Highest Rating of all Living Chemists: Prof George Whitesides

I have been following Prof George Whiteside for past one year, when I started working on microfluidics. While doing some literature search related to my work, I found some of the pioneer work done by his group. Later on found that his group has done some fundamental, pioneer work on microfluidics. For example: his group started paper microfluidics.Scientists are predicting paper microfluidics may revolutionize medical diagnostics in developing country by providing cheap and reliable diagnosis for common diseases. Now, withing three years this field has seen huge increase. Many research groups are after paper microfluidics. They lead or find the path, others just follow them. Recently, I also have been attracted to this area of research hoping to be able to do similar research work in resources limited countries like Nepal.

This guy is the highest H-index rating of all living chemists on the earth as of Nov 2010. He has published around 1100 papers in peer reviewed journals. This is amazing. In his ~45 yrs of science career (after his PhD), publishing 1100 papers means more than 20 papers per month. Looking at his research group this time, it kinda makes sense. His group has almost 4 dozens postdocs and rare graduate students. And, his group members are the best chemists he can find. They are in Harvard Chemistry department. 

The single primary objective of his lab is "to fundamentally change the paradigms of science." I like his idea of simplicity. Science and its applications should be very simple so that general public could benefit from science. This is how they developed microfluidics on filter papers.

You can check details about him in wiki page. Just google his name. He is still very active chemist on the age of 72.

Prof Whitesides is also famous for public talks. I have seen his couple of talks and one of them was on TedShow. You can watch his talk on the video below.

By the way: The h-index is an index that attempts to measure both the productivity and impact of the published work of a scientist or scholar. The index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other people's publications (from wiki)


-Basant