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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List of the most influential people

#3201

Wesley A. Traub

#167623

Overall Influence

#3202

Subbu S. Venkatraman

#167738

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

#3203

Gary Shiu

#167742

Overall Influence

#3204

Karen M. Fischer

#167747

Overall Influence

Karen Fischer is an American seismologist known for her research on the structure of Earth's mantle, its lithosphere, and how subduction zones change over geologic history. Education and career Fischer has a B.S. in geology and geophysics from Yale University . While an undergraduate, Fischer had summer research experiences at Yale University and Lamont–Doherty Geological Observatory. In 1989, she earned a Ph.D. in geophysics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a dissertation titled "The morphology and dynamics of subducting lithosphere". After a postdoctoral appointment at La...

#3205

S. Samar Hasnain

#167764

Overall Influence

S. Samar Hasnain FInstP, FRSC, is the inaugural Max Perutz professor of Molecular Biophysics at the University of Liverpool. In 1991 he became a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and in 2002 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. In 1997 he became a Fellow of the Third World Academy of Sciences. He became Foreign Fellows of Pakistan Academy of Sciences in 2017.

#3206

Susan Humphris

#167820

Overall Influence

Susan Humphris is a geologist known for her research on processes at mid-ocean ridges. She is an elected fellow of the American Geophysical Union. Education and career Humphris grew up in the United Kingdom, where she learned to sail and enjoyed hikes that incited her interest in the natural world. As a child, she was not fond of history classes, but enjoyed the other subjects. Humphris has an undergraduate degree from Lancaster University , and earned her Ph.D. in 1976 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Following her Ph.D., she spent time as a postdoc at Imperial College in London and a year at Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory.

#3207

Rhonda Stroud

#167900

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (54 years)

Rhonda M. Stroud is a materials physicist and planetary scientist at Arizona State University, where she serves as Director of the Buseck Center for Meteorite Studies. From 1998- 2022, she was a Research Physicist at the United States Naval Research Laboratory, where she led the Nanoscale Materials Section. She is known for her research on nanostructures, including quasicrystals and aerogel, and on the materials that make up comets and cosmic dust. She pioneered the use of focused ion beam technology in the study of meteorites.

#3208

Alex Sigal

#167969

Overall Influence

Alex Sigal is a South Africa–based virologist at the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban, South Africa, Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, and University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. His work concentrates on evolution and persistence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. His laboratory was the first to isolate the live B.1.351 variant of SARS-CoV-2 first detected in South Africa. Sigal’s laboratory was also the first to report results on the ability of the Omicron variant to escape antibody neutralization in individuals who had two doses of the Pfizer BNT162b2 vaccine as well as ...

#3209

Damon Simonelli

#168085

Overall Influence

1959 - 2004 (45 years)

Damon Paul Simonelli was a planetary scientist who worked for Cornell University and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the U.S. He was a pioneer in the development of radiative transfer models to analyze astronomical objects.

#3210

Kelsi Singer

#168181

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (41 years)

Kelsi N. Singer is an American planetary scientist who is a senior research scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, CO. She is a co-investigator and deputy project scientist of NASA's New Horizons mission studying the geomorphology and geophysics of the Pluto system and of Arrokoth .

#3211

Kenneth P. Bogart

#168250

Overall Influence

1943 - 2005 (62 years)

Kenneth Paul Bogart was an American mathematician known for his work on preference structures and for his textbook on combinatorics. He was a professor at Dartmouth College. Education and career Bogart was originally from Cincinnati, and was a 1965 graduate of Marietta College. He earned his Ph.D. in 1968 at the California Institute of Technology. His dissertation, Structure Theorems for Local Noether Lattices, was supervised by Robert P. Dilworth.

#3212

John H. Malmberg

#168257

Overall Influence

1927 - 1992 (65 years)

John Holmes Malmberg was an American plasma physicist and a professor at the University of California, San Diego. He was known for making the first experimental measurements of Landau damping of plasma waves in 1964, as well as for his research on non-neutral plasmas and the development of the Penning–Malmberg trap.

#3213

Howard Lipshitz

#168546

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Howard David Lipshitz is an American and Canadian biologist who does genetic research on the fruit fly, Drosophila. Early life and education Lipshitz was born and raised in Durban, South Africa, where he attended the University of Natal , obtaining a B.Sc. in Biological Sciences and Mathematical Statistics and a B.Sc. cum laude in Biological Sciences . He completed his M. Phil. and Ph.D. degrees in Biology at Yale University with Douglas R. Kankel, working on Drosophila developmental neurogenetics. He then carried out postdoctoral research in the Biochemistry Department at Stanford Univers...

