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

#1701

Kurt Thoroughman

#79726

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (53 years)

Kurt A. Thoroughman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. He is known for his work in the study of motor control, motor learning, and computational neuroscience.

#1702

Mayda Velasco

#79784

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Mayda Velasco is a physicist and professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern University. She works in experimental particle physics and is a leading member of the CMS Collaboration at the CERN LHC. She founded COFI and is its first director. She is a pioneer in the physics potential of photon colliders.

#1703

Adam Wierman

#79865

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (46 years)

Adam Wierman is Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology. He is known for his work on scheduling , heavy tails, green computing, queueing theory, and algorithmic game theory.

#1704

Robert Lickley

#79869

Overall Influence

1912 - 1998 (86 years)

Sir Robert Lang Lickley was a Scottish aeronautical engineer, and Chief Engineer at Fairey Aviation during whose tenure the Fairey Delta 2 became the first aircraft to exceed 1,000 mph. Early life Lickley was born in Dundee in Scotland and was educated at the High School of Dundee. He studied Civil Engineering at the University of Edinburgh where he graduated BSc, and then went on to Imperial College London as a postgraduate, where he studied Aeronautics on a Caird Scholarship.

#1705

Ian Fisher

#79879

Overall Influence

Ian Randal Fisher is a United States-based British physicist and Director of the Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials at Stanford University. Ian R. Fisher was born and educated in the United Kingdom. He did his undergraduate study at the School of Physics and Space Research at the University of Birmingham in England from 1989 to 1992. He graduated with a BSc in physics from Birmingham University in 1993. He was a research assistant at the New Zealand Institute for Industrial Research, in Lower Hutt, New Zealand, in 1993. He did his PhD at the University of Cambridge, in England from 199...

#1706

Russell Kulsrud

#80050

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (97 years)

Russell M. Kulsrud is an American physicist who specializes in plasma physics and astrophysics. Kulsrud studied at the University of Maryland where he received his bachelor's degree in 1949, and then at the University of Chicago, where he completed his master's degree in 1952 and received his doctorate from Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar in 1954 . From 1954, he was in the Matterhorn Nuclear Fusion Project at Princeton University and subsequently at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. In 1964, he became head of the theoretical department. In 1966, he and his wife Helene Kulsrud moved to Yale University where he became a professor.

#1707

Robert Loewy

#80098

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (99 years)

Robert Gustav Loewy is an aerospace engineer who has been influential in the development of rotary-wing vertical take-off and landing aircraft. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the class of 1947 with a Bachelor of Aeronautical Engineering degree. He earned an M.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. From 1948 to 1962, Dr. Loewy worked in industry for the Glenn L. Martin Company; Piasecki Helicopter Corporation; Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory; and Vertol Aircraft, which later became a division of the Boeing Company.

#1708

Martin Ridge

#80141

Overall Influence

1923 - 2003 (80 years)

Martin Ridge was an American historian and director of research at the Huntington Library. He is particularly known for the 1982 5th edition of "Westward expansion: a history of the American frontier" co-authored with Ray Allen Billington.

#1709

Paul K. Calaway

#80294

Overall Influence

1910 - 1993 (83 years)

Paul Kenneth Calaway was an American chemical engineer and the director of the Georgia Tech Research Institute from 1954 to 1957. Education Born in Bethesda, Arkansas, Calaway received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Arkansas College, a Master of Science from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1933, and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas.

#1710

Lewis Tilney

#80315

Overall Influence

Lewis G. Tilney is an American cell biologist and professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University Medical School in 1964. Tilney is known for studying the cytoskeleton of animal cells, specifically how different components affect the cytoskeleton's overall properties.

#1711

Jerry Harris

#80466

Overall Influence

Jerry M. Harris is an American geophysicist and the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Geophysics at Stanford University. Harris established the Stanford Wave Physics Lab, which investigate the physics of seismic and electromagnetic waves in complex media. He was co-founder of the Stanford Global Climate and Energy Project and the Center for Computational Earth and Environmental Science.

#1712

Dusan Krajcinovic

#80714

Overall Influence

1935 - 2007 (72 years)

Dusan Krajcinovic was a mechanics scientist. He was past member and chair of the Applied Mechanics Division of ASME. He served a term on the U. S. National Committee on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. He authored a review paper on damage mechanics that predates his book on the same subject.

#1713

Walter Mauderli

#80762

Overall Influence

1924 - 2005 (81 years)

Walter Mauderli DSc was a pioneer in the development of the field of medical physics. He earned his doctorate from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology under the instruction of notable physicists as Nobel Laureate physicist Wolfgang Pauli.

#1714

Charles Musgrave

#80787

Overall Influence

Charles Musgrave is an American chemist, engineer and materials scientist. He won the 1993 Foresight Institute Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology. He earned his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology in 1994, his B.S. at the University of California at Berkeley and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He previously taught chemical engineering and materials science and engineering at Stanford University and chemistry at Harvard University. He currently teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he is professor, associate dean for graduate educ...

#1715

Dennis S. Bernstein

#80832

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

#1716

Vy Maria Dong

#80847

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (49 years)

Vy Maria Dong is a Vietnamese-American Chancellor's Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Irvine . Dong works on enantioselective catalysis and natural product synthesis. She received the Royal Society of Chemistry's Merck, Sharp & Dohme Award in 2020, the American Chemical Society's Elias James Corey Award in 2019, and the UCI's Distinguished Alumni Award in 2018.

#1717

Art Westerberg

#80850

Overall Influence

Art Westerberg is an emeritus professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He has been a major contributor to the field of numerical methods for solving chemical engineering problems, and has been involved since the 1980s with a mathematical modelling package named ASCEND.

#1718

Guillermo Bazan

#80864

Overall Influence

Guillermo Carlos Bazan is an American chemist, material scientist, and academic. Bazan earned a B.Sc with Honors in chemistry from the University of Ottawa in 1986, and a Ph.D in Inorganic Chemistry from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991. From 1992 to 1998 he was on the faculty of the University of Rochester. In 1998 he was appointed as a professor in the Chemistry & Biochemistry Department and the Materials Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In January 2020, he took a position at the National University of Singapore.

#1719

Goetz Oertel

#80887

Overall Influence

1934 - 2021 (87 years)

Goetz Oertel was an American physicist and science manager. Youth Flight from West Prussia Oertel was born in Stuhm, West Prussia, Germany . In January 1945, Oertel escaped from the advancing Red Army with his parents, milling director Egon Oertel and his wife Margarete westwards, initially to Gransee in Brandenburg, then continuing to Triptis in Thuringia which was captured by US forces rather than the Soviets. When Thuringia fell under Soviet control in the course of the Potsdam Agreement, the flight continued by horse and carriage, further westwards to Öhringen in southwestern Württemberg.

#1720

John Edwin Midwinter

#81192

Overall Influence

1938 - 2021 (83 years)

John Edwin Midwinter OBE FRS FREng was a British electrical engineer and professor, who was President of the Institution of Electrical Engineers from 2000 to 2001. Education He was educated at St Bartholomew's School, King's College London and the University of London .

#1721

Thomas J. Katz

#81202

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Thomas Joseph Katz is an American organic chemist known for his experimental work with prismane, olefin metathesis, and enyne metathesis. He is an emeritus professor at Columbia University. Training Katz earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1956 and received his doctoral thesis in chemistry at Harvard in 1959.

#1722

Tsuhan Chen

#81264

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (60 years)

Prof Chen Tsuhan is the Deputy President at National University of Singapore. He is currently the Chief Scientist of AI Singapore. Prior to his current appoint he was the Dean of the College of Engineering at Nanyang Technological University from 2015 to 2017. He was previously Director of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University from 2009 to 2013.

#1723

Gregory S. Chirikjian

#81297

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Gregory Scott Chirikjian is an American roboticist and applied mathematician, primarily working in the field of kinematics, motion planning, computer vision, group theory applications in engineering, and the mechanics of macromolecules. He currently serves as the head and professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore. Before joining NUS, he was a professor at the Johns Hopkins University. He is well known for his theoretical contributions to the kinematics of hyper-redundant robots and stochastic methods on Lie groups.

#1724

Wei Cai

#81325

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (48 years)

Wei Cai is a professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University. Early life and career In 1995, Cai received his Bachelor of Science degree in optoelectronics from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Hubei province, China. In 2001, Cai received a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and immediately after it became a postdoc at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he remained until 2004. In July 2004, Cai became an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University, and in September 2011 was promoted to assoc...

#1725

Howard Davis

#81346

Overall Influence

1937 - 2009 (72 years)

Howard Theodore "Ted" Davis was an American chemical engineer and regents professor in the Department of chemical engineering and materials science at the University of Minnesota. He is internationally known for his work in statistical thermodynamics, transport in porous media, and surface thermodynamics. Davis was an author of more than 400 academic papers and five books including the acclaimed textbooks: “Linear Algebra and Linear Operators in Engineering” ., "Statistical Mechanics of Phases, Interfaces and Thin Films" . He served as the department head of CEMS for 15 years , followed by...

#1726

John R. Falck

#81355

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

John Russell “Camille” Falck is an American chemist, Professor of Biochemistry, and holder of the Robert A. Welch Distinguish Chair in Chemistry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center . In 1996 he was awarded the Wilfred T. Doherty Recognition Award from the Dallas-Forth Worth Section of the American Chemical Society and a Recognition Award at the March 10, 2002, Winter Eicosanoid Conference in appreciation of his significant contributions to the chemistry of natural products, and to the identification and functional characterization of the cytochrome P450 arachidonic aci...

#1727

Alan Fowler

#81371

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (97 years)

Alan Bicksler Fowler is an American physicist. Life and education He was born in Denver, Colorado on October 15, 1928. Fowler served in the U.S. Army from 1946 to 1948 and from 1952 to 1953. He earned a BS in 1951, then an MS in 1952 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. In 1958, he earned his PhD from Harvard University.

#1728

Robert A. Gross

#81390

Overall Influence

1927 - 2018 (91 years)

Robert A. Gross was an American physicist. Gross attended the University of Pennsylvania, and earned a doctorate in applied physics from Harvard University. He subsequently worked for the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation. In 1960, Gross joined the Columbia University faculty, where he later became the Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Professor of Applied Physics. He was named founding chair of Columbia's department of applied physics and nuclear engineering. Gross then led the department of mechanical engineering, and from 1982 to 1990, served as dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

#1729

C. Kevin Boyce

#81427

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (51 years)

C. Kevin Boyce is a paleobotanist. He is best known for winning a MacArthur Award in 2013. Boyce's work deals with the relationship between current and past ecosystems. Prior to his employment at Stanford, Boyce was associated with the University of Chicago.

#1730

Anil Virkar

#81428

Overall Influence

Anil Vasudeo Virkar is an American materials scientist and engineer, currently Distinguished Professor at University of Utah. He is a Fellow of the ASM International. Publications

#1731

Anna Coble

#81601

Overall Influence

1936 - 2009 (73 years)

Anna Jane Coble-Mullen was an American biophysicist. She was the first black woman to earn a doctorate in biophysics, and the first black woman to be hired at Howard University. Early life and education Coble was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she became interested in mathematics and physics. Her father was a teacher at St. Augustine's University. Coble studied mathematics at Howard University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1958 and a master's degree in 1961. After graduating, she taught physics at North Carolina A&T State University for four years. Coble moved to University of Illin...

#1732

J. Virginia Lincoln

#81618

Overall Influence

1915 - 2003 (88 years)

Jeannette Virginia Lincoln was an American physicist. Early life Lincoln was born on September 7, 1915, in Ames, Iowa. He parents were Rush B. Lincoln and Jeannette Bartholomew Lincoln. Her father was a major general in the US Army Air Forces. Lincoln's mother taught chemistry at Iowa State University. Her brother, Rush B. Lincoln Jr. became a Major General in the US Army. Their grandfather Lincoln fought in the Civil War as a Confederate captain. Lincoln was unsurprisingly deep into her family's military life and continued with this throughout her life.

#1733

George W. Chang

#81692

Overall Influence

George W. Chang is a professor and a resident faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley. He resides on campus with his wife Abby, while he is currently an Associate Professor Emeritus in the Department of Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology.

#1734

Tracy Teal

#81796

Overall Influence

Tracy Teal is an American bioinformatician and the executive director of Data Carpentry. She is known for her work in open science and biomedical data science education. Education and early career Teal received her Bachelors of Science in Cybernetics from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1997 and later received her Master of Arts in Organismal Biology, Ecology, and Evolution in 1999. There, she worked in the laboratory of Charles Taylor, studying how the evolution of language is impacted by the way people learn it. She then earned her PhD from the California Institute of Technology in Computation and Neural Systems in 2007.

#1735

Edward Thomas

#81892

Overall Influence

Edward E. Thomas Jr. is an American plasma physicist and a Professor of Physics at Auburn University. He currently serves as the university's associate dean for research and graduate studies and is also the university's Charles W. Barkley Endowed Professor for diversity and inclusion. He is a fellow of the National Society of Black Physicists , the Alabama Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society .

#1736

Christos Georgakis

#81909

Overall Influence

Christos Georgakis is an American chemical engineer, currently a distinguished professor at Tufts University and also a Fellow to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, International Federation of Automatic Control and American Institute of Chemical Engineers. He was previously the du Pont Professor, 1975–76, and Edgerton Professor, 1977–79, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Iacocca Professor at Lehigh University from 2001 to 2002, Othmer Professor at New York University Tandon School of Engineering from 2002 to 2003.

#1737

J. Christopher Jaffe

#82112

Overall Influence

1927 - 2013 (86 years)

J. Christopher Jaffe was recognized for leadership in architectural-acoustic design. Work Jaffe graduated from the School of Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1949 and then went on to graduate studies in theater at Columbia University.

