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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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people

#1501

Morgan Watson

#69992

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Morgan M. Watson is an American engineer and Professor of Engineering at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In 1963, he became part of the first cohort of African American engineers to work at NASA in the Deep South, working on the Apollo 11 mission that sent the first man to the Moon.

#1502

Andrew Childs

#70040

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Andrew MacGregor Childs is an American computer scientist and physicist known for his work on quantum computing. He is currently a professor in the department of computer science and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland. He also co-directs the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, a partnership between the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

#1503

James B. Anderson

#70091

Overall Influence

1935 - 2021 (86 years)

James Bernhard Anderson was an American chemist and physicist. From 1995 to 2014 he was Evan Pugh Professor of Chemistry and Physics at the Pennsylvania State University. He specialized in Quantum Chemistry by Monte Carlo methods, molecular dynamics of reactive collisions, kinetics and mechanisms of gas phase reactions, and rare-event theory.

#1504

Robert E. Ireland

#70108

Overall Influence

1929 - 2012 (83 years)

Robert E. Ireland was an American chemist and the Thomas Jefferson Chair Professor of chemistry at the University of Virginia. He is best known for his textbook Organic Synthesis and his contributions to the Ireland–Claisen rearrangement chemical reaction.

#1505

Lee Samuel Finn

#70147

Overall Influence

Lee Samuel Finn is an American astrophysicist, former professor of physics, astronomy and astrophysics and former director of the Center for Gravitational Wave Physics at Pennsylvania State University. His research interests are in gravitational wave astronomy.

#1506

G. Michael Morris

#70157

Overall Influence

G. Michael Morris was president of the Optical Society of America in 2002. Morris received his B.S. degree with special distinction in engineering physics from the University of Oklahoma, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology.

#1507

Alfred Foster

#70200

Overall Influence

1904 - 1994 (90 years)

Alfred Leon Foster was an American mathematician. He was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley from 1934 until 1971. In 1932 he was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in Zürich. In 1934 he accepted a regular position at Berkeley. At that time Griffith Evans was Head of the Mathematics Department and was charged by President Sproul with building a first-class mathematics center, which he did. Alfred Foster and Charles Morrey were Evans' first two appointments. Except for subsequent sabbatical leaves, spent most notably in Freiburg and Tübingen, Foster served continuously at Berkele...

#1508

Ken Seddon

#70231

Overall Influence

1950 - 2018 (68 years)

Kenneth Richard Seddon was a chemist specialising in ionic liquids. Biography Seddon was born in Liverpool in 1950. He studied chemistry at Liverpool University, completing his PhD in 1973, then took up a research fellowship at the University of Oxford. In 1982 he moved to the School of Chemistry and Molecular Sciences at the University of Sussex. He left Sussex in 1993 to become chair and Director of the Queen's University Belfast, where he founded the Queen's University Ionic Liquid Laboratories Research Centre. He was also Professor Catedrático Visitante at the Instituto de Tecnologia Q...

#1509

Paul J. Coleman

#70293

Overall Influence

1932 - 2019 (87 years)

Paul J. Coleman Jr. was an American space scientist, NASA veteran, professor of space physics at the University of California, Los Angeles and founding chairman of the Girvan Institute of Technology. Coleman was also a co-founder of JumpStartFund, an online crowdsourcing platform.

#1510

Stephanie Wehner

#70423

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (48 years)

Stephanie Dorothea Christine Wehner is a German physicist and computer scientist. She is the Roadmap Leader of the Quantum Internet and Networked Computing initiative at QuTech, Delft University of Technology. She is also known for introducing the noisy-storage model in quantum cryptography. Wehner's research focuses mainly on quantum cryptography and quantum communications.

#1511

Arthur Komar

#70427

Overall Influence

1931 - 2011 (80 years)

Arthur Baraway Komar was a theoretical physicist, specializing in general relativity and helping to develop the canonical approach to quantum gravity. Arthur Komar made a significant contribution to physics as an educator, research scientist, and administrator. He had wide interests in numerous other subjects, and his friends knew him as a renaissance man.

#1512

Asantha Cooray

#70439

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (52 years)

Asantha R. Cooray is a professor and a chancellor's fellow at University of California, Irvine, California, US, and a member of the research faculty at the California Institute of Technology. His research expertise is in the field of space science, cosmology, astrophysics and is a member of several space-based and NASA sounding rocket experiments and instrumentation aimed at understanding the early universe, first stars, and galaxies. He is a member of the ESA's Herschel Space Observatory-SPIRE Instrument Team and several NASA astrophysics missions planned for this decade, including the Inflation Probe.

