The Most Influential People Across History

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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List of the most influential people

#38651

Ali MacGraw

Ali MacGraw
#38663
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Elizabeth Alice MacGraw is an American actress and activist. She gained attention with her role in the film Goodbye, Columbus , for which she won the Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Newcomer. She gained an international profile for her role in the romantic drama Love Story , for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama. In 1972, MacGraw was voted the top female box office star in the world and was honored with a hands and footprints ceremony at Grauman's Chinese Theatre after having been in just three films.
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#38652

Gene Hackman

Gene Hackman
#38664
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Eugene Allen Hackman is an American retired actor and novelist. In a career that spanned more than six decades, he received two Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, four Golden Globes, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and the Silver Bear. Hackman's two Academy Award wins included one for Best Actor for his role as Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle in William Friedkin's acclaimed thriller The French Connection and the other for Best Supporting Actor for his role as "Little" Bill Daggett in Clint Eastwood's Western film Unforgiven . His other Oscar-nominated roles were in Bonnie and Clyde , I Never Sang for My Fa...
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#38653

Rafael Irizarry

Rafael Irizarry
#38665
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Rafael Irizarry is a professor of biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and professor of biostatistics and computational biology at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute. Irizarry is known as one of the founders of the Bioconductor project.
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#38654

Carl Cotman

#38666
Overall Influence
Carl Wayne Cotman is an American neuroscientist. He is a professor of neurology at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine, where he is also the founding director of the Institute for Brain Aging and Dementia and the Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders . He is known for researching the neurochemistry of Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia. His research has shown, for example, that physical exercise increases production of brain-derived neurotropic factor, which protects neurons from aging-related damage and promotes the growth of new ones.
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#38655

Ronald Brunskill

#38667
Overall Influence
1929 - 2015 (86 years)
Ronald William Brunskill OBE was an English academic who was Reader in Architecture at the University of Manchester. He was an authority on the history of architecture and particularly on British vernacular architecture.
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#38656

Anne H. Charity Hudley

#38668
Overall Influence
Anne Harper Charity Hudley is an American linguist who works on language variation in secondary schools. Since 2021, she has been a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Early life and education Charity Hudley received her PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005. She is from Richmond, Virginia, where she attended St. Catherine's School for 13 years. Her undergraduate degree is from Harvard University.
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#38657

Laurent Wauquiez

#38669
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Laurent Timothée Marie Wauquiez is a French politician who has presided over the Regional Council of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes since 2016. He is a member of The Republicans , which he led from 2017 to 2019 following the resignation of Nicolas Sarkozy.
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#38658

Guy Benton Johnson

#38670
Overall Influence
1901 - 1991 (90 years)
Guy Benton Johnson was an American sociologist and social anthropologist. He was a distinguished student of black culture in the rural South and a pioneer advocate of racial equality. Biography Johnson was born in Caddo Mills, Texas on February 28, 1901. He married Guion Griffis, a noted historian, and together they had two sons: Guy Benton, Jr. and Edward. Johnson died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on March 23, 1991, at the age of 90.
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#38659

Christopher Snowden

#38671
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Sir Christopher Maxwell Snowden, is a British electronic engineer and academic. He was the former Vice-Chancellor of Surrey University and of the University of Southampton . He was president of Universities UK for a two-year term until 31 July 2015 and is currently chairman of the ERA Foundation.
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#38660

Francesco Guerra

Francesco Guerra
#38672
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Francesco Guerra is an Italian mathematical physicist, whose main research contributions are in quantum field theory and spin glasses. Career highlights Francesco Guerra received his degree from the University of Naples in 1964. He was Professor of Theoretical Physics in Sapienza Università di Roma since 1979. In 1983 and 1984, he was Director of the Department of Mathematics and, from 1995 to 2001, Director of the Department of Physics.
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#38661

