Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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List of the most influential people

#1601

William R. Muehlberger

William R. Muehlberger

#74910

Overall Influence

1923 - 2011 (88 years)

William Rudolf "Bill" Muehlberger , Professor of Geology at University of Texas at Austin, was the geology principal investigator of both the Apollo 16 and 17 missions to the Moon, for National Aeronautics and Space Administration . He died of natural causes on September 14, 2011.

#1602

Victor Li

#75125

Overall Influence

Victor C. Li is the James R. Rice Distinguished University Professor of Engineering and the E.B. Wylie Collegiate Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Michigan. He is also Director of the Center for Low Carbon Built Environment at the University of Michigan College of Engineering. Li led the team that developed engineered cementitious composites , popularly known as "bendable concrete." Li argues EEC can increase the durability of infrastructure and reduce its carbon footprint.

#1603

Jacobo Bielak

#75131

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Jacobo Bielak is a Mexican-born earthquake engineer. Bielak was raised in Mexico City and earned his bachelor's of science degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1963. He subsequently attended Rice University in the United States, completing his master's degree in 1966, followed by a doctorate from the California Institute of Technology, graduating in 1971. Bielak taught at Carnegie Mellon University, where he was named Hamerschlag University Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and granted emeritus status upon retirement in 2018.

#1604

Kazimierz Czarnecki

#75198

Overall Influence

1916 - 2005 (89 years)

Kazimierz R. Czarnecki was an aeronautics engineer who worked for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and later, for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Bibliography Kazimierz R. Czarnecki was born in 1916 in Poland , to a Polish family. He had immigrated to the United States in an unknown year. He graduated in 1939 from the University of Alabama. He started working with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics that same year and remained through the renaming to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration until his retirement in 1978 from a position as Senior Aeronautical Research Engineer.

#1605

Larry Curtiss

#75361

Overall Influence

#1606

Kenji Satake

#75376

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Kenji Satake is a Japanese seismologist who has made significant contributions to subduction and tsunami research. Along with Brian Atwater and David Yamaguchi, Satake assembled disparate pieces of information regarding a Japanese tsunami that had no known origin. The three scientists worked together to pinpoint a date, time, and location for the 1700 Cascadia earthquake – 9p.m. on January 26, 1700 – on the Cascadia Subduction Zone off the Pacific Northwest coast of North America.

#1607

Xiao-Fan Wang

#75379

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Xiao-Fan Wang is a Chinese-American oncologist. He is the Donald and Elizabeth Cooke Professor of Cancer Research at Duke University School of Medicine. Biography Wang was born in Ürümqi, Xinjiang, China in 1955. His family moved to a village in Henan province in the 1970s, during the Cultural Revolution, his mother was imprisoned by local government for "historical questions". Wang was raised by his paternal grandmother. Before graduating from primary school, he was assigned to work as a worker in a factory for 8 years. After resuming the college entrance examination, he entered Wuhan University, majoring in biochemistry, where he graduated in 1982.

#1608

John Hershberger

#75421

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

John E. Hershberger is an American computer scientist and software professional, a principal engineer at Mentor Graphics Corporation since 1993. He is known for his research in computational geometry and algorithm engineering.

#1609

Laura Chappell

#75482

Overall Influence

Laura Chappell is an American researcher and educator. She is best known as the founder of Chappell University, Wireshark University and the WCNA Certification program . She has authored several publications on Wireshark including:Wireshark Network Analysis: the Official Wireshark Certified Network Analyst Study GuideWireshark 101: Essential Skills for Network AnalysisChappell's career began in 1989 at Novell, Inc., where she developed an interest in newly emergent Internet and networking technology. She subsequently worked as a road show presenter and course developer.

#1610

Bruce Lusignan

#75490

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (89 years)

Bruce Lusignan is an emeritus professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University and a visiting professor at Portland State University. He earned his B.S.E.E , M.S.E.E. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford. In the early 1960s, he worked in radio astronomy at Stanford. He has been director of Stanford's Communication Satellite Planning Center and Stanford's Center for International Cooperation in Space. He has also owned a small company designing cellular phones and pagers.

#1611

David Weiss

#75522

Overall Influence

David S. Weiss is an American physicist. Weiss graduated from Amherst College in 1985 with a Bachelor of Arts in physics. He earned a Ph.D. in the same subject in 1993, from Stanford University. Weiss began his teaching career at the University of California, Berkeley, and joined the Pennsylvania State University faculty in 2001, where he later became a distinguished professor. He was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2007, and the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences awarded him an equivalent honor in 2020. Weiss is the 2022 awardee of the Davisson-Germer Pr...

#1612

James C. Hone

#75542

Overall Influence

#1613

Dan Lindsley

#75598

Overall Influence

1925 - 2018 (93 years)

Dan Lindsley was an American geneticist known for his Drosophila research. Lindsley was born on October 13, 1925, and raised in California. He attended the University of Texas while serving in the United States Navy during World War II, and pursued a medical degree at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. A. B. Griffen, whom Lindsley first met in Texas, convinced him to transfer to the University of Missouri School of Medicine. There, Lindsley left medicine for biology. After earning his bachelor's and master's degree, Lindsley began doctoral study at the California Institute of Technology in 1949, and completed the program in 1952.

#1614

Bil Clemons

#75610

Overall Influence

William "Bil" Clemons, Jr. is an American structural biologist and Professor of Biochemistry at Caltech. He is best known for his work solving the atomic structure of the ribosome with dissertation advisor, Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, Venki Ramakrishnan. He is also known for his work on the structure and function of proteins involved in membrane translocation and docking of proteins, including the membrane protein translocation channel SecY, chaperones involved in the targeting of tail-anchored membrane proteins in the Get pathway, and signal recognition proteins of the Twin-arginine translocation pathway.

#1615

Barry Onouye

#75725

Overall Influence

Barry Onouye is a structural engineer, emeritus faculty member in the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington, and author of multiple textbooks on structural engineering and design.

#1616

Barbara A. Williams

#75728

Overall Influence

Barbara Ann Williams is an American radio astronomer and the first African-American woman to earn a PhD in astronomy . Her research largely focused on compact galaxy groups, in particular observations of their emissions in the H I region in order to build up a larger scale picture of the structure and evolution of galaxies. Williams was named as the Outstanding Young Woman of America in 1986 and is currently a retired Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Delaware.

#1617

Stephen Quake

#75731

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Stephen Ronald Quake is an American physicist, inventor, and entrepreneur. Education and Career Quake earned his B.S. in physics and M.S. in mathematics from Stanford in 1991 and his D.Phil. in theoretical physics from Oxford University in 1994 as a Marshall Scholar. His thesis research was in statistical mechanics and the effects of knots on polymers. He did his postdoctoral work at Stanford in single-molecule biophysics with Steven Chu. Quake joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology at the age of 26, where he rose through the ranks and was ultimately appointed the Thomas and Doris Everhart Professor of Applied Physics and Physics.

#1618

Aaron D. Ames

#75751

Overall Influence

Aaron D. Ames has been the Bren Professor of Mechanical and Civil Engineering and Control and Dynamical Systems at California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, California, since 2017. Formerly, he was an associate professor of mechanical engineering and electrical and computer engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, and an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas.

#1619

Sándor J. Kovács

Sándor J. Kovács

#75779

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Sándor J. Kovács is a Hungarian-American academic cardiologist and cardiovascular physiologist, best known for his work on the physiological dynamics of the human heart. He is a professor of medicine, physics, physiology, and biomedical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.

#1620

R. Keith Ellis

#75798

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Richard Keith Ellis, is a British theoretical physicist, working at the University of Durham, and a leading authority on perturbative quantum chromodynamics and collider phenomenology. Education Ellis graduated from the University of Oxford . He has held positions at Imperial College, MIT, Caltech, CERN and the University of Rome.

#1621

John H. Walter

#75829

Overall Influence

1927 - 2021 (94 years)

John Harris Walter was an American mathematician known for proving the Walter theorem in the theory of finite groups. Born in Los Angeles, Walter received from California Institute of Technology his bachelor's degree in 1951. He received from the University of Michigan his master's degree in 1953 and his Ph.D. in 1954 with thesis Automorphisms of the Projective Unitary Groups under the supervision of Leonard Tornheim. Walter was a visiting professor in 1960/61 and 1965/66 at the University of Chicago, 1967/68 at Harvard University, and 1972/73 at the University of Cambridge, UK. He was a prof...

#1622

William B. Bridges

William B. Bridges

#75874

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (91 years)

William B. Bridges is the Carl F Braun Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics in the Engineering and Applied Science division at the California Institute of Technology. Born in Inglewood, California, he is the discover/inventor of the Argon Ion laser, and holds the patent for the Ionized Noble Gas Laser.

#1623

David Stuart

#75876

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Sir David Ian Stuart is a Medical Research Council Professor of Structural Biology at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford where he is also a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. He is best known for his contributions to the X-ray crystallography of viruses, in particular for determining the structures of foot-and-mouth disease virus, bluetongue virus and the membrane-containing phages PRD1 and PM2. He is also director of Instruct and Life Sciences Director at Diamond Light Source.

#1624

Paul G. Comba

#75896

Overall Influence

1926 - 2017 (91 years)

Paul G. Comba was an Italian-American computer scientist, an amateur astronomer and a prolific discoverer of minor planets. He was born in Tunisia to Italian parents in 1926, and moved to Italy at a young age. Admitted to university studies at the age of 17, He attended the University of Turin . In 1946 he moved to the United States to attend Bluffton College, from which he graduated in 1947. He then attended Caltech, and completed his Ph.D. work in mathematics in 1951 . In 1951 he moved to Honolulu where he taught at the University of Hawaii until 1960.

#1625

Kenneth G. Libbrecht

Kenneth G. Libbrecht

#75922

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Kenneth G. Libbrecht is a professor of physics and department chairman at the California Institute of Technology. Biography Libbrecht received a B.S. in physics at Caltech in 1980. He was originally trained as a solar astronomer, studying under Robert Dicke at Princeton University and received his Ph.D. in 1984. However, much of his recent research has focused on the properties of ice crystals, particularly the structure of snowflakes. In addition to his professional papers, he has published several popular books illustrating the variety of snowflake forms:The Snowflake: Winter's Secret Beaut...

#1626

Heather Maynard

Heather Maynard

#75947

Overall Influence

Heather D. Maynard is the Dr Myung Ki Hong Professor in Polymer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. She works on protein-polymer conjugates and polymeric drugs. Maynard is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#1627

Vasundara Varadan

#75970

Overall Influence

Vasundara Venkatraman Varadan is a professor emeritus at University of Arkansas and a Fellow of SPIE. Her research considerers microwave sensors and new materials for solar panels. She served on the faculty at Pennsylvania State University for 22 years.

#1628

William Hawthorne

#76001

Overall Influence

1913 - 2011 (98 years)

Sir William Rede Hawthorne CBE, FRS, FREng, FIMECHE, FRAES, was a British professor of engineering who worked on the development of the jet engine. Bragg-Hawthorne equation is named after him. Life Hawthorne was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, the son of a civil engineer from Belfast. He had two younger brothers, John and Edward. He was educated at Westminster School, London, then read mathematics and engineering at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating in 1934 with a double first. He spent two years as a graduate apprentice with Babcock & Wilcox Ltd, then went to the Massachusetts In...

#1629

Allen Boozer

#76008

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Allen Boozer is an American physicist, full professor, Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University and co-recipient of the 2010 Hannes Alfvén Prize. He is noted for work in plasma physics.

#1630

Nirupa Chaudhari

#76021

Overall Influence

Nirupa Chaudhari is an American biologist who has shown that human and animal tongues have special receptors that respond to umami, the fifth taste. Chaudhari is a researcher at the University of Miami.

