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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Ranking

List of the most influential people

#2301

Jean L. Turner

#109007

Overall Influence

Jean L. Turner is an astrophysicist and distinguished professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She was lead author on research and discovery of a particular star cluster in the dwarf galaxy NGC 5253, considered 'remarkable' for being an extremely dusty gas cloud and having highly efficient star formation.

#2302

Chandrasekhar Nataraj

#109025

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Chandrasekhar Nataraj , an American-Indian scientist, and Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Villanova University, where he holds the Mr. and Mrs. Robert F. Moritz, Sr. Endowed Chair position in Engineered Systems. His research includes nonlinear dynamic systems with applications to machinery diagnostics, rotor dynamics, vibration, control, electromagnetic bearings, mobile robotics, unmanned vehicles and biomedical diagnostics. He is currently the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Vibration Engineering & Technologies, and associate editor of Nonlinear Dynamics.

#2303

Marcos Intaglietta

#109050

Overall Influence

#2304

Michael Julian Drake

#109102

Overall Influence

1946 - 2011 (65 years)

Michael Julian Drake , regent's professor, was the director of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and head of the Department of Planetary Sciences. He was the principal investigator of the Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer mission of NASA's New Frontiers Program. The OSIRIS-REx mission, launched on September 8, 2016, and scheduled to arrive at Asteroid Bennu in December 2018, is the most ambitious University of Arizona planetary science project to date and will retrieve a sample of the asteroid and return it to Earth. He...

#2305

Xanthippi Markenscoff

#109184

Overall Influence

Xanthippi Markenscoff is a Greek-American mechanical engineer specializing in the dynamics of defects and dislocations in materials, including Eshelby's inclusion; other topics in her research have included grasping and fixturing, and the relation between strain and natural frequency. She is a distinguished professor emerita in the Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego.

#2306

Antoinette Galvin

#109229

Overall Influence

Antoinette Galvin is space physicist at the University of New Hampshire. She is known for her research on the solar wind. Education and career Galvin earned her B.S. in physics from Purdue University, and has an M.S. and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Maryland. Galvin was a research faculty member of the University of Maryland before moving to the University of New Hampshire in 1997. As of 2011, Galvin is a research professor in physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire and the director of the New Hampshire NASA Space Grant program and the New Hampshire NASA EPSCoR p...

#2307

Lars A. Berglund

#109247

Overall Influence

#2308

Cindy Regal

#109294

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (46 years)

Cindy A. Regal is an American experimental physicist most noted for her work in quantum optics; atomic, molecular, and optical physics ; and cavity optomechanics. Regal is an associate professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Colorado and JILA Fellow; and a Fellow of the American Physical Society .

#2309

G. Faye Boudreaux-Bartels

#109336

Overall Influence

Gloria Faye Boudreaux-Bartels is an American electrical engineer known for her work on signal processing, including time–frequency representation, wavelet transforms, and the Wigner distribution function. She is a professor emerita of electrical, computer and biomedical engineering at the University of Rhode Island.

#2310

James F. Bell III

James F. Bell III

#109342

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (60 years)

James F. Bell III is a professor of Astronomy at Arizona State University, specializing in the study of planetary geology, geochemistry and mineralogy using data obtained from telescopes and from various spacecraft missions. Bell's active research has involved the NASA Mars Pathfinder, Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous , Comet Nucleus Tour , 2001 Mars Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the Mars Science Laboratory missions. His book Postcards from Mars includes many images taken by the Mars rovers. Bell is currently an editor of the space science journal Icarus and president of The Planetary Society.

#2311

Martha Locke Hazen

#109440

Overall Influence

1931 - 2006 (75 years)

Martha Locke Hazen was an American astronomer, best known for her contributions as curator of the Harvard astronomical photographs collection and her work on variable stars. Early life and education Martha Locke Hazen was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts and grew up in Belmont. In 1953, she graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a degree in astronomy. She went on to complete her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 1958. Her thesis foscused on how the intensities of elliptical galaxies within the Virgo cluster were distributed.

#2312

James H. Strauss Jr.

James H. Strauss Jr.