#3214

Henry Lin

#168587

Overall Influence

1995 - Present (30 years)

Henry Wanjune Lin is an American student who won the $50,000 Intel Young Scientist award, the second-highest award at the 2013 Intel Science and Engineering Fair for his work with MIT professor Michael McDonald on simulations of galaxy clusters. In 2015, he was named one of Forbes' 30 under 30 scientists.

#3215

George Lof

#168796

Overall Influence

1913 - 2009 (96 years)

George Oscar Löf was an American engineer and inventor who was best known for his contributions to solar energy research. "Nobody played a more enduring role in the 20th century solar house movement than George Löf."

#3216

Stephen Fairhurst

#168810

Overall Influence

#3217

Martha Gilmore

#168848

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (45 years)

Martha Scott Gilmore is an American planetary geologist. She is the George I. Seney Professor of Geology and Director of Graduate Studies at Wesleyan University. Early life and education Gilmore passed a high school equivalency exam at the age of 14 and applied to Franklin & Marshall College's geology and astronomy program. After graduating college, she earned her PhD from Brown University in 1998 and worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a postdoctoral researcher.

#3218

Marcia O'Malley

#168855

Overall Influence

Marcia Kilchenman O'Malley is an American mechanical engineer, the Thomas Michael Panos Family Professor in Mechanical Engineering and associate dean for research and innovation for the George R. Brown School of Engineering at Rice University. Her research concerns "systems for enhancing the human sensorimotor control system", including work on exoskeletons, neuroprosthetics, haptic technology, and brain–computer interfaces.

#3219

Rohit Khare

#168894

Overall Influence

Rohit Khare is an Indian American computer scientist and entrepreneur who has been active in many aspects of the development of the World Wide Web. He is the founder of Ångströ, the co-founder of KnowNow, a former director of CommerceNet Labs and a key player in the microformats community. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine and bachelor's degree from Caltech, both in Computer Science. He previously worked on Internet security for the W3C. He is active in the Representational State Transfer community, and in August 2007 wrote the ARRESTED paper on syndication-oriente...

#3220

Ernest Hondros

#168996

Overall Influence

1930 - 2016 (86 years)

Ernest Demetrious Hondros was a British material scientist, and visiting professor at Imperial College London. Life He was born in Kastelorizo in Greece. He grew up in Queensland. He earned a Doctor of Science degree from the University of Melbourne. He was Director of the Petten Establishment, at the Joint Research Centre.

#3221

Vanessa Wood

#169055

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (42 years)

Vanessa Claire Wood is an American engineer who is a professor at the ETH Zurich. She holds a chair in Materials and Device Engineering and serves as Vice President of Knowledge Transfer and Corporate Relations.

#3222

Song Li

#169132

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (60 years)

Song Li is a Chancellor Professor and Department Chair of Bioengineering at University of California, Los Angeles. He received his Ph.D. in bioengineering from University of California, San Diego. Dr. Li was a Bioengineering faculty at University of California, Berkeley , and he moved to UCLA in 2016. His research is focused on cell engineering, mechanobiology, biomaterials, and regenerative medicine. He is well recognized bioengineer, and has been elected as a Fellow of the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering, Biomedical Engineering Society and American Institute for ...

#3223

John Robert Cary

#169165

Overall Influence

John Robert Cary is a professor of physics at the University of Colorado Boulder and CEO of Tech-X Corporation, which he co-founded in 1994. Biography and education In 1973 Cary earned a BA cum laude in physics and a BA cum laude in mathematics at the University of California, Irvine. He earned his MS in 1975 and Ph.D. in physics in 1979 at the University of California, Berkeley.

#3224

Sudip Mazumder

#169220

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Sudip K. Mazumder is a UIC Distinguished Professor and is the Director of Laboratory for Energy and Switching-Electronics Systems in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago . He has over 30 years of professional experience and has held R&D and design positions in leading industrial organizations, and has served as technical consultant for several industries. He also serves as the president of NextWatt LLC, a small business organization that he set up in 2008.

#3225

Henry A. Lester

#169291

Overall Influence

Henry A. Lester is an American biologist, currently the Bren Professor at California Institute of Technology. He received an A.B. from Harvard College in 1966 and a Ph.D. from Rockefeller University in 1971.

#3226

Njema Frazier

#169301

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (51 years)

Njema Frazier is a nuclear physicist at the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration in Washington, D.C. Frazier has a bachelor's degree in physics from Carnegie Mellon University and a PhD in nuclear physics from Michigan State University.

