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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Ranking

List of the most influential people in Communications,

#5701

Alfred Reed

#97486

Overall Influence

1921 - 2005 (84 years)

Alfred Reed was an American neoclassical composer, with more than two hundred published works for concert band, orchestra, chorus, and chamber ensemble to his name. He also traveled extensively as a guest conductor, performing in North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia.

#5702

Mike Post

#54988

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Mike Post is an American composer, best known for his television theme music for various shows, including Law & Order; Law & Order: Special Victims Unit; The A-Team; The Byrds of Paradise; NYPD Blue; Renegade; The Rockford Files; L.A. Law; Quantum Leap; Magnum, P.I.; and Hill Street Blues. He was also the producer of the Van Halen III album by the band Van Halen.

#5703

Chris Carter

#94487

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Chris Carter is an English musician, best known for being a member of Throbbing Gristle and the duo Chris & Cosey, both with his longtime partner Cosey Fanni Tutti. Background Carter was born 28 January 1953 in Islington, North London and educated at Friern Barnet Grammar School.

#5704

Ryan Gabrielson

#97120

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Ryan Gabrielson is an American investigative journalist. He has won a George Polk Award, and Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. Education He graduated from the University of Arizona. Career Gabrielson began his career in journalism at The Monitor in McAllen, Texas. He reported for the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Arizona. In 2009 and 2010 he was a fellow in the Investigative Reporting Program at University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, which supports investigative reporters "in an era of cutbacks at major news organizations". He is currently working for California Watch and the Center for Investigative Reporting as a public safety reporter.

#5705

Pee Wee King

#71556

Overall Influence

1914 - 2000 (86 years)

Julius Frank Anthony Kuczynski , known professionally as Pee Wee King, was an American country music songwriter and recording artist best known for co-writing "Tennessee Waltz". Pee Wee King is credited with bringing the musicians union to the Grand Ole Opry — he was one of the first musicians in Nashville to carry a union card, and to have the members of his band work union. He also served on the board of the Country Music Hall of Fame.

#5706

Kaifi Azmi

#56578

Overall Influence

1919 - 2002 (83 years)

Kaifi Azmi was an Indian Urdu poet. He is remembered as the one who brought Urdu literature to Indian motion pictures. Together with Pirzada Qasim, Jaun Elia and others he participated in many memorable Mushaira gatherings of the twentieth century. His wife was theatre and film actress Shaukat Kaifi.

#5707

Joshua Bennett

#81262

Overall Influence

Joshua Bennett is an American author, professor and artist. He is a Professor of Literature and Distinguished Chair of Humanities at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bennett's research and teaching interests include 20th and 21st century African American literature, animality studies, affect theory, black poetics, and environmental studies.

#5708

Kevin McKenzie

#61234

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Kevin McKenzie is an American ballet dancer, choreographer, and director. A former principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, he then served as the company's artistic director from 1992 to 2022.

#5709

Carmel O'Shannessy

#120886

Overall Influence

Carmel O'Shannessy is an Australian linguistics professor at the Australian National University. She is particularly known for her work on language contact in Australia, having described and documented what is now known as Light Warlpiri. Her research combines her expertise in linguistics with a teaching background. She worked as a teacher in Indigenous schools in Australia's Northern Territory in the 1990s. Since 2017, she has been Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University.

#5710

Ralph Burns

#94873

Overall Influence

1922 - 2001 (79 years)

Ralph Joseph P. Burns was an American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger. Early life Burns was born in Newton, Massachusetts, United States, where he began playing the piano as a child. In 1938, he attended the New England Conservatory of Music. He admitted that he learned the most about jazz by transcribing the works of Count Basie, Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. While a student, Burns lived in the home of Frances Wayne. Wayne was an established big band singer and her brother Nick Jerret was a bandleader who began working with Burns. He found himself in the company of such performers...

