Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Business,

#351

Bill Ward

#34278

Overall Influence

1919 - 1998 (79 years)

William Hess Ward , was an American cartoonist notable as a good girl artist and creator of the risqué comics character Torchy. Biography Early life and career Born in Brooklyn, New York, Ward grew up in Ridgewood, New Jersey, where his father was an executive with the United Fruit Company.

#352

Timothy R. Lannon

#18713

Overall Influence

Timothy Ryan Lannon, S.J. was the 24th president of Creighton University from July 1, 2011, to January 20, 2015. He was previously the president of Saint Joseph's University. Biography Early life Timothy Ryan Lannon, S.J., is a native of Mason City, Iowa. His father, James Lannon, played football at Creighton University, where he earned a medical degree during the 1930s.

#353

Shelby D. Hunt

#81399

Overall Influence

#354

Elsayed Saad Eldin Hafez

#82229

Overall Influence

#355

Karim Jamal

#67636

Overall Influence

Dr. Karim Jamal, CA, is Chartered Accountants' Distinguished Chair in Accounting, and a professor at the University of Alberta School of Business. He has a Fellowship at the Institute for United States Policy Studies. He is a professor of Financial Accounting, Managerial Accounting, Management Control, Accounting Theory and Auditing, as well as a few MBA courses. Dr. Karim is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Alberta , American Accounting Association , and the Canadian Academic Accounting Association . Jamal has a BComm from the University of Manitoba, an MSc from the Univ...

#356

Henry Jarecki

#35086

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Henry George Jarecki is a German-born American academic, psychiatrist, entrepreneur, producer and philanthropist. Early life and career Henry Jarecki was born into a German-Jewish family in Stettin , the son of Max Jarecki, a physician, and Gerda Kunstmann, the scion of a shipping family. As a child, he fled Nazi Germany with his family for the United Kingdom and subsequently the United States. His wealthy family was able to transfer their wealth from occupied Poland.

#357

Ed Elton

#70587

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Edwin Elton is a Nomura Professor of Finance at New York University Stern School of Business and Academic Director of the Stern Doctoral Program. Biography Professor Elton has served as a portfolio theory and investment management consultant for major financial institutions in Asia, Europe, and the United States. He has been a senior research fellow at the International Institute of Management in Berlin and a visiting scholar at the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management in Brussels and at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

#358

Michael Useem

#60677

Overall Influence

Michael Useem is an American academic. He is the William and Jacalyn Egan Professor of Management at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also the director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management. He is the author of several books.

#359

P. George Benson

P. George Benson

#44500

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Paul George Benson is an American academic, and the former President of the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina. Early life and education Benson was born in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania to Paul Benson and Anna Louise Stolz Benson . His father was the CEO of Royal Imprints, Inc. and his mother taught mathematics at Bucknell University. In 1951, Benson's brother Charles Edward Benson was born. In 1960, his father sold Royal Imprints and returned to teaching statistics and mathematics at Bucknell University, which he had done for several years in the 1940s. After being a homemaker i...

#360

Jay Nunamaker

#32631

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Jay F. Nunamaker Jr. is Regents Professor and Soldwedel Professor at the University of Arizona. Regents Professor is the highest faculty rank bestowed at the university, an honor reserved for the top 3% of scholars.

#361

Ragnar Löfstedt

Ragnar Löfstedt

#71955

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Ragnar E. Löfstedt is the Professor of Risk Management at King's College London and the Director of King's Centre for Risk Management and is the President-Elect of Society for Risk Analysis. Background Löfstedt grew up in Los Angeles to parents who were professors of medieval languages. With Swedish and American nationality, he is also fluent in German. He worked as a lumberjack on the family farm in Sweden before attending UCLA. He has a doctorate from the Graduate School of Geography, Clark University, studying with Roger Kasperson .

#362

Philip Podsakoff

#62890

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Philip Michael Podsakoff is an American management professor, researcher, author, and consultant who held the John F. Mee Chair of Management at Indiana University. Currently, he is the Hyatt and Cici Brown Chair in Business at the University of Florida.

#363

Wendy Moe

#70638

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Wendy Moe is a marketing professor, and formerly the associate dean, at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. In 2013, she launched and the directed the Smith School's MS in Marketing Analytics program. She is known for her research in digital marketing, social media analytics, and customer engagement with digital content.

#364

Utpal Bhattacharya

#54408

Overall Influence

Utpal Bhattacharya is a finance professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is known for his research on market integrity, especially on insider trading. In 2000, his research paper "When an Event is Not an Event" uncovered the rampant insider trading on Mexican stock markets. This led to many questions about the value and the enforceability of insider trading laws. Later, in "The World Price of Insider Trading" he discovered the fact that insider trading laws in themselves are not effective - they only start being effective once there is credible enforcement. Additionally he could "put a price on honesty", i.e.

#365

Arch G. Woodside

#83485

Overall Influence

#366

Kevin Desouza

#37216

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Kevin C. Desouza is an Indian American academic. He is an ASU Foundation professor in the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University and is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. From 2012 to 2016 he served as Associate Dean for Research at the College of Public Service & Community Solutions.

#367

Kjell Grønhaug

#72091

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Kjell Grønhaug is a Norwegian organizational theorist, management consultant and Professor emeritus of Business Administration at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration. Biography Grønhaug obtained his MS in sociology from the University of Bergen, his MBA and his PhD in marketing from the Norwegian School of Economics. Early 1970s he obtained a postgraduate degree from the University Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Washington.

#368

Judy D. Olian

#61832

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Judy D. Olian is an Australian-American academic administrator serving as the 9th president of Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. Early life and education Olian was born and raised in Australia, the daughter of Holocaust survivors. During her childhood, Olian also lived in Israel. She received a Bachelor of Science degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She went on to receive a Masters of Science degree and PhD in industrial relations from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

#369

Anirban Mukhopadhyay

#83906

Overall Influence

Anirban Mukhopadhyay is a marketing scholar associated with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Consumer Psychology from 2018 to 2020 and Co-Editor in 2016 and 2017. At HKUST, he served as Associate Provost from 2020-22 and Associate Dean of the School of Business and Management from 2015-20.

#370

Kenneth Ronald French

#84652

Overall Influence

#371

George Haley

#49574

Overall Influence

George T. Haley is an American author and academic, currently a tenured professor of industrial and international marketing at the University of New Haven in the US state of Connecticut. He is also the director of the Center for International Industry Competitiveness. His research covers industrial marketing, emerging markets, new product development, innovation and B2B marketing. He has testified about his research on China before the United States Congress and several government agencies. The American Marketing Association's Marketing News named him as one of six marketing academics to watch based on his research, teaching and broader impact.

#372

Vijay Mahajan

#23852

Overall Influence

Vijay Mahajan is the John P. Harbin Centennial Chair in Business at McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin. He was born on April 5, 1948, in Jammu, India. He is known for his work on marketing strategy, international marketing and innovation. He was the dean of the Indian School of Business from 2002 to 2004 and is a former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Marketing Research.

#373

G. William Schwert

#85516

Overall Influence

#374

Peaches Golding

Peaches Golding

#54483

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Lois Patricia Golding , commonly known as Peaches Golding , is an American-British business executive, administrator, and former academic who is Lord-Lieutenant of the County and City of Bristol. On her 2010 appointment as High Sheriff of Bristol, she was the second Black person and the first Black woman to hold the position. She was appointed Honorary Captain of the Royal Naval Reserves in June 2020.

#375

Charles A. Holloway

#30346

Overall Influence

Charles Arthur Holloway has been a professor at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business since 1968 and has been a member of SRI International's board of directors since 2003. In 1990, he founded the Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing at Stanford. He is also a co-founder of the Stanford Center for Entrepreneurial Studies and serves on the boards of Annuity Systems, Freedom Financial Corporation, Lexy, Neato Robots and Occam.

#376

Giovanni B. Giglioni

#73890

Overall Influence

1929 - 2008 (79 years)

John Giovanni Battista Giglioni was an American business theorist, and professor of management and international business at Mississippi State University. He is notable for his 1974 article, "A Conspectus of Management Control Theory: 1900-1972", co-authored with Arthur G. Bedeian.

#377

Navi Radjou

#40829

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Navi Radjou is an Indian born scholar and an innovation and leadership advisor based in Silicon Valley. He is a Fellow of Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge and has spoken and written widely on the theme of frugal innovation.

#378

David S. Scharfstein

#77049

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

David S. Scharfstein is the Edmund Cogswell Converse Professor of Finance and Banking at Harvard Business School. Biography He received an AB in 1982 from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, at Princeton University, and, in 1986, a PhD in economics from MIT. He then joined Harvard Business School in 1986 as Assistant professor of Business Management, moving to the Sloan School of Management at MIT as Assistant Professor of Finance in 1987. He was promoted there to Associate Professor in 1990, and to Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank Professor of Management and Professor of Finance, in 1994.

#379

Ravi Dhar

#80596

Overall Influence

Ravi Dhar is an American behavioral scientist, an expert in consumer behavior and branding, currently the George Rogers Clark Professor of Management and Marketing at Yale School of Management. He is also the director of the Center for Customer Insights at the Yale School of Management. He also has an affiliated appointment as professor of psychology in the Department of Psychology, Yale University.

#380

Scott Shane

#86505

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Scott Andrew Shane is the A. Malachi Mixon III Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies and professor of economics at Case Western Reserve University. He has written over sixty academic papers on entrepreneurship, as well as writing or editing ten books on the subject. His research has focused on many aspects of entrepreneurship, including technology entrepreneurship and venture finance, as well as using twin studies to explore the genetic basis of entrepreneurial behaviors.

#381

Eric Bradlow

#63953

Overall Influence

Eric Thomas Bradlow is K.P. Chao Professor, Professor of Marketing, Statistics, Education and Economics, Chairperson Wharton Marketing Department, and Vice-Dean of Analytics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is known for his work on marketing research methods, missing data problems, and psychometrics. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and a fellow the American Education Research Association. Professor Bradlow is also co-founder of GBH Insights, a leading data-focused marketing strategy and insights firm that caters to Fortune 500 companies.

#382

James L. Heskett

#83105

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

James L. Heskett is an American academic. He is the UPS Foundation Professor of Business Logistics, Emeritus at the Harvard Business School. Early life James L. Heskett earned a PhD from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

#383

Jerome Katz

#76219

Overall Influence

Jerome A. Katz is an American professor, consultant and author who specializes in entrepreneurship. He is the Robert H. Brockhaus Endowed Chair of Entrepreneurship at Saint Louis University in St Louis, Missouri and Director of the Billiken Angels Network.

#384

Linda E. Ginzel

#42995

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Linda E. Ginzel is a Clinical Professor of Managerial Psychology at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the founder of the Customized Executive Education program. She researches, develops curricula, and teaches courses on negotiation, effective leadership, and organizational behavior. Ginzel is a two-time recipient of the James S. Kemper Jr. Grant in Business Ethics.

#385

Shyam Sunder

#67149

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Shyam Sunder is an accounting theorist and experimental economist. He is the James L. Frank Professor of accounting, economics, and finance at the Yale School of Management; a professor in Yale University’s Department of Economics; and a Fellow of the Whitney Humanities Center.

#386

Gary Hamel

#80922

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Gary P. Hamel is an American management consultant. He is a founder of Strategos, an international management consulting firm based in Chicago. Biography Hamel graduated from Andrews University in 1975, and from Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan in 1990.

#387

John M. Stopford

#54956

Overall Influence

1939 - 2011 (72 years)

John Morton Stopford was a British organizational theorist, consultant, and Professor of the London Business School, and Head of its Strategic and International Management Area. He was known for his work on management of multinationalss, corporate entrepreneurs, and competition.

