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

#1551

Terry Gaasterland

Terry Gaasterland

#72437

Overall Influence

Theresa Gaasterland is an American politician and scientist. She is a Professor of Computational Biology and Genomics and Director of the Scripps Genome Center at the University of California, San Diego . She was elected a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology in 2018 for outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics.

#1552

C. Dianne Martin

#72446

Overall Influence

Carol Dianne Briggs Martin is an American computer scientist, former Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs at George Washington University and first Senior Faculty Fellow of the North Carolina Study Center. She currently teaches at the University of North Carolina Department of Computer Science and the School of Information and Library Sciences.

#1553

Emanuel Kamber

#72461

Overall Influence

Emanuel Yousif Kamber is an Assyrian physics professor at Western Michigan University and was the Secretary General of the Assyrian Universal Alliance. He was born in the small Assyrian village of Darbandokeh in Iraq.

#1554

Forrest S. Mozer

#72477

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (96 years)

Forrest S. Mozer is an American experimental physicist, inventor, and entrepreneur known best for his pioneering work on electric field measurements in space plasma and for development of solid state electronic speech synthesizers and speech recognizers.

#1555

Richard McGehee

#72488

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Richard Paul McGehee is an American mathematician, who works on dynamical systems with special emphasis on celestial mechanics. McGehee received from Caltech in 1964 his bachelor's degree and from University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1965 his master's degree and in 1969 his Ph.D. under Charles C. Conley with thesis Homoclinic orbits in the restricted three body problem. As a postdoc he was at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. In 1970 he became an assistant professor and in 1979 a full professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he was from...

#1556

Frederick Nelson

#72496

Overall Influence

1932 - 2009 (77 years)

Frederick Nelson was professor emeritus of mechanical engineering at Tufts University School of Engineering in Medford, Massachusetts, USA. His areas of professional interest included acoustics, vibration, shock and rotordynamics. He wrote or co-authored more than 50 articles in professional publications. He wrote a monograph entitled An Introduction to Rotordynamics which was published posthumously by SAVIAC. Professor Nelson graduated from the Tufts College of Engineering in 1954 and received his Ph.D. in applied mechanics from Harvard University in 1961. He joined the Tufts faculty in 1955.

#1557

Brian E. Henderson

#72505

Overall Influence

1937 - 2015 (78 years)

#1558

Tso-Ping Ma

#72540

Overall Influence

1945 - 2021 (76 years)

Tso-Ping Ma was a Chinese-American electronic engineer and professor of electrical engineering and applied physics at Yale University, USA. Early life Tso-Ping Ma was born in Lanzhou, China in 1945, but relocated to Taiwan to escape the Chinese Civil War. After graduating from National Taiwan University in 1968, he moved to live and study in the United States. He completed his Ph.D. degree from Yale University in 1974.

#1559

Abraham Kupfer

#72592

Overall Influence

Abraham "Avi" Kupfer is an Israeli American professor of cell biology, and the co-director of immunobiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Kupfer discovered the immunological synapse at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver. He first presented his findings during a Keystone Symposia in 1995, when he showed three-dimensional images of immune cells interacting with one another. His main focus is on teaching and studying the mechanisms of inter- and intra-cellular communication in the immune system.

#1560

Meenakshi Wadhwa

#72639

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Meenakshi Wadhwa is a planetary scientist and educator who studies the formation and evolution of the Solar System through the analysis of planetary materials including meteorites, Moon rocks and other extraterrestrial samples returned by spacecraft missions. She is director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University.

#1561

Robert G. Griffin

#72640

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

Robert Guy Griffin is a Professor of Chemistry and director of the Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He is known for his work in nuclear magnetic resonance and developing high-field dynamic nuclear polarisation for the study of biological solids. He has contributed many different methods and approaches now widely used in solid-state NMR spectroscopy, in particular in context of magic-angle-spinning NMR. For example, this extends to methods for resolution enhancement via heteronuclear decoupling, as well as techniques for polarisation transfer betwe...

#1562

Thomas Prince

#72687

Overall Influence

Dr. Thomas A. Prince is the Ira S. Bowen Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology and holds a joint appointment with Caltech’s NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a senior research scientist. Between May 2001 and June 2006, Prince was the chief scientist at JPL. He is currently the director and Allen V.C. Davis and Lenabelle Davis Leadership Chair for the W. M. Keck Institute for Space Studies at Caltech.

#1563

Robert Finn

#72689

Overall Influence

1922 - 2022 (100 years)

Robert Samuel Finn was an American mathematician. Early life and education Finn was born in Buffalo, New York. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a PhD in mathematics from Syracuse University. Studying under Abe Gelbart, Finn completed a thesis titled On some properties of the solution of a class of non-linear partial differential equations.

