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 Communications,

#6151

Adam Green

#106843

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Adam Green is an American actor, filmmaker and musician, best known for his work in horror and comedy films, including the Hatchet franchise, 2010's Frozen, and the television series Holliston. Originating from Holliston, Massachusetts, Green earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Television and Film production at Hofstra University and founded ArieScope Pictures with fellow filmmaker Will Barratt in 1998. Green was also the lead singer for the hard rock and metal band "Haddonfield".

#6152

Greg Burson

#89692

Overall Influence

1949 - 2008 (59 years)

Gregory Lewis Burson was an American voice actor. He was best known as a replacement for voice actors Daws Butler and Mel Blanc following their deaths in 1988 and 1989, respectively. Career Burson was trained by Daws Butler, who was his acting mentor and one of his influences. Following Butler's death, Burson inherited most of his characters, starting with Yogi Bear on The New Yogi Bear Show and many other characters in Hanna-Barbera-related shows. He also inherited the role of Mr. Magoo in the animated segments of the live action feature film of the same name in 1997 .

#6153

Kelly Reichardt

Kelly Reichardt

#74241

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Kelly Reichardt is an American film director and screenwriter. She is known for her minimalist films closely associated with slow cinema, many of which deal with working-class characters in small, rural communities.

#6154

Don Potter

#93003

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Don Potter is an American musician and producer in Nashville, Tennessee. A longstanding producer for Wynonna Judd, he has become known as "the man who created the Judds' sound". Musical career Potter has been singing, playing guitar, writing songs, and recording and producing music since the 1960s, and has performed with many notable artists. He played acoustic guitar on the 1971 release of Chuck Mangione's Friends & Love - a Chuck Mangione Concert. Potter used to be a member of the Show Stoppers rock and roll band and the Don Potter and Bat McGrath duo based in Rochester, New York

#6155

Anna Majchrzak

#143373

Overall Influence

#6156

Furio Colombo

#112457

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Furio Colombo is an Italian journalist and politician. He is the former editor-in-chief of L'Unità. Biography Journalistic and academic career Colombo was born in Châtillon, Aosta Valley, into a Jewish family. In the mid-1950s, he started working for the Italian national broadcasting corporation RAI, where he collaborated to the creation of cultural radio and television programs, documentaries and journalistic reportages. In the early 1970s, Colombo taught Theory and Techniques of Media and Radio and Television Language in the newly founded Department of Art, Music and Entertainment at the U...

#6157

Tony Hatch

#114076

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Anthony Peter Hatch is an English composer for musical theatre and television. He is also a songwriter, pianist, arranger and producer. Early life and early career Hatch was born in Pinner, Middlesex. Encouraged by his musical abilities, his mother – also a pianist – enrolled him in the London Choir School in Wansunt Road, Bexley, Kent when he was 10. Instead of continuing at the Royal Academy of Music, he left school in 1955 and found a job with Robert Mellin Music in London's Tin Pan Alley.

#6158

Kelly Jones

#62026

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Kelly Jones is a Welsh singer-songwriter and a founding member, lead singer, and guitarist of the rock band Stereophonics. Early life and debut Kelly Jones was born the youngest of three boys to Beryl and Arwyn Jones in the small Welsh former mining village of Cwmaman, Rhondda Cynon Taff, spending his childhood with them and his two older brothers, Kevin and Lee.

#6159

Brandon Boyd

#48975

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Brandon Charles Boyd is an American musician, best known as the lead vocalist of the rock band Incubus, with whom he has recorded eight studio albums. In addition to his work with Incubus, Boyd has released two solo albums – The Wild Trapeze and Echoes & Cocoons – and has collaborated with producer Brenden O'Brien under the name Sons of the Sea.

#6160

Stan Lai

#80136

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Stan Lai or Lai Sheng-chuan is an American-born Taiwanese playwright and theater director who is perhaps best known for his play Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land. Apart from being a world-renowned theatre artist, Lai is also an award-winning filmmaker, and a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism and has translated multiple books on the subject. Robert Brustein has called Lai "The major contemporary Asian playwright of his time, perhaps of all time."

#6161

John Digweed

#91873

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Thomas John Digweed is a British DJ and record producer. DJ Magazine voted him the World No. 1 DJ in 2001. As well as achieving success as a solo act, he has collaborated with Sasha as Sasha & John Digweed, and with Nick Muir as Bedrock.