David Friedman

David Friedman
#38673
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
David Friedman is an American jazz percussionist. His primary instruments are vibraphone and marimba. Friedman studied drums in the 1950s, then marimba and xylophone in the 1960s at Juilliard. In the 1960s he was a member of the New York Philharmonic and the pit orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera, and worked as a jazz musician with Wayne Shorter, Joe Chambers, Hubert Laws, Horace Silver, and Horacee Arnold in the 1970s. He and Dave Samuels played together in drum workshops before starting a project in 1975, called The Mallet Duo. They also assembled a quartet called Double Image during the years 1977–1980.
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#38662

James Rodríguez

#38674
Overall Influence
1991 - Present (35 years)
James David Rodríguez Rubio is a Colombian professional footballer who plays as an attacking midfielder or a winger for Campeonato Brasileiro Série A club São Paulo and the Colombia national team. He has been praised for his technique, vision, and playmaking skills, and was often considered the successor to his compatriot Carlos Valderrama.
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#38663

Bernard B. Brodie

#38675
Overall Influence
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#38664

José José

#38676
Overall Influence
1948 - 2019 (71 years)
José Rómulo Sosa Ortiz , known professionally as José José, was a Mexican singer. Also known as El Príncipe de la Canción , his performance and vocal style have influenced many Latin pop artists in a career that spanned more than four decades. Due to his vocals and popularity, José José was considered by Latin audience and media as an icon of Latin pop music and one of the most emblematic Latin singers of his time.
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#38665

Joan Copjec

#38677
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Joan K. Copjec is an American philosopher, theorist, author, feminist, and prominent American Lacanian psychoanalytic theorist. She is Professor of Modern Culture & Media at Brown University. Early life and career Joan K. Copjec was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1946; her family is of Czech ancestry. She received her bachelor's degree in English literature, with a minor in Classics, in 1968 from Wheaton College. She received her master's degree in English in 1969 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and began her doctoral work there, with a minor in Film in 1972. Abandoning her original Ph.D.
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#38666

Albert Buckman Wharton III

#38678
Overall Influence
Albert Buckman Wharton III is an American rancher. Early life Albert Buckman Wharton III grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is the son of Albert Buckman Wharton Jr., a.k.a. Buster Wharton, an heir to the Waggoner Ranch and polo player. His mother was Buster Wharton's third wife. His paternal grandmother was Electra Waggoner and his paternal grandfather, Albert Buckman Wharton. His paternal great-grandfather was William Thomas Waggoner and his paternal great-great-grandfather, Daniel Waggoner.
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#38667

Patricio Lorente

Patricio Lorente
#38679
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Patricio Lorente is an Argentine scholar and General Secretary of the National University of La Plata. Biography Lorente was born in La Plata on March 19, 1969. He's the only male among the four children of his parents, Hugo Enrique Lorente, a telecommunications engineer of Basque descent, and Beatriz Gliemmo, an architect of Italian descent.
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#38668

Anthony Phillips

#38680
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Anthony Edwin Phillips is an English musician, songwriter, producer and singer who gained prominence as the original lead guitarist of the rock band Genesis, from 1967 to 1970. He left in July 1970 and learned to play more instruments, before he began a solo career.
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#38669

Cecilia Medina

Cecilia Medina
#38681
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Cecilia Medina Quiroga is a Chilean jurist. Biography Cecilia Medina studied legal and social sciences at the University of Chile in Santiago and earned a doctorate in law at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.
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#38670

Vittorio Gassman

Vittorio Gassman
#38682
Overall Influence
1922 - 2000 (78 years)
Vittorio Gassman , popularly known as , was an Italian actor, director, and screenwriter. He is considered one of the greatest Italian actors, whose career includes both important productions as well as dozens of divertissements.
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#38671

Anthea Butler

#38683
Overall Influence
Anthea Deidre Butler is an African-American professor of religion and chair of the University of Pennsylvania Department of Religious Studies, where she is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought.
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#38672

