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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List of the most influential people

#3401

Mita Dasog

#181279

Overall Influence

Mita Dasog is an associate professor at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada. She has received the Emerging Professional Award, the Canadian Council of University Chemistry Chairs Doctoral Award, is a “Top 25” Global Young Scientist in Sustainable Research, and is one of the top 150 women in STEM for her outreach efforts with youth and young women.

#3402

Patricia Mooney

Patricia Mooney

#181313

Overall Influence

Patricia May Mooney is a Professor Emerita of Physics at Simon Fraser University. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Materials Research Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Physical Society.

#3403

Larry Crumpler

#181599

Overall Influence

Larry Crumpler is a geologist and volcanologist. He is Research Curator for Volcanology & Space Science at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, and a member of the Mars Exploration Rover science team. Larry's Lookout on Mars is named after him.

#3404

Doris Wagner

#181704

Overall Influence

Doris Wagner is an American biologist who is the Robert I. Williams Term Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research looks to better understand the structure-function relationships of plant cells. She established the Epigenomics of Plants International Consortium. Wagner is a Fellow of the American Society of Plant Biologists.

#3405

Aza Raskin

#181728

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (41 years)

Aza Raskin is the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology and of the Earth Species Project. He is also a writer, entrepreneur, inventor, and interface designer. He is the son of Jef Raskin, a human–computer interface expert who was the initiator of the Macintosh project at Apple.

#3406

David Melville

#181741

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Sir David Melville, is a British physicist, academic, academic administrator, and public servant. He was Vice-Chancellor of Middlesex University from 1991 to 1996, Chief executive of the Further Education Funding Council for England from 1996 to 2001, and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Kent from 2001 to 2007.

#3407

Padi Boyd

#181761

Overall Influence

Padi Boyd is an American astrophysicist. She is the head of NASA's Exoplanets and Stellar Astrophysics Laboratory and an Associate Director at the Goddard Space Flight Center. She is the project scientist for NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission.

#3408

Lisa Jones

#181875

Overall Influence

Lisa Michelle Jones is an associate professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Maryland, Baltimore . Her research is in structural proteomics, using mass spectrometry together with fast photochemical oxidation of proteins , allowing researchers to study the solvent accessibility of proteins experimentally.

#3409

Jennifer Love

#181961

Overall Influence

Jennifer Ann Love is an American professor of chemistry at the University of Calgary. She is a Fellow of the Chemical Institute of Canada. Early life and education Love was born in New England. She grew up in Rochester, New York. Love realized she was interested in science whilst at high school, but it was not until the second year of college that she realized her favourite science was chemistry. She was an undergraduate student at Allegheny College, and graduated magna cum laude. She moved to Stanford University for graduate studies, where she studied metal-catalyzed reactions to generate seven membered rings.

#3410

Mark Alford

#182035

Overall Influence

Mark G. Alford is a theoretical physicist and former chair of the Department of Physics at Washington University in St. Louis. He researches dense matter inside neutron stars. Alford received his bachelor's degree with first-class honors from Oxford in 1984 and his master's and doctoral degrees from Harvard in 1988 and 1990, respectively, under the supervision of Sidney Coleman. Afterwards he held postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Santa Barbara Institute for Theoretical Physics , Cornell's Laboratory of Nuclear Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics.

#3411

Paul Fuoss

#182146

Overall Influence

Paul Henry Fuoss is an American physicist who specializes in the study of X-ray scattering and their application to materials' physics. Early life and education Fuoss was born to parents Floyd and Sylvia Fuoss and raised in South Dakota, where he attended Spears Rural School, followed by Draper High School in Draper and T. F. Riggs High School in Pierre. Fuoss graduated from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology and completed a doctorate at Stanford University.

#3412

David Sleet

#182255

Overall Influence

David A. Sleet is an American scientist recognized for championing the application of behavioral science to unintentional injury prevention and helping to establish injury prevention as a global public health concern. He has published hundreds of articles and book chapters and was co-editor of the Handbook of Injury and Violence Prevention.; Injury and Violence Prevention: Behavioral Science Theories; Derryberry’s Educating for Health; and the international prize-winning World Report on Road Traffic Injury Prevention.

#3413

Elisabeth Gwinn

#182266

Overall Influence

Elisabeth Gwinn is a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara . Gwinn was the first woman to join the Physics faculty at UCSB. Gwinn's research team explores topics at the intersection of nanoscience, biology, and optics. She is particularly well known for her work on silver nanoclusters and bimolecular-stabilized derivatives thereof. Gwinn is a prominent advocate for boosting diverse representation in the field of physics. She has been an advocate for increasing accessibility to STEM careers more generally through mentorship opportunities for publ...

#3414

Mark B. Allen

#182317

Overall Influence

#3415

Julia Velkovska

#182367

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (53 years)

Julia Apostolova Velkovska is a Bulgarian-American high energy particle physicist who is the Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Physics at Vanderbilt University. Her research considers nuclear matter in the extreme conditions generated at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. She hopes that this work will help to explain the mechanisms that underpin the strong force.

#3416

Roberto Zenit

#182431

Overall Influence

#3417

Raffaello D'Andrea

#182460

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Raffaello D’Andrea is a Canadian-Italian-Swiss engineer, artist, and entrepreneur. He is professor of dynamic systems and control at ETH Zurich. He is a co-founder of Kiva Systems , and the founder of Verity, an innovator in autonomous drones. He was the faculty advisor and system architect of the Cornell Robot Soccer Team, four time world champions at the annual RoboCup competition. He is a new media artist, whose work includes The Table, the Robotic Chair, and Flight Assembled Architecture. In 2013, D’Andrea co-founded ROBO Global, which launched the world's first exchange traded fund focused entirely on the them of robotics and AI.

#3418

George Stranahan

#182466

Overall Influence

1931 - 2021 (90 years)

George Secor Stranahan was an American physicist and entrepreneur, best remembered for founding the Flying Dog Brewery, Stranahan's Colorado Whiskey, and the Aspen Center for Physics. His family owned the Champion Spark Plug Company, and his inheritance was used to found these ventures. He founded the Woody Creek Tavern, which was the favorite watering hole of Hunter S. Thompson, who was also Stranahan's best friend. He founded and was principal of the Aspen Community School.

#3419

Terry Schalk

#182470

Overall Influence

Terry Schalk is an American physicist currently professor emeritus at University of California, Santa Cruz and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Education Schalk earned his PhD at Iowa State University in 1969.

#3420

Andrew J. Baker

#182480

Overall Influence

Andrew J. Baker is an American astrophysicist. After completing a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics and physics at Harvard University, he completed a doctorate in astronomy at the California Institute of Technology. In 2006, Baker joined the faculty of Rutgers University. Baker was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2014.

#3421

Dapeng Wu

#182522

Overall Influence

Dapeng Wu is an electrical engineer at the University of Florida in Gainesville. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2013 for his contributions to video communications, processing, and wireless networking.

#3422

Cinzia Zuffada

#182531

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Cinzia Zuffada is an Italian-American engineer who is the Associate Chief Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Her role considers the strategic planning of scientific programs for JPL and the development of reflectometry technologies for Global navigation satellite systems. She is the chair of the Board of the Italian Scientists & Scholars in North America Foundation.

#3423

Amy Connolly

#182541

Overall Influence

Amy Lynn Connolly is an American physicist. She is an associate professor in the Department of Physics at Ohio State University and a Fellow of the American Physical Society for "her contributions to experimental and theoretical studies of ultrahigh energy neutrinos, and to searches for these neutrinos using radio techniques."

#3424

Pankaj Joshi

#182590

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Pankaj S. Joshi is an Indian astrophysicist and cosmologist whose research is mainly focused on areas of gravitational collapse and spacetime singularity. He has published more than 225 research papers in national and international journals, and books and monographs on the subject. Currently he is a Distinguished Professor of Physics, and founding director of the International Center for Space and Cosmology at Ahmedabad University.

#3425

Thomas Henyey

#182624

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Thomas Henyey is an American earth scientist and son of American astronomer Louis G. Henyey. Henyey is the former director of the Southern California Earthquake Center at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California.

#3426

Annie Kersting

#182691

Overall Influence

Annie Bernadette Kersting is a chemist known for her work on the movement of compounds such as plutonium in the environment. She was the 2016 recipient of the Garvan–Olin Medal from the American Chemical Society.

#3427

Clara Brink Shoemaker

#182711

Overall Influence

1921 - 2009 (88 years)

Clara Brink Shoemaker was a Dutch-born American crystallographer and a senior research professor at Oregon State University. As a postdoctoral researcher, she worked on the structure determination of vitamin B12 in the group of Dorothy Hodgkin. Together with her husband, David Shoemaker, she contributed to the research on transition metal phases and intermetallic compounds. They were the first to recognize that interstices in tetrahedrally close-packed metal crystals are exclusively tetrahedral and only have four types of coordination polyhedra.

#3428

Lawrence Pinsky

#183238

Overall Influence

Lawrence Pinsky is an American physicist specializing in relativistic heavy ion physics, and currently the John & Rebecca Moores Professor at the University of Houston. Pinsky is also a licensed lawyer who deals in international patent law. He is one of the inventors of the board game Blitzkrieg. He also designed several World War II wargames.

#3429

Norna Robertson

#183260

Overall Influence

Norna Robertson is a lead scientist at LIGO at California Institute of Technology, and professor of experimental physics at the University of Glasgow. Her career has focused on experimental research into suspension systems and instrumentation to achieve the detection of gravitational waves.

#3430

Susan D. Allen

#183373

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Susan Davis Allen is an American engineering professor and academic administrator. She is currently Associate Dean of Research for the College of Engineering and Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Her research has spanned multiple applications of lasers and optics, including spectroscopy, laser sensors, laser ablation, micromachining, and others.

#3431

Vinod Gupta

#183513

Overall Influence

#3432

Ping Zhang

#183573

Overall Influence

Ping Zhang is an American structural biologist researching the structural and mechanistic basis of multi-component kinase signaling complexes that are linked to human cancers and other diseases, with a long-term goal of developing new therapeutic strategies. She is a NIH Stadtman Investigator in the Structural Biophysics Laboratory at the National Cancer Institute.

#3433

Mark Bolsterli

#183582

Overall Influence

1930 - 2012 (82 years)

Mark Bolsterli was an American theoretical physicist, specializing in nuclear physics. Biography Mark Bolsterli attended high school in Webster Groves, Missouri, where he became an Eagle Scout. He graduated in 1955 from Washington University in St. Louis with a Ph.D. in physics. His Ph.D. thesis A perturbation procedure for bound states of nuclei was supervised by Eugene Feenberg. Bolsterli received a Fulbright Scholarship to England for the academic year 1955–1956, a fellowship to the Niels Bohr Institute for the academic year 1961–1962, and a Guggenheim Fellowship to the University of Oxford for the academic year 1964–1965.

#3434

Beth A. Cunningham

#183642

Overall Influence

Beth A. Cunningham is an American physicist. Cunningham earned her undergraduate and doctoral degrees from Kent State University, and subsequently completed postdoctoral training at the Hormel Institute. She began her teaching career at Gettysburg College. After a year in Gettysburg, Cunningham joined the Bucknell University faculty in 1989. At Bucknell, Cunningham became associate dean of the faculty in the college of arts and sciences in 2000, two years before attaining the rank of full professor. Cunningham was appointed provost, dean of the faculty, and physics professor at Illinois Wesleyan University in 2006.

#3435

Jane H. Davidson

#183950

Overall Influence

Jane H. Davidson is an American mechanical engineer whose research involves renewable energy, thermal energy storage, alternative fuel, and solar-powered carbon capture and storage for the energy needs of homes, workplaces, and vehicles. She is a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota, where she directs the Solar Energy Laboratory, and is the former Ronald L. and Janet A. Christenson chair of renewable energy at the university.

#3436

Jabez McClelland

#183976

Overall Influence

Jabez Jenkins McClelland is an American physicist. He is best known for his work applying the techniques of laser cooling and atom optics to nanotechnology. This work involved expanding the number of atomic species that could be laser cooled from the alkalis and a few alkaline earth and noble gas species, to transition metals such a chromium and rare earths such as erbium. In the early 1990s he and colleagues showed that the nodes of an optical standing wave could act as lenses, focusing chromium atoms as they deposit onto a surface to create a permanent grating structure whose periodicity is precisely tied to an atomic resonance frequency, making it a useful nanoscale length standard.