#6162

Gazbia Sirry

#48407

Overall Influence

1925 - 2021 (96 years)

Gazbia Sirry was an Egyptian painter. Born in Cairo, Gazbia Sirry studied fine arts at the Higher Institute of Art Education for Women Teachers in 1950 , where her dissertation traced Egypt's political history. She later became a professor there, and also at the American University in Cairo. She has had more than 50 personal exhibitions, official purchases by international museums, international prizes, scholarships and university chairs. The paintings of Sirry capture the relationship between social reform, feminist consciousness and advocacy of women. Because of their eclecticism and heter...

#6163

Montserrat Boix

Montserrat Boix

#109484

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Montserrat Boix Piqué is a Spanish journalist, considered among the most influential women in her country. In early 2000, she created and developed the concepts of social cyberfeminism, and a year later those of feminist hacktivism. Another of her main areas of work is gender violence and communication. She has also stood out as a defender of the right to communication and citizenship rights for women. Since 1986, she has been a journalist for the Information Services of Televisión Española , in the international section.

#6164

Maria Schneider

Maria Schneider

#89108

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Maria Lynn Schneider is an American composer and jazz orchestra leader who has won multiple Grammy Awards. Biography Born in Windom, Minnesota, Schneider studied music theory and composition at the University of Minnesota, graduating in 1983, then earned a master's degree in Music in 1985 from the Eastman School of Music, studying for one year as well at the University of Miami. After leaving Eastman, she was hired by Gil Evans as his copyist and assistant.

#6165

H. C. Wolfart

#81310

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Hans Christoph Wolfart is a German-born Canadian researcher, editor, translator and Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of Manitoba. He is a graduate of the University of Freiburg as well as Cornell University. He completed a PhD in 1969 at Yale, and has since written and edited a corpus of over one hundred books, articles, and reference grammars. In 2008, John D. Nichols and Arden C. Ogg edited a collection of Algonquian and Iroquoian language studies in honour of Wolfart. Wolfart was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1995, and his 1973 thesis is still considered the definitive work of Plains Cree grammar.

#6166

Ben Sidran

#85664

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Ben Hirsh Sidran is an American jazz and rock keyboardist, producer, label owner, and music writer. Early in his career he was a member of the Steve Miller Band and is the father of Grammy-nominated musician, composer and performer Leo Sidran.

#6167

Michael Jarrell

#112828

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Michael Jarrell is a Swiss composer and academic teacher, whose operas, such as Cassandre, have been performed internationally. Life Born in Geneva, Jarrell studied at the Geneva Conservatoire, and later with Klaus Huber in Freiburg. His works span many genres. In 1982, he won first prizes for composition and went on to win many more, including the Acanthes Prize in 1983, the Beethovenpreis awarded by Bonn in 1986, the Marescotti Prize , both the Gaudeamus International Composers Award and the Henriette Renié prizes in 1988, and the Siemens-Förderpreis .

#6168

James Jordan

#70650

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

James Jordan is an American writer, conductor, and professor at Westminster Choir College in Lawrenceville, New Jersey where he is currently a Senior Conductor and directs the select recording ensemble Williamson Voices and the former director of the sophomore choir, Schola Cantorum, and the freshman choir, Chapel Choir. Jordan received a Bachelor of Music degree from Susquehanna University, and both a Master of Music degree in choral conducting and a Doctor of Philosophy in the psychology of music from Temple University and was a student of Elaine Brown, Wilhelm Ehmann and Frauke Haasemann.

#6169

Heimo Zobernig

#39346

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Heimo Zobernig is an Austrian artist who works in a variety of media from painting and sculpture to site specific installation and design. Education Zobernig attended the Academy of Fine Arts , Vienna in the late 1970s and graduated from the Academy of Applied Arts , Vienna in 1983.

#6170

Edward Langille

Edward Langille

#50902

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Edward M. Langille has been a professor of Modern Languages at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, since 1989. He specializes in the area of Enlightenment studies, and is one of Truro’s leading experts on Voltaire and his works. He is the North American correspondent for Société des études voltairiennes, an international organization that promotes and coordinates research, events and publications relating to Voltaire. Langille also specializes in studies of Acadian culture and history.

#6171

Graham Lyle

#70554

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Graham Hamilton Lyle is a Scottish singer-songwriter, guitarist and producer. Between 1970 and 1997, he co-wrote 18 British Top 40 hits, 9 Billboard Hot 100 entries, 4 US Country No.1s and 1 US Adult Contemporary No.1, as well as 3 Australian chart-toppers. His songwriting collaborators have included Terry Britten, Albert Hammond, Troy Seals, Jim Diamond and his long-time performing partner, Benny Gallagher.