#5711

Thierry Mechler

#127046

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Thierry Mechler is a French organist and organ and improvisation teacher at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln. He teaches future concert students and gives international masterclasses for students of improvisation, piano and organ playing.

#5712

Rens Bod

#91165

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Rens Bod is a professor in digital humanities and history of humanities at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on the exploration of patterns and underlying principles in language, music, art, literature and history. He also investigates the history of pattern searching in the humanities from a supranational perspective, thereby giving an impulse to the new field of "history of the humanities". In addition, Bod explores the history of the human search for meaning and purpose, and the underlying patterns and principles therein.

#5713

Osian Ellis

#117037

Overall Influence

1928 - 2021 (93 years)

Osian Gwynn Ellis was a Welsh harpist, composer and teacher. He was principal harpist of the London Symphony Orchestra, a founding member of the Melos Ensemble, and a harp teacher at the Royal Academy of Music. Many composers wrote music for him. From 1959 onwards, Ellis had a close professional partnership with Benjamin Britten that lasted to the latter's death. He often first performed and recorded Britten's works.

#5714

Bob Cranshaw

#84875

Overall Influence

1932 - 2016 (84 years)

Melbourne Robert Cranshaw was an American jazz bassist. His career spanned the heyday of Blue Note Records to his later involvement with the Musicians Union. He is perhaps best known for his long association with Sonny Rollins. Cranshaw performed in Rollins's working band on and off for over five decades, starting with a live appearance at the 1959 Playboy jazz festival in Chicago and on record with the 1962 album The Bridge.

#5715

David Cooperrider

David Cooperrider

#16275

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

David Cooperrider , is the Fairmount Minerals Chair and Professor of Social Entrepreneurship at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, and Faculty Director at the Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit at Case.

#5716

Dawn Upshaw

#76461

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Dawn Upshaw is an American soprano. She is the recipient of several Grammy Awardss and has released a number of Edison Award-winning discs; she performs both opera and art song, and her repertoire spans Baroque to contemporary. Many composers, including Henri Dutilleux, Osvaldo Golijov, John Harbison, Esa-Pekka Salonen, John Adams, and Kaija Saariaho, have written for her. In 2007, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

#5717

Adam Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz

#110284

Overall Influence

Adam Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz is an American designer and educator, who teaches at Michigan State University. He has designed both virtual reality and serious games. History Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz received an MFA from SUNY Buffalo and a PhD from the USC Interactive Media & Games Division. He has taught game design and theory at the University of California, Los Angeles. As a student, he developed a theory around popular games, specifically FarmVille, as a cultural phenomenon.

#5718

John McCusker

#108796

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

John McCusker is a Scottish folk musician, record producer, and composer. He had a long association as a member of the Battlefield Band beginning in the 1990s and was later a band member and producer for folk singer Kate Rusby. He has served as producer and arranger for various artists. He has also released several solo albums.

#5719

Terri Te Tau

#95223

Overall Influence

Terri Te Tau is a New Zealand contemporary artist and writer. She is a member of the Mata Aho Collective. In 2017, the collective represented New Zealand at documenta, a quinquennial contemporary-art exhibition held in Kassel, Germany. This was the first time New Zealand artists had been invited to present their work at the event.

#5720

John Mair

#115672

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

John Mair is an associate senior lecturer in broadcast journalism at the Coventry University Department of Media and Communication. Mair is a former BBC current affairs producer who has also worked for Channel Four and ITV. He helped devise Question Time and Watchdog at the BBC .

#5721

Srijit Mukherji

Srijit Mukherji

#63185

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Srijit Mukherji is an Indian film director and screenwriter who predominantly works in Bengali cinema. His regular collaboration with veteran actor Prosenjit Chatterjee brought him into the limelight. His first feature film Autograph , was a critical and commercial success, where he had written the script with Chatterjee in mind. His fifth film, Jaatishwar, won four national awards at India's 61st National Film Awards . He won the National Film Award for Best Direction and Best Original Screenplay for his sixth film, Chotushkone, at India's 62nd National Film Awards. His eighth film, Rajkahini had been remade into a Hindi film titled, Begum Jaan, starring Vidya Balan in 2017.

#5722

Izumi Hoshi

#114471

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

is a Japanese scholar of Tibetan linguistics at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Born in Chiba, she is the daughter of the equally noted Tibetan linguist Michiyo Hoshi. Education 1991 University of Tokyo Faculty of Letters graduation1993 The University of Tokyo Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences Graduate Degree1997 PhD in the "descriptive study of the meaning of the predicate in Lhasa Tibetan"

#5723

Roman Totenberg

Roman Totenberg

#103863

Overall Influence

1911 - 2012 (101 years)

Roman Totenberg was a Polish-American violinist and educator. A child prodigy, he lived in Poland, Moscow, Berlin, and Paris, before formally immigrating to the U.S. in 1938, at age 27. He performed and taught nationally and internationally throughout his life.

#5724

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

#114476

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is an American literature, film, and media scholar who has been teaching in the Department of English Language and Literature at Central Michigan University since 2001. He has authored or edited twenty-nine books and a range of articles focusing on the American Gothic tradition, monsters, cult film and television, popular culture, weird fiction, pedagogy, and goth music. He is the associate editor in charge of horror for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

#5725

Aleš Klégr

#121924

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Aleš Klégr is a Czech linguist, professor of English language at Charles University in Prague. He specializes, among others, in lexicology, lexicography, semantics and morphology. As a student of English at Charles University in Prague, he was a pupil of Prague school linguists Bohumil Trnka and Ivan Poldauf. Having started his academic career as researcher with the Encyclopaedic Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences, and instructor at several university language centres, he joined the Department of English and American Studies and later the Department of English Language and ELT Methodology...

#5726

John Flansburgh

John Flansburgh

#65368

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

John Conant Flansburgh is an American musician. He is half of the long-standing Brooklyn, New York–based alternative rock duo They Might Be Giants with John Linnell, for which he writes, sings, and plays rhythm guitar.

#5727

Tom Zoellner

#48375

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Tom Zoellner is an American author and journalist. He is the author of popular non-fiction books which take multidimensional views of their subject. His work has been widely reviewed and has been featured on The Daily Show. His 2020 book Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire was a finalist for the Bancroft Prize in history and in 2021 won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

#5728

Arun Kumar Rai

#135394

Overall Influence

#5729

Rory O'Connor

#80146

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Rory O’Connor is a journalist, author, educator, and documentary filmmaker. He is co-founder and president of the Globalvision Corporation, and board chair of the Global Center, an affiliated non-profit foundation. His films and television programs have aired on PBS, BBC, NHK, CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, and numerous other networks. He has been involved in the production of more than two dozen documentaries, and his broadcast, film and print work has been honored with a George Polk Award, a Writer's Guild Award for Outstanding Documentary, an Orwell Award and two Emmys. He has written several books a...

#5730

Harry Leonard Shorto

#100491

Overall Influence

1919 - 1995 (76 years)

Harry Leonard Shorto was a British philologist and linguist who specialized on the Mon language and Mon-Khmer studies. He authored both a modern Mon dictionary and a dictionary of Mon epigraphy. He worked for most of his career at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, finally as Professor of Mon-Khmer Studies at the University of London until his retirement in 1984.

#5731

William J. Drummond

#117211

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

William Joe Drummond is an American journalist. He teaches at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with bachelor's degree, and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism with a master's degree. He was a White House Fellow in 1976. He was associate press secretary to President Jimmy Carter. In 1977, he was a founding editor of “Morning Edition,” at NPR.

#5732

Earl Wild

#102364

Overall Influence

1915 - 2010 (95 years)

Earl Wild was an American pianist known for his transcriptions of jazz and classical music. Biography Royland Earl Wild was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1915. Wild was a musically precocious child and studied under Selmar Janson at the Carnegie Institute of Technology there, and later with Marguerite Long, Egon Petri, and Helene Barere , among others. As a teenager, he started making transcriptions of romantic music and composition.

#5733

M. S. Subbulakshmi

#64483

Overall Influence

1916 - 2004 (88 years)

Madurai Shanmukhavadivu Subbulakshmi was an Indian Carnatic singer from Madurai, Tamil Nadu. She was the first musician ever to be awarded the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honour and the first Indian musician to receive the Ramon Magsaysay award.

#5734

Andy Sheppard

#109825

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Andy Sheppard is a British jazz saxophonist and composer. He has been awarded several prizes at the British Jazz Awards, and has worked with some notable figures in contemporary jazz, including Gil Evans, Carla Bley, George Russell and Steve Swallow. In 2019 he was presented the degree of Doctor of Music honoris causa by the University of Bristol.

#5735

Morten Lauridsen

Morten Lauridsen

#63528

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Morten Johannes Lauridsen is an American composer and academic teacher. A National Medal of Arts recipient , he was composer-in-residence of the Los Angeles Master Chorale from 1994 to 2001, and is the distinguished professor emeritus of composition at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, where he taught for fifty-two years until his retirement in 2019.

#5736

F. Gary Gray

#49672

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Felix Gary Gray is an American film director, film producer, and music video director. Gray began his career as a director on numerous critically acclaimed and award-winning music videos, including "It Was a Good Day" by Ice Cube, "Natural Born Killaz" by Dr. Dre and Ice Cube, "Keep Their Heads Ringin'" by Dr. Dre, "Waterfalls" by TLC, and "Ms. Jackson" by Outkast.

#5737

Edwin S. Williams

#130872

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Edwin Samuel Williams is an American linguist and Emeritus Professor of linguistics at Princeton University. He is known for his expertise on morphology and syntax. Williams is credited as the creator of representation theory.

#5738

Bruce Kulick

#45266

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Bruce Howard Kulick is an American guitarist and since 2000 a member of the rock band Grand Funk Railroad. Previously, Kulick was a member of the band Kiss . He was also a member of Union with John Corabi from 19972002 and Blackjack from 19791980.

#5739

Irina Blok

#27283

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Irina Blok is a graphic designer and an artist. She is best known for the creation of the Android logo including its green robot icon. Irina Blok has appeared on ABC's Reality Show Shark Tank as one of the contestants, and her designs were featured in NBC NY, USA today, SF weekly, the French Edition of Elle Magazine and multiple publications around the world.

#5740

John Fahey

#66744

Overall Influence

1939 - 2001 (62 years)

John Aloysius Fahey was an American fingerstyle guitarist and composer who played the steel-string acoustic guitar as a solo instrument. His style has been enormously influential and has been described as the foundation of the genre of American primitive guitar, a term borrowed from painting and referring mainly to the self-taught nature of the music and its minimalist style. Fahey borrowed from the folk and blues traditions in American roots music, having compiled many forgotten early recordings in these genres. He would later incorporate 20th-century classical, Portuguese, Brazilian, and In...

#5741

Toshio Masuda

#76149

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (99 years)

Toshio Masuda is a Japanese film director. He developed a reputation as a consistent box office hit-maker. Over the course of five decades, 16 of his films made the yearly top ten lists at the Japanese box office—a second place record in the industry. Between 1958 and 1968 he directed 52 films for the Nikkatsu Company. He was their top director of action films and worked with the company's top stars, including Yujiro Ishihara with whom he made 25 films. After the breakdown of the studio system, he moved on to a succession of big-budget movies including the American-Japanese co-production Tora! Tora! Tora! and the science fiction epic Catastrophe 1999: The Prophecies of Nostradamus .

#5742

Vince Mendoza

#84008

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Vince Mendoza is an American composer, music arranger and conductor. He debuted as a solo artist in 1989, and is known for his work conducting the Metropole Orkest and WDR Big Band Köln, as well as arranging music for musicians such as John Scofield, Joni Mitchell, Michael Brecker and Björk. Over the course of his career, he has won seven Grammy Awards and one Latin Grammy Award and has been nominated for a total of 38 between the two awards.

#5743

Billy Joe Shaver

#72597

Overall Influence

1939 - 2020 (81 years)

Billy Joe Shaver was an American country singer and songwriter. He was a prominent figure in progressive and outlaw country. Biography Shaver was born in Corsicana, Texas, and raised by his mother, Victory Watson Shaver. Until he was 12, he spent a great deal of time with his grandmother in Corsicana, so his mother could work in Waco. He sometimes accompanied his mother to her job at a local nightclub, where he began to be exposed to country music.

#5744

Colin Stetson

#76899

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Colin Stetson is a Canadian-American saxophonist, multireedist, and composer based in Montreal. He is best known as a regular collaborator of the indie rock acts Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, Bell Orchestre, and Ex Eye. In addition to saxophone, he plays clarinet, bass clarinet, French horn, flute, and cornet.

#5745

Mehli Mehta

#35713

Overall Influence

1908 - 2002 (94 years)

Mehli Mehta was an Indian conductor and violinist. Early life Mehta was born in Bombay, India to a Parsi family. His involvement in music stemmed from his birth. As a young violinist his main musical influence and inspiration was Jascha Heifetz. A pioneering figure in the Indian musical world, he founded the Bombay Symphony Orchestra in 1935, and was its Concertmaster and conductor . He was married to Tehmina.

#5746

Simon Tett

#63649

Overall Influence

Simon Tett is a climatologist at the University of Edinburgh who was formerly with the Hadley Centre. His most-cited paper is Of it he says:All attempts at detecting and attributing climate change signals need a reliable observed data set and simulations with mechanisms that drive climate change included. In a nutshell, this paper is important because it was the first study to investigate the effect of sulphate aerosols in a general circulation model of the climate system. The experiments simulate the climate back to 1860 ... After 1970 our model with greenhouse gases alone begins to depart significantly from the observations.

#5747

David Stern

#98991

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

David Stern is an American conductor, director and founder of the ensemble Opera Fuoco. He has been the Chief Conductor of Palm Beach Opera since 2015. Life and career Stern was born in New York, the son of violinist Isaac Stern and his second wife Vera née Lindenblit. In 1986 he received his BA from Yale University where he was the music director of the Yale Bach Society. He then studied he studied conducting under Otto-Werner Mueller at the Juilliard School, receiving his Masters in Music degree in 1989.

#5748

Michael Hedges

#77280

Overall Influence

1953 - 1997 (44 years)

Michael Alden Hedges was an American acoustic guitarist and songwriter. Early years The son of Thayne Alden Hedges and Ruth Evelyn Hedges Ipsen, Michael Hedges was born in Sacramento, California. His life in music began in Enid, Oklahoma, playing flute and guitar. He enrolled at Phillips University in Enid to study classical guitar and composition under E. J. Ulrich, who Hedges credited as his biggest influence from his academic training. Hedges studied as a composition major at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Maryland where he applied his classical background to steel-string acoustic gui...

#5749

Emir Kusturica

#87323

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Emir Kusturica is a Bosnian-born Serbian film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and musician. He also has French citizenship. Kusturica is one of the most-distinguished European filmmakers beginning in the mid-1980s, best known for surreal and naturalistic movies that express deep sympathies for people from the margins. He has also been recognized for his projects in town-building. He has competed at the Cannes Film Festival on five occasions and won the Palme d'Or twice , as well as the Best Director prize for Time of the Gypsies.

#5750

Valentina Polukhina

Valentina Polukhina

#105794

Overall Influence

1936 - 2022 (86 years)

Valentina Platonovna Polukhina was a British-Russian scholar, Emeritus Professor at Keele University, and the widow of Daniel Weissbort. She was the recipient of the A. C. Benson Medal and the Medal of Pushkin.

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