#1513

Ila Fiete

#70496

Overall Influence

Ila Fiete is an Indian–American physicist and computational neuroscientist as well as a Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences within the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fiete builds theoretical models and analyses neural data and to uncover how neural circuits perform computations and how the brain represents and manipulates information involved in memory and reasoning.

#1514

Terri S. Armstrong

Terri S. Armstrong

#70553

Overall Influence

Terri S. Armstrong is an American scientist and nurse practitioner. She is a senior investigator in the Center for Cancer Research Neuro-Oncology Branch of the National Cancer Institute. Armstrong held the Dunn Distinguished Professorship in Oncology Nursing at UTHealth Jane and Robert Cizik School of Nursing.

#1515

Gary W. Cox

#70635

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Gary W. Cox , born in Maryland, is a political scientist, the William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He qualified as a Ph.D., California Institute of Technology, in 1983, was elected a Guggenheim Fellow in 1995, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005.

#1516

Robert West

#70695

Overall Influence

1928 - 2022 (94 years)

Robert Culbertson West Jr. was an American chemist. West was an E. G. Rochow Professor of Chemistry Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison; Director of the Organosilicon Research Center, University of Wisconsin–Madison 1999–20??; President, Silatronix, Inc. ; Distinguished Professor, Yonsei University, 2007–2011. He died in Madison, Wisconsin on October 12, 2022, at the age of 94.

#1517

Ronald Greeley

#70706

Overall Influence

1939 - 2011 (72 years)

Ronald Greeley was a Regents’ Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University , the Director of the NASA-ASU Regional Planetary Image Facility , and Principal Investigator of the Planetary Aeolian Laboratory at NASA-Ames Research Center. He was involved with lunar and planetary studies since 1967 and most recently focused his research on understanding planetary surface processes and geologic histories.

#1518

Lila Gierasch

#70721

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Lila Mary Gierasch is an American biochemist and biophysicist. At present, she is a distinguished Professor working on "protein folding in the cell" in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the College of Natural Sciences, University of Massachusetts—Amherst.

#1519

Christopher Chang

#70776

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (51 years)

Christopher J. Chang is a professor of chemistry and of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the Class of 1942 Chair. Chang is also a member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, adjunct professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco, and faculty scientist at the chemical sciences division of Lawrence Berkeley Lab. He is the recipient of several awards for his research in bioinorganic chemistry, molecular and chemical biology.

#1520

Donald Voet

#70900

Overall Influence

1938 - 2023 (85 years)

Donald Herman Voet was an American biochemist who was emeritus associate professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. His laboratory used x-ray crystallography to understand structure-function relationships in proteins. He and his wife, Judith G. Voet, are authors of biochemistry text books that are widely used in undergraduate and graduate curricula.

#1521

George Wallerstein

#70974

Overall Influence

1930 - 2021 (91 years)

George Wallerstein was an American astronomer who researched the chemical composition of stellar atmospheres. The son of German immigrants, he was raised in New York City during the Great Depression. In school he developed an interest in boxing and won the senior class boxing award. He graduated from Brown University in 1951 before receiving his M.S. and Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology. He served in the Navy during the Korean War, then, after teaching at the University of California, joined the astronomy department of the University of Washington in 1965. In March 1998, he retired from the University and was appointed Professor Emeritus.

#1522

Ben Klemens

#70979

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (50 years)

Ben Klemens is an Australian economist, author, and co-host of the podcast 'Pod, Paper, Scissors'. He works for the US Treasury Department and was previously a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center on Social and Economic Dynamics. He holds a PhD in Social Sciences from Caltech.

#1523

Grigoriy Yablonsky

Grigoriy Yablonsky

#71038

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Grigoriy Yablonsky is an expert in the area of chemical kinetics and chemical engineering, particularly in catalytic technology of complete and selective oxidation, which is one of the main driving forces of sustainable development.

#1524

Duane D. Johnson

#71056

Overall Influence

#1525

Fotios Zaharoglou

#71060

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Fotios Zaharoglou is a Greek computer scientist. He received his Diploma in Electrical Engineering from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 1986, his MS in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1987, and his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego in 1993. His work on the applications of topology to the theory of distributed computing along with Maurice Herlihy, Michael Saks and Nir Shavit, was awarded the 2004 Gödel Prize.

#1526

John R. Mascola

#71129

Overall Influence

John R. Mascola is an American physician-scientist, immunologist and infectious disease specialist. He was the director of the Vaccine Research Center , part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases , National Institutes of Health . He also served as a principal advisor to Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID, on vaccines and biomedical research affairs. Mascola is the current Chief Scientific Officer for ModeX Therapeutics.

#1527

Boris Kayser

#71218

Overall Influence

Boris Jules Kayser is an American theoretical physicist. He specializes in the study of neutrinos. He worked at the National Science Foundation for nearly thirty years before joining the US government research facility Fermilab. He retired from Fermilab in 2012. For five years, he was the editor of the peer-reviewed journal the Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science.

#1528

Hillard Bell Huntington

#71297

Overall Influence

1910 - 1992 (82 years)

Hillard Bell Huntington was a physicist who first proposed, in 1935, that hydrogen could occur in a metallic state. He is also known for his work on the electromigration of atoms, which later became an important consideration in semiconductor electronics.

#1529

Michael Bühl

#71308

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Michael Bühl is a professor of Computational and Theoretical Chemistry in the School of Chemistry, University of St. Andrews. He has published work on the performance of various density functionals, modelling thermal and medium effects, transition-metal NMR of metalloenzymes, modelling of homogeneous catalysis, and molecular dynamics of transition metal complexes.

#1530

Adam J. Matzger

#71314

Overall Influence

Adam J. Matzger, a researcher in polymers and crystals, is the Charles G. Overberger Collegiate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Michigan. Biography Matzger is a native of Piedmont, California but moved to Ohio to complete his undergraduate career at Oberlin College, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry in 1992. From there he moved back to California for his graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley where he studied under Professor Peter C. Vollhardt. In 1997 he earned his Ph. D. degree with a thesis titled "Synthetic, Theoretical, and Struct...

#1531

Azita Emami

#71324

Overall Influence

Azita Emami-Neyestanak is the Andrew and Peggy Cherng Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering at Caltech. Emami works on low-power mixed-mode circuits in scalable technologies. She is Executive Officer of the Department of Electrical Engineering and an investigator in the Heritage Medical Research Institute.

#1532

Robert Coombe

#71383

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Robert Coombe is a chemist and an educator. He has been a faculty member at the University of Denver since 1981. From 2005 until 2014 he was chancellor. Education and Work Background Robert Coombe was born in 1948 in Kansas City, Missouri, lived in Colorado for the majority of his life. He graduated in 1970 at Williams College, and in 1973 with a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. Coombe then was a postdoctorate at the University of Toronto, and later worked at Rockwell International in California for seven years as a researcher.

#1533

Jay Hauser

#71494

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

#1534

Thomas K. Caughey

#71523

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (98 years)

Thomas Kirk Caughey is a Scottish-born academic who served as a professor of applied mechanics. Thomas K. Caughey Dynamics Award is named after him. Biography Born in Rutherglen, Scotland, Caughey graduated with a bacelor's degree from the University of Glasgow. Later, he moved to the United States as a Fulbright scholar and attended Cornell University. In 1954, he completed his PhD from Caltech.

#1535

Arnold Beck

#71593

Overall Influence

1916 - 1997 (81 years)

Arnold Hugh William Beck was a British scientist and electrical engineer, a specialist in plasma and microwaves, Professor of Engineering in the University of Cambridge. Early life and education The younger son of Major Hugh Beck and Diana L. Beck, the young Beck was educated at Gresham's School, Holt, and University College, London, where he graduated BSc Eng. His old college elected him to a Fellowship in 1979.

#1536

John Fincham

#71682

Overall Influence

1926 - 2005 (79 years)

John Robert Stanley Fincham FRS FRSE was a noted British geneticist who made important contributions to biochemical genetics and microbial genetics. Education and personal life Fincham was a son of Robert Fincham and Winifred Emily Western . His father was a self-employed Hertfordshire nurseryman, through whom Fincham developed his interest in botany. He was educated at Hertford Grammar School, then at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read Natural Sciences. He earned his PhD in the Botany School at Cambridge and then did a year's postgraduate research at the California Institute of Technology...

#1537

Heidi Thornquist

#71749

Overall Influence

Heidi Krista Thornquist is an American applied mathematician at Sandia National Laboratories known for her work on the Trilinos system of software for scientific computing. Her research interests include numerical linear algebra and electronic circuit simulation.

