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 …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people

#1751

Jeffrey Schlom

#82732

Overall Influence

#1752

William L. Johnson

#82761

Overall Influence

#1753

Sarah Eno

#82784

Overall Influence

Sarah C. Eno is an American experimental particle physicist at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is a professor of physics and UMD Distinguished Scholar–Teacher. She has participated in several large experimental collaborations in high-energy physics, including the AMY experiment at the Japanese TRISTAN particle accelerator, the DØ experiment at Fermilab in the US, the Collider Detector at Fermilab, and the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in France and Switzerland.

#1754

Ping Sheng

#82819

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

#1755

Edwin J. Vandenberg

#82884

Overall Influence

1918 - 2005 (87 years)

Edwin J. Vandenberg was a chemist at Hercules Inc. and a researcher at Arizona State University. Vandenberg is best known for his work at Hercules in the 1950s through the 1970s that included the independent discovery of isotactic polypropylene and the development of Ziegler-type catalysts.

#1756

Amir Lerman

#82931

Overall Influence

#1757

Joseph Veverka

#83002

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Joseph Veverka is the James A. Weeks Professor of Physical Sciences, professor of Astronomy at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. His research area is in planetary sciences, with a focus on physical studies of satellite surfaces and planetary rings. Veverka was the principal investigator on the NASA Discovery Program mission CONTOUR, a co-investigator of the Deep Impact space mission to Comet Tempel 1, and is the principal investigator on the NASA Discovery Mission of Opportunity, Stardust-NeXT. He is the recipient of the 2001 National Air and Space Museum Trophy and has the asteroid 271...

#1758

Hao Wu

#83126

Overall Influence

Hao Wu is a Chinese American biochemist and crystallographer and the Asa and Patricia Springer Professor of Structural Biology in the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. Her work focuses on molecular mechanisms of signal transduction in cell death and inflammation. She is the discoverer of signalosomes, which are large macromolecular complexes involved in cell death and in innate and adaptive immune pathways. She has established a new paradigm for signal transduction that involves higher-order protein assemblies. She has received the Pew S...

#1759

Patrick Cordier

#83136

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Patrick Cordier is a mineralogist who uses experimental and numerical approaches to study the plasticity of geological materials. He has authored or co-authored over 200 articles in international scientific journals. He received the Dana Medal from the Mineralogical Society of America in 2016, and is currently a chief editor of the European Journal of Mineralogy. and a member ofInstitut Universitaire de France.

#1760

Monica Riley

#83150

Overall Influence

1926 - 2013 (87 years)

Monica Riley was an American scientist who contributed to the discovery of messenger RNA in her Ph.D work with Arthur Pardee, and was later a pioneer in the exploration and computer representation of the Escherichia coli genome.

#1761

Ralph Adolphs

#83165

Overall Influence

#1762

Paul W. Sternberg

#83226

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Paul W. Sternberg is an American biologist. He does research for WormBase on C. elegans, a model organism. Early life and education Paul Sternberg grew up in Long Island, New York. He attended Hampshire College for undergrad in Amherst, Massachusetts where he got a B.A. in 1978. After that he went to MIT where he received his PhD in Biology for work on nematode development with Robert Horvitz. He went on to do postdoctoral research with Ira Herskowitz in yeast molecular development at the University of California San Francisco. He is currently working at the California Institute of Technology ...

#1763

William S. Zwicker

#83249

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

William Seymour Zwicker is an American mathematician and the William D. Williams Professor of Mathematics at Union College in Schenectady, New York. Zwicker earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1971, and a Ph.D from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976, under the supervision of Eugene M. Kleinberg. He joined the Union College faculty in 1975, was given his named chair in 2006, and retired in 2021.

#1764

Kristen Harris

#83269

Overall Influence

Kristen Harris is Professor of Neuroscience and Fellow in the Center for Learning and Memory at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research group at UT Austin uses serial section electron microscopy to study synapses. She is also a member of the Institute for Neuroscience and the Center for Theoretical and Computational Learning.

#1765

Bill Robinson

#83301

Overall Influence

1938 - 2011 (73 years)

William Henry Robinson was a New Zealand scientist and seismic engineer who invented the lead rubber bearing seismic isolation device. He grew up in West Auckland, New Zealand. He earned a master's degree at the Ardmore School of Engineering, then a PhD in physical metallurgy at the University of Illinois. Robinson was director of the DSIR's Physics and Engineering Laboratory between 1985 and 1991. He continued to invent and develop seismic isolation devices, travel and lecture until his early 70s.

#1766

Viswanathan Mohan

#83322

Overall Influence

#1767

John Francis Lovering

#83338

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (95 years)

John Francis Lovering was an Australian geologist. He was Professor of Geology at the University of Melbourne from 1969 to 1987 and Vice-Chancellor of Flinders University from 1987 to 1995. Background Lovering attended the selective state Canterbury Boys' High School in south-west Sydney. He reported his family could not afford to send him to university and he received support from a 'cadetship' in mineralogy and petrology awarded by the Australian Museum. He held a BSc and MSc in geology from the University of Sydney , and a PhD from the Division of Geological Sciences, California Institute of Technology .

#1768

Donald R. Blake

#83476

Overall Influence

Donald R. Blake is an American chemist currently a distinguished professor at University of California, Irvine and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and American Geophysical Union.

#1769

Harry Soodak

#83486

Overall Influence

1920 - 2008 (88 years)

Harry Soodak was an American physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, publishing the first design of a sodium-cooled breeder reactor, and was a professor at City College of New York. Along with Arthur Iberall, Soodak developed the concept of homeokinetics to explain the functioning of complex systems.

#1770

France A. Córdova

France A. Córdova

#83571

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

France Anne-Dominic Córdova is an American astrophysicist and administrator who was the fourteenth director of the National Science Foundation. Previously, she was the eleventh President of Purdue University from 2007 to 2012. She now serves as President of the Science Philanthropy Alliance.

#1771

David Kelly Campbell

#83619

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

David Kelly Campbell is an American theoretical physicist and academic leader. His research has spanned high energy physics, condensed matter physics and nonlinear dynamics. He also served as Physics Department Head at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Dean of the College Engineering at Boston University, and Boston University Provost.

#1772

Robert A. Rosenstone

#83644

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (89 years)

Robert A. Rosenstone is an American author, historian, and Professor Emeritus of history at the California Institute of Technology. He is the leading international scholar in the fast growing field devoted to studying the relationship between history and the visual media. He has written two books on the topic, "Visions of the Past: the Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History" , and "History on Film / Film on History" , and has edited an influential collections of essays, "Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past" . His most recent addition to the field , "A Blackwell Comp...

#1773

Laramie Potts

#83649

Overall Influence

Laramie Potts is an American scientist who identified the Wilkes Land mass concentration in Antarctica in collaboration with Ralph von Frese. He is from South Africa. He is an associate professor in the School of Applied Engineering and Technology and teaches geomatics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology .

#1774

Lawrence Que Jr.

#83663

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Lawrence Que Jr. is a chemist who specializes in bioinorganic chemistry and is a Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He received the 2017 American Chemical Society Award in Inorganic Chemistry for his contributions to the field., and the 2008 ACS Alfred Bader Award in Bioinorganic Chemistry.

#1775

Judith Gamora Cohen

#83691

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Judith Gamora Cohen , is an American astronomer and the Kate Van Nuys Page Professor of Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology. She is a recognized expert regarding the Milky Way Galaxy, particularly with respect to the Galaxy's outer halo. She also played a key role in the design and construction of the Keck Telescope.

#1776

A. Louis London

#83745

Overall Influence

1913 - 2008 (95 years)

Alexander Louis London was an American mechanical engineer and professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University. London was elected to the National Academy of Engineering "for contributions to the theory and applications of compact heat exchangers, especially in the gas turbine field". The National Academy of Engineering called London "one of the world's best known experts in heat transfer equipment design, performance and analysis." The Stanford University called him "engineering expert on heat transfer". London received the R. Tom Sawyer Award by the Gas Turbine Division of th...

#1777

Jennifer L. West

#83790

Overall Influence

Jennifer L. West is an American bioengineer. She is the current Dean of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Virginia. She was the Fitzpatrick University Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University from 2012-2021. In 2000, West cofounded Nanospectra Biosciences in Houston to develop a cancer therapy based on gold nanoparticles that destroy tumor cells and has been listed by MIT Technology Review as one of the 100 most innovative young scientists and engineers world wide.

#1778

Felix Mitelman

#83823

Overall Influence

#1779

Ravindra Shripad Kulkarni

#83833

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

Ravindra Shripad Kulkarni is an Indian mathematician, specializing in differential geometry. He is known for the Kulkarni–Nomizu product. Education and career Ravi S. Kulkarni received in 1968 his Ph.D. from Harvard University under Shlomo Sternberg with thesis Curvature and Metric. For the academic year 1980–1981 he was a Guggenheim Fellow.

#1780

Stephen L. Mayo

#83846

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Stephen L. Mayo is a professor at the California Institute of Technology, where he is the William K. Bowes Jr. Leadership Chair in the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, and the Bren Professor of Biology and Chemistry. His research focuses on structural biology and the development of computational methods for protein design. Mayo was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2004 and was appointed to a six-year term on the National Science Board in 2013.

#1781

George D. Watkins

#83855

Overall Influence

1924 - Present (101 years)

George Daniels Watkins is an American solid-state physicist. Biography Watkins was born in Evanston, Illinois and received his bachelor's degree in physics from Randolph-Macon College in 1943. He earned his master's degree in 1947 and his Ph.D. in 1952 from Harvard University with the thesis A R. F. Spectrometer with Applications to Studies of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Absorption in Solids. From 1952 to 1975 he did research in solid state physics at the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York. During his time at General Electric, he was also an adjunct professor at Rens...

#1782

Jacqueline Barton

Jacqueline Barton

#83868

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Jacqueline K. Barton , is an American chemist. She worked as a professor of chemistry at Hunter College , and at Columbia University before joining the California Institute of Technology. In 1997 she became the Arthur and Marian Hanisch Memorial Professor of Chemistry and from 2009 to 2019, the Norman Davidson Leadership Chair of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Caltech. She currently is the John G. Kirkwood and Arthur A. Noyes Professor of Chemistry.

#1783

Boris Rotman

#83879

Overall Influence

1924 - Present (101 years)

Marcos Boris Rotman was a Chilean American immunologist–molecular biologist and professor emeritus of Medical Science at Alpert Medical School of Brown University. He is widely recognized for performing the first single molecule experiments in biology. He died in July 2021 at the age of 96.

#1784

Dean Roden Chapman

#83881

Overall Influence

1922 - 1995 (73 years)

Dean Roden Chapman was a mechanical engineer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and at Stanford University. Biography He played basketball for the oft-maligned Caltech Beavers men's basketball team while he got a B.S. from Caltech. He began his professional career at Ames Aeronautical Laboratory in 1948, where he later became Director of Astronautics. He left government service in 1980 to join the faculty at Stanford University. At the time of his death from cancer at age 73, he was Professor Emeritus of the Department of Aeronautics and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University.

#1785

Bill Harris

#83979

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

William Anthony Harris FRS FMedSci is a Canadian-born neuroscientist, Professor of Anatomy at Cambridge University, and fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. He was head of the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience since its formation in 2006 until his retirement in 2018.

#1786

Christopher W. Jones

#83981

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (52 years)

Christopher W. Jones is an American chemical engineer and researcher on catalysis and carbon dioxide capture. In 2022 he is the John Brock III School Chair and Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering and adjunct professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, Georgia. Previously he served as associate vice president for research at Georgia Tech , including a stint as interim executive vice-president for research in 2018.

#1787

Victoria Lundblad

Victoria Lundblad

#83989

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Victoria Lundblad is an American geneticist whose work focuses on the genetic control of chromosome behavior in yeast. Many of her discoveries have concerned telomerase, the RNA-containing enzyme that completes the ends of chromosomes. She works at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California.

#1788

Joseph Kirschvink

#84103

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Joseph L. Kirschvink is an American geologist and geophysicist. He is the Nico and Marilyn Van Wingen Professor of Geobiology at Caltech, known for contributions to paleomagnetism and biomagnetism and the Snowball Earth hypothesis. He is also Principal Investigator of Earth–Life Science Institute.

#1789

Tiffany Shaw

#84185

Overall Influence

Tiffany Shaw is a geophysical scientist from Canada. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Chicago. She is known for her extensive contributions to the geophysical and atmospheric sciences.

#1790

Peter Westervelt

#84287

Overall Influence

1919 - 2015 (96 years)

Peter Westervelt was an American physicist, noted for his work in nonlinear acoustics, and Professor Emeritus of Physics at Brown University. Education He received his BS in Physics from MIT in 1947, and his PhD in Physics from MIT in 1951, at which time he joined the Physics Department at Brown University.

#1791

Norman Tolk

#84304

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

Norman Henry Tolk is an American physicist and musician. Life Tolk was born in Idaho Falls, Idaho. He grew up in a Mormon and Protestant family. He majored in physics at Harvard College, graduating in 1960, and earned his Ph.D. in atomic physics from Columbia University in 1966. Currently he is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt University. For all his life Tolk has been a Mormon.

#1792

Anton Lang

#84332

Overall Influence

1913 - 1996 (83 years)

Anton Lang was a Russian Empire-born American biologist and a plant physiologist. He was born in Saint Petersburg, his father was Georg Lang, a famous Russian Empire scientist and founding father of modern therapeutic therapies. He graduated from the University of Berlin in 1939, majoring in botany. After that, he is working as scientific assistant of Georg Melchers at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin-Dahlem. The cooperation between Anton Lang and Georg Melchers proved extremely fruitful and continued at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen until 1949, when Anton, his wife Lydia, and his mother emigrated to North America.

#1793

James Keener

#84364

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

James "Jim" Paul Keener is an American mathematician, currently Distinguished Professor at University of Utah. He is recognized as a pioneer in the field of mathematical physiology and cardiology. Biography Jim Keener received his PhD from the California Institute of Technology in 1972. Initially intending to work on bifurcation theory, he came across a paper by Otto Rossler that implied that heartbeat can be modeled using chaos theory. Looking to investigate this claim, he picked up the Textbook of Medical Physiology by Arthur Guyton to build some foundational knowledge in cardiology and disc...

#1794

Mark Matsumoto

#84370

Overall Influence

Mark Matsumoto is an American engineer specializing in water and wastewater treatment, especially land-based treatment systems and hazardous waste site remediation. He is currently the Dean of the University of California, Merced's School of Engineering and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#1795

Shiv G. Kapoor

#84406

Overall Influence

Shiv Gopal Kapoor is the Grayce Wicall Gauthier Chair professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. His interests are manufacturing technologies and material machining. He attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison for his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering.

#1796

Heather A. Knutson

Heather A. Knutson

#84520

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Heather A. Knutson is an astrophysicist and professor at California Institute of Technology in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences. Her research is focused on the study of exoplanets, their composition and formation. She won the American Astronomical Society's Newton Lacy Pierce Prize in Astronomy for her work in exoplanetary atmospheres.

#1797

F. Dean Toste

#84565

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (54 years)

F. Dean Toste is the Gerald E. K. Branch Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley and faculty scientist at the chemical sciences division of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. He is a prominent figure in the field of organic chemistry and is best known for his contributions to gold chemistry and asymmetric ion-pairing catalysis. Toste was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018.

#1798

Michael Ortiz

#84569

Overall Influence

#1799

William J. Willis

#84698

Overall Influence

1932 - 2012 (80 years)

William J. Willis was an American experimental particle physicistist. Biography William Willis studied physics at Yale University, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1954 and his PhD in 1958 with advisor Earle Fowler and dissertation related to the development of hydrogen bubble chambers in Ralph P. Shutt's research group. Willis was a postdoc at Brookhaven National Laboratory , where he observed weak decays of kaons and hyperons in bubble chambers. In 1961/62 he was at CERN, where he was involved in experiments on weak decays of hyperons, which confirmed the Cabibbo theory of weak interaction.

#1800

Gilles Klopman

#84737

Overall Influence

1933 - 2015 (82 years)

Gilles Klopman was the Charles F. Mabery Professor of Research in Chemistry, Oncology and Environmental Health Sciences Director of the Laboratory for Decision Support Methodologies at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and Adjunct Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health,

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions