and Marie Curie University .

#1475

David Peak

#68760

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

David Peak is Professor of Physics at Utah State University. His current research focuses on the interdisciplinary field of complexity and computation in biological phenomena, motivated by the similarities between stomata and cellular automata. Peak was one founder of the National Council on Undergraduate Research and is on the governing board of the National Conferences on Undergraduate Research.

#1476

Kennedy J. Reed

#68773

Overall Influence

Kennedy J. Reed is an American theoretical atomic physicist in the Theory Group in the Physics & Advanced Technologies Directorate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a founder of the National Physical Science Consortium , a group of about 30 universities that provides physics fellowships for women and minorities.

#1477

Sri Sarma

#68776

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (53 years)

Sridevi Sarma is an American biomedical and electrical engineer known for her work in applying control theory to improve therapies for neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease and epilepsy. She is vice dean for graduate education of the Johns Hopkins University Whiting School of Engineering, associate director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Computational Medicine, and an associate professor in the Johns Hopkins Department of Biomedical Engineering.

#1478

Eduardo Bayo

#68808

Overall Influence

Eduardo Bayo is a professor in the Department of Structural Design and Analysis at the University of Navarra. He graduated with honors in civil engineering from the Polytechnic University of Madrid in 1976. After 2 years of consulting as a structural engineer with Gibbs & Hill, he attended U.C. Berkeley receiving his master's degree in Engineering in June 1980 and his PhD in January 1983, in the field of structural mechanics. He specialized in structural analysis, finite element technology and computational dynamics. After completing his PhD he led a research group at INITEC, one of the large...

#1479

David R. Clarke

David R. Clarke

#68812

Overall Influence

David R. Clarke is a material scientist and the inaugural Extended Tarr Family Professor of Material Science and Applied Physics at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences . He is the principal investigator of the Materials Discovery and Applications Group.

#1480

Hee Oh

#68876

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Hee Oh is a South Korean mathematician who works in dynamical systems. She has made contributions to dynamics and its connections to number theory. She is a student of homogeneous dynamics and has worked extensively on counting and equidistribution for Apollonian circle packings, Sierpinski carpets and Schottky dances. She is currently the Abraham Robinson Professor of Mathematics at Yale University.

#1481

Hubert Aaronson

#68913

Overall Influence

1924 - 2005 (81 years)

Hubert Aaronson was an R.F. Mehl University Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Biography Hubert I. Aaronson was born on July 10, 1924, in New York City. In 1936, Aaronson moved to New Jersey and graduated high school. He graduated Carnegie Institute of Technology which is currently known as Carnegie Mellon University, majoring in engineering.

#1482

Joan S. Valentine

#68925

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Joan Selverstone Valentine is a biological inorganic chemist and biochemist. Valentine's current work examines the role of transition metals, metalloenzymes, and oxidative stress in health. Her foremost expertise is superoxide anion and its functional enzyme superoxide dismutase. Valentine has been a member of the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles since 1980. She served as Associate Editor of the journal Inorganic Chemistry from 1989 to 1995, and has served as Editor-in-Chief of Accounts of Chemical Research since 1994. In 2005, she was elected to the National Academy of Sc...

#1483

Michael J. Welsh

#69017

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Michael James Welsh is an American pulmonologist. He is the current Roy J. Carver Chair in Biomedical Research, the Professor of Internal Medicine in Pulmonary, Critical Care and Occupational Medicine at the Department of Internal Medicine, and the Director of Pappajohn Biomedical Institute, Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine, University of Iowa. He is also a professor at the Department of Neurosurgery, Department of Neurology, and Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics. He received the 2022 Shaw Prize in Life science and Medicine, together with Paul A. Negulescu, for ...

#1484

Ruriko Yoshida

#69062

Overall Influence

Ruriko Yoshida is a Japanese-American mathematician and statistician whose research topics have ranged from abstract mathematical problems in algebraic combinatorics to optimized camera placement in sensor networks and the phylogenomics of fungi. She works at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California as a professor of operations research. She was promoted as a rank of professor on July 1st 2023.

#1485

David Evans

#69185

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

David Evans is an American professor of geology and geophysics at Yale University. He works on quantitative reconstruction of supercontinents. He is involved in the Snowball Earth theory of Precambrian ice ages by demonstrating that the magnetic latitudes of ancient ice deposits were tropical. He is also the head of Berkeley College, one of Yale's fourteen residential colleges.

#1486

Fumiko Futamura

#69207

Overall Influence

Fumiko Futamura is a Japanese-American mathematician known for her work on the mathematics of perspective and perspective drawing. She is a professor of mathematics at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, and Lord Chair in Mathematics and Computer Science at Southwestern.

#1487

Mohamed Osman Baloola

Mohamed Osman Baloola

#69208

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (44 years)

Mohamed Osman Baloola is a Sudanese scientist and inventor who was named among The World's 500 Most influential Arabs in 2012 and 2013 for his work on diabetes. Baloola has been a teaching assistant of biomedical engineering at the Ajman University of Science and Technology since 2010. He won a science and innovation award at the Arabian Business Awards 2011, in the Amrani hotel at Burj Khalifa in Dubai. He won Dh40,000 during a Sharjah television competition for his invention of a remote monitoring and control system for diabetes patients via mobile phone.

