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).

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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Communications,

#5651

Anna Chancellor

#97256

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Anna Theodora Chancellor is a British actress who has received nominations for BAFTA and Olivier Awards. Background and early life Chancellor was born in Richmond, England to barrister John Paget Chancellor, eldest son of Sir Christopher Chancellor, and Mary Jolliffe, a daughter of Lord Hylton. The Chancellor family were Scottish gentry who had owned land at Quothquan since 1432.

#5652

Rosanne Somerson

Rosanne Somerson

#69315

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Rosanne Somerson is an American-born woodworker, furniture designer/maker, educator, and former President of Rhode Island School of Design . An artist connected with the early years of the Studio Furniture, her work and career have been influential to the field.

#5653

BT

#60599

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Brian Wayne Transeau , known by his initials as BT, is an American musician, DJ, singer, songwriter, record producer, composer, and audio engineer. An artist in the electronic music genre, he is credited as a pioneer of the trance and intelligent dance music styles that paved the way for EDM, and for "stretching electronic music to its technical breaking point." In 2010, he was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Electronic/Dance Album for These Hopeful Machines. He creates music within a myriad of styles, such as classical, film composition, and bass music.

#5654

Blackbear

#52236

Overall Influence

1990 - Present (36 years)

Matthew Tyler Musto , professionally known as Blackbear , is an American singer, songwriter, rapper and record producer. He has released six studio albums, six EPs, one mixtape and two collaborative albums. Musto is also a member of the alternative hip hop duo Mansionz with singer-songwriter Mike Posner.

#5655

Hank Thompson

#80241

Overall Influence

1925 - 2007 (82 years)

Henry William Thompson was an American country music singer-songwriter and musician whose career spanned seven decades. Thompson's musical style, characterized as honky-tonk Western swing, was a mixture of fiddles, electric guitar, and steel guitar that featured his distinctive, smooth baritone vocals.

#5656

Paquito D'Rivera

#83822

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Francisco de Jesús Rivera Figueras , known as Paquito D'Rivera, is a Cuban-American alto saxophonist, clarinetist and composer. He was a member of the Cuban songo band Irakere and, since the 1980s, he has established himself as a bandleader in the United States. His smooth saxophone tone and his frequent combination of Latin jazz and classical music have become his trademarks.

#5657

Jack Hoeksema

#46167

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Jacob "Jack" Hoeksema is a linguist and professor in the Department of Dutch Language and Culture with a specialities in semantics, morphology, and historical linguistics. His first degree was in Dutch literature and linguistics at the University of Groningen in 1981, and his PhD was completed at the same university in 1984 .

#5658

Phil Minton

#114266

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Phil Minton is a British avant-garde jazz/free-improvising vocalist and trumpeter. Minton is a highly dramatic baritone who tends to specialize in literary texts: he has sung lyrics by William Blake with Mike Westbrook's group, Daniil Kharms and Joseph Brodsky with Simon Nabatov, and extracts from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake with his own ensemble. He sings on a Jimi Hendrix tribute album, belting out the lyrics in over-the-top fashion. Between 1987 and 1993 Minton toured Europe, North America, and Russia with Lindsay Cooper's Oh Moscow ensemble.

#5659

Alicia de Larrocha

#87584

Overall Influence

1923 - 2009 (86 years)

Alicia de Larrocha y de la Calle was a Spanish pianist and composer. She was considered one of the great piano legends of the 20th century. Reuters called her "the greatest Spanish pianist in history", Time "one of the world's most outstanding pianists", and The Guardian "the leading Spanish pianist of her time".

#5660

Richard Carpenter

#108425

Overall Influence

1929 - 2012 (83 years)

Richard Michael "Kip" Carpenter was an English screenwriter, author and actor. He created a number of British television series, including Robin of Sherwood and Catweazle. Early life Carpenter was born in King's Lynn, Norfolk, and educated at Downham Market Grammar School

#5661

Elmer Robinson

#45984

Overall Influence

1924 - 2016 (92 years)

Elmer Robinson was an American atmospheric scientist. He was one of the first scientists to recognise climate-change risks in fossil fuel burning, co-authoring, with R C Robbins, another Stanford Research Institute researcher, reports warning the industry in 1968 and 1969.

#5662

Elizabeth Pisani

Elizabeth Pisani

#48908

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Elizabeth Pisani is a British-American epidemiologist, public health consultant, author and journalist. She is an academic researcher and the director of Ternyata Ltd., a public health consultancy based in London, UK. Her research investigates the ways in which politics, economics and culture influence public health. This has included markets for substandard and falsified medicines and HIV. Before this, Pisani was a journalist who worked as a correspondent for Reuters in several Asian countries.

#5663

Chuck Berghofer

#88470

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Charles Curtis Berghofer , professionally known as Chuck Berghofer, is an American double bassist and electric bassist, who has worked in jazz and as a session musician in the film industry for more than 60 years, including working on more than 400 movie soundtracks.

#5664

Richard Goode

#98736

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Richard Goode is an American classical pianist who is especially known for his interpretations of Mozart and Beethoven. Early life Goode was born in the East Bronx, New York. He studied piano with Elvira Szigeti, Claude Frank, and Nadia Reisenberg at Mannes College - The New School for Music , and Rudolf Serkin and Mieczysław Horszowski at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

#5665

Rafael Ninyoles i Monllor

#81944

Overall Influence

1943 - 2019 (76 years)

Rafael Lluís Ninyoles i Monllor was a Spanish sociolinguist, considered one of the parents of Catalan sociolinguistics along with Lluís Vicent Aracil i Boned. He was born in Valencia. He took secondary studies in a Jesuit school, where he met Alfons Cucó, Eliseu Climent and Lluís Vicent Aracil. Afterwards, he graduated in sociolinguistics at Universitat de València and then he travelled to the United States of America in 1967.

#5666

Doris Dörrie

#76576

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Doris Dörrie is a German film director, producer and author. Early life and education Born in Hanover, Dörrie completed her secondary education there in 1973. The same year, she began a two-year attendance in film studies in the drama department of the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. She then studied at the New School of Social Research in New York. She worked odd jobs in cafés and as a film presenter in New York's Goethe-Institut.

#5667

Salvatore Sciarrino

#79268

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Salvatore Sciarrino is an Italian composer of contemporary classical music. Described as "the best-known and most performed Italian composer" of the present day, his works include Quaderno di strada and La porta della legge .

#5668

Kim Ki-duk

#72799

Overall Influence

1960 - 2020 (60 years)

Kim Ki-duk was a South Korean film director and screenwriter, noted for his idiosyncratic art-house cinematic works. His films have received many distinctions in the festival circuit, rendering him one of the most important contemporary Asian film directors.

#5669

Yves Roberge

#111313

Overall Influence

Yves Roberge is professor of linguistics in the French Department at the University of Toronto. He received a BA in French Studies in 1981 and an MA in linguistics in 1983, both from the University of Sherbrooke, and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of British Columbia in 1986. Roberge has been principal of New College since 2010.

#5670

Ed Blackwell

#79141

Overall Influence

1929 - 1992 (63 years)

Edward Joseph Blackwell was an American jazz drummer born in New Orleans, Louisiana, known for his extensive, influential work with Ornette Coleman. Biography Blackwell's early career began in New Orleans in the 1950s.He played in a bebop quintet that included pianist Ellis Marsalis and clarinetist Alvin Batiste. There was also a brief stint touring with Ray Charles. The second line parade music of New Orleans greatly influenced Blackwell's drumming style and could be heard in his playing throughout his career. He has also credited his inspiration for playing the drums to his time growing up trying to mimic and match the sounds of his older sisters tap dancing.

#5671

Richard Davis

#90567

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

Richard Davis was an American jazz bassist. Among his best-known contributions to the albums of others are Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch!, Andrew Hill's Point of Departure, and Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, of which critic Greil Marcus wrote , "Richard Davis provided the greatest bass ever heard on a rock album."

#5672

Claudio Ciborra

#21400

Overall Influence

1951 - 2005 (54 years)

Claudio Ciborra was an Italian organizational theorist, and Professor of Information Systems and PWC Chair in Risk Management in the London School of Economics. Prior to the LSE, he was professor at the Theseus International Management Institute.

#5673

Georg Friedrich Haas

#81043

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Georg Friedrich Haas is an Austrian composer. In a 2017 Classic Voice poll of the greatest works of art music since 2000, pieces by Haas received the most votes , and his composition in vain topped the list.

#5674

Petre Stoica

#79371

Overall Influence

1931 - 2009 (78 years)

Petre Stoica was a Romanian poet and translator. A native of the Timișoara area, he studied at the University of Bucharest before launching a career as a writer. Making his debut in the late 1950s alongside several better-known generational colleagues, he published a number of books over the subsequent decades. His poetry dealt with quotidian subjects and studiously avoided glorification of the ruling communist regime. After the Romanian Revolution, he briefly engaged with the political scene before withdrawing to Jimbolia, not far from where he grew up. There, he worked to enrich the town's ...

#5675

Samuel B. Bacharach

Samuel B. Bacharach

#105053

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Samuel B. Bacharach is the McKelvey-Grant Professor in the Department of organizational behavior at Cornell University’s New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations. He is the head of Cornell University’s New York City-based Institute for Workplace Studies. He is the co-founder of the Bacharach Leadership Group, an organization that focuses on helping organizations develop leaders, and the co-founder of Pragmatic Leadership, a mobile simulation platform that trains leaders in a modular approach.

#5676

Frank Johnson

#86822

Overall Influence

1943 - 2006 (63 years)

Frank Robert Johnson was an English journalist and editor. Education Johnson was born in London. He failed his 11-plus examination, and was educated at a state secondary school in Shoreditch in East London, which he left at the age of 16. Unlike many senior journalists of his time, he did not have a background in further or higher education, and instead, had taken a job as a 'messenger' on a national newspaper.

#5677

Simon Morrison

#93845

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Simon Morrison is a scholar and writer specializing in 20th-century music, particularly Russian, Soviet, and French music, with special interests in dance, cinema, aesthetics, and historically informed performance based on primary sources.

#5678

Kenny Rankin

#78745

Overall Influence

1940 - 2009 (69 years)

Kenneth Joseph Rankin was an American singer and songwriter in the folk rock and singer-songwriter genres; he was influenced by jazz. Rankin would often sing notes in a high range to express emotion.

#5679

Chiharu Shiota

#53525

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

is a Japanese performance and installation artist. Educated in Japan, Australia, and Germany, Shiota interweaves materiality and the psychic perception of the space to explore ideas around the body and flesh, personal narratives that engage with memory, territory, and alienation. Her signature installations, which consist of dazzling, intricate networks of threads stretching across gallery rooms, made the artist rise to fame in the 2000s. Shiota has exhibited worldwide and represented Japan in the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.

#5680

Eugene Migliaro Corporon

#57692

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Eugene Migliaro Corporon is an American conductor known for his work with wind ensembles and is a scholar of wind/band music repertoire. He is the co-editor of two literature catalogs, Wind Ensemble/Band Repertoire and Wind Ensemble Literature , as well as all ten volumes of the Teaching Music Through Performance in Band series . He also co-hosted the Inner Game of Music videotape.

#5681

Nuno Bettencourt

Nuno Bettencourt

#62653

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Nuno Duarte Gil Mendes Bettencourt is a Portuguese-American guitarist. He became known as the lead guitarist of the Boston rock band Extreme. Bettencourt has recorded a solo album and has founded rock bands including Mourning Widows, DramaGods, and Satellite Party.

#5682

Marilyn Mason

#85399

Overall Influence

1925 - 2019 (94 years)

Marilyn Mason was an American concert organist, recording artist, and professor. Mason joined the staff of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1947, became chair of the organ department in 1962, and was named a professor in 1965.

#5683

Daniel Jones

#100925

Overall Influence

1912 - 1993 (81 years)

Daniel Jenkyn Jones was a Welsh composer of classical music, who worked in Britain. He used both serial and tonal techniques. He is best known for his quartets and thirteen symphonies and for his song settings for Dylan Thomas's play Under Milk Wood.

#5684

Christine K.w. Cheung

#134724

Overall Influence

#5685

Nels Cline

#65276

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Nels Courtney Cline is an American guitarist and composer. He has been the guitarist for the band Wilco since 2004. In the 1980s he played jazz, often in collaboration with his twin brother Alex, a percussionist. He has worked with musicians in punk and alternative rock such as Carla Bozulich and the Geraldine Fibbers, Mike Watt and Thurston Moore. He leads the Nels Cline Singers, Nels Cline Trio, and the Nels Cline 4.

#5686

Isang Yun

#83018

Overall Influence

1917 - 1995 (78 years)

Isang Yun, or Yun I-sang , was a Korean-born composer who made his later career in West Germany. Early life and education Yun was born in Sancheong , Korea in 1917, the son of poet Yun Ki-hyon. His family moved to Tongyeong when he was three years old. He began to study violin at the age of 13 whereupon he composed his first melody. Despite his father's opposition to pursuing a career in music, Yun began formal music training two years later with a violinist in a military band in Keijō . Eventually his father relented once Yun agreed to enroll in a business school while continuing his musical studies.

#5687

Joe Wilder

#116790

Overall Influence

1922 - 2014 (92 years)

Joseph Benjamin Wilder was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. Wilder was awarded the Temple University Jazz Master's Hall of Fame Award in 2006. The National Endowment for the Arts honored him with its highest honor in jazz, the NEA Jazz Masters Award for 2008.

#5688

Emily McVarish

#103827

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Emily McVarish is an American writer, designer, book artist and professor at California College of the Arts. She lives and works in San Francisco and her work primarily takes the form of books. Clifton Meador says "she uses the form of the book to explore things that cannot be explored any other way".

#5689

Cecile Reynaud

#117454

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Cecile Reynaud is an American volleyball educator and retired coach of the Florida State Lady Seminoles volleyball team. After her retirement from coaching she was an associate professor with the sport management program at Florida State University until August, 2015. She also served as an interim assistant athletic director and senior women's administrator at Florida State University from 1994-95. She has served as a television color analyst for collegiate volleyball matches on ACCN, Fox Sports Net South, Sunshine Network and ESPN.

#5690

Rennie Harris

#67416

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Lorenzo Harris is a dancer, choreographer, artistic director and professor of hip-hop dance. Harris formed the first and longest running hip-hop dance touring company, Rennie Harris Puremovement in 1992. In 2007, he conceived another touring company, RHAW or Rennie Harris Awe-Inspiring Works.

#5691

Jonathan Freeman-Attwood

#94594

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, CBE is the 14th principal of the Royal Academy of Music in London; he was appointed in 2008. Alongside his commitment to education, he is a writer, record producer, broadcaster and musician.

#5692

Kim Witte

#116161

Overall Influence

Kim Witte is a communications scholar with an emphasis on the area of fear appeals called “scare tactics”. In 2015 Witte is a professor who teaches graduate courses at Michigan State University. Early life and education Witte received her Ph.D. at the University of California.

#5693

Moshe Zviran

#37543

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Moshe Zviran is professor at the Coller School of Management at Tel Aviv University. He currently serves as chief entrepreneurship and innovation officer of Tel Aviv university as well as the Head and Academic Director of the Bloomberg-Sagol Center for City Leadership at Tel Aviv University. He is also the founder of “The Zviran Index” for comparative compensation and benefits surveys in Israel.

#5694

Vini Poncia

#71650

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Vincent "Vini" Poncia Jr. is an American musician, songwriter and record producer. Life and career Early life Poncia was born in Providence, Rhode Island. He is of Italian ancestry. The 1960s In the 1960s, Poncia formed a songwriting team with Peter Anders . An album of songs co-written by these childhood friends, The Anders & Poncia Album, was produced by Richard Perry and released in 1969. Their songs were recorded by artists including the Ronettes, Bobby Bloom, and Darlene Love. Anders and Poncia were also members of the Trade Winds . The Trade Winds' debut single "New York is a Lonely ...

#5695

Petr Eben

#109116

Overall Influence

1929 - 2007 (78 years)

Petr Eben was a Czech composer of modern and contemporary classical music, and an organist and choirmaster. His life Born in Žamberk in northeastern Bohemia, Eben spent most of his childhood and early adolescence in Český Krumlov in southern Bohemia. There he studied piano, and later cello and organ. The years of World War II were especially difficult for the young man. Although Eben was raised as a Catholic, his father was a Jew and thus fell foul of the National Socialist occupiers of his homeland. In 1943, aged 14, Eben was captured and imprisoned by the Nazis in Buchenwald, remaining ther...

#5696

Craig Jessop

#87418

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Craig D. Jessop is an American academic, musician and singer best known for his tenure as the music director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir from 1999 to 2008. Biography A native of Millville, Utah, Jessop has been a lifelong member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . He was a student of Robert Shaw and received a B.A. from Utah State University , M.A. from Brigham Young University , and D.M.A. from Stanford University.

#5697

Patrick Y. K. Chau

#134881

Overall Influence

#5698

James Clackson

#91292

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

James Peter Timothy Clackson is a British linguist and Indo-Europeanist. He is a professor of Comparative Philology at the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow and Director of Studies at Jesus College, Cambridge.

#5699

Julian Anderson

#83594

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Julian Anderson is a British composer and teacher of composition. Biography Anderson was born in London. He studied at Westminster School, then with John Lambert at the Royal College of Music, with Alexander Goehr at Cambridge University, privately with Tristan Murail in Paris, and on courses given by Olivier Messiaen, Per Nørgård and György Ligeti.

#5700

Jana Boušková

#97521

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Jana Boušková is a Czech harpist and pedagogue. She has been the principal harpist of the Czech Philharmonic since 2005. Boušková is also a professor at the Royal College of Music in London since 2019, the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague since 2007, and she was the harp teacher at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels from 2005 to 2020.

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