The Most Influential People Across History
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
#2001
Sanjay Banerjee
#94432
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (48 years)
Sanjay Banerjee is an American engineer at the University of Texas at Austin, director of Microelectronics Research Center, and director of the Southwest Academy of Nanoelectronics — one of three such centers in the United States funded by the Semiconductor Research Corporation to develop a replacement for MOSFETs as part of their Nanoelectronics Research Initiative .
Go to Profile#2002
Lisa McElwee-White
#94493
Overall Influence
Lisa McElwee-White is currently the Colonel Allen R. and Margaret G. Crow Professor of Chemistry at the University of Florida. Career Lisa McElwee-White received her B.S. degree in Chemistry from the University of Kansas in 1979, and completed her Ph.D. degree at the California Institute of Technology under the supervision of Dennis A. Dougherty. After two years of postdoctoral work at Stanford University with James P. Collman, she joined the Stanford faculty as an assistant professor in Chemistry in 1985.
Go to Profile#2003
Jenny Y. Yang
#94570
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Jenny Yue-fon Yang is an American chemist. She is a Professor of chemistry at the University of California, Irvine where she leads a research group focused on inorganic chemistry, catalysis, and solar fuels.
Go to Profile#2004
Susan Celniker
#94618
Overall Influence
Susan E. Celniker is an American biologist, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and an adjunct professor Comparative Biochemistry department at UC Berkeley. She is the co-director of the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project.
Go to Profile#2005
John Arrington
#94627
Overall Influence
John Arrington is a nuclear physicist and group leader of Medium-Energy Physics, Physics Division, at the Argonne National Laboratory. He is known for his leading role in a number of important nuclear physics and medium-energy/high-energy experiments at the Argonne and Jefferson National Laboratory Accelerator Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility facilities. He is perhaps one of the most active and most cited young nuclear physicists in the world, with more than 8000 citations to his work and an H-index of 51.
Go to Profile#2006
Omer Blaes
#94655
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Omer Michael Blaes is an American astrophysicist. He is a professor of physics at University of California, Santa Barbara. Early life and education Blaes was born April 30, 1961. He completed a BSc with first class honors in astrophysics at Queen Mary University of London in August 1983. He earned a MPhil in physics, cum laude, from the International School for Advanced Studies in October 1985. He completed a PhD in physics at SISSA in September 1986. His doctoral advisor was . Blaes' dissertation was titled The Stability of Thick Accretion Disks. Blaes was the Chaim Weizmann Research Fellow...
Go to Profile#2007
Jeff Wilson
#94710
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Jeff Wilson is an American academic and serial startup entrepreneur. The pseudonym Professor Dumpster is based upon his role as part of 'The Dumpster Project', an educational and minimalist living experiment that transformed a trash dumpster into a fully sustainable home. Wilson lived in the dumpster over the course of the yearlong project.
Go to Profile#2008
H. Douglas Keith
#94725
Overall Influence
1927 - 2003 (76 years)
Harvey Douglas Keith was a physicist and one of the primary polymer researchers over the latter half of the 20th century. Early UK University affiliations In 1948, Keith obtained a BSc degree from Queen's University in Belfast. In 1951, he received a PhD in Physics from the University of Bristol in England, where he taught optics as a lecturer in Physics between 1951 and 1956.
Go to Profile#2009
Henry S. Valk
#94744
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (96 years)
Henry S. Valk is Professor Emeritus of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Valk attended George Washington University where he received his B.S. in physics in 1953 and M.S. in mathematics in 1954. He then earned his Ph.D. at Washington University in St. Louis in 1957. Before joining the faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Valk was a professor of physics at the University of Nebraska.
Go to Profile#2010
Carl A. Rouse
#94750
Overall Influence
1926 - 2014 (88 years)
Carl A. Rouse was an American physicist, working in the fields of atomic, plasma, and computational physics. Rouse was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in physics from Caltech . Early life and education Rouse was born in Hazelton, Ohio. Interested in physics and boxing from an early age, Rouse was described as "gifted high school student" and won a Golden Glove in high school. He entered the Army Special Training Reserves in 1944 , where his academic performance sent him to New York University to participate in the ASTR Civil Engineering Course. Rouse would later realize that the p...
Go to Profile#2011
Herbert S. Rosenkranz†
#94800
Overall Influence
#2012
Tomasz Robert Taylor
#94831
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Tomasz Robert Taylor is a Polish-American theoretical physicist and faculty at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America. He obtained his PhD degree from the University of Warsaw, Poland in 1981 under the supervision of Stefan Pokorski. He is a descendant of John Taylor who originated from Fraserburgh in Scotland and emigrated to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth c.1676.
Go to Profile#2013
Miaofang Chi
#94833
Overall Influence
Miaofang Chi is a distinguished scientist at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences in Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Her primary research interests are understanding interfacial charge transfer and mass transport behavior in energy and quantum materials and systems by advancing and employing novel electron microscopy techniques, such as in situ and cryogenic scanning transmission electron microscopy. She was awarded the 2016 Microscopy Society of America Burton Medal and the 2019 Microanalysis Society Kurt Heinrich Award. She was named to Clarivate's list of Highly Cited Researchers in 2...
Go to Profile#2014
Wesley Smith
#94840
Overall Influence
Wesley H. Smith is the Bjorn Wiik Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he has taught since 1988. Before that he taught at Columbia University. Along with fellow physics professor Sau Lan Wu and math professor Terry Millar, he was “central to Wisconsin’s contribution to development of the Large Hadron Collider.”
Go to Profile#2015
Wei-Shau Hu
#94858
Overall Influence
Wei-Shau Hu is an American geneticist specialized in HIV research, retroviral recombination, RNA packaging, and virus assembly. She is a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute and head of the viral recombination section. She was an associate professor at West Virginia University.
Go to Profile#2016
Christopher Bielawski
#94874
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Christopher William Bielawski is a distinguished professor at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology and group leader of the Synthesis Group in the Center for Multidimensional Carbon Materials. His research in synthesis and polymer chemistry has resulted in more than 290 publications and multiple patents.
Go to Profile#2017
James F. Pankow
#94878
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
James F. Pankow is an American environmental engineer. Pankow studied chemistry at the State University of New York at Binghamton and earned a doctorate in engineering from the California Institute of Technology . He is a professor of chemistry and engineering at Portland State University. Pankow has been an ISI highly cited researcher since 2003. In 2009, Pankow was elected a member of the United States National Academy of Engineering "for contributions to understanding the chemical thermodynamics of organic particulate matter in urban air and the global atmosphere."
Go to Profile#2018
K. Mani Chandy
#94881
Overall Influence
#2019
Scott C. Weaver
#94965
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Scott C. Weaver is an American virologist who is the research director of Galveston National Laboratory. External links https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7kMhCowCfg
Go to Profile#2020
Harold Zirin
#95107
Overall Influence
1929 - 2012 (83 years)
Harold "Hal" Zirin was an American solar astronomer also known as Captain Corona to a generation of Caltech Astronomy students. Life Most content from 1998 interview with Zirin Born in 1929 to immigrants from Russia and Austro-Hungary in Boston, Zirin grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut. While attending Bassick High School, Zirin's home-built telescope won him a Westinghouse Prize, a Pepsi-Cola Scholarship, and scholarships to Harvard University as class of 1946 Valedictorian. Zirin earned his Bachelor of Science from Harvard in Applied Physics and completed his Astronomy Ph.D. in 1953. Du...
Go to Profile#2021
Sharon K. Davis
#95191
Overall Influence
Sharon K. Davis is an American social epidemiologist. She is a senior scientist and head of the Social Epidemiology Research Unit at the National Human Genome Research Institute. Education Davis completed a B.A. from University of Arkansas in 1980. She earned a M.Ed. from Northeastern University in 1983. In 1987, she completed a M.P.A. from John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She earned a Ph.D. from the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University in 1991. Her dissertation was titled Assessing the effect of Medicare's Prospective Payment System ...
Go to Profile#2022
Melvin I. Simon
#95300
Overall Influence
#2023
Jean Schwarzbauer
#95370
Overall Influence
Jean E. Schwarzbauer is an American molecular biologist currently the Eugene Higgins Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. A cited expert in her field, Schwarzbauer's interests are kidney fibrosis, tissue regeneration and repair, cartilage development and tumor formations.
Go to Profile#2024
Brenda Dingus
#95390
Overall Influence
Brenda Lynn Dingus is an American particle astrophysicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, known for her research on gamma-ray bursts and cosmic rays. Education and career Dingus majored in physics at Harvey Mudd College, graduating in 1982. She completed a Ph.D. in 1988 at the University of Maryland, College Park, specializing in experimental cosmic-ray physics under the supervision of Gaurang Yodh.
Go to Profile#2025
Judy Brown
#95420
Overall Influence
Judith "Judy" C. Brown is an American physicist and professor emerita at Wellesley College. She was a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab in the Machine Listening Group for over 20 years, and is recognized for her contributions in music information retrieval, including developing the constant-Q transform. She is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and has served on the ASA technical committees for musical acoustics and animal bioacoustics.
Go to Profile#2026
Allan Acosta
#95485
Overall Influence
1924 - 2020 (96 years)
Allan James Acosta was an American engineer, and a Richard L. and Dorothy M. Hayman Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Emeritus at California Institute of Technology. He was elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science and National Academy of Engineering.
Go to Profile#2027
A. Brooks Harris
#95502
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Arthur Brooks Harris, called Brooks Harris, is an American physicist. Biography Harris was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied at Harvard University with bachelor's degree in 1956, master's degree in 1959, and PhD in experimental solid state physics from Horst Meyer in 1962. Harris was in 1961/62 at Duke University to complete his doctoral thesis with Meyer and then was an instructor there from 1962 to 1964. During 1961–1964 at Duke University Harris retrained himself as a theorist in condensed matter physics and then spent the academic year 1964/65 as a researcher working with John Hubbard in the UK at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment near Harwell, Oxfordshire.
Go to Profile#2028
James Gegan Miller
#95572
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
James Gegan Miller is an American physicist, engineer, and inventor whose primary interests center around biomedical physics. He is currently a professor of physics, Medicine, and Biomedical Engineering, emeritus, at Washington University in St. Louis, where he holds the Albert Gordon Hill Endowed Chair in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He is notable for his interdisciplinary contributions to biomedical physics, echocardiography, and ultrasonics.
Go to Profile#2029
John Harris
#95845
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
John William Harris is an American experimental high energy nuclear physicist and D. Allan Bromley Professor of Physics at Yale University. His research interests are focused on understanding high energy density QCD and the quark–gluon plasma created in relativistic collisions of heavy ions. Dr. Harris collaborated on the original proposal to initiate a high energy heavy ion program at Cern in Geneva, Switzerland, has been actively involved in the CERN heavy ion program and was the founding spokesperson for the STAR collaboration at RHIC at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the U.S.
Go to Profile#2030
Christopher Voigt
#95919
Overall Influence
Christopher Voigt is an American synthetic biologist, molecular biophysicist, and engineer. Career Voigt is the Daniel I.C. Wang Professor of Advanced Biotechnology in the Department of Biological Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He works in the developing field of synthetic biology. He is the co-director of the Synthetic Biology Center at MIT and the co-founder of the MIT-Broad Foundry.
Go to Profile#2031
Renee M. Johnson
#95977
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Renee M. Johnson is an American scientist specializing in the mental health of adolescents and young adults. She researches substance abuse, substance use epidemiology, and violence in marginalized youth including persons of color, LGBTQ, and immigrants. Johnson is an associate professor in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Go to Profile#2032
Edward John Smith
#96010
Overall Influence
#2033
Riccardo Betti
#96120
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Riccardo Betti is the Robert L. McCrory professor of Mechanical Engineering and Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester, in Rochester, NY. Since 2004, he has also acted as the Director of the Fusion Science Center at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics. He received is Ph.D. from the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992. Prior to that he studied at the University of Rome , where he graduated with honors with a degree in Nuclear Engineering in 1987.
Go to Profile#2034
Steven L. Teitelbaum
#96144
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
#2035
Mary Lidstrom
#96206
Overall Influence
Mary E. Lidstrom is a Professor of Microbiology at the University of Washington. She also holds the Frank Jungers Chair of Engineering, in the Department of Chemical Engineering. She currently is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Bacteriology and FEMS Microbial Ecology.
Go to Profile#2036
Daniel J. Scheeres
#96255
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Daniel Jay Scheeres is an American aerospace engineer. He is the A. Richard Seebass Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In honor of his "pioneering work into the investigation of the dynamics of orbits close to small, irregularly shaped minor planets," Asteroid 1994LK1 was renamed Scheeres in 1999.
Go to Profile#2037
William James Nelson
#96345
Overall Influence
#2038
Thomas Howard Johnson
#96407
Overall Influence
Thomas H. Johnson is a research professor at the Naval Postgraduate School's Department of National Security Affairs. Johnson is the Director of the Naval Postgraduate School's Program for Culture & Conflict Studies. Johnson has taught at the University of Southern California, George Mason University and the Foreign Service Institute.
Go to Profile#2039
Mark Inghram
#96443
Overall Influence
1919 - 2003 (84 years)
Mark Gordon Inghram was an American physicist. Inghram was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Life Inghram was born in Livingston, Montana. He did undergraduate work at Olivet College, receiving a B.A. in 1939. He worked in the Manhattan Project during World War II and at Argonne National Laboratories from 1945 to 1947. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1947. He began teaching at the University of Chicago as an instructor in 1947 and remained there until his retirement in 1985. He died at his home in Holland, Michigan in 2003.
Go to Profile#2040
Gerhard Neukum
#96483
Overall Influence
1944 - 2014 (70 years)
Gerhard Neukum was a German planetary scientist who worked on the chronology of solar system bodies. He obtained a Ph.D. in physics at the Heidelberg University. He was a professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and at the Free University of Berlin.
Go to Profile#2041
William P. Winfree
#96681
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
William Paul Winfree is an American experimental physicist who is known for his contributions to the field of nondestructive evaluation. Winfree received his B.A. in 1973 from George Mason University, where he graduated magna cum laude and was awarded the department citation as the outstanding undergraduate in mathematics and physics. He earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in physics from The College of William and Mary in 1975 and 1978, respectively.
Go to Profile#2042
Salih J. Wakil
#96737
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
Salih Jawad Wakil was an American biochemist. Wakil's laboratory discovered both Acetyl CoA Carboxylase and Fatty Acid Synthetase. Early life Wakil was born on August 16, 1927, in Karbala, Iraq to a shoemaker. After scoring in the top 5 on the national baccalaureate exam of Iraq, Wakil earned a scholarship to the American University of Beirut. Upon graduating in 1948 with a degree in chemistry, he emigrated to the United States to earn his PhD in biochemistry from the University of Washington. Upon completing his PhD, Wakil became a research associate at the Institute for Enzyme Research at t...
Go to Profile#2043
Kim D. Pruitt
#96806
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Kim Dixon Pruitt is an American bioinformatician. She is chief of the information engineering branch at the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Pruitt led the development of the RefSeq gene database.
Go to Profile#2044
Todd Martínez
#96808
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (57 years)
Todd J. Martínez is a David Mulvane Ehrsam and Edward Curtis Franklin Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and a Professor of Photon Science at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Education He attended Carol Morgan School in the Dominican Republic before receiving his B.S. from Calvin College in 1989 and his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1994. He was a Fulbright Fellow at the Fritz Haber Institute for Molecular Dynamics at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel and later a University of California Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA.
Go to Profile#2045
Lasse Jensen
#96825
Overall Influence
Lasse Jensen is a professor of theoretical chemistry at Pennsylvania State University whose works have appeared in such chemistry journals as the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Journal of Physical Chemistry A, Journal of Chemical Physics and the Chemical Society Reviews, among others. He got his bachelor's degree from University of Copenhagen in 1998 and two years later obtained master's from the same place. Four years later he got his Ph.D. from the University of Groningen and till 2007 worked as a postdoc at the Northwestern University along with George C. Schatz. He is well-recog...
Go to Profile#2046
Mary C Boyce
#96868
Overall Influence
#2047
Balaraman Kalyanaraman
#97036
Overall Influence
#2048
John Kormendy
#97095
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
John Kormendy , is an American astronomer, currently the Curtis T. Vaughn, Jr. Centennial Chair at University of Texas at Austin. He is known for the Kormendy relation found in the surface brightness profiles for elliptic galaxies.
Go to Profile#2049
L. David Sibley
#97107
Overall Influence
#2050
Junshan Zhang
#97110
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Junshan Zhang from the Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2012 for contributions to cross-layer optimization of wireless networks.
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