#109532

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

James Henry Strauss Jr. is an American biologist who is the Ethel Wilson Bowles and Robert Bowles Professor of Biology, Emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology.

#2313

Ann Karagozian

#109542

Overall Influence

Ann Renee Karagozian is an aerospace engineer known for her work on combustion, fluid dynamics, advanced propulsion techniques, and transverse jets in supersonic flows. She is a distinguished professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles , where she is also the former interim vice chancellor for research, the director of the Collaborative Center for Aerospace Studies, the director of the Promise Armenian Institute, a trustee of the Institute for Defense Analyses, and a trustee of the American University of Armenia.

#2314

Andrew J. Heymsfield

#109566

Overall Influence

#2315

John Quinn

#109601

Overall Influence

1933 - 2018 (85 years)

John Joseph Quinn was an American theoretical physicist as well as an academic administrator; he was a former Chancellor and a member of the faculty at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, US. He was considered to be an expert in the areas of solid-state physics and many-body theory including two dimensional Composite fermions, low-dimensional systems, quantum Hall effect and nanoscience. Quinn was also one of the first researchers to recognize that physics of ‘two-dimensional electronic systems’ needs to be treated as a professional-sub-specialty.

#2316

Ravindra N. Sudan

#109708

Overall Influence

1931 - 2009 (78 years)

Ravindra Nath Sudan was an Indian-American electrical engineer and physicist who specialized in plasma physics. He was known for independently discovering the whistler instability in 1963, an instability which causes audible low-frequency radio waves to be emitted in the magnetosphere in the form of whistler waves. He also pioneered the study of the generation and propagation of intense ion beams, and contributed to theories of plasma instabilities and plasma turbulence.

#2317

Peter Franaszek

#109715

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Peter A. Franaszek is an American information theorist, an IEEE Fellow, a research staff member emeritus at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and a former member of the IBM Academy of Technology. He received his Sc.B. from Brown University in 1962, and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1966.

#2318

Raymond Andrew

#109738

Overall Influence

1921 - 2001 (80 years)

Edward Raymond Andrew FRS FRSE was a 20th-century British scientist who was a pioneer of nuclear magnetic resonance. He was a primary figure in the development and creation of the world's first MRI scanner.

#2319

Stephen Trimberger

#109749

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Stephen "Steve" Trimberger is an American computer scientist, electrical engineer, philanthropist, and prolific inventor with 250 US utility patents as of August 26, 2021. He is a DARPA program manager of the microsystems technology office.

#2320

James C. Eisenach

#109855

Overall Influence

James C. Eisenach is an American anesthesiologist, currently the FM James, III Professor at Wake Forest School of Medicine, Wake Forest University and the former Editor-in-Chief of American Society of Anesthesiologists's journal Anesthesiology.

#2321

Peter M. Shearer

#109964

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

#2322

Richard McCray

#110021

Overall Influence

1937 - 2021 (84 years)

Richard Alan McCray was an American astronomer and astrophysicist. McCray received his B.S. in physics from Stanford University in 1959 and his Ph.D. in physics in 1967 from the University of California, Los Angeles with thesis advisor Peter Goldreich. McCray was a research fellow at Caltech from 1967 to 1968 and then an assistant professor at Harvard University from 1968 to 1971. At the department of astrophysical and planetary sciences of the University of Colorado Boulder, he was from 1971 to 1975 an associate professor, from 1975 to 1997 a full professor, from 1997 to 2004 the George Gamow Distinguished Professor Astrophysics, and from 2004 to 2013 a professor emeritus.

#2323

Deborah Nickerson

#110097

Overall Influence

1954 - 2021 (67 years)

Deborah Ann "Debbie" Nickerson was an American human genomics researcher. She was professor of genome sciences at the University of Washington. Nickerson founded and directed of one of the five clinical sites of the Gregor Consortium and was a major contributor to many genomics projects, including the Human Genome Project and the International HapMap Project.

#2324

Robert E Kingston

#110108

Overall Influence

#2325

Raymond Arvidson

#110112

Overall Influence

Raymond E. Arvidson is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. He is known for his contributions to NASA missions to Mars, including as deputy director of the Mars Exploration Rovers.

#2326

Keith D Paulsen

#110163

Overall Influence

#2327

Jennifer Hoffman

#110183

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Jennifer Hoffman is an American astrophysicist and associate professor at the University of Denver. She studies the circumstellar material around stars. Early life and education In 1994 Hoffman graduated from University of California, Berkeley, having spent a year at University of Göttingen. Hoffman earned her PhD in 2002. She worked with Kenneth Nordsieck on Locating Mass Loss: Numerical Modeling of Circumstellar Material in Binary Systems.

#2328

William Abikoff

#110221

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

William Abikoff is an American mathematician. He has been a professor of mathematics at the University of Connecticut since 1981. Abikoff earned his Ph.D. in 1971 from the New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering under the supervision of Georges Gustave Weill. In 2012, Abikoff became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

#2329

Alexander Pukhov

#110258

Overall Influence

#2330

Steve Edwards

#110291

Overall Influence

1930 - 2016 (86 years)

Steve Edwards was an American nuclear physicist and professor emeritus at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. Education Edwards earned B.S. and M.Sc. degrees in physics from Florida State University in 1952 and 1954, respectively. In 1960, he completed his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University with the thesis "EXCHANGE EFFECTS IN DIRECT REACTIONS".

#2331

Raymond J. Deshaies

#110361

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Raymond Joseph Deshaies is an American biochemist and cell biologist. He is senior vice president of global research at Amgen and a visiting associate at the California Institute of Technology . Prior to that, he was a professor of biology at Caltech and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is also the co-founder of the biotechnology companies Proteolix and Cleave Biosciences. His research focuses on mechanisms and regulation of protein homeostasis in eukaryotic cells, with a particular focus on how proteins are conjugated with ubiquitin and degraded by the proteasom...

#2332

Halson V. Eagleson

#110424

Overall Influence

1903 - 1992 (89 years)

Halson Vashon Eagleson Jr. was an American physicist and professor, and the fifth African American person to receive a PhD in physics in the United States. He was also the first African American person to receive a PhD in physics from Indiana University. Eagleson's research focused on acoustics and the behavior of sound.

#2333

Ayana Holloway Arce

Ayana Holloway Arce

#110460

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Ayana Holloway Arce is a professor of physics at Duke University. She works on particle physics, using data from the Large Hadron Collider to understand phenomena beyond the Standard Model. Early life and education Arce was born in Lansing, Michigan. She studied physics at Princeton University, graduating with honors and a bachelor's degree in 1998. She moved on to Harvard University for her PhD, working the Collider Detector at Fermilab detector at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. She completed her PhD in 2006.

#2334

Penina Axelrad

#110489

Overall Influence

Penina Axelrad is an American aerospace engineer known for her research on satellite orbital dynamics and the Global Positioning System. She is Joseph T. Negler Professor in the Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research and the Ann and H.J. Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences department at the University of Colorado.

#2335

Nathan Dunfield

#110498

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (50 years)

Nathan Michael Dunfield is an American mathematician, specializing in Topology. Career Dunfield did his undergraduate studies at Oregon State University, obtaining a B.S. in mathematics in 1994. For his graduate studies, he went to the University of Chicago, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1999, with a thesis on Cyclic Surgery, Degrees of Maps of Character Curves, and Volume Rigidity for Hyperbolic Manifolds written under the supervision of Peter Shalen and Melvin Rothenberg.

#2336

James J. Riley

#110516

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

James Joseph Riley is an American fluid dynamicist. He is PACCAR professor of engineering in the department of mechanical engineering of the University of Washington. Riley graduated from Rockhurst University in 1965. He received a PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1972. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was also elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2014 for contributions in analysis, modeling, and computations of transitioning and turbulent...

#2337

Christine Orme

#110572

Overall Influence

Christine A. Orme is an American physicist who studies the growth and decay of materials at surfaces, especially focusing on biomineralization. She is a Senior Staff Scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, working in the BioNanomaterials Group of the Physical and Life Sciences Directorate.