#1488

Gerald Meyer

#69275

Overall Influence

Gerald J. Meyer is an active researcher and professor of inorganic chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was previously the Bernard N. Baker Chair In Chemistry at Johns Hopkins University. His research interests include inorganic photochemistry with emphasis on solar energy, using interfacial electron transfer processes and dye-sensitized solar cells.

#1489

Bethany Ehlmann

Bethany Ehlmann

#69317

Overall Influence

Bethany List Ehlmann is a professor of Planetary Science at California Institute of Technology and a Research Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Education and early career Ehlmann was born in Southern California and raised in Tallahassee, Florida. She received her Bachelor of Arts in 2004 from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was a Compton Fellow. During her Sophomore year, she was awarded the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and the Morris K. Udall Fellowship. She worked with Professor Raymond Arvidson on operations of the Spirit and Opportunity Mars Exploration rovers at ...

#1490

Michael Whelan

#69336

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (94 years)

Michael John Whelan HonFRMS FRS FInstP is a British scientist. Education and Career Whelan completed his PhD at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge under the supervision of Peter Hirsch. He held research posts at the University of Cambridge until 1966 when he moved to the University of Oxford. As of 2011, Whelan is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford, England, and an Emeritus Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford.

#1491

George Weinstock

George Weinstock

#69346

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

George M. Weinstock is an American geneticist and microbiologist on the faculty of The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine, where he is a professor and the associate director for microbial genomics. Before joining The Jackson Laboratory, he taught at Washington University in St. Louis and served as associate director of The Genome Institute. Previously, Dr. Weinstock was co-director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and Professor of Molecular and Human Genetics there.[1] He received his B.S. degree from the University of Michigan in 1970 and his Ph.D.

#1492

Wolfgang Fink

#69379

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Wolfgang Fink is a German-American theoretical physicist. He is currently an associate professor and the inaugural Maria & Edward Keonjian Endowed Chair of Microelectronics at the University of Arizona. Fink has joint appointments in the Departments of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Systems & Industrial Engineering, Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering, and Ophthalmology & Vision Science at the University of Arizona. He is the current Vice President of the Prognostics and Health Management Society.

#1493

George M. Murray

#69427

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

George Milton Murray is an academic in Chemistry and Material Science. He specializes in chemical analysis, sensors and molecularly imprinted polymers. Murray was born in Manchester, Tennessee. He spent a year at the University of the South before enlisting in the United States Navy. He served in the United States Navy from 1972 until 1979 achieving the rank of Machinists Mate Second Class. He received his B.A. in chemistry from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 1982 and the Ph.D. in chemistry from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 1988. He performed Post-doctoral work in the Transuranium Research Laboratory at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

#1494

Maureen Neitz

#69456

Overall Influence

Maureen E. Neitz is an American vision scientist whose research includes work on color vision and color blindness and the prevention of nearsightedness. She holds the Ray H. Hill Endowed Chair in Ophthalmology at the University of Washington.

#1495

Ernest Ambler

#69475

Overall Influence

1923 - 2017 (94 years)

Ernest Ambler was a British-American physicist who served as the Acting Under Secretary for Technology in the Department of Commerce , as director of the United States' National Bureau of Standards , and as the first director of the United States' National Institute of Standards and Technology 1988–89.

#1496

Harry Hurt

#69630

Overall Influence

1927 - 2009 (82 years)

Hugh Harrison Hurt, Jr., was an American researcher on motorcycle safety. He was the author of the 1981 Hurt Report, described as "the most comprehensive motorcycle safety study of the 20th century."

#1497

Don R. Swanson

#69672

Overall Influence

1924 - 2012 (88 years)

Don R. Swanson was an American information scientist, most known for his work in literature-based discovery in the biomedical domain. His particular method has been used as a model for further work, and is often referred to as Swanson linking. He was an investigator in the Arrowsmith System project, which seeks to determine meaningful links between Medline articles to identify previously undiscovered public knowledge. He had been professor emeritus of the University of Chicago since 1996, and remained active in a post-retirement appointment until his health began to decline in 2009.

#1498

Robert Lin

#69684

Overall Influence

1942 - 2012 (70 years)

Robert Peichung Lin was Chinese-born American astrophysicist. He was a professor and director of the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. As a pioneer of gamma-ray astronomy and of particle detection in space, his research was fundamental to the development of our knowledge in solar physics, the physics of the solar wind and of the magnetosphere. He was the principal investigator for the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager.

#1499

Norbert Pienta

#69816

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Norbert Pienta is an American chemist currently Professor at University of Georgia and editor-in-chief of American Chemical Society's Journal of Chemical Education. His current interests are browser web education research and tutorial and education in schools. He is currently retired.

#1500

John G. King

#69954

Overall Influence

1925 - 2014 (89 years)

John Gordon King was an English-born American physicist who was the Francis Friedman Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the former director of MIT’s Molecular Beam Laboratory, and the former associate director of MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions