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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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people

#1901

Mark Webber

#89689

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Mark Webber is a British political scientist and international relations specialist whose research interests include the international politics of the former Soviet Union, contemporary Russian foreign policy, foreign policy analysis , politics of NATO and European Union enlargement, security studies, and comparative international organisations. He is a professor of International Politics at the University of Birmingham, where between 2011 and July 2019 he was the Head of the School of Government and Society. He was also the Head of the Department of Politics, History and International Relati...

#1902

Richard C. Powell

#89732

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (86 years)

Richard C. Powell is an American professor emeritus of physics and vice president emeritus of the University of Arizona , whose career focused on research in materials science and laser optics. He served as president of the Optical Society of America in 2000.

#1903

Larry Lake

#89754

Overall Influence

Larry W. Lake is the Shahid and Sharon Ullah Endowed Chair in petroleum engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He has served on the faculty of the Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering since 1978. He obtained a B.S.E. from Arizona State University and a Ph.D. from Rice University, both in chemical engineering. He is a world-famous expert in reservoir engineering, geochemistry, fluid flow in porous media and enhanced oil recovery.

#1904

Matthew Koss

#89777

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Matthew B. Koss is a widely published solid-state physicist. Biography Koss received his AB degree from Vassar College in 1983 and a Ph.D. in experimental condensed matter physics from Tufts University in 1989.

#1905

Dave Rearick

#89785

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (91 years)

Dave Rearick is an American rock climber and mathematician. A pioneer of Yosemite's golden age of climbing, Rearick – frequently climbing with Bob Kamps – was instrumental in shifting the focus from aid climbing to free climbing in the 1950s.

#1906

Robert Grayson Littlejohn

#89812

Overall Influence

Robert Grayson Littlejohn is an American physicist, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Littlejohn completed a bachelor's degree and doctorate in physics at Berkeley, in 1975 and 1980, respectively. He then served as a post-doctoral researcher at the La Jolla Institute and the University of California, Los Angeles before returning to teach at Berkeley in 1983. He retired in 2018.

#1907

Curt Wittig

#89892

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Curt Franklin Wittig is a professor of chemistry and the holder of the Paul A. Miller Chair in the college of letters, arts, and sciences at the University of Southern California . Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Curt Wittig received his B.S. and Ph.D in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois in 1970.

#1908

Walter D. Knight

#89948

Overall Influence

1919 - 2000 (81 years)

Walter D. Knight was an American physicist. He discovered the Knight shift, the effect that has been given his name. Knight shifts are frequency shifts of the nuclear magnetic resonance in metals.

#1909

Mervyn Maze

#89963

Overall Influence

Mervyn Maze, MD, MB ChB has been a Professor in the Departments of Anesthesia and Pain Medicine, Intensive Care at the University of California, San Francisco since 1988. He has also served as Professor and Chair at Imperial College London.

#1910

Jennifer Dionne

#89981

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (44 years)

Jennifer Dionne is an American scientist and pioneer of nanophotonics. She is currently senior associate vice provost of research platforms at Stanford University, a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator, and an associate professor of materials science and engineering and by courtesy, of radiology. She serves as director of the Department of Energy's "Photonics at Thermodynamic Limits" Energy Frontier Research Center , which strives to create thermodynamic engines driven by light, and she leads the "Extreme Scale Characterization" efforts of the DOE's Q-NEXT Quantum Science Center. She is also an associate editor of the ACS journal Nano Letters.

#1911

Ryan C. Bailey

#90040

Overall Influence

Ryan C. Bailey is an American professor of chemistry at the University of Michigan. Bailey joined the department of chemistry in 2006 as assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2012. In 2011, he was received the Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

#1912

Zhou Peiyuan

#90073

Overall Influence

1902 - 1993 (91 years)

Zhou Peiyuan was a Chinese theoretical physicist and politician. He served as president of Peking University, and was an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences . Born in Yixing, Jiangsu, China, Zhou graduated from Tsinghua University in 1924. Then he went to the United States and obtained a bachelor's degree from University of Chicago in spring of 1926, and a master's degree at the end of the same year. In 1928, he obtained his doctorate degree from California Institute of Technology under Eric Temple Bell with thesis The Gravitational Field of a Body with Rotational Symmetry in Einstein's Theory of Gravitation.

#1913

Kenneth Galloway

#90128

Overall Influence

Kenneth F. Galloway, Sr. is an American engineer and engineering educator. He is a Distinguished Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, and Dean of the School of Engineering, Emeritus, at Vanderbilt University. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Society for Engineering Education and the American Physical Society.

#1914

Chi Ming Chan

#90162

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Chi Ming Chan, is a Chinese chemical engineer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology . Education Chan obtained his Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1975. He then pursued research and received his Master of Science and Ph.D. degrees in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1977 and 1979 respectively.

#1915

Rosa Matzkin

#90283

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Rosa Matzkin is an economist who is the Charles E. Davidson Professor of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2018 Matzkin was awarded membership to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She works in the fields of econometrics and microeconomic theory, including panel data models and the study of economic decision-making.

#1916

Bennie Ward

#90328

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Bennie Franklin Leon Ward is a theoretical particle physicist at Baylor University in Texas, US. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and is currently co-editor-in-chief of The Open Nuclear and Particle Physics Journal.

#1917

John A. Tainer

#90329

Overall Influence

#1918

Bascom S. Deaver

#90484

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (95 years)

Bascom Sine Deaver Jr. is a retired American physicist known for his research into superconductor applications, and a professor and assistant chairman for undergraduate studies of the physics department at the University of Virginia.

#1919

Merrill Joan Gerber

#90574

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

Merrill Joan Gerber is an American writer. She is an O. Henry Award winner. Biography Gerber was born in Brooklyn, New York, March 15, 1938. She received a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Florida in 1959, and a Masters in English from Brandeis University.

#1920

Marta Zlatic

#90611

Overall Influence

Marta Zlatic is a Croatian neuroscientist who is group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. Her research investigates how neural circuits generate behaviour. Early life and education Zlatic is from Zagreb, Croatia. She has said that growing up she had excellent Latin and Greek teachers. She was awarded a full scholarship to study the Natural Sciences Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge. During her summer holidays from Cambridge, Zlatic studied linguistics and Russian at the University of Zagreb. Alongside her studies, Zlatic was involved with the Cambridge theatre scene, taking part in Greek tragedies and Shakespeare's plays.

#1921

Donald Cox

#90614

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

Donald C. Cox is an electrical engineer researching wireless communication, currently a professor at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he heads the Wireless Communications Research Group. His work on multipath and other propagation problems has been fundamental to the development of mobile phone technology.

#1922

Vilma Rose Hunt

#90621

Overall Influence

1926 - 2012 (86 years)

Vilma Rose Hunt was a scientist noted for research into radiation and workplace safety for women. After beginning a dentistry career in Australia and New Zealand, Hunt traveled to the United States where she earned her A.M. in Physical Anthropology at Radcliffe College and began researching public health and radiation biology. In 1964, Hunt discovered that polonium 210 is a natural contaminant of tobacco, providing additional evidence for the link between smoking and bronchial cancer. In 1974, she wrote a 121-page report on workplace hazards for pregnant women, which made the front page of the New York Times.

#1923

Gary Parker

#90623

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

#1924

Sanjiva K. Lele

#90708

Overall Influence

#1925

Velmer A. Fassel

#90737

Overall Influence

1919 - 1998 (79 years)

Velmer A. Fassel was an American chemist who developed the inductively coupled plasma and demonstrated its use as ion source for mass spectrometry. Early life and education 1941 B.A. Southeast Missouri State College1947 Ph.D. Iowa State University

#1926

Steven Boggs

#90785

Overall Influence

Steven Edward Boggs is an American astrophysicist. He is the dean of the division of physical sciences at University of California, San Diego. Education Boggs completed a Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley in 1998.

#1927

Garry R. Buettner

#90824

Overall Influence

#1928

Simon Ramo

#90844

Overall Influence

1913 - 2016 (103 years)

Simon "Si" Ramo was an American engineer, businessman, and author. He led development of microwave and missile technology and is sometimes known as the father of the intercontinental ballistic missile . He also developed General Electric's electron microscope. He played prominent roles in the formation of two Fortune 500 companies, Ramo-Wooldridge and Bunker Ramo Corporation .

#1929

Mark Andrew Richards

#90898

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Mark Andrew Richards is a retired American engineer best known for his textbooks and professional education courses in the area of radar and radar signal processing. He remains employed part time as a Principal Research Engineer and adjunct professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and as a private consultant and expert witness.

#1930

L. M. Narducci

#90920

Overall Influence

1942 - 2006 (64 years)

Lorenzo M. Narducci was an Italian-American physicist known for his contributions to quantum optics and the study of laser instabilities, in particular. He was the author of more than 200 scientific papers and several books including Laser Physics and Laser Instabilities. In addition to his research on the theory of laser instabilities he also contributed to the physics of emission and absorption in three-level systems, and frequency locking.

#1931

Paul K. Hansma

#90933

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Paul K. Hansma is an American physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Early life and education Paul K. Hansma was born in Salt Lake City, Utah on April 28, 1946. He received his undergraduate degree from New College of Florida, and his PhD in physics from the University of California, Berkeley where he studied electron tunneling and Josephson junctions.

#1932

Roger Chevalier

#90961

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Roger Chevalier is an American astronomer currently on faculty at University of Virginia. A cited expert in theoretical astrophysics, his interests include astronomical supernovae environment and gases.

#1933

Walter Lynn

#91015

Overall Influence

1928 - 2011 (83 years)

Walter Lynn was a distinguished professor at Cornell University for most of his academic career. As a civil engineer he was interested in water-quality issues, he was at the forefront of environmental studies. According to one obituary, he coined the term "sustainability."

#1934

Peter Capak

#91065

Overall Influence

Peter Lawrence Capak is currently the Architect of Perception Systems at the Oculus division of Facebook. His current focus is developing machine perception technologies, sensors, displays, and compute architectures for the next generation of augmented , mixed and virtual reality systems. His research has focused on using physical modeling and advanced statistical methods including artificial intelligence and machine learning to extract information from very large multi-wavelength data sets. He has primarily used this to study structure formation in the universe, cosmology, and the nature...

#1935

Tobias Delbruck

#91070

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Tobias "Tobi" Delbrück is an American neuromorphic engineer at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2014 "for contributions to neuromorphic visual sensors and processing".

#1936

Raymond Seeger

#91080

Overall Influence

1906 - 1992 (86 years)

Raymond John Seeger was an American physicist. He was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey and graduated from Rutgers University in 1926 with a B.A. in theoretical physics. He was awarded a doctorate in physics from Yale University in 1929. That year he became an associate professor at the private Presbyterian College in South Carolina. In 1930, he joined the George Washington University . From 1935, while remaining at GWU, he worked with Edward Teller in applied quantum mechanics. With the start of World War II, in 1942 he began working at the Bureau of Ordnance. He collaborated with John von Neumann and John G.

#1937

Heather Kulik

#91100

Overall Influence

Heather J. Kulik is an American computational materials scientist and engineer who is an associate professor of chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research considers the computational design of new materials and the use of artificial intelligence to predict material properties.

#1938

Carson D. Jeffries

#91207

Overall Influence

1922 - 1995 (73 years)

Carson Dunning Jeffries was an Americann physicist. The National Academies Press said that Jeffries "made major fundamental contributions to knowledge of nuclear magnetism, electronic spin relaxation, dynamic nuclear polarization, electron-hole droplets, nonlinear dynamics and chaos, and high-temperature superconductors." He was noted for being the first to observe the isotropic spin-spin exchange interaction in metals . He also discovered methods for the dynamic nuclear polarization by saturation of forbidden microwave resonance transitions in solids. He also discovered the existence of giant electron-hole droplets in semiconductors.

#1939

Janis Louie

#91317

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (54 years)

Janis Louie is a Chemistry professor and Henry Eyring Fellow at The University of Utah. Louie contributes to the chemistry world with her research in inorganic, organic, and polymer chemistry. Education Louie received her B.S. from University of California, Los Angeles in 1993, where she was a cheerleader. She then moved on to get her Ph.D. from Yale University for work under Professor John Hartwig in 1998. In the years of 1998-2001 Louie was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology.

#1940

George William Housner

#91406

Overall Influence

#1941

William Alexander Gambling

#91482

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (99 years)

William Alexander Gambling FRS, FREng was a British electrical engineer. Life From 1950 to 1955, he was lecturer in electric power engineering at the University of Liverpool. He taught at the University of Southampton and was dean of Engineering and Applied Sciences from 1972 to 1975.

#1942

William Francis Brace

#91514

Overall Influence

1926 - 2012 (86 years)

William Francis Brace was an American geophysicist. Career Education Brace matriculated in 1943 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and after 1944–1946 service in the Navy, graduated with bachelor's degrees in 1946 in naval architecture and in 1949 in civil engineering. In 1953 he received his PhD from MIT's department of geology and geophysics. In 1953–1954 he was a Fulbright scholar at Bruno Sander's laboratory in Austria.

#1943

Elena Long

#91605

Overall Influence

Elena Amanda Long is assistant professor of physics at the University of New Hampshire and is an activist for LGBT people in science. The journal Nature called her a "diversity trailblazer" in their Nature's 10: Ten people who mattered this year in 2016. Long's research on the internal structure of nucleons earned her a 2015 Jefferson Science Associates Promising Young Scientist award. Long has made significant contributions to improve the inclusion of under-represented researchers and students by founding the LGBT+ Physics organisation and serving as a member of the American Physical Societ...

#1944

Yue Qi

#91618

Overall Influence

Yue Qi is a Chinese-born American nanotechnologist and physicist who specializes in computational materials scientist at Brown University. She won the 1999 Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology for Theory along with William Goddard and Tahir Cagin for "work in modeling the operation of molecular machine designs."

#1945

Roger Dashen

#91648

Overall Influence

1938 - 1995 (57 years)

Roger Frederick Dashen was an American theoretical physicist who studied particle physics and quantum field theory. Dashen studied physics at the Harvard University , where he graduated "summa cum laude" in 1960. Then he went to Caltech, where he earned his PhD in 1964. After that, he was a professor at Caltech in 1967 and the Institute for Advanced Study in 1969. In 1986, he became a professor at the University of California, San Diego in 1988 was Head of Faculty. He played a leading role in the establishment of a supercomputer center at UCSD and in the establishment of the Institute for Th...

#1946

Lisa Dyson

#91690

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (51 years)

Lisa Dyson is an American scientist, physicist, and entrepreneur. She is the founder and CEO of Kiverdi, a biotechnology company that uses carbon transformation technologies to develop sustainable products for commercial applications, including agriculture, plastics, and biodegradable materials. She is also the founder and CEO of Air Protein, a spin-off company from Kiverdi, which seeks to produce sustainable meat alternatives from elements found in air.

#1947

Ni Guangjiong

#91697

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (91 years)

Ni Guangjiong is a Chinese physicist. He began studies in physics about 1950, and became a Doctor of Philosophy in 1955. He married Su Qing, a physics professor, in 1960. He published his first book in 1978. He holds a Chair in Physics at Fudan University, Shanghai. He is the director of Modern Physics Institute and the head of the Division for Theoretical Physics.

#1948

Teri Klein

#91797

Overall Influence

Teri E. Klein is an American professor of Biomedical Data Science and Medicine at Stanford University. She is known for her work on pharmacogenomics and computational biology. Education Klein has a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz and a Ph.D. from the University of California, San Francisco . In 2000 she started a position at Stanford University where, as of 2022, she holds the position of professor .

#1949

Ray F. Weiss

#91817

Overall Influence

#1950

Jon Michael Smith

#91870

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

Jon Michael Smith is an American scientist/engineer, retired NASA officer, and author, who developed the numerical integration technique known as T-integration. Biography Born in 1938, Smith holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from the Jesuit Seattle University. He attended the Harvard Business School's six-week Advanced Management Program, and a past member of the MIT Sloan School of Management Complex Organizations Program.

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