Swiss professor tops ranking of 100,000 scientists 

The ranking also includes another 156 EPFL scientists. Keystone

A scientist at Switzerland’s Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) has been ranked first in a list of 100,000 top scientists across all fields.  

EPFL Professor Michael Grätzel, who is at the helm of the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces, came first. The ranking also includes another 156 EPFL scientists.  

Grätzel is globally recognised for inventing dye-sensitized solar cells (dubbed “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. 

The ranking method, EPFL noted in a statement on Monday, is based on a new, more accurate standardised 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 published a paper in the journal PloS Biology outlining a new way to rank scientists by citations and other metrics. 

The virtue of this new method is that it avoids falling prey to common abuses such as self-citation or citation farms. It produced a database of over 100,000 scientists in a wide range of fields. 

Photovoltaics is the conversion of light into electricity using semiconducting materials, in this case perovskite, a mineral made up primarily of calcium titanate. 

Regularly ranked among the 25 top universities in the world, the EPFL has spawned various discoveries of scientific or commercial value.