CSE faculty among most cited researchers
High citation counts suggests substantial contributions to their field
Five College of Science and Engineering faculty were recently named among the "Highly Cited Researchers" in the world: Hai Cheng, Christopher Cramer, R. Lawrence Edwards, Dan Knights, and Donald Truhlar.
The international list, released by Clarivate Analytics in November 2018, is now in its fifth year. It recognizes researchers whose citation records place them in the top one percent of citation counts for their field over the course of a decade.
High citation counts demonstrate that a researcher’s work has been frequently referenced by their peers and suggests that it may also have contributed substantially to advancing knowledge in their field.
Hai Cheng, a senior research scientist in the Department of Earth Sciences, was listed in the field of geosciences. His research centers on the development and application of U-series dating techniques to address fundamental issues in geochronology, palaeoclimatology, palaeoceanography, human evolution, and global climate change research. He has published numerous papers in top journals in geochemistry, geophysics and human evolution, including Science and Nature.
R. Lawrence Edwards, a Robert D. and Carol C. Gunn Professor and Distinguished McKnight University Professor in Department of Earth Sciences, was also listed among the most cited researchers in geosciences. His expertise lies in climate history, climate change, and geochronology. Edwards is an isotope geochemist renowned for his role in developing modern uranium-thorium (or Th-230) dating methods and his application of these methods to the study of climate history and ocean chemistry.
Christopher Cramer, the University of Minnesota’s vice president for researchand a Distinguished McKnight University Professor, was listed among the most cited in the field of chemistry. His research focuses on energy and catalysis, chemical theory and computation, as well as environmental and green chemistry. Cramer formerly served as the College of Science and Engineering’s associate dean for academic affairs and associate dean for research and planning.
Donald Truhlar, a University of Minnesota Regents Professor and one of the top theoretical chemists in the world, was also listed in the chemistry category with Cramer. His multifaceted research in theoretical and computational chemistry focuses on kinetics, dynamics, solvation, electronic structure, thermochemistry, and catalysis—with special emphases on reaction dynamics and quantum mechanics.
Dan Knights, a computational biologist with joint appointments in the College of Science and Engineering and the College of Biological Sciences, was named in the biology and biochemistry most-cited list. His research uses data mining and machine learning to aggregate and mine multiple sources of microbial and human genomic data for patterns linking to environmental conditions and human disease.
To prepare this year’s list, Clarivate Analytics used a compilation of science performance metrics and trend data based on scholarly paper publication counts and citation data.