#1564

Ryszard Syski

#72778

Overall Influence

1924 - 2007 (83 years)

Ryszard Syski was a Polish-American mathematician whose research was in queueing theory. During World War II he was in the Armia Krajowa with his parents, partaking in the Warsaw uprising, being imprisoned in Lamsdorf, Silesia and Bavaria , and joining the Polish Second Corps for fights in Italy .

#1565

Ursula Hamenstädt

Ursula Hamenstädt

#72972

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Ursula Hamenstädt is a German mathematician who works as a professor at the University of Bonn. Her primary research subject is differential geometry. Education and career Hamenstädt earned her PhD from the University of Bonn in 1986, under the supervision of Wilhelm Klingenberg. Her dissertation, Zur Theorie der Carnot-Caratheodory Metriken und ihren Anwendungen [The theory of Carnot–Caratheodory metrics and their applications], concerned the theory of sub-Riemannian manifolds.

#1566

Stanley S. Ballard

#72981

Overall Influence

1908 - 1998 (90 years)

Stanley S. Ballard was an American physicist, specializing in optics. He was president of the Optical Society of America in 1963 and of the American Association of Physics Teachers during 1968–69. In 1986 he was awarded the Oersted Medal. During World War II, Ballard served as a Commander in the United States Navy. From 1956 to 1959 he was the President of the International Commission for Optics.

#1567

Scott Sandford

#73043

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (60 years)

Scott Sandford is an American astronomer and NASA scientist. He has studied meteorites and other specimens that travel through outer space. Sandford has also written for the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research.

#1568

Douglas C. Rees

#73114

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Douglas Charles "Doug" Rees is an American biochemist, biophysicist, and structural biologist. Rees graduated from Yale University with a bachelor's degree in 1974 and received a PhD in biophysics from Harvard University in 1980. In 1982 he went to the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1989, he became a professor of chemistry at Caltech. There he is Roscoe Gilkey Dickinson Professor and Dean of graduate studies. From 1997 onwards, he has been an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He served as the editor or co-editor of the Annual Review of Biophysics and Biomolecul...

#1569

Christopher Conselice

Christopher Conselice

#73145

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (51 years)

Christopher J. Conselice is an astrophysicist who is Professor of Extragalactic Astronomy at the University of Manchester. Background Conselice grew up in Neptune Beach, Florida and graduated from Stanton College Preparatory School. Conselice received his bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Chicago in 1996 and his PhD in astronomy from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2001 where he was a student of John S. Gallagher. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the Space Science Telescope Institute and later a National Science Foundation Fellow at the California Institute of Technology where he led the Palomar Observatory Wide-Field Infrared Survey .

#1570

Richard M. Noyes

#73159

Overall Influence

1919 - 1997 (78 years)

Richard Macy Noyes was an American physical chemist. Family Noyes was born April 6, 1919, in Champaign, Illinois, to the American chemist William Noyes and his third wife Katherine Macy, daughter of Jesse Macy. His older half-brother was Albert and his brother Pierre ; both were chemists.

#1571

Sally Oey

#73185

Overall Influence

Dr. Sally Oey is an American astronomer at the University of Michigan and an expert in massive, hot stars which are often precursors to supernovae. In 1999, she was awarded the Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy by the American Astronomical Society and, in 2006, was invited to give an address to the 206th meeting of the AAS. Oey is currently a professor and is a member of the board of the Gemini Observatory.

#1572

Chris Mack

#73216

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Chris Mack is an expert in photolithography. He received multiple undergraduate degrees from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in 1982, a master of science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1989, and a PhD in chemical engineering from The University of Texas in 1998.

#1573

Stanley Watson

#73227

Overall Influence

Stanley J. Watson Jr. is a neuroscientist whose research focuses on regulation by the central nervous system of behavior in the brains of individuals with severe mental illness. He is the co-director of the Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Institute with Huda Akil and the Ralph Waldo Gerard Professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at the University of Michigan. He is also the co-director of the University of Michigan node of the Pritzker Neuropsychiatric Disorders Research Consortium.

#1574

Jack Lutz

#73242

Overall Influence

Jack Lutz is an American theoretical computer scientist best known for developing the concepts of resource bounded measure and effective dimension; he has also published research on DNA computing and self-assembly. He is a professor of computer science and mathematics at Iowa State University.

#1575

Bradley Nelson

#73253

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Bradley James Nelson is an American roboticist and entrepreneur. He has been the Professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH Zurich since 2002 and is known for his research in microrobotics, nanorobotics, and medical robotics.