#1538

Bruno Reversade

#71966

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (47 years)

Bruno Reversade is an American human geneticist and developmental biologist . He is a Director of the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Genome Institute of Singapore at A*STAR and holds several faculty positions at other universities. Reversade is known for identifying mutated genes that cause Mendelian diseases, for his research on the genetics of identical twins and for the characterizations of novel hormones.

#1539

Samuel Williamson

#72052

Overall Influence

1939 - 2005 (66 years)

Samuel J. Williamson was an American physicist and neuroscientist. Williamson was a co-developer of magnetic source imaging , and used this technique throughout his life to visualize and study brain activity especially as it relates to vision and hearing. He published over 100 articles in the fields of biomagnetism and neuroscience. He received both his bachelor's degree in physics and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , in 1961 and 1965 respectively. Dr. Williamson started his professional career at MIT's Francis Bitter National Magnet Laboratory as a staff scientist, and remained there until 1971 when he joined the physics department at New York University .

#1540

Ma Chung-pei

#72089

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Ma Chung-pei is an astrophysicist and cosmologist. She is the Judy Chandler Webb Professor of Astronomy and Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. She led the teams that discovered several of largest known black holes from 2011 to 2016.

#1541

Andrew W. Murray

#72121

Overall Influence

Andrew W. Murray is a British-born American evolutionary biologist known for his research on budding yeast. He is the Herchel Smith Professor of Molecular Genetics and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor at Harvard University. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2014.

#1542

Raymond Chiao

#72143

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Raymond Y. Chiao is an American physicist best known for his experimental work in quantum optics. He is currently an emeritus faculty member at the University of California, Merced physics department, where he is conducting research on gravitational radiation in collaboration with Prof. Jay Sharping.

#1543

Yuk L. Yung

#72155

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Yuk-ling Yung is an American scientist who has been a Professor of Planetary Science at the California Institute of Technology from 1986 to present. Biography Education He was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, earning B.S. in Engineering Physics, with honors, and at Harvard University, acquiring a Ph.D. in Physics in 1974.

#1544

Charles Edward Stevens

#72204

Overall Influence

1927 - 2008 (81 years)

Dr. Charles Edward "Ed" Stevens was an American scientist, professor, and veterinarian. An internationally recognized expert in the field of comparative physiology and digestive systems, Dr. Stevens was responsible for over 70 publications including text books used in Veterinary Schools worldwide, including Comparative Physiology of the Vertebrate Digestive System.

#1545

Lisa C. Klein

#72233

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Lisa C. Klein is an American engineer. She is a distinguished professor of engineering at Rutgers University in New Jersey. In 1977, she became the first female faculty member in the Rutgers School of Engineering. She is the director of the graduate program in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

#1546

James M. Berger

#72270

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

James Michael Berger is an American academic working as a professor of biophysics and biophysical chemistry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he is also the co-director of the Cancer Chemical and Structural Biology Program at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center and the director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences. His main area of research is the functions of molecular cellular machinery.

#1547

Jessie Christiansen

Jessie Christiansen

#72337

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Jessie Christiansen is an Australian astrophysicist working at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology . She won the 2018 NASA Exceptional Engineering Achievement Medal for her work on the Kepler planet sample.

#1548

Harold Weitzner

#72359

Overall Influence

Harold Weitzner is an American applied mathematician and physicist whose primary research is plasma physics. He is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and has served as Director of the Magneto-Fluid Dynamics Division at Courant since 1981, succeeding Harold Grad. He has published over 120 research articles on the topics of plasma physics, magnetohydrodynamics, fluid mechanics, fractional equations and kinetics, and chaos.

#1549

Michael Ortiz

#72369

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Michael Ortiz is a dual American-Spanish scientist and researcher in the fields of structural, continuum and computational mechanics and is a Frank and Ora Lee Marble Professor Emeritus of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering at California Institute of Technology. Prior to his arrival at Caltech in 1995, he was Professor of Engineering at Brown University.

#1550

David Comer

#72370

Overall Influence

David J. Comer received the BSEE degree from San Jose State University, the MSEE degree from the University of California, Berkeley and the PhD from Washington State University. He spent five years with IBM's Advanced Systems Development Division working in the automatic speech recognition area and the automated warehousing area. Doctor Comer's academic career began as an assistant professor at the University of Idaho in 1964. He moved to the University of Calgary as an associate professor in 1966 and then to California State University, Chico in 1969 as a professor and dean of the engineering program.

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