#3437

Anthony Joseph Penico

#184158

Overall Influence

1923 - 2011 (88 years)

Anthony "Tony" Joseph Penico was an American mathematician and engineer. He is known for the Penico theorem, Penico solvability, and Penico series. After graduating from South Philadelphia High School, Penico was awarded scholarships to the University of Pennsylvania. There he graduated in 1946 with a bachelor's degree in physics and in 1950 with a Ph.D. in mathematics. His dissertation, written under the supervision of Richard D. Schafer, is entitled The Wedderburn Principal Theorem for Jordan Algebras. The theorem, which generalizes a theorem of A. A. Albert, was published in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society in 1951.

#3438

Stephen P Roberts

#184300

Overall Influence

#3439

Henry C. Yuen

#184406

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Henry Che-Chuen Yuen is a founder and former CEO of Gemstar-TV Guide International. He has a PhD in applied mathematics from Caltech. He worked briefly at Caltech and New York University, then obtained a law degree from Loyola Law School.

#3440

Susan Lepri

#184520

Overall Influence

Susan Lepri is an American space scientist and is currently Professor of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering at the University of Michigan. She led development of portions of the Heavy Ion Sensor which was launched onboard the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter mission in February 2020. She has been director of the University of Michigan Space Physics Research Laboratory since 2021.

#3441

Nele Meckler

#184630

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (48 years)

Anna Nele Meckler is a professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Bergen, and is also affiliated with the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research. She specialises in paleoceanography and paleoclimatology, and leads multiple grants to develop new techniques to reconstruct past temperatures, most importantly clumped isotope thermometry. By analysing speleothems Meckler's team can identify how past levels of in the atmosphere correlate with temperature changes, which gives essential knowledge for predicting future climate change.

#3442

Marc Rafelski

#184774

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (43 years)

Marc Alexander Rafelski is an American astrophysicist. Rafelski studied astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles with Andrea Gehz. He obtained his PhD in physics from the University of California, San Diego, under supervision of Arthur Wolfe, in 2011.

#3443

Harry W. K. Tom

#185530

Overall Influence

Harry W. K. Tom is a physicist and professor at the University of California, Riverside. He was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2000, "[f]or pioneering contributions to our understanding of the ultrafast dynamics of surface chemical and physical reactions, particularly femtosecond laser-induced nonequilibrium phase transitions and chemical reactions."

#3444

John Crocker

#185615

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

John C. Crocker is an American physicist and chemical engineer. He is a Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Crocker's research is focused in soft matter physics, nanotechnology and cell mechanics.

#3445

Winthrop W. Smith

#185628

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Winthrop W. Smith is an American physicist. Smith studied physics at Amherst College, completing his degree in 1958, and subsequently pursued a doctorate in the subject at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he earned in 1963. Smith began teaching at Columbia University as an instructor, and was appointed to an assistant professorship before he joined the University of Connecticut faculty as an associate professor in 1969. From 1975 to 2009, Smith held a full professorship at UConn. Upon retirement, he was granted emeritus status. In 1973, Smith was elected a fellow of the American P...

#3446

George Pickett

#185671

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (86 years)

George Richard Pickett FRS is Professor of Low Temperature Physics at Lancaster University. Life Pickett was born in 1939 and educated at Bedford Modern School and Magdalen College, Oxford . Pickett was a Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader and then Head of the Department of Physics at Lancaster University. In the 1996 Nobel Prize citation of physicist David Lee, credit was given to Pickett and his research group for their work on 3He.

#3447

Katherine Barbeau

#185709

Overall Influence

Katherine Barbeau is a professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography known for her work on trace metals and the linkages between trace metals and biology. Education and career Barbeau graduated from Mercy High School in Middleton, Connecticut. She has a B.S. from Southampton College , and then moved to the Université libre de Bruxelles for one year. She earned a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1998. Following her Ph.D. she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara until 2001 when she joined t...

#3448

Adrienne Lavine

#185723

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Adrienne S. Lavine is an American mechanical engineer specializing in heat transfer, thermal energy, and energy storage, and known as a coauthor of several widely used textbooks on heat transfer. She is a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, director of the UCLA Modeling of Complex Thermal Systems Laboratory, and a former associate vice provost at UCLA.

#3449

William Robertson

#185921

Overall Influence

#3450

Antoinette Taylor

#185988

Overall Influence

Antoinette Jane Taylor is an American physicist known for her research on metamaterials and nanophotonics including terahertz metamaterials for controlling and generating submillimeter radiation. She is Associate Laboratory Director, Physical Sciences at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

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