#3227

Kathleen A. Richardson

#169344

Overall Influence

Kathleen Ann Cerqua-Richardson is an American physicist and the Pegasus Professor of Optics & Photonics, Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Central Florida. She is a Fellow of SPIE, the American Ceramic Society and The Optical Society. Her research considers the synthesis and characterisation of novel glasses and ceramic materials.

#3228

Laura Pauley

#169410

Overall Influence

Laura Lynn Pauley is an American mechanical engineer specializing in computational fluid dynamics, including the simulation of cavitation, flow separation, and large eddy simulation, with applications including the design of airfoils, boat propellors, and centrifugal pumps. She is a professor of mechanical engineering in the Penn State College of Engineering, the former Arthur L. Glenn Professor of Engineering Education at Penn State, and the interim executive director of the Penn State faculty senate.

#3229

Laura Kaufman

#169528

Overall Influence

Laura Jill Kaufman is an American chemist who is a professor of chemistry at Columbia University. Her research considers the dynamics of crowded systems, including biopolymer gels, supercooled liquids and conjugated polymers.

#3230

Kimberly L. Foster

#169539

Overall Influence

Kimberly L. Foster is an American mechanical engineer specializing in microelectromechanical systems including stick-slip phenomena, biomimetic adhesives, parametric oscillators, and microsensors. She is dean of science and engineering at Tulane University, where she is also a professor of physics and engineering physics and of biomedical engineering.

#3231

Peter Shawhan

#169611

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Peter Shawhan is an American physicist. He is currently professor of physics at the University of Maryland and was a co-recipient of the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the Gruber Prize in Cosmology, and the Bruno Rossi Prize for his work on LIGO.

#3232

Connie C. Lu

#169625

Overall Influence

Connie C. Lu is a Taiwanese-American inorganic chemist and a professor of chemistry at the University of Bonn. She was previously a professor of chemistry at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Lu's research focuses on the synthesis of novel bimetallic coordination complexes, as well as metal-organic frameworks. These molecules and materials are investigated for the catalytic conversion of small molecules like as N2 and CO2 into value-added chemicals like ammonia and methanol. Lu is the recipient of multiple awards for her research, including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award ...

#3233

Mark Mitchell

#169752

Overall Influence

Mark A. Mitchell is the director of the Applied Concepts Laboratory at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, a position he has held since 2013. Education Mitchell received Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Master of Science in Electrical Engineering degrees from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1985 and 1986, respectively. As a student at Georgia Tech, he worked for the campus radio station, WREK, serving terms as music director and programming director during his time there.

#3234

Theodore Goodson III

#169814

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Theodore Goodson III is an American chemist who is the Richard Barry Bernstein Professor of Chemistry at the University of Michigan. Goodson studies the non-linear optical properties of novel organic materials. He was elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2012 and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2021.

#3235

Max C. Brewer

#169949

Overall Influence

1924 - 2012 (88 years)

Max Clifton Brewer was an Arctic scientist, geophysicist, geological engineer, environmentalist, educator, and philosopher, and is best known for his expertise in the scientific field of permafrost. He was the longest-serving director of the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory in Utqiaġvik, Alaska where he established and managed the NARL ice stations in the Arctic Ocean. From 1971-1974 he served in the gubernatorial cabinet of William A. Egan as the first commissioner of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.

#3236

Robert T. Powers

#170007

Overall Influence

Robert T. Powers is an American mathematician. Powers earned his doctorate from Princeton University and taught at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2012, he was elected an inaugural fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

#3237

André Taylor

#170027

Overall Influence

André Taylor is an American scientist who is an associate professor of chemical engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering. Taylor works on novel materials for energy conversion and storage. He was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2010, and named as one of The Community of Scholars' Most Influential Black Researchers of 2020.

#3238

Antonios Kounadis

#170043

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

Antonios or Anthony Kounadis is a discus thrower, civil engineer, scholar and academician from Greece. He was President of the Academy of Athens for the year 2018. He was named the 1959 Greek Athlete of the Year.

#3239

Aaron Hawkins

#170070

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

Aaron Roe Hawkins is an American engineer known for his work in optofluidics. He is a professor and chair in the department of electrical and computer engineering at Brigham Young University. Education and career Hawkins was born in Rehoboth, New Mexico. He received his B.S. degree from the California Institute of Technology in applied physics in 1994, and went on to the University of California, Santa Barbara for his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering, which he completed in 1998. His dissertation, Silicon-Indium-Gallium-Arsenide Avalanche Photodetectors, was supervised by John E. Bowers.