#1738

Jay R. Winkler

#82124

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (60 years)

Jay Richmond Winkler, Ph.D. is an American physical chemist, currently director of the Beckman Institute Laser Resource Center at the California Institute of Technology. He has authored over two hundred twenty five articles on applications of inorganic spectroscopy, including the pioneering study of intramolecular electron transfer reactions in biological systems.

#1739

John David Kennedy

#82139

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

John David Kennedy is a chemist and emeritus professor of inorganic chemistry at the University of Leeds. He works in the area of polyhedral borane chemistry. Biography John D Kennedy was born in 1943. He was educated at Scarborough High School for Boys between 1954 and 1962 and received his BSc from University College London in 1965. After receiving his PhD from University College London in 1968, he was a research associate at State University of New York at Albany until 1971. He then returned to University College London as a research fellow. From 1971 to 1972 he served as a temporary lect...

#1740

Paul Chirik

#82163

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (52 years)

Paul James Chirik is an American chemist known for his work in sustainable chemistry using Earth-abundant metals like iron, cobalt, and nickel to surpass the performance of more exotic elements traditionally used in catalysis. He is the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Chemistry and chair of the chemistry department at Princeton University.

#1741

Rod Crewther

#82184

Overall Influence

1945 - 2020 (75 years)

Rodney James Crewther was a physicist, notable in the field of gauge field theories. Education After gaining his MSc at Melbourne University, Crewther was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to the California Institute of Technology. He studied under the tutelage of Nobel prizewinner Murray Gell-Mann and completed his doctorate, in 1971, after successfully defending his dissertation against the renowned theorist Richard Feynman. His thesis was entitled Spontaneous Breakdown of Conformal and Chiral Invariance.

#1742

Farah Alibay

#82198

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (124 years)

Farah Alibay is a Canadian systems engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory who has worked on the InSight, Mars Cube One, and Mars 2020 missions. Early life and education The daughter of immigrants from Madagascar, Alibay was born in Montréal, Quebec. She grew up in nearby Joliette, Quebec, and moved with her family to Manchester, England for high school. French is her native language. The journey by the Canadian astronaut Julie Payette to space inspired Alibay in middle school; as Payette was from her province, she served as a role model. She went to the University of Cambridge, where s...

#1743

Gabriel Georgiades

#82200

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Gabriel Georgiades is a professor of Aerospace Engineering in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is a widely published author known throughout the world as one of the leading authorities on light aircraft spin tendencies and recovery along with a major contributor to the creation of the finite element method of analyzing aircraft structures.

#1744

Alice Harding

#82235

Overall Influence

Alice Kust Harding is an American astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland. Early life and education Harding earned a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, in 1973, and a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, in 1979.

#1745

Peter H. Schultz

#82291

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Peter H. Schultz is Professor of Geological Sciences at Brown University specializing in the study of planetary geology, impact cratering on the Earth and other objects in the Solar System, and volcanic modifications of planetary surfaces. He was co-investigator to the NASA Science Mission Directorate spacecraft Deep Impact and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite . He was awarded the Barringer Medal of the Meteoritical Society in 2004 for his theoretical and experimental studies of impact craters.

#1746

James S. Famiglietti

#82315

Overall Influence

James S. Famiglietti is the director of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. Prior to that he was the Senior Water Scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA and a professor of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine. He is a leading expert in global water issues and in raising awareness about the global water crisis and in particular, about global groundwater depletion.

#1747

Amy B. Jordan

#82434

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Amy B. Jordan is an American astronomer and a discoverer of minor planets who works at the University of Colorado. Career In 2002 she was part of the team which discovered , a resonant Kuiper belt object at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, Chile. She also co-discovered two main-belt asteroids. In 2005, she was a teaching assistant at the Summer Science Program, which teaches astronomy to high school students using a curriculum based on observing and calculating orbits of asteroids.

#1748

John G. Anderson

#82444

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

John G. Anderson is an American seismologist and Professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. Anderson specializes in studies of strong ground motion and seismic hazards. He was Director of the Nevada Seismological Laboratory from 1998 to 2009. He has published more than 150 articles and more than 90 abstracts. He completed a PhD in Geophysics from Columbia University in 1976 and a bachelor of science in physics from Michigan State University in 1970. He received his high school diploma in 1966.

#1749

David Axon

#82518

Overall Influence

1951 - 2012 (61 years)

David John Axon was a British astrophysicist specialising in observations of active galactic nuclei. He was a professor at the University of Hertfordshire and the Rochester Institute of Technology , and at the time of his death was Head of the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Sussex.

#1750

Mitra Hartmann

#82670

Overall Influence

Mitra J.Z. Hartmann is a professor of mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering at the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University. She specializes in robotics, sensory acquisition behaviors, sensorimotor integration, and neuroethology. Her lab focuses on translating sensory signals felt by whiskers to robotics.

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