Michael Grätzel tops new ranking of scientists
Professor Michael Grätzel holding up a dye-sensitized solar cell. Credit: Alain Herzog/EPFL
EPFL Professor Michael Grätzel is ranked #1 in a list of 100,000 top scientists across all fields. The ranking method is a based on new, more accurate standardized citation metrics developed by scientists led by Stanford University.
On August 12, a group of scientists led by Professor John P.A. Ioannides at Stanford University published a paper in the journal PloS Biology outlining a new way to rank scientists by citations and other metrics, without falling prey to common abuses such as self-citation or citation farms. The new method produced a database of over 100,000 top scientists across multiple fields, and was extensively covered by Nature.
The ranking places EPFL Professor Michael Grätzel at #1. Grätzel, who directs EPFL’s Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces, is world-famous for inventing the dye-sensitized solar cells (“Grätzel cells”), which became the launchpad for the current development of perovskite photovoltaics. Dye-sensitized solar cells are already manufactured on a multi-megawatt scale, and perovskite photovoltaics are poised to conquer the market in the near future.
The database also includes another 156 EPFL scientists.
“Needless to say, I was surprised and overwhelmed with joy when Jan [Hesthaven], our Dean, informed me about being rated number 1 on the list of 100,000 top scientists across all fields that was just published by colleagues from Stanford University,” says Grätzel. “The new standardized citation method they applied to screen over seven million scientists worldwide appears to me fair and well-balanced.”