24 in 2024: list of most highly cited researchers includes UC Santa Cruz scientists and engineers

In a notable recognition of scholarly achievement, 24 scientists and engineers from UC Santa Cruz have earned a spot on the 2024 Highly Cited Researchers list, recently unveiled by Clarivate. Six UC Santa Cruz researchers have joined the list since 2023, when 18 UCSC researchers were honored.

This prestigious list acknowledges researchers globally whose papers rank in the top 1% by citations for their respective fields and year of publication, highlighting their substantial influence in the research community.

Among the UC Santa Cruz faculty honored are Jonathan Fortney and J. Xavier Prochaska, professors of astronomy and astrophysics; Garth Illingworth, distinguished professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics; David Haussler, distinguished professor of biomolecular engineering and director of the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute; Karen Miga, associate professor of biomolecular engineering; Benedict Paten, professor of biomolecular engineering; and Shaowei Chen and Yat Li, both professors of chemistry and biochemistry.

The list also includes Mark Diekhans, technical director of the Genomics Institute’s Computational Genomics Laboratory, and James Kent, creator and director of the UC Santa Cruz Genome Browser, along with 11 other current and former members of the Genome Browser Team: Galt Barber, Jonathan Casper, Hiram Clawson, Maximilian Haeussler, Angie Hinrichs, Robert Kuhn, Brian T. Lee, Matthew Speir, Brian Raney, Kate Rosenbloom, and Ann Zweig.

Two researchers who list their secondary affiliation as UC Santa Cruz made the list: Steven Bograd, adjunct professor of ocean sciences and program lead for climate and ecosystem at the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and Rychard Bouwens, former UCSC postdoctoral fellow and now an associate professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

The 2024 Highly Cited Researchers list includes 6,886 influential researchers hailing from diverse fields and representing 59 countries and regions. The University of California system’s 10 campuses perform exceptionally well. 

The full 2024 Highly Cited Researchers list and executive summary can be found here, and the methodology can be found here. Clarivate organizes the world’s research information to enable academia, corporations, publishers and governments to accelerate the pace of research. It is powered by Web of Science, the world’s largest publisher-neutral citation index and research intelligence platform.