#3240

Paula V. Welander

#170114

Overall Influence

Paula Veronica Welander is a microbiologist and professor at Stanford University who is known for her research using lipid biomarkers to investigate how life evolved on Earth. Early life and career Welander was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley. Her mother and father immigrated from Mexico to Los Angeles in the early 1970’s. She received her undergraduate degree from Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1998. She has a master's degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She went on to do postdoctoral studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Departments of Biology and of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences.

#3241

Sachiko Amari

#170173

Overall Influence

Sachiko Amari is a Japanese astrophysicist who focuses upon presolar grains. She developed the method for isolating presolar grains in primitive meteorites and also researched noble gases in meteorites. Amari was awarded the Urey Medal by the European Association of Geochemistry in 2021. She currently is a Research Professor of Physics at Washington University in St. Louis.

#3242

Fabrizio Carbone

#170210

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (49 years)

Fabrizio Carbone is an Italian and Swiss physicist and currently an Associate Professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne . His research focuses on the study of matter in out of equilibrium conditions using ultrafast spectroscopy, diffraction and imaging techniques. In 2015, he attracted international attention by publishing a photography of light displaying both its quantum and classical nature.

#3243

Donald T. Farley

#170230

Overall Influence

1933 - 2018 (85 years)

Donald Thorn Farley Jr. was an American physicist and Professor of Engineering at Cornell University who pioneered the use of radar remote sensing of the earth's ionosphere. He developed the theory and technique of incoherent scatter observation of the thermal fluctuations of plasma. About 80 percent of all ionospheric radio scientists in the United States who practice incoherent scatter were trained by Farley, or by his students. Farley was the J. Preston Levis Professor of Engineering at Cornell University. His principal collaborators included John Dougherty, Tor Hagfors, Bela Fejer, Ronald...

#3244

Tyra Wolfsberg

#170234

Overall Influence

Tyra Gwendolen Wolfsberg is an American bioinformatician. She is the associate director of the bioinformatics and scientific programming core at the National Human Genome Research Institute. Life Wolfsberg received a A.B. in molecular biology from Princeton University. She earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry and biophysics from the University of California, San Francisco. Her 1995 dissertation was titled Identification and characterization of ADAM, a novel gene family. Wolfsberg transitioned to computationally based research by performing a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Center for Biotechnology Information at NIH.

#3245

Farhat N. Beg

#170253

Overall Influence

Farhat N. Beg from the University of California, San Diego, was awarded the status of Fellow in the American Physical Society, after he was nominated by his Division of Plasma Physics in 2009, for contributions to the understanding of physics of short pulse high intensity laser matter interactions and pulsed power driven dense Z-pinches. His empirical scaling of hot electron temperature versus laser intensity has contributed significantly to the understanding of relativistic electron generation and transport in matter. He was the recipient of the Department of Energy Early Career Award in 2005 as well as the IEEE Early Achievement Award in 2008.

#3246

Lynette Willoughby

Lynette Willoughby

#170271

Overall Influence

Helen Lynette Estelle Willoughby is a feminist electronic engineer and champion of teaching women about technology, whose career has spanned 50 years. She was a lecturer on microprocessor engineering at Leeds Polytechnic and Leeds Beckett University for 24 years. She was the president of the Women's Engineering Society from 1993 to 1995.

#3247

Anatole Boris Volkov

#170358

Overall Influence

1924 - 2000 (76 years)

Anatole Boris Volkov was an American physicist, allegedly serving as a courier for the Silvermaster spy ring between Washington, D.C., and New York City. Volkov taught both abroad and in America, retiring in the United States 1989. Though Volkov's name appears in the FBI's files, he was never convicted of any espionage by the U.S. government.

#3248

Harry Hemond

#170435

Overall Influence

Harry F. Hemond is an American engineer, focusing on environmental chemistry and wetland chemistry. He is currently the William E. Leonhard Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Education Hemond received a Bachelor of Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a Master of Arts from Connecticut College.

#3249

Abhijit Mahalanobis

#170554

Overall Influence

Abhijit Mahalanobis is an electrical engineer at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control in Orlando, Florida. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for his contributions to the development of correlation filters for automatic target recognition.

#3250

Thomas Novak

#170701

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Thomas Novak, PhD, PE is the Alliance Coal Academic Chair of Mining Engineering at the University of Kentucky, appointed in 2010. Previously, he held appointments at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Virginia Tech, the University of Alabama and Pennsylvania State University. He received his PhD in mining engineering from the Pennsylvania State University in 1984. His research focuses on techniques to assess and improve mine safety and ventilation. His most recognized contributions to the field have been in understanding how electrical hazards such as lightning can trigger explosions in underground mines.

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