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).
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List of the most influential people
#3201
Denis Noble
#3206
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Denis Noble is a British physiologist and biologist who held the Burdon Sanderson Chair of Cardiovascular Physiology at the University of Oxford from 1984 to 2004 and was appointed Professor Emeritus and co-Director of Computational Physiology. He is one of the pioneers of systems biology and developed the first viable mathematical model of the working heart in 1960. Noble established The Third Way of Evolution project with James A. Shapiro which predicts that the entire framework of the modern synthesis will be replaced.
Go to Profile#3202
Robert T. Bakker
#3207
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Robert Thomas Bakker is an American paleontologist who helped reshape modern theories about dinosaurs, particularly by adding support to the theory that some dinosaurs were endothermic . Along with his mentor John Ostrom, Bakker was responsible for initiating the ongoing "dinosaur renaissance" in paleontological studies, beginning with Bakker's article "Dinosaur Renaissance" in the April 1975 issue of Scientific American. His specialty is the ecological context and behavior of dinosaurs.
Go to Profile#3203
Stephen Daldry
#3208
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Stephen David Daldry CBE is an English director and producer of film, theatre, and television. He has won three Tony Awards for his work on Broadway and an Olivier Award for his work in the West End. He has received three Academy Awards nominations for Best Director, for the films Billy Elliot , The Hours , and The Reader .
Go to Profile#3204
Nathan Jacobson
#3209
Overall Influence
1910 - 1999 (89 years)
Nathan Jacobson was an American mathematician. Biography Born Nachman Arbiser in Warsaw, Jacobson emigrated to America with his family in 1918. He graduated from the University of Alabama in 1930 and was awarded a doctorate in mathematics from Princeton University in 1934. While working on his thesis, Non-commutative polynomials and cyclic algebras, he was advised by Joseph Wedderburn.
Go to Profile#3205
Sidney Mintz
#3210
Overall Influence
1922 - 2015 (93 years)
Sidney Wilfred Mintz was an American anthropologist best known for his studies of the Caribbean, creolization, and the anthropology of food. Mintz received his PhD at Columbia University in 1951 and conducted his primary fieldwork among sugar-cane workers in Puerto Rico. Later expanding his ethnographic research to Haiti and Jamaica, he produced historical and ethnographic studies of slavery and global capitalism, cultural hybridity, Caribbean peasants, and the political economy of food commodities. He taught for two decades at Yale University before helping to found the Anthropology Department at Johns Hopkins University, where he remained for the duration of his career.
Go to Profile#3206
Greg Rucka
#3211
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Gregory Rucka is an American writer known for the series of novels starring his character Atticus Kodiak, the creator-owned comic book series Whiteout, Queen & Country, Stumptown and Lazarus, as well as lengthy runs on such titles as Detective Comics, Wonder Woman and Gotham Central for DC Comics, and Elektra, Wolverine and The Punisher for Marvel. He has written a substantial amount of supplemental material for a number of DC Comics' line-wide and inter-title crossovers, including "No Man's Land", "Infinite Crisis" and "New Krypton".
Go to Profile#3207
Shokichi Iyanaga
#3212
Overall Influence
1906 - 2006 (100 years)
Shokichi Iyanaga was a Japanese mathematician. Early life Iyanaga was born in Tokyo, Japan on April 2, 1906. He studied at the University of Tokyo from 1926 to 1929. He studied under Teiji Takagi. As an undergraduate, he published two papers in the Japanese Journal of Mathematics and the Proceedings of the Imperial Academy of Tokyo. Both of his papers appeared in print in 1928. After completing his undergraduate degree in 1929, he stayed at Tokyo and worked under Takagi for his doctorate. He completed his Ph.D. in mathematics 1931.
Go to Profile#3208
Joel Mokyr
#3213
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
#3209
Peter Vallentyne
#3214
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Peter Vallentyne is Florence G. Kline Professor of Philosophy at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. He holds dual citizenship in the United States and Canada. Biography Vallentyne received his B.A. from McGill University in 1978 and his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1984, under the direction of David Gauthier and with significant help from Shelly Kagan. He formerly taught at the University of Western Ontario and Virginia Commonwealth University .