Griff Rhys Jones

Griff Rhys Jones
#38684
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Griffith Rhys Jones , often known and credited as Griff Rhys Jones, is a Welsh comedian, writer, actor, and television presenter. Rhys Jones starred in a number of television series with his comedy partner, Mel Smith. He and Smith came to national attention in the 1980s for their work in the BBC television comedy sketch shows Not the Nine O'Clock News and Alas Smith and Jones.
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#38673

Julio Gea-Banacloche

#38685
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Julio Gea-Banacloche is professor of physics and currently the head of the department of physics at the University of Arkansas. He is notable for his contribution to the field of quantum information, where he has shown that the quantum mechanical nature of the fields used to manipulate the quantum information carriers themselves might lead to unpredictable errors in the performance of the quantum logical operations. The lower bound on the size of these errors can be made smaller by increasing the energy of the control system. This has led Gea-Banacloche to predict a minimum energy requiremen...
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#38674

Mahmoud Sadri

#38686
Overall Influence
Mahmoud Sadri is an Iranian-American sociologist. He is the twin brother of Ahmad Sadri. He graduated with his master's degree in Sociology as well as a Baccalauréat qualification from the University of Tehran in 1976 and 1974 respectively. He then earned his Ph.D. from The New School University, New York in 1988.
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#38675

Saïd Amir Arjomand

#38687
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Saïd Amir Arjomand is an Iranian-American scholar and Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University, Long Island, and Director of the Stony Brook Institute for Global Studies. He received his Ph.D. in 1980 from the University of Chicago.
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#38676

Shahar Mozes

#38688
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Shahar Mozes is an Israeli mathematician. Mozes received in 1991, his doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with thesis Actions of Cartan subgroups under the supervision of Hillel Fürstenberg. At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mozes became in 1993 a senior lecturer, in 1996 associate professor, and in 2002 a full professor.
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#38677

Isabelle Gallagher

Isabelle Gallagher
#38689
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Isabelle Gallagher is a French mathematician. Her research concerns partial differential equations such as the Navier–Stokes equations, the wave equation, and the Schrödinger equation, as well as harmonic analysis of the Heisenberg group.
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#38678

Edgardo Lander

Edgardo Lander
#38690
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Edgardo Lander is a Venezuelan sociologist and left-wing intellectual. A professor emeritus of the Central University of Venezuela and fellow of the Transnational Institute, he is the author of numerous books and research articles on democracy theory, the limits of industrialization and economic growth, and left-wing movements in Latin America.
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#38679

Stephen M. Watt

#38691
Overall Influence
Stephen M. Watt, a computer scientist and mathematician, is past Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
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#38680

Rafael Medoff

Rafael Medoff
#38692
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Rafael Medoff is an American professor of Jewish history and the founding director of The David Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, which is based in Washington, D.C. and focuses on issues related to America's response to the Holocaust.
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#38681

Mordechai Shani

Mordechai Shani
#38693
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Mordechai Shani is an Israeli physician. He is Professor of Healthcare Systems at Tel Aviv University. He served as the Director General of the Sheba Medical Center. He was the recipient of the Israel Prize in 2009.
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#38682

Timo Vihavainen

Timo Vihavainen
#38694
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Timo Juhani Vihavainen is a Finnish historian and a professor of Russian Studies at the University of Helsinki. He has written extensively on Russian and Finnish history. Vihavainen graduated as a Master of Philosophy in 1970, a Licentiate in Philosophy in 1983, a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1988 and a Docent in Russian history in 1992. He is a member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters since 2009. At the beginning of the 2000s he was among the contributors of the Kanava magazine.
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#38683

LeAnne Howe

#38695
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
LeAnne Howe (born April 29, 1951) is an American author and Eidson Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of Georgia , Athens. She previously taught American Indian Studies and English at the University of Minnesota and at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and is a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. LeAnne Howe attended Oklahoma State University–Tulsa where she majored in English. Afterwards, Howe worked toward pursuing her Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Norwich University in 2000. Over the next couple of ...
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#38684

Josep Fontana

Josep Fontana
#38696
Overall Influence
1931 - 2018 (87 years)
Josep Fontana i Lázaro was a Spanish historian from Catalonia. Education Born in Barcelona, he received his master's degree in philosophy and letters at the University of Barcelona in 1956 and his doctorate in history by the same university in 1970. He was a student of Jaume Vicens i Vives and Ferran Soldevila. Their main currents of investigation are economic history, 19th century Spanish history and the history of property. He was influenced in his thought by E.P. Thompson, Pierre Vilar, Gramsci and Walter Benjamin.
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#38685

Richard Edwin Hills

Richard Edwin Hills
#38697
Overall Influence
1945 - 2022 (77 years)
Richard Edwin Hills was a British astronomer who was emeritus professor of Radio Astronomy at the University of Cambridge. Education Born on 30 September 1945 and educated at Bedford School, Hills studied the Natural Science Tripos at Queens' College, Cambridge and then went to the University of California, Berkeley to complete his Doctor of Philosophy degree.
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#38686

Anthony Minghella

Anthony Minghella
#38698
Overall Influence
1954 - 2008 (54 years)
Anthony Minghella, was a British film director, playwright and screenwriter. He was chairman of the board of Governors at the British Film Institute between 2003 and 2007. He directed Truly, Madly, Deeply , The English Patient , The Talented Mr. Ripley , and Cold Mountain , and produced Iris , The Quiet American , Michael Clayton , and The Reader .
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#38687

Gonçalo Abecasis

Gonçalo Abecasis
#38699
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Gonçalo Rocha Abecasis is a Portuguese American biomedical researcher at the University of Michigan and was chair of the Department of Biostatistics in the School of Public Health. He leads a group at the Center for Statistical Genetics in the Department of Biostatistics, where he is also the Felix E. Moore Collegiate Professor of Biostatistics and director of the Michigan Genomic Initiative. His group develops statistical tools to analyze the genetics of human disease.
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#38688

Gert Sabidussi

#38700
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Gert Sabidussi is an Austrian mathematician specializing in combinatorics and graph theory. Biography Sabidussi was born in Graz, Austria. His family later moved to Innsbruck where his father was a Protestant deacon. He graduated from the University of Vienna, where he attended lectured by Felix Ehrenhaft, Nikolaus Hofreiter, Johann Radon and Hans Thirring. In 1953, he defended his doctorate on 0-1 matrices under the supervision of Edmund Hlawka and received a two-year fellowship at Princeton University. He was then an Instructor at University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, but because of the heavy teaching load moved a year later, in 1956, to Tulane University in New Orleans.
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#38689

Arthur B. C. Walker Jr.

#38701
Overall Influence
1936 - 2001 (65 years)
Arthur Bertram Cuthbert Walker Jr. was an African-American solar physicist and a pioneer of EUV/XUV optics. He is most noted for having developed normal incidence multilayer XUV telescopes to photograph the solar corona. Two of his sounding rocket payloads, the Stanford/MSFC Rocket Spectroheliograph Experiment and the Multi-Spectral Solar Telescope Array, recorded the first full-disk, high-resolution images of the Sun in XUV with conventional geometries of normal incidence optics; this technology is now used in solar telescopes such as SOHO/EIT and TRACE, and in the fabrication of microchip...
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#38690

Andreas Hackethal

#38702
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Andreas Hackethal is a Professor of Finance and the Dean of the Goethe Business School at the Goethe University Frankfurt. Life Andreas Hackethal earned his degrees in Business Administration from Goethe University Frankfurt and the University of Iowa. He finished his doctoral studies at Goethe University in 1999 and received his postdoctoral lecture qualification from Goethe University in 2005. Parallel to his academic career he spent two years in banking and eight years in strategy consulting. From 2005 to 2007 he held a position as Finance Professor and was head of Finance Department at Eu...
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#38691

Yuri M. Marusik

#38703
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Yuri Mikhailovitch Marusik is a Russian arachnologist. Early life and education Marusik was born in Sarny, a small town in West Ukraine, to Mikhail Adamovich, a school teacher, and Tamara Andreevna, a nurse. His interest in zoology started at an early age, from reading books about animals. Marusik started his studies at Leningrad State University in 1979 where he specialized in entomology under the supervision of Victor P. Tyshchenko. After his graduation in 1984, Marusik was accepted into a Ph.D. program in Magadan, working in the lab of Daniil I. Berman. His Ph.D. dissertation was devoted...
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#38692

Lucas Pouille

Lucas Pouille
#38704
Overall Influence
1994 - Present (32 years)
Lucas Pouille is a French professional tennis player. He has a career-high ATP singles ranking of world No. 10, achieved on 19 March 2018 and a career-high ATP doubles ranking of world No. 79, achieved on 11 April 2016. He has won five singles titles on the ATP Tour and was on the winning French Davis Cup team in 2017.
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#38693

Curtis Joseph

Curtis Joseph
#38705
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Curtis Shayne Joseph is a Canadian ice hockey coach and former professional player. Nicknamed "Cujo", Joseph was immediately recognizable on the ice for his masks featuring a snarling dog, drawing inspiration from the Stephen King novel Cujo.
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#38694

Bernard Li

#38706
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Professor Bernard Li, KSG , KHS is a Taiwanese philosopher and former president of Fu Jen Catholic University. He is known for the official founder of Fu Jen School and Fu Jen Academia Catholica. He obtained the bachelor's, master's and doctoral degree at Fu Jen Catholic University.
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#38695

Rene Russo

Rene Russo
#38707
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Rene Marie Russo is an American actress and model. She began her career as a fashion model in the 1970s, appearing on magazine covers such as Vogue and Cosmopolitan. She made her film debut in the 1989 comedy Major League, and rose to international prominence in a number of thrillers and action films throughout the 1990s, including Lethal Weapon 3 , In the Line of Fire , Outbreak , Get Shorty , Ransom , Lethal Weapon 4 , and The Thomas Crown Affair .
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#38696

Robert Poulin

#38708
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Robert Poulin is an evolutionary ecologist specialising in the ecology of parasitism. He is a professor of zoology at the University of Otago and a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. Biography Poulin grew up in Canada, taking his bachelor's degree in aquatic biology at McGill University, Montreal and gaining his doctorate at Université Laval, Quebec City. He became a researcher in Quebec. He moved to New Zealand in 1992, where he is a professor of zoology, leading a research group studying the ecology of parasites at the University of Otago.
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#38697

Geno Smith

Geno Smith
#38709
Overall Influence
1990 - Present (36 years)
Eugene Cyril Smith III is an American football quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks of the National Football League . He played college football at West Virginia, leading the Mountaineers to multiple bowl games, breaking numerous passing records, and garnering multiple awards before getting drafted by the New York Jets in the second round of the 2013 NFL Draft.
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#38698

Mostafa Kamal Tolba

Mostafa Kamal Tolba
#38710
Overall Influence
1922 - 2016 (94 years)
Mostafa Kamal Tolba was an Egyptian scientist who served for seventeen years as the executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme . In that capacity he led development of the Montreal Protocol, which saved the ozone layer and thus millions of lives from skin cancer and other impacts.
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#38699

Robert Michael Franklin Jr.

#38711
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Robert Michael Franklin Jr. is an American author, theologian, ordained minister, and academic administrator who served as the tenth president of Morehouse College from 2007 to 2012. Franklin is a visiting scholar in residence at Stanford University's Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute. In January 2014, he became director of the religion program at the Chautauqua Institution.
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#38700

Alberto Broggi

Alberto Broggi
#38712
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Alberto Broggi is General Manager at VisLab srl and a professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Parma in Italy. Research in computer vision, hardware, and AV Broggi's research activities started in 1991–1994. His group together with the Dipartimento di Elettronica, Politecnico di Torino, Italy, built their own hardware architecture and installed it on board of a mobile laboratory to develop and test some initial concepts in the field of intelligent vehicles.
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