#2338

Lisa Pruitt

#110582

Overall Influence

Lisa Anne Pruitt is an American mechanical engineer known for her research on orthopedic biomaterials and medical polymers. Early life and education Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Pruitt double-majored in Materials Engineering and Chemical and Ocean Engineering at the University of Rhode Island, earning two bachelor's degrees in 1988. She earned her master's and PhD degrees from Brown University in 1990 and 1993 respectively.

#2339

Stanley S. Hanna

#110588

Overall Influence

1920 - 2012 (92 years)

Stanley Sweet Hanna was an American physicist. Stanley Hanna was born in Burma to missionary parents. At age fourteen he was sent to the Fannie Doane Home for missionary children in Granville, Ohio, where he attended high school and then graduated with A.B. from Denison University in 1941. From 1941 to 1944 he was a graduate student in physics at Johns Hopkins University. From 1945 to 1946 he was in the U.S. Army and worked at Los Alamos. In 1947 he received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. There he was an instructor from 1946 to 1949 and an assistant professor from 1949 to 1955. He ...

#2340

Thomas Schmugge

#110658

Overall Influence

Thomas J. Schmugge is an American physicist and hydrologist. Schmugge graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1965 with a doctorate in physics, and joined the faculty of Trinity College in Connecticut as an assistant professor of physics. From 1970 to 1986, he worked for Goddard Space Flight Center's Hydrological Sciences Branch. Schmugge was subsequently employed by the Agricultural Research Service until 2004. After leaving the federal government, Schmugge was the Gerald Thomas Chair for Sustainable Agriculture at New Mexico State University from 2005 to 2008. He was elected a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, and received the AGU's Robert E.

#2341

Ronald J. Tallarida

#110699

Overall Influence

#2342

Robert E. Cohen

#110852

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Robert E. Cohen is an American chemical engineer currently at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2010, Cohen was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for research on polymer morphology and surfaces, commercial products and processes, successful entrepreneurship, and novel educational programs. He is also a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

#2343

William W. Nazaroff

#110982

Overall Influence

#2344

Pief Panofsky

#111065

Overall Influence

1919 - 2007 (88 years)

Wolfgang Kurt Hermann "Pief" Panofsky , was a German-American physicist who won many awards including the National Medal of Science. Early life Panofsky was born in Berlin, Germany to a family of art historians Dorothea and Erwin Panofsky. His ancestors were of Jewish descent. He spent much of his early life in Hamburg, where his father was a professor of art history. From the age of 10, he attended the Johanneum, where he received a classical education involving Latin and Ancient Greek, but little science. At the age of 15, he moved with his family to the United States and entered Princeton University.

#2345

Douglas Noll

#111234

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Douglas C. Noll is an American bioengineer currently the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Professor of Bioengineering at University of Michigan, where he also is professor of radiology and co-director of the Functional MRI Laboratory.

#2346

Bonnie Buratti

#111284

Overall Influence

Bonnie J. Buratti is an American planetary scientist in the Division of Earth and Space Sciences at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where she leads the Comets, Asteroids, and Satellites Group. Her research involves the composition and physical properties of planetary surfaces, and volatile transport in the outer solar system.

#2347

Martin R. Bryce

#111286

Overall Influence

#2348

Nasser N. Peyghambarian

#111298

Overall Influence

#2349

Seth Bonder

#111333

Overall Influence

1932 - 2011 (79 years)

Seth Bonder was an American engineer who made substantial contributions in Operations Research for the US military, first as a pilot during the Korean War in the US Air Force and later as a consultant through Vector Research, Inc., a company he founded and later served as its CEO. Amongst his numerous honors includes being named a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

#2350

James Michael Moran

#111347

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

James Moran is an American radio astronomer living in Massachusetts, USA. He was a professor of Astronomy at Harvard University from 1989 through 2016, a senior radio astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory from 1981 through 2020 and the director of the Submillimeter Array during its construction and early operational phases from 1995 through 2005. In 1998 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, in 2010 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2020 to the American Philosophical Society. He is currently the Donald H. Menzel Professor of Astrophysics, ...

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