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Oded Goldreich
#3215
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Oded Goldreich is a professor of computer science at the faculty of mathematics and computer science of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. His research interests lie within the theory of computation and are, specifically, the interplay of randomness and computation, the foundations of cryptography, and computational complexity theory. He won the Knuth Prize in 2017 and was selected in 2021 to receive the Israel Prize in mathematics.
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Birutė Galdikas
#3216
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Birutė Marija Filomena Galdikas or Birutė Mary Galdikas, OC , is a Lithuanian-Canadian anthropologist, primatologist, conservationist, ethologist, and author. She is a professor at Simon Fraser University. In the field of primatology, Galdikas is recognized as a leading authority on orangutans. Prior to her field study of orangutans, scientists knew little about the species.
Go to Profile#3212
Jody Williams
#3217
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Jody Williams is an American political activist known for her work in banning anti-personnel landminess, her defense of human rights , and her efforts to promote new understandings of security in today's world. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her work toward the banning and clearing of anti-personnel mines.
Go to Profile#3213
Catherine Malabou
#3218
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Catherine Malabou is a French philosopher. She is a Professor at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, at the European Graduate School, and in the department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, a position formerly held by Jacques Derrida.
Go to Profile#3214
Shlomo Avineri
#3219
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Shlomo Avineri was an Israeli political scientist. He was a professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He also served as a recurring visiting professor at the Central European University in Budapest and a fellow at Munich-based academic think tank Centrum für angewandte Politikforschung, offering advice to politicians. Avineri died on 1 December 2023, at the age of 90.
Go to Profile#3215
Bryan Stevenson
#3220
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Bryan Stevenson is an American lawyer, social justice activist, law professor at New York University School of Law, and the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. Based in Montgomery, Alabama, he has challenged bias against the poor and minorities in the criminal justice system, especially children. He has helped achieve United States Supreme Court decisions that prohibit sentencing children under 18 to death or to life imprisonment without parole. He has assisted in cases that have saved dozens of prisoners from the death penalty, advocated for the poor, and develope...
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Arthur Burks
#3221
Overall Influence
1915 - 2008 (93 years)
Arthur Walter Burks was an American mathematician who worked in the 1940s as a senior engineer on the project that contributed to the design of the ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. Decades later, Burks and his wife Alice Burks outlined their case for the subject matter of the ENIAC having been derived from John Vincent Atanasoff. Burks was also for several decades a faculty member at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Go to Profile#3217
Tom Gruber
#3222
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Thomas Robert Gruber is an American computer scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur with a focus on systems for knowledge sharing and collective intelligence. He did foundational work in ontology engineering and is well known for his definition of ontologies in the context of artificial intelligence.
Go to Profile#3218
Frieder Nake
#3223
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Frieder Nake is a mathematician, computer scientist, and pioneer of computer art. He is best known internationally for his contributions to the earliest manifestations of computer art, a field of computing that made its first public appearances with three small exhibitions in 1965.
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Daniel Buren
#3224
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Daniel Buren is a French conceptual artist, painter, and sculptor. He has won numerous awards including the Golden Lion for best pavilion at the Venice Biennale , the International Award for best artist in Stuttgart and the prestigious Premium Imperiale for painting in Tokyo in 2007. He has created several world-famous installations, including "Les Deux Plateaux" in the Cour d'honneur of the Palais-Royal, and the Observatory of the Light in Fondation Louis Vuitton. He is one of the most active and recognised artists on the international scene, and his work has been welcomed by the most impor...
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Richard Williamson
#3225
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Richard Nelson Williamson is a British independent Traditionalist Catholic bishop who opposes the changes in the church brought about by the Second Vatican Council. In 1988, Williamson was one of four Society of Saint Pius X priests illicitly consecrated as bishops by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, for which Pope John Paul II declared he had incurred ipso facto automatic excommunication. The validity of the excommunication has always been denied by the SSPX, who, citing canon law, argue that the consecrations were permissible due to a crisis in the Catholic Church. The excommunications, includi...
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Agnès Callamard
#3226
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Agnès Callamard is a French human-rights activist who is the Secretary General of Amnesty International. She was previously the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council, and the former Director of the Columbia University Global Freedom of Expression project.
Go to Profile#3222
Appar
#3227
Overall Influence
Appar, also referred to as or Navukkarasar, was a seventh-century Tamil Śaiva poet-saint. Born in a peasant Śaiva family, raised as an orphan by his sister, he lived about 80 years and is generally placed sometime between 570 and 650 CE. Appar composed 4,900 devotional hymns to the god Shiva, out of which 313 have survived and are now canonized as the 4th to 6th volumes of Tirumurai. One of the most prominent of the sixty-three revered Nayanars, he was an older contemporary of Thirugnana Sambandar.
Go to Profile#3223
Mary Higgins Clark
#3228
Overall Influence
1927 - 2020 (93 years)
Mary Higgins Clark was an American author of suspense novels. Each of her 51 books was a bestseller in the United States and various European countries, and all of her novels remained in print , with her debut suspense novel, Where Are the Children?, in its seventy-fifth printing.
Go to Profile#3224
Erik Brynjolfsson
#3229
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Erik Brynjolfsson is an American academic, author and inventor. He is the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and a Senior Fellow at Stanford University where he directs the Digital Economy Lab at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, with appointments at SIEPR, the Stanford Department of Economics and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a best-selling author of several books. He is known for his contributions to the world of IT productivity research and work on the economics of information and t...
Go to Profile#3225
Brian May
#3230
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Sir Brian Harold May is an English musician, songwriter, singer, astrophysicist and animal rights activist. He achieved worldwide fame as the lead guitarist of the rock band Queen, which he co-founded with singer Freddie Mercury and drummer Roger Taylor. His guitar work and songwriting contributions helped Queen become one of the most successful acts in music history.
Go to Profile#3226
Mahmoud Darwish
#3231
Overall Influence
1941 - 2008 (67 years)
Mahmoud Darwish was a Palestinian poet and author who was regarded as Palestine's national poet. He won numerous awards for his works. Darwish used Palestine as a metaphor for the loss of Eden, birth and resurrection, and the anguish of dispossession and exile. He has been described as incarnating and reflecting "the tradition of the political poet in Islam, the man of action whose action is poetry." He also served as an editor for several literary magazines in Palestine.
Go to Profile#3227
M. Scott Peck
#3232
Overall Influence
1936 - 2005 (69 years)
Morgan Scott Peck was an American psychiatrist and best-selling author who wrote the book The Road Less Traveled, published in 1978. Early life Peck was born on May 22, 1936, in New York City, the son of Zabeth and David Warner Peck, an attorney and judge. His parents were Quakers. Peck was raised a Protestant .
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Corey Keyes
#3233
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Corey Keyes is an American sociologist and psychologist. He is known for his work with positive psychology. Keyes currently teaches at Emory University in Georgia. Work Keyes works in the areas of complete mental health and methods for attaining positive social relationships. He also studies the psychology of aging. Keyes is known for coining the psychological terms "flourishing" and "Languishing" which describes mentally healthy adults and has published widely in this field. He is considered to be a pioneer in the field of positive psychology . Keyes is a member of advisory board for the World Happiness Forum and is a member of the Positive Psychology Network.
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Peter Burke
#3234
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Ulick Peter Burke is a British historian and professor. He was born to a Roman Catholic father and Jewish mother . From 1962 to 1979, he was a member of the School of European Studies at University of Sussex, before moving to the University of Cambridge, where he holds the title of Professor Emeritus of Cultural History and Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Burke is celebrated as a historian not only of the early modern era, but one who emphasizes the relevance of social and cultural history to modern issues. He is married to the Brazilian historian Maria Lúcia Garcia Pallares-Burke who ...