#1631

John Slonczewski

#76064

Overall Influence

1929 - 2019 (90 years)

John Slonczewski was an American physicist known for his work on spin dynamics in magnetic systems. Biography Slonczewski did his undergraduate education at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1950 and started his PhD on "Band structure of Graphite" at Rutgers University in 1958. He then joined the IBM Research center in Yorktown, New York as a staff researcher, where he stayed till his retirement in 2002. Slonczewski is known for his extensive theoretical study of magnetic system, in particular his applications of magnetic tunnel junctions s.

#1632

Brian Keith Tanner

Brian Keith Tanner

#76065

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Brian Keith Tanner CPhys, FRSA, FInstP, FHEA is a British physicist, currently Emeritus Professor of Physics and former Dean of Knowledge Transfer at Durham University. Early life Brian Tanner grew up in Northamptonshire, attending Wellingborough Grammar School. He studied undergraduate physics at Balliol College, University of Oxford, where he went on to graduate with a DPhil in 1971 on 'X-ray diffraction topography; methods and applications'.

#1633

James P. Eisenstein

#76266

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

James P. Eisenstein is the Frank J. Roshek Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at the physics department of California Institute of Technology. Academic career Eisenstein received a doctoral degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Since 1983 he had been member of staff at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, until in 1996 he moved to take up a professorial post at California Institute of Technology.

#1634

Yadav Pandit

#76296

Overall Influence

Dr. Yadav Pandit is a research scholar, working in the field of Experimental Nuclear Physics. Early life and education Yadav Pandit was born in Tikuri, Pyuthan District, located in the western hills of Nepal. He is the youngest child of Bhuwaneshwar Pandit and Radhika Pandit. He was educated first at Shishu Kalyan Primary School in Tikuri and then at Janata High School Bagdula, from where he graduated S.L.C. He studied science at Tribhuvan University, from where he obtained a M.Sc., and later went to the United States for further education, earning a Ph.D. degree in Experimental Nuclear Phys...

#1635

Michael Hasselmo

#76342

Overall Influence

Michael Hasselmo is an American neuroscientist and professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University. He is the director of the Center for Systems Neuroscience and is editor-in-chief of Hippocampus . Hasselmo studies oscillatory dynamics and neuromodulatory regulation in cortical mechanisms for memory guided behavior and spatial navigation using a combination of neurophysiological and behavioral experiments in conjunction with computational modeling. In addition to his peer-reviewed publications, Hasselmo wrote the book How We Remember: Brain Mechanisms of Ep...

#1636

Schelte J. Bus

#76390

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Schelte John "Bobby" Bus is an American astronomer and discoverer of minor planets at the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawaiʻi and deputy director of NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility at the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii, United States.

#1637

R. E. A. Palmer

#76408

Overall Influence

1933 - 2006 (73 years)

Robert Everett Allen Palmer II was a historian and a leading figure in the study of archaic Rome. At the time of his death was professor emeritus of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

#1638

Christopher Kochanek

#76416

Overall Influence

Christopher Kochanek is an American astronomer. He works in the fields of cosmology, gravitational lensing, and supernovae. Kochanek currently is an Ohio Eminent Scholar at Ohio State University as well as an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#1639

William K. George

#76547

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

William Kenneth George is an American-born fluid dynamicist holding both American and Swedish citizenships. He is currently senior research investigator in the Department of Aeronautics at Imperial College London. George is known for his research on both theoretical and experimental turbulence.

#1640

Janet Luhmann

#76584

Overall Influence

Janet G. Luhmann is an American physicist and senior fellow of the Space Sciences Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley. She has made major contributions to a wide range of topics in planetary, solar, magnetospheric, and heliospheric physics. She is the principal investigator of the IMPACT instrument suite on the twin-spacecraft STEREO mission. IMPACT stands for In-situ Measurements of Particles and Coronal mass ejection Transients. It consists of a, "suite of seven instruments that samples the 3-D distribution of solar wind plasma electrons, the characteristics of the solar e...

#1641

Robin Canup

#76607

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Robin M. Canup is an American astrophysicist. Her main area of research concerns the origins of planets and satellites. In 2003, Canup was awarded the Harold C. Urey Prize. In April, 2022, Canup presented the findings of the Planetary Science Decadal Survey as co-chair of the Survey Steering Committee with Philip R. Christensen.

#1642

James Lattimer

#76677

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

James Michael Lattimer is a nuclear astrophysicist who works on the dense nuclear matter equation of state and neutron stars. Career Lattimer completed his BSc in 1972 at the University of Notre Dame and his PhD in 1976 at the University of Texas at Austin. After postdocs at the University of Chicago and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in 1979 he became a professor at Stony Brook University and in 2013 became a Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy. He is an American Physical Society Fellow , and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship , a Sloan Fellowship , and the Fullam Award from Dudley Observatory .

#1643

Jesse Lowen Shearer

#76703

Overall Influence

1921 - 1992 (71 years)

Jesse Lowen Shearer was an American professor, engineer and pioneer in the field of hydraulics. Shearer obtained his Sc.D. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and as a member of their faculty for mechanical engineering he worked at Dynamic Analysis & Control Laboratory from 1950 to 1963. After then he became professor of the faculty of mechanical engineering at Pennsylvania State University until his retirement 1985. He was also a member of the Dynamic Systems and Control Division of American Society of Mechanical Engineers .

#1644

Christopher Ober

#76719

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Christopher Kemper Ober is an American/Canadian materials scientist and engineer. , he is the Francis Norwood Bard Professor of Materials Engineering at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University and Director of the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility. Among other posts at Cornell, he has served as Interim Dean of Engineering and Director of the Department of Materials Science & Engineering in the Cornell University College of Engineering . Prior to joining Cornell University, he was a researcher at the Xerox Research Centre of Canada.

#1645

Paul Palmer

#76808

Overall Influence

1926 - 2011 (85 years)

E. Paul Palmer was a Brigham Young University physicist who specialized in geophysics. He coined the term "cold fusion". However he was an early critic of Fleischmann and Pons's claims to have developed a useful method of cold fusion.

#1646

David Rodbard

#76860

Overall Influence

#1647

David Benney

#77108

Overall Influence

1930 - 2015 (85 years)

David John Benney was a New Zealand applied mathematician, known for work on the nonlinear partial differential equations of fluid dynamics. Education and early life Born in Wellington, New Zealand, on 8 April 1930 to Cecil Henry Benney and Phyllis Marjorie Jenkins, Benney was educated at Wellington College. He graduated BSc from Victoria University College in 1950, and MSc from the same institution in 1951. He then went to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, from where he graduated BA in the Mathematical Tripos in 1954. He was at Canterbury University College for two years as a lecturer, before ta...

#1648

Richard M. Myers

Richard M. Myers

#77127

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Richard M. Myers is an American geneticist and biochemist known for his work on the Human Genome Project . The National Human Genome Research Institute says the HGP “[gave] the world a resource of detailed information about the structure, organization and function of the complete set of human genes.” Myers' genome center, in collaboration with the Joint Genome Institute, contributed more than 10 percent of the data in the project.

#1649

Marios Papaefthymiou

Marios Papaefthymiou

#77147

Overall Influence

Marios Papaefthymiou is the Ted and Janice Smith Family Foundation dean of the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, United States. He previously served as chair of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2014 for contributions to the design of adiabatic circuits for high-performance computing.

#1650

David S. Heeschen

#77234

Overall Influence

1926 - 2012 (86 years)

David Sutphin Heeschen was an American radio astronomer, best known for his long and influential tenure as director of the U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory during the time that radio astronomy was transformed from a hands-on approach by a few individuals building their own instruments to a discipline with staff-supported user facilities servicing often large teams of dedicated observers.

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