#1576

Chiara Daraio

#73289

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (47 years)

Chiara Daraio is an Italian-American materials scientist and acoustical engineer. She is the G. Bradford Jones Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics at the California Institute of Technology.

#1577

Maurice W. Long

Maurice W. Long

#73304

Overall Influence

1925 - Present (100 years)

Maurice W. Long was an American electrical engineer, radar engineer, and physicist. He served as director of the Georgia Tech Research Institute from 1968 to 1975. He worked as a part-time radar consultant, principal research engineer at GTRI and adjunct professor of electrical engineering at Southern Polytechnic State University.

#1578

Jonathan How

#73413

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Jonathan P. How is a Canadian-American astrophysicist and aeronautical engineer currently the Richard Cockburn Maclaurin Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and editor-in-chief of the IEEE Control Systems Magazine, also previously a Davis Faculty Scholar at Stanford University. His current concerns are technology systems engineering and space engineering.

#1579

Niles Pierce

#73494

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (54 years)

Niles A. Pierce is an American mathematician, bioengineer, and professor at the California Institute of Technology. He is a leading researcher in the fields of molecular programming and dynamic nucleic acid nanotechnology. His research is focused on kinetically controlled DNA and RNA self-assembly. Pierce is working on applications in bioimaging.

#1580

Sunney Chan

#73527

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (89 years)

Sunney Ignatius Chan is an American-born biophysical chemist. His work primarily focused on the use of various magnetic resonance spectroscopic and other physical chemical techniques in the analysis of various biochemical and biological problems.

#1581

Richard Stratt

#73632

Overall Influence

Richard Stratt is an American chemist and physicist, currently the Newport Rogers Professor and also formerly the Harrison S. Kravis Professor from 1999 to 2000, at Brown University, focusing with theoretical chemistry, molecular dynamics in liquids and ultrafast spectroscopy.

#1582

Lawrence A Loeb

#73708

Overall Influence

#1583

Shana O. Kelley

#73776

Overall Influence

Shana O. Kelley is a scientist and Neena B. Schwartz Professor of Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern University. She is affiliated with Northwestern's International Institute for Nanotechnology and was previously part of the University of Toronto's Faculty of Pharmacy and Faculty of Medicine. Kelley's research includes the development of new technologies for clinical diagnostics and drug delivery. In 2023, she was chosen as president of Chicago's new Chan Zuckerberg Biohub.

#1584

Medhat Haroun

#73803

Overall Influence

1951 - 2012 (61 years)

Medhat Haroun was an Egyptian-American expert on earthquake engineering. He wrote more than 300 technical papers and received the Charles Martin Duke Lifeline Earthquake Engineering Award and the Walter Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize from the American Society of Civil Engineers.

#1585

Geoffrey W. Coates

#74037

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Geoffrey "Geoff" William Coates is an American chemist and the Tisch University Professor in the department of chemistry and chemical biology at Cornell University. Early life and education Coates was born in 1966 in Evansville, Indiana. He received a B.A. degree in chemistry from Wabash College in 1989. He entered graduate school at Stanford University where he worked with Robert M. Waymouth as a Hertz Fellow. His thesis work investigated the stereoselectivity of metallocene-based Ziegler-Natta catalysts. He was awarded a Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 1994. Coates then was a NSF Postdoctoral Fellow with Robert H.

#1586

Winston Patrick Kuo

#74061

Overall Influence

Winston Patrick Kuo is a Chinese-American computational biologist who specializes in utilizing translational technologies to solve biomedical related issues. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Developmental Biology at Harvard School of Dental Medicine and Director of the Laboratory for Innovative Translational Technologies.

#1587

George Seligman

#74078

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (98 years)

George Benham Seligman is an American mathematician who works on Lie algebras, especially semi-simple Lie algebras. Biography Seligman received his bachelor's degree in 1950 from the University of Rochester and his PhD in 1954 from Yale University under Nathan Jacobson with thesis Lie algebras of prime characteristic. After he received his PhD he was a Henry Burchard Fine Instructor at Princeton University from 1954–1956. In 1956 he became an instructor and from 1965 a full professor at Yale, where he was chair of the mathematics department from 1974 to 1977.

#1588

Edmund Bertschinger

#74142

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Edmund Bertschinger is an American theoretical astrophysicist and cosmologist and professor of physics at MIT. Career Bertschinger received his bachelor's degree in physics from Caltech in 1979, and his Ph.D. degree in astrophysical science from Princeton University in 1984. He held postdoctoral positions at the University of Virginia and UC Berkeley, then went to MIT as an assistant professor of physics in 1986 becoming a full professor in 1996. He served as head of the physics department from 2007 to 2013 and currently serves as the Institute Community and Equity Officer. He has served on various committees promoting women and minorities in astronomy and physics.