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Zalmay Khalilzad
#3235
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Zalmay Mamozy Khalilzad is an American diplomat and foreign policy expert. Khalilzad was U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation from September 2018 to October 2021. Khailzad was appointed by President George W. Bush to serve as United States Ambassador to the United Nations, serving in the role from 2007 to 2009. Khalilzad was the highest ranking Muslim-American in government at the time he left the position. Prior to this, Khalilzad served in the Bush administration as Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2004 to 2005 and Ambassador to Iraq from 2005 to 2007.
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Stanley Kubrick
#3236
Overall Influence
1928 - 1999 (71 years)
Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, producer, screenwriter and photographer. Widely considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, his films—nearly all of which are adaptations of novels or short stories—span a number of genres and are known for their intense attention to detail, innovative cinematography, extensive set design and dark humor.
Go to Profile#3232
Kalevi Kull
#3237
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Kalevi Kull is a biosemiotics professor at the University of Tartu, Estonia. He graduated from the University of Tartu in 1975. His earlier work dealt with ethology and field ecology. He has studied the mechanisms of species coexistence in species-rich communities and developed mathematical modelling in ecophysiology. Since 1975, he has been the main organiser of annual meetings of theoretical biology in Estonia. In 1992, he became a Professor of Ecophysiology in the University of Tartu. In 1997, he joined the Department of Semiotics, and became a Professor in Biosemiotics. From 2006 to 2018, he was the Head of the Department of Semiotics in the University of Tartu, Estonia.
Go to Profile#3233
W. Arthur Lewis
#3238
Overall Influence
1915 - 1991 (76 years)
Sir William Arthur Lewis was a Saint Lucian economist and the James Madison Professor of Political Economy at Princeton University. Lewis was known for his contributions in the field of economic development. In 1979, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
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Orlando Figes
#3239
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
#3235
Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry
#3240
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry is a Pakistani jurist who served as the 20th Chief Justice of Pakistan over three non-consecutive terms from 29 June 2005 to 11 December 2013. Chaudhry began practice as an advocate of the Sindh High Court in 1976, before shifting to his native Quetta and later serving as Advocate General of Balochistan, Pakistan. He was elected as president of the Balochistan High Court Bar Association, Quetta in 1986 and was elected twice as member of the Bar Council. He was appointed Advocate General of Balochistan in 1989. He also discharged duties as Banking Judge Special Court for Speedy Trials, Judge Customs Appellate Court as well as Company Judge.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#3241
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian writer whose works include novels, short stories and nonfiction. She was described in The Times Literary Supplement as "the most prominent" of a "procession of critically acclaimed young anglophone authors" of Nigerian fiction who are attracting a wider audience, particularly in her second home, the United States.
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Edwin Southern
#3242
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Sir Edwin Mellor Southern is an English Lasker Award-winning molecular biologist, Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. He is most widely known for the invention of the Southern blot, published in 1975 and now a common laboratory procedure.
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Ian McHarg
#3243
Overall Influence
1920 - 2001 (81 years)
Ian L. McHarg was a Scottish landscape architect and writer on regional planning using natural systems. McHarg was one of the most influential persons in the environmental movement who brought environmental concerns into broad public awareness and ecological planning methods into the mainstream of landscape architecture, city planning and public policy. He was the founder of the department of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. His 1969 book Design with Nature pioneered the concept of ecological planning. It continues to be one of the most widely celebrated books on landscape architecture and land-use planning.
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Roger Zelazny
#3244
Overall Influence
1937 - 1995 (58 years)
Roger Joseph Zelazny was an American poet and writer of fantasy and science fiction short stories and novels, best known for The Chronicles of Amber. He won the Nebula Award three times and the Hugo Award six times , including two Hugos for novels: the serialized novel ...And Call Me Conrad , subsequently published under the title This Immortal and then the novel Lord of Light .
Go to Profile#3240
Martinus J. G. Veltman
#3245
Overall Influence
1931 - 2021 (90 years)
Martinus Justinus Godefriedus "Tini" Veltman was a Dutch theoretical physicist. He shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in physics with his former PhD student Gerardus 't Hooft for their work on particle theory.
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Lloyd Alexander
#3246
Overall Influence
1924 - 2007 (83 years)
Lloyd Chudley Alexander was an American author of more than 40 books, primarily fantasy novels for children and young adults. Over his seven-decade career, Alexander wrote 48 books, and his work has been translated into 20 languages. His most famous work is The Chronicles of Prydain, a series of five high fantasy novels whose conclusion, The High King, was awarded the 1969 Newbery Medal for excellence in American children's literature. He won U.S. National Book Awards in 1971 and 1982.
Go to Profile#3242
Osiel Cárdenas Guillén
#3247
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Osiel Cárdenas Guillén is a Mexican drug lord and the former leader of the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas. Originally a mechanic in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, he entered the cartel by killing Juan García Abrego's friend and competitor Salvador Gómez, after the former's arrest in 1996. As confrontations with rival groups heated up, Osiel Cárdenas sought and recruited over 30 deserters from the Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales to form the cartel's armed wing. Los Zetas served as the hired private mercenary army of the Gulf Cartel.
Go to Profile#3243
Stanley Hoffmann
#3248
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Stanley Hoffmann was a French political scientist and the Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor at Harvard University, specializing in French politics and society, European politics, U.S. foreign policy, and international relations.
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David A. Kolb
#3249
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
David Allen Kolb is an American educational theorist whose interests and publications focus on experiential learning, the individual and social change, career development, and executive and professional education. He is the founder and chairman of Experience Based Learning Systems, Inc. , and an Emeritus Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
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Sylvia Nasar
#3250
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Sylvia Nasar is an American journalist. She is best known for her biography of John Forbes Nash Jr., A Beautiful Mind, for which she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. Nasar currently serves as Knight Professor Emerita at Columbia University's School of Journalism.
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Dennis Lehane
#3251
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Dennis Lehane is an American author. He has published more than a dozen novels; the first several were a series of mysteries featuring recurring characters, including A Drink Before the War. Four of his novels were adapted as films of the same names: Clint Eastwood's Mystic River , Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island , and Gone Baby Gone and Live by Night , both directed by Ben Affleck. His short story "Animal Rescue" was also adapted into the film The Drop, noted for being the final film role for actor James Gandolfini.
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Phil Zimmermann
#3252
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Philip R. Zimmermann is an American computer scientist and cryptographer. He is the creator of Pretty Good Privacy , the most widely used email encryption software in the world. He is also known for his work in VoIP encryption protocols, notably ZRTP and Zfone. Zimmermann is co-founder and Chief Scientist of the global encrypted communications firm Silent Circle.
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Paul Joskow
#3253
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Paul Lewis Joskow is an American economist and professor. He became President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation on January 1, 2008. He is also the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics, Emeritus at MIT. He has served on the MIT faculty since 1972. From 1994 through 1998 he was Head of the MIT Department of Economics. From 1999 through 2007 he was the Director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. Since rejoining in 2018 from his 1988-2007 term, Professor Joskow is Research Associate on the National Bureau of Economic Research .
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Feng Zhang
#3254
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Areas of Specialization: Neuroscience, Bioengineering Feng Zhang is a core member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University, the James and Patricia Poitras Professor in Neuroscience for the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and for Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After immigrating to the US from China with his mother at the age of 11, he attended school in Iowa. He earned his BA in Chemistry and Physics from Harvard University and his PhD in chemical and biological engineering from Stanford University. Best kn...
Go to Profile#3250
Colin Groves
#3255
Overall Influence
1942 - 2017 (75 years)
Colin Peter Groves was a British-Australian biologist and anthropologist. Groves was Professor of Biological Anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. Education Born in England, Groves completed a Bachelor of Science at University College London in 1963, and a Doctor of Philosophy at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine in 1966. From 1966 to 1973, he was a postdoctoral researcher and teaching fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, Queen Elizabeth College and the University of Cambridge.
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