#388

Gautam Kaul

#77570

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Gautam Kaul is a John C. and Sally S. Morley Professor of Finance in the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. Kaul's research focuses on the behavior of stock and bond prices including asset pricing models, market microstructure and the time-series behavior of stock prices. He uses computer-intensive methodologies to gauge the effectiveness of trading strategies commonly proposed on Wall Street and in academic literature.

#389

Thomas Jeanjean

#69511

Overall Influence

Thomas Jeanjean is a French accounting academic. Former president of the French Accounting Association. Thomas Jeanjean was the dean for executive education at ESSEC Business School. As of 2021, he is the Chief Education Officer at the Paris Île-de-France Regional Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

#390

C. K. Prahalad

#81246

Overall Influence

1941 - 2010 (69 years)

Personal Life Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad was an Indian-American entrepreneur and author. He was born to a stay at home mother and a father who was a judge. He was married to a woman named Gayatri, and shared two children with her - a son named Murali and a daughter named Deepa. Prahalad had three grandchildren.

#391

Christian Leuz

#76152

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Christian Leuz is a German business economist, specializing in finance, accounting, and institutional economics. He is the Charles F. Pohl Distinguished Service Professor of Accounting and Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

#392

Peter Naudé

#77950

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Peter Naudé is a British organisational theorist and Professor of Marketing at the Manchester Business School, known for his work on business networks. Life and work Naudé obtained his Phd in Marketing 1992 at the Manchester Business School.

#393

Martin Meyerson

Martin Meyerson

#24627

Overall Influence

1922 - 2007 (85 years)

Martin Meyerson was an American city planner, academic, and president of the University of Pennsylvania from 1970 to 1981. His research, mentorship, essays, and consulting were focused on post-World War II urban policy at the municipal and federal levels.

#394

Royce Gracie

#36691

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Royce Gracie is a Brazilian retired professional mixed martial artist. Gracie gained fame for his success in the Ultimate Fighting Championship . He is a member of the Gracie jiu-jitsu family, a UFC Hall of Famer, and is considered to be one of the most influential figures in the history of mixed martial arts . He also competed in PRIDE Fighting Championships, K-1's MMA events, and Bellator.

#395

James Duderstadt

James Duderstadt

#23619

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

James Johnson Duderstadt was the President of the University of Michigan from 1988 to 1996. Duderstadt was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1987 for significant contributions to nuclear science and engineering relating to fission and fusion energy systems and reactor theory and design.

#396

Steven A. Cohen

#35978

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Steven A. Cohen is an American academic who has taught public management and environmental policy at Columbia University since 1981. He is the former executive director of Columbia University's Earth Institute and now serves as a senior advisor for the institute. He is a professor in the practice of public affairs at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. He is also the director of the Master of Public Administration in Environmental Science and Policy in the School of International and Public Affairs and the director of the Master of Science in Sustainability Management in the School of Professional Studies.

#397

Christian Grönroos

#90554

Overall Influence

#398

Zvi Wiener

#76293

Overall Influence

Zvi Wiener is a Professor of Finance and the former dean of the Hebrew University Business School Business administration at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Biography Wiener has Ph.D. in mathematics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot . He completed postdoc at the Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania and then joined the Fixed Income division of Lehman Brothers in New York City. Since 1996 Wiener joined the Hebrew University faculty.

#399

Gene Dalton

#90692

Overall Influence

1928 - 1997 (69 years)

Gene Wray Dalton was a professor of organizational behavior at Harvard Business School and later at Brigham Young University . Dalton was born in Pocatello, Idaho to Dell Moroni Dalton and his wife the former Rachel Wray. He was an alumnus of Pocatello High School. Dalton served as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Central States Mission. He earned a bachelor's degree in accounting from the University of Utah. He was than an accounting instructor at Idaho State University before joining the Air Force ROTC in 1955 and studying at Brigham Young University.

#400

Muhammad Zafarullah

#66211

Overall Influence

Muhammad Zafarullah is a former professor of management science in Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan, Pakistan, where he was the Director of the Institute of Management Sciences. He served as Pro Rector, University of Central Punjab, UCP. it was top administrative position. He is replaced by Dr. Nizammuddiun.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions