People Research

David Van Essen listed as Highly Cited Researcher for eighth consecutive year

For eight years in a row, David Van Essen, PhD, Alumni Endowed Professor of Neuroscience at Washington University School of Medicine, has made Clarivate’s list of Highly Cited Researchers. According to the Clarivate website, “Highly Cited Researchers have demonstrated significant and broad influence reflected in their publication of multiple highly cited papers over the last decade.”

David Van Essen
David Van Essen, PhD

According to the Web of Science, which provides citation data for the list, Van Essen has been cited nearly 45,000 times. Among his most-cited work is a 1991 paper in Cerebral Cortex that described hierarchical visual processing in the macaque brain based on intricate anatomical mapping of cortical connections (cited 9,416 times). His continued work on delineating the functional architecture of the primate brain has yielded more than a dozen papers topping 1,000 citations each.

Dozens of researchers from Washington University made the 2022 list. Van Essen’s former graduate student Matthew Glasser, MD, PhD, was named to the Highly Cited Researcher list for the second year in a row. In a Nature paper published in 2016 (and cited more than 3,000 times), Glasser, Van Essen and colleagues reported the parcellation of the human cerebral cortex, annotating 180 cortical areas in each hemisphere of the brain. Glasser is now an Instructor in Radiology and a Neuroradiology Fellow at the School of Medicine.

Read a profile of Dr. Glasser»