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

#1651

Megan Schwamb

#77248

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (41 years)

Megan E. Schwamb is an American astronomer and planetary scientist, and lecturer at Queen's University, Belfast. Schwamb has discovered and co-discovered several trans-Neptunian objects, and is involved with Citizen science projects such as Planet Four and Planet Hunters.

#1652

Ronald A. Roy

#77251

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Ronald A. Roy is an American engineer, physicist, and academic, who is an expert in physical acoustics and its applications to ultrasonics, biomedical acoustics, acousto-optics, cavitation, and bubble swarm acoustics.

#1653

Donald B. Campbell

#77266

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

Donald B. Campbell is an Australian-born astronomer and Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University. Prior to joining the Cornell faculty he was Director of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico for seven years. Campbell's research work is in the general area of planetary studies with a concentration on the radio-wavelength-scattering properties of planets, planetary satellites, and small bodies. His work includes studies of Venus, the Moon, the Galilean satellites of Jupiter, Titan, as well as comets and asteroids. Campbell observed near-Earth asteroid 433 Eros, which was the first astero...

#1654

Amanda Hendrix

#77308

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Amanda R. Hendrix is an American planetary scientist known for her pioneering studies of solar system bodies at ultraviolet wavelengths. She is a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. Her research interests include moon and asteroid surface composition, space weathering effects and radiation products. She is a co-investigator on the Cassini UVIS instrument, was a co-investigator on the Galileo UVS instrument, is a Participating Scientist on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter LAMP instrument and is a Principal Investigator on Hubble Space Telescope observing programs. As of 2019, ...

#1655

Erin Schuman

#77326

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Erin Margaret Schuman, born May 15, 1963, in California, US, is a neurobiologist who studies neuronal synapses. She is currently a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research. Career Erin Schuman attended the University of Southern California , where she received her B.A. in Psychology . She continued her education to obtain a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Princeton University . She conducted postdoctoral research from 1990–1993 in Daniel V. Madison’s lab in the Molecular and Cellular Physiology Department at Stanford University. From there, Schuman was recruited to join the faculty i...

#1656

Viviana Gradinaru

Viviana Gradinaru

#77419

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (44 years)

Viviana Grădinaru is a Romanian-American neuroscientist who is a Professor of Neuroscience and Biological Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. She develops neurotechnologies including optogenetics CLARITY tissue clearing, and gene delivery vectors. She has been awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and the National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award. In 2019 she was a finalist for the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists. In 2020 she was awarded a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science by the Vilcek Foundation.

#1657

Alan Carlin

#77421

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

Alan Carlin , is an American economist specializing in cost-benefit analysis and the economics of global climate change control. Education Carlin earned a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology.

#1658

Kenneth Young

#77519

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Kenneth Young is a professor of physics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong . He obtained his BSc in Physics in 1969, and his PhD in Physics and Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology, USA. He took a position at CUHK in 1973, and embarked on a highly regarded career as a theoretical physicist. He has produced extensive research in elementary particles, field theory, high energy phenomenology and dissipative systems. Young has contributed greatly to the development of higher education in Hong Kong, administering grants, educational program development, and worked to develop b...

#1659

Dell K. Allen

#77535

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (94 years)

Dell K. Allen is an American engineer, and Professor Emeritus of manufacturing engineering at Brigham Young University . The Society of Manufacturing Engineers named their Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award after him.

#1660

Leigh Royden

#77595

Overall Influence

Leigh "Wiki" H. Royden is an American Geologist. Early life Royden was born in Palo Alto, California. Royden's father was Halsey Royden, a mathematician. Education Royden received an A.B. degree in physics from Harvard University and a PhD in geology and geophysics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .

#1661

Erika Hamden

#77763

Overall Influence

Erika Tobiason Hamden is an American astrophysicist and assistant professor at the University of Arizona and Steward Observatory. Her research focuses on developing ultraviolet detector technology, ultraviolet–visible spectroscopy instrumentation and spectroscopy, and galaxy evolution. She served as the project scientist and project manager of a UV multi-object spectrograph, FIREBall-2, that is designed to observe the circumgalactic medium . She is a 2019 TED fellow.

#1662

Wallace D. Hayes

#77821

Overall Influence

1918 - 2001 (83 years)

Wallace Dean Hayes was a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University and one of the world's leading theoretical aerodynamicists, whose numerous and fundamental contributions to the theories of supersonic and hypersonic flow and wave motion strongly influenced the design of aircraft at supersonic speeds and missiles at hypersonic speeds. This greatly enhanced the development of supersonic flight and supersonic aircraft design.

#1663

Elizabeth Cuthill

#77897

Overall Influence

1923 - 2011 (88 years)

Elizabeth Hahnemann Cuthill was an American applied mathematician and numerical analyst known for her work on sparse matrix algorithms, on block iterative methods for the numerical approximation of differential equations, and on the development of computer simulations of nuclear reactors. She was a researcher for the United States Navy at the David Taylor Model Basin. The Cuthill–McKee algorithm and reverse Cuthill–McKee algorithm are heuristics for permuting matrices into forms with small bandwidth and for associated problems in graph bandwidth, named for the work of Cuthill with James McKee...

#1664

Needhi Bhalla

#77927

Overall Influence

Needhi Bhalla is an American biologist. She researches mitosis and meiosis in Caenorhabditis elegans. Bhalla is a professor at University of California, Santa Cruz. Early life and education Needhi Bhalla was raised on the southern shore of Long Island near Queens. She was born to Indian parents in Khatri family who emigrated to the United States in the 1960s and 1970s for higher education opportunities. Bhalla's mother is a nutritionist and her father, a United States Air Force engineer.

#1665

Michelle A. Petri

#77977

Overall Influence

#1666

Joseph Laws McKibben

#77996

Overall Influence

1912 - 2001 (89 years)

Joseph Laws McKibben was an American physicist and engineer who worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer as a group leader on the Manhattan Project. He personally witnessed the Trinity test and flipped the switch that set off the atomic bomb at Trinity. McKibben, motivated by his daughter Karan's paralysed hands due to polio, also invented the Air Muscle in 1957.

#1667

Karl Henrik Johansson

#78049

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Karl Henrik Johansson is a Swedish researcher and best known for his pioneering contributions to networked control systems, cyber-physical systems, and hybrid systems. His research has had particular application impact in transportation, automation, and energy networks. He holds a Chaired Professorship in Networked Control at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. He is Director of KTH Digital Futures.

#1668

Geoffrey Chang

#78091

Overall Influence

Geoffrey Chang is a professor at the University of California, San Diego's Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Department of Pharmacology, School of Medicine. His laboratory focuses on the structural biology of integral membrane proteins, particularly exploring X-ray crystallography techniques for solving the tertiary structures of membrane proteins that are notoriously resistant to crystallization. The laboratory has specialized in structures of multidrug resistance transporter proteins in bacteria. In 2001, while a faculty member of The Scripps Research Institute, Chang...

#1669

Kevin Struhl

#78126

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Kevin Struhl is an American molecular biologist and the David Wesley Gaiser Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. Struhl is primarily known for his work on transcriptional regulatory mechanisms in yeast using molecular, genetic, biochemical, and genomic approaches. More recently, he has used related approaches to study transcriptional regulatory circuits involved in cellular transformation and the formation of cancer stem cells.

#1670

Clarence Allen

#78174

Overall Influence

1925 - 2021 (96 years)

Clarence Roderic Allen was an American geologist who studied seismology. Career He was a graduate of Reed College and the California Institute of Technology . Allen was President of the Seismological Society of America in 1975 and the Geological Society of America. He was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, and the Geological Society of America. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1975. Allen was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering since 1976.

#1671

Harris Mayer

#78239

Overall Influence

1921 - Present (104 years)

Harris Louis Mayer was an American physicist known for his collaboration with Edward Teller and John von Neumann. He worked on the Manhattan Project. Mayer also worked on Project Orion. His work had to do with opacity, mostly in the context of atmospheric opacity to nuclear radiation.

#1672

Jesse L. Beauchamp

#78272

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

Jesse L. Beauchamp is the Charles and Mary Ferkel Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. Early life and education 1964 B.S. California Institute of Technology1967 Ph.D. Harvard University

#1673

R. Mark Isaac

#78283

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Robert Mark Isaac is an American academic who uses experimental economics to address basic microeconomic problems. His work has provided new empirical insights for many traditional economic problems, particularly cooperation and collective action problems.

#1674

Andrea Armani

#78485

Overall Influence

Andrea Martin Armani is the Ray Irani Chair in Engineering and Materials Science and professor of chemical engineering and materials science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. She was awarded the 2010 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from Barack Obama and is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader.

#1675

Felix Boehm

#78505

Overall Influence

1924 - 2021 (97 years)

Felix Hans Boehm was a Swiss-American experimental physicist, known for his research on weak interactions, parity violation, and neutrino physics. Biography He had four brothers and both his father and his paternal grandfather were in the publishing business. Felix Boehm completed his Matura in 1943 and was drafted into Swiss army, which allowed him to study physics part-time at the University of Geneva. In the autumn of 1943 he matriculated at ETH Zurich. There he took several classes from Wolfgang Pauli and graduated in physics with his Diplom in 1948 and his doctorate in 1951 with doctoral advisor Paul Scherrer.

#1676

George Stark

#78533

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (92 years)

George Stark is an American chemist and biochemist. His research interests include protein and enzyme function and modification, interferons and cytokines, signal transduction, and gene expression. Personal life George Stark was born in New York City in 1933. His father, Jack Stark, was a restaurant owner, and his mother, Florence Stark, was a bookkeeper. He was the youngest of three children, with two older sisters, Edna and Bernyce.

#1677

Sylvan Wittwer

#78573

Overall Influence

1917 - 2012 (95 years)

Sylvan Harold Wittwer was an American agronomist who served as director of the agricultural experiment station at Michigan State University. Wittwer was born in 1917 in Hurricane, Utah. He received his bachelor's degree at Utah State University and his doctors degree from the University of Missouri. He was inducted into the Alumni Hall of Honor of the College of Agriculture and Applied Science at Utah State University, 2003.

#1678

Fiona A. Harrison

#78587

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Fiona A. Harrison is the Kent and Joyce Kresa Leadership Chair of the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy at Caltech, Harold A. Rosen Professor of Physics at Caltech and the Principal Investigator for NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array mission. She won the Hans A. Bethe Prize in 2020 for her work on NuSTAR.

#1679

James R. Fair

#78595

Overall Influence

1920 - 2010 (90 years)

James Rutherford Fair was an American chemical engineer. His professional career included 33 years working in a variety of industrial positions, primarily for Monsanto Company. In 1979, he shifted to academia, joining the University of Texas at Austin School of Chemical Engineering, where he founded the Separations Research Program, which he headed from 1982 until 1996. Although he officially retired in 1992, he remained active as professor emeritus until his death in 2010.

#1680

Sofia Simmonds

#78601

Overall Influence

1917 - 2007 (90 years)

Sofia S. "Topsy" Simmonds was an American biochemist who studied amino acid metabolism and peptide metabolism in E. coli. Following training with Vincent du Vigneaud at Cornell University, she spent most of her career at Yale University. After decades as a researcher and then associate professor there, Simmonds became a full professor of biochemistry in 1975, and later served as Associate Dean of Yale College. With her husband Joseph Fruton, Simmonds coauthored the influential General Biochemistry, the first comprehensive biochemistry textbook. Simmonds received the American Chemical Society'...

#1681

Elayne Arrington

#78610

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Elayne Arrington is an American mathematician and engineer. She was the first African American woman to graduate with a bachelor's degree from the School of Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. After earning her Ph.D., she went on to conduct performance analyses of Soviet Union aircraft at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

#1682

Yogendra Gupta

#78707

Overall Influence

Yogendra M. Gupta is an Indian-American physicist. He is a Regents Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Washington State University . Education Gupta attended the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani in India before emigrating to the United States to attend Washington State University in 1968. His teacher at WSU was George E. Duvall, an early researcher of shock physics. After completing his PhD, Gupta conducted two years of postdoctoral research before joining the Stanford Research Institute as a Physicist, Senior Physicist, and Assistant Director in the Poult...

#1683

John Lewis

#78718

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

John Alan Lewis is an American computer science educator, and the owner of a Twitter account that is well-known for its frequent cases of mistaken identity. Computer science Formerly of Villanova University and the New York Institute of Technology, Lewis is an adjunct professor at Virginia Tech. He is one of the coauthors of Java Software Solutions, an introductory text on Java programming.

#1684

Guy T. McBride

#78816

Overall Influence

1919 - 2011 (92 years)

Guy Thornton McBride was an American chemical engineer who was a professor at Rice University, president of the Colorado School of Mines and as an executive of a major American corporation. McBride earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Texas in 1940, where he was valedictorian, and the Doctor of Philosophy degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology , in 1948.

#1685

Neil Garg

#78820

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (47 years)

Neil K. Garg is currently a Distinguished professor of chemistry and holds the Kenneth N. Trueblood Endowed Chair at the University of California, Los Angeles. Garg's research is focused on the chemical synthesis of organic compounds, with an emphasis on the development of new strategies for the preparation of complex molecules possessing unique structural, biological, and physical properties. His group has made breakthroughs in catalysis, especially strong bond activation of esters and amides using nickel catalysts, and in the understanding and utilization of strained intermediates, such as arynes, cyclic alkynes, and cyclic allenes.

#1686

Venkat Chandrasekaran

#78856

Overall Influence

Venkat Chandrasekaran is a Professor in the Computing and Mathematical Sciences Department at the California Institute of Technology. He is known for work on mathematical optimization and its application to the information sciences.

#1687

Augusto Sagnotti

Augusto Sagnotti

#78973

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Augusto Sagnotti is an Italian theoretical physicist at Scuola Normale . Biography Sagnotti earned a Laurea in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" in 1978 ; and a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Caltech in 1983 . He was Post-Doctoral Fellow at Caltech and Miller Research Fellow at U.C. Berkeley .

#1688

Lina Jamil Karam

#78988

Overall Influence

Lina J. Karam is a Lebanese-American electrical and computer engineer and inventor. She is an IEEE Fellow. Her areas of work span digital signal processing, image/video processing, compression/coding and transmission, computer vision, machine learning/deep learning, perceptual-based visual processing, and automated mobility. She served as an expert delegate of the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29 Committee and participated in JPEG/MPEG standardization activities. She served as expert consultant in matters related to Intellectual Property /Patent Litigation, Image/Video Compression and Streaming, Image/Video...

#1689

James C. McWilliams

#79123

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

James C. McWilliams is a professor at the UCLA Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics and Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. Early life McWilliams was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and attended high school in Tulsa. McWilliams received a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Caltech in 1968. In 1969 and 1971, he received a M.S. and Ph.D respectively from Harvard University. McWilliams held a Research Fellowship in Geophysical Fluid Dynamics at Harvard from 1971 to 1974 and afterwards worked in the Oceanography Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research where he became a Senior Scientist in 1980.

#1690

Roy W. Gould

#79132

Overall Influence

1927 - 2022 (95 years)

Roy Walter Gould was an American electrical engineer and physicist who specialized in plasma physics. In 1959, he was the first to describe electrostatic waves that were propagating at the boundary of a magnetized plasma column, now commonly known as Trivelpiece–Gould modes.

#1691

Andrea Lynn Kritcher

#79142

Overall Influence

#1692

Rahul Sarpeshkar

#79173

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Rahul Sarpeshkar is the Thomas E. Kurtz Professor and a professor of engineering, professor of physics, professor of microbiology & immunology, and professor of molecular and systems biology at Dartmouth. Sarpeshkar, whose interdisciplinary work is in bioengineering, electrical engineering, quantum physics, and biophysics, is the inaugural chair of the William H. Neukom cluster of computational science, which focuses on analog, quantum, and biological computation. The clusters, designed by faculty from across the institution to address major global challenges, are part of President Philip Hanlon's vision for strengthening academic excellence at Dartmouth.

#1693

Robert Swendsen

#79252

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Robert Haakon Swendsen is Professor of Physics at Carnegie Mellon University. He is known in the computational physics community for the Swendsen-Wang algorithm, the Monte Carlo Renormalization Group and related methods that enable efficient computational studies of equilibrium phenomena near phase transitions. He is the 2014 Recipient of the Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics from the American Physical Society.

#1694

Curtis Greene

#79452

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Curtis Greene is an American mathematician, specializing in algebraic combinatorics. He is the J. McLain King Professor of Mathematics at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. Greene did his undergraduate studies at Harvard University, and earned his Ph.D. in 1969 from the California Institute of Technology under the supervision of Robert P. Dilworth. He held positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania before moving to Haverford.

#1695

Donald Merrifield

Donald Merrifield

#79518

Overall Influence

1928 - 2010 (82 years)

Donald Paul Merrifield was an American Jesuit who served as the 11th president of Loyola University of Los Angeles. He became the first president of Loyola Marymount University president upon Loyola University's merger with Marymount College in 1973 and remained as the school's president until 1984. Under Merrifield, Loyola Marymount went through a period of rapid expansion in which thirteen new buildings were constructed on the main campus.

#1696

R. Michael Alvarez

#79526

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Ramon Michael Alvarez is professor of political science at California Institute of Technology , as well as the co-director of the Voting Technology Project, a joint Caltech-Massachusetts Institute of Technology initiative.

#1697

Helen Blackwell

#79589

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (53 years)

Helen E. Blackwell is an American organic chemist and chemical biologist. She is a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Education Blackwell is a native of Shaker Heights, Ohio and was educated as an undergraduate at Oberlin College, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in chemistry in 1994. She received a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1999 working with Robert Grubbs.

#1698

Mark Kachanov

#79616

Overall Influence

Mark Kachanov is an American mechanical engineer, currently a professor at Tufts University and also the Editor-in-Chief of Elsevier's International Journal of Engineering Sciences and Springer's Letters in Fracture and Micromechanics.

#1699

Ellen Cohn

#79649

Overall Influence

Ellen R. Cohn is an associate dean and associate professor at University of Pittsburgh School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, with a secondary faculty appointment at University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy. She is a faculty member of the McGowan Institute of Regenerative Medicine.

#1700

Robert Stuart Edgar

#79700

Overall Influence

1930 - 2016 (86 years)

Robert Stuart Edgar was a geneticist. Upon graduating from McGill University, Edgar pursued graduate study at the University of Rochester. After completing his doctorate, he began teaching and doing research at the California Institute of Technology in 1957. While at Caltech he carried out research that explained the mechanisms by which bacterial viruses assemble their component parts into a functional virus particle. As part of this research he developed the important experimental strategy of using "conditional" mutants as an experimental tool to elucidate complex biological phenomena.

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