#1589

Irving P. Krick

#74244

Overall Influence

1906 - 1996 (90 years)

Irving P. Krick was an American meteorologist and inventor, the founding professor of Department of Meteorology at California Institute of Technology , one of the U.S. Air Force meteorologists who provided forecasts for the Normandy Landings in 1944, a controversial pioneer of long-term forecasting and cloud seeding, and "a brilliant American salesman" who in 1938 started the first private weather business in the United States.

#1590

Eric V. Anslyn

#74254

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Eric V. Anslyn is an American chemist , University Distinguished Teaching Professor, and Welch Regents Chair in Chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin. He previously held the Norman Hackerman Professorship. Anslyn is co-author of Modern Physical Organic Chemistry, an introductory graduate textbook.

#1591

Marjorie Clarke

#74278

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Marjorie J. "Maggie" Clarke is an American environmental scientist who specializes in recycling participation, waste prevention methods, waste-to-energy/incinerator emissions controls, environmental impacts of the World Trade Center fires and collapse, and community botanical gardening. Since the September 11, 2001 attacks she has focused on increasing participation in New York City's waste prevention and recycling programs.

#1592

Sindee Simon

#74340

Overall Influence

Sindee Lou Simon is an American chemical engineer and polymer physicist who studies the glass transition, thermosetting polymers, and nanoconfinement. Her research has included studies of ancient amber, showing that unlike liquids glass does not flow. She is the head of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at North Carolina State University.

#1593

Oscar Bruno

#74399

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Oscar P. Bruno is Professor of Applied & Computational Mathematics in the Computing and Mathematical Sciences Department at the California Institute of Technology. He is known for research on numerical analysis.

#1594

Giuseppe Longo

#74457

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Giuseppe Longo is an Italian mathematician, epistemologist, theoretical biologist, author, and academic. He is the Research Director Emeritus at Centre national de la recherche scientifique at the Cavaillès interdisciplinary center of École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

#1595

Joy Crisp

#74497

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Joy A. Crisp is a planetary geologist specializing in Mars geology. She is noted for her work on NASA missions to Mars, including the Mars Exploration Rovers and Mars Science Laboratory. Early life and education Crisp was born in Colorado Springs, CO. She earned a bachelor's degree in geology from Carleton College in 1979, and both a Master's and a PhD from Princeton University. Subsequently, Crisp was a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA for more than two years. Her studies involved investigating rocks from the Canary Islands under conditions similar to those within volcanoes.

#1596

Berend Smit

#74504

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

#1597

Alan S. Goldman

#74522

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Alan S. Goldman is an American chemist and Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Rutgers University. He is a winner of the ACS Catalysis Lectureship for the Advancement of Catalytic Science, and received the ACS Award in Organometallic Chemistry in 2019 and the Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2020. In 2021 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Goldman's research has focused on reactions of small molecules catalyzed by transition metal complexes, and the mechanisms of relevant reactions.

#1598

Mark Meier

#74590

Overall Influence

1925 - 2012 (87 years)

Mark F. Meier was an American glaciologist who was considered a leading expert on the study of rising sea levels due to the melting of glaciers. Meier was the Director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research from 1985 to 1994 and remained the institute's director emeritus until his death in 2012. He was also a professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder.

#1599

Rebecca Fitzgerald

#74695

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Rebecca Clare Fitzgerald is a British medical researcher whose work focuses on the early detection and treatment of oesophageal cancers. She is a tenured Professor of Cancer Prevention and Program Leader at the Medical Research Council Cancer Unit of the University of Cambridge. In addition to her professorship, Fitzgerald is currently the Director of Medical Studies for Trinity College, Cambridge, where she is also a Fellow. She is also an Honorary Consultant in Gastroenterology and General Medicine at Cambridge's Addenbrooke's Hospital. She is also the co-leader of the CRUK Cambridge Insti...

#1600

C. Bradley Moore

#74785

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (86 years)

Charles Bradley Moore is an American chemist and research administrator. His research focused on the application of lasers to understand the behavior and reaction dynamics of energized molecules and energy transfer between molecules. He is currently professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, where he had a long career as a faculty member actively engaged in research . While at UC Berkeley, Moore also served in several administrative roles, including chair of the department of chemistry , dean of the college of chemistry , and director of the chemical sciences division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory .

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