Will Percival, a Perimeter associate faculty member and director of the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Waterloo, has been named as one of the world’s most influential scientists in his field on Clarivate Analytics’ Highly Cited Researchers™ 2023 list.

Percival, a cosmologist who also holds the Distinguished Research Chair in Astrophysics at Waterloo, uses observations to test theoretical models. His focus is on galaxy surveys, using the positions of galaxies to measure the cosmological expansion rate and growth of cosmological structures. 

Percival played a central role in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, and extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, for which he was honoured by the European Physical Society earlier this year. He continues to play a key role with both the Euclid mission of the European Space Agency and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. 

Percival is among the 7,125 highly cited researchers in the world, across all scientific fields, on this year’s Clarivate Analytics list. His 434 published papers have had more than 69,000 citations, according to the INSPIRE database.

Besides Percival, two of Perimeter’s Distinguished Visiting Research Chairs are also on the 2023 list: Leon Balents, who studies quantum matter at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Edo Berger, an astronomer from the Smithsonian Institution and Harvard University.

The list recognizes researchers who have published multiple papers that rank among the top one percent of most-cited papers in their fields over the last decade, according to Web of Science™, a large database of reputable journals.

Citations give credit to the results and ideas of other scientists and show how a researcher’s work influences the research of others. They are considered an important measure of scientific impact. 

This is the sixth time Percival has appeared on the Highly Cited Researchers list.