11 Gillings School experts named to Clarivate's 2024 Highly Cited Researchers List

November 26, 2024

Clarivate has named 11 academics from the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health to their 2024 list of Highly Cited Researchers™.

Since 2001, the Highly Cited Researchers list has identified global research scientists and social scientists who have demonstrated exceptional influence – reflected through their publication of multiple papers frequently cited by their peers during the last decade. The list uses both quantitative and qualitative analysis to identify individuals from across the globe who have demonstrated significant and broad influence in their chosen field or fields of research.

The preliminary list of Highly Cited Researchers is drawn from the highly cited papers that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and publication year in the Web of Science™ citation index over the past decade. The list also identifies the research institutions and regions where they are based. The methodology that determines the “who’s who” of influential researchers draws on the data and analysis performed by bibliometric experts and data scientists at the Institute for Scientific Information™ at Clarivate.

Clarivate adheres to international rather than regional norms and looks for recognition from an international and wide-ranging network of citing authors. The addition of enhanced filters to address hyper-authorship, excessive self-citation, anomalous citation patterns and more ensures that recognized researchers meet the benchmarks required for the Highly Cited Researchers program and emphasizes Clarivate’s commitment to research integrity.

From the Gillings School, those faculty include:

Dr. Ralph Baric

Ralph S. Baric, PhD, William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of epidemiology. Baric has spent the past three decades as a world leader in the study of coronaviruses, flaviviruses,  noroviruses and other important emerging viruses that threaten global populations.

Dr. Noel Brewer

Noel T. Brewer, PhD, Gillings Distinguished Professor in Public Health and professor of health behavior. Brewer’s research explores why people engage in vaccination, tobacco cessation and other health behaviors that prevent cancer.

Dr. Stephen Cole

Stephen R. Cole, PhD, professor of epidemiology. Cole works to build accurate and impactful knowledge at the intersection of epidemiology, statistics and causal inference.

Dr. Rachel Graham

Rachel Graham, PhD, assistant professor of epidemiology. Graham’s research areas include coronavirus replication fidelity, viral genome recombination, candidate live-attenuated vaccine design, and phylogenetic and molecular analyses of coronavirus genomes as they emerge and adapt to novel hosts.

Dr. Lisa Gralinksi

Lisa Gralinski, PhD, assistant professor of epidemiology. Gralinski’s research explores the interaction of highly pathogenic human coronaviruses with the host immune system. In particular, she is interested in how these interactions can lead to the resolution of virus infection or alternatively lead to virus-induced, immune-mediated disease.

Dr. Sarah R. Leist

Sarah Leist, PhD, research associate in epidemiology. As part of the Baric Lab, Leist develops mouse models for COVID-19 research and studies virus-host interaction and the influence of host genetics on respiratory virus infections and disease outcomes.

Dr. Hans Paerl

Hans W. Paerl, PhD, professor of marine and environmental sciences and engineering and William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor at UNC’s Institute of Marine Sciences. Paerl’s research specializes in water quality, eutrophication, harmful algal bloom and food web dynamics of freshwater and marine ecosystems — locally, nationally and internationally.

Dr. Barry Popkin

Barry M. Popkin, PhD, William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of nutrition. Popkin’s research focuses currently on large-scale regulatory actions to reduce consumption of ultra-processed food, including research to support policy and evaluations of policies across low- and middle-income countries. In addition, he does work to further his concept of the nutrition transition and his concept of the double burden of malnutrition, including drivers and health consequences.

Dr. Byron Powell

Byron Powell, PhD, LCSW, adjunct associate professor of health policy and management at the Gillings School and associate professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. He aims to improve the quality of health and social services by advancing methods in implementation research and practice.

Dr. Alexandra Schaefer

Alexandra Schaefer, PhD, assistant professor of epidemiology. Schaefer’s work focuses on identifying quantitative trait loci, genes and alleles that regulate emerging viral pathogenesis and immunity and the role of these loci in pathogenesis. A major goal is to identify and study common genes and polymorphisms that regulate emerging virus disease severity across species.

Dr. Timothy Sheahan

Timothy Sheahan, PhD, assistant professor of epidemiology. Sheahan’s research focuses on better understanding how viruses jump into humans, developing new models to study how emerging viruses cause disease, and identifying drugs, antibodies and vaccines for the emerging viruses of today and the future.

The methodology that determines the “who’s who” of influential researchers draws on the data and analysis performed by bibliometric experts and data scientists at the Institute for Scientific Information™ at Clarivate. It also uses the tallies to identify the countries and research institutions where these citation elite are based.

See the full 2024 Highly Cited Researchers list and executive summary and learn more about the methodology.

Contact the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health communications team at sphcomm@unc.edu.