#6172

Geoffrey Bush

#115095

Overall Influence

1920 - 1998 (78 years)

Geoffrey Bush was a British composer, teacher and music scholar. Largely without formal training in composition, he produced a wide range of compositions across different genres, including many songs and works for choirs. He also edited and arranged the works of other composers. Most of his teaching was within the framework of the Extramural Departments at Oxford University and London University. He was a popular broadcaster on BBC music programmes, and the author of several books.

#6173

Dénes Zsigmondy

#41042

Overall Influence

1922 - 2014 (92 years)

Dénes Zsigmondy was a Hungarian classical violinist and music educator. He was born Dénes Liedemann in Budapest, but changed his name to Zsigmondy, his paternal grandmother's surname, as it was more Hungarian than German. In 1944, whilst attending the Summer Academy in Salzburg, he was informed by his parents that he had been drafted into the Hungarian military—to avoid the draft he did not return to Hungary and hid out with a German family at Lake Starnberg. After World War II, Zsigmondy was rejected by several orchestras before joining the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra when he impressed...

#6174

Daphne Brooker

#120927

Overall Influence

1927 - 2012 (85 years)

Daphne Elizabeth Brooker was a British model, costume designer, and a professor and head of fashion at Kingston University for three decades, where she had "a leading role in the teaching of fashion".

#6175

Nicoletta Maraschio

#105452

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Nicoletta Maraschio is an academic teacher of "History of Italian Language" at University of Florence. She was the first woman in charge of Accademia della Crusca, from 2008 to 2014, succeeding Francesco Sabatini.

#6176

Nathan Chapman

#53091

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Nathan Chapman is an American record producer who works in the field of country music. He is known primarily for working with American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, having co-produced with Swift for her albums Taylor Swift, Fearless, Speak Now, Red and 1989. Taylor Swift was also the first album that he produced and he is a 2001 graduate of Lee University. He was said to be working in a shack before producing music with various artists. It was a converted one-car garage just off Music Row in Nashville, Tennessee.

#6177

Martin Luther King

#143594

Overall Influence

#6178

Anne Manne

#52667

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Anne Manne is an Australian journalist and social philosopher. Her 2005 book Motherhood: How should we care for our children? was short-listed in 2006 for Australian journalism's Walkley Award. Anne Manne has been married to Australian political science professor Robert Manne since 1983. They have two children, including Cornell University philosophy professor Kate Manne.

#6179

Brian R. Duling

#143611

Overall Influence

#6180

Robert Farnon

#101346

Overall Influence

1917 - 2005 (88 years)

Robert Joseph Farnon CM was a Canadian-born composer, conductor, musical arranger and trumpet player. As well as being a composer of original works , he was commissioned by film and television producers for theme and incidental music. In later life he composed a number of more serious orchestral works, including three symphonies, and was recognised with four Ivor Novello awards and the Order of Canada.

#6181

Gayane Hovhannisyan

#99156

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Gayane Hovhannisyan is an Armenian linguist, Doctor of Sciences in Philology/Linguistics , Professor . Hovhannisyan was the first Chair of English Teaching Methodology at Armenian State Pedagogical University after Khachatur Abovyan, Yerevan. Currently she is the head of English Communication and Translation Chair at Brusov State University.

#6182

Carla Rippey

#72708

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Carla Rippey is a visual artist and the ex-director of The National School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving "La Esmeralda." Although she was born in the US, Rippey is a considered a Mexican feminist artist.

#6183

Nigel Rogers

#119384

Overall Influence

1935 - 2022 (87 years)

Nigel David Rogers was an English multilingual tenor, music conductor, and vocal coach, who sang in over seventy classical music album recordings in German, French, Italian, Latin and English, mostly of early music, baroque and sacred music, including works by Claudio Monteverdi, Handel, Purcell, and Bach. Singing critics like Melanie Eskenazi describe him as a vocal virtuoso of the local phrasing and decoration of those particular musical periods exactly as they were practised back then. He was considered a world authority in the field of European early music, the scores of which he helped ...

#6184

David Wain

#66355

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

David Benjamin Wain is an American comedian, writer, actor, and director. He has co-written and directed six feature films, including Wet Hot American Summer , Role Models , Wanderlust and They Came Together . He has also served as a creator, producer, writer and director on a number of television series, including Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later, Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, Childrens Hospital and Medical Police. He has had small roles in most of the films and TV series he has produced or directed. Wain had a starring voice role as The Warden on the 2008–2014 Adult S...

#6185

Larry Lee Cummings

#143781

Overall Influence

#6186

Bruce Smith

#96746

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Bruce Neal Smith is an American musician best known as the drummer for post-punk band The Pop Group. He has also been a member of The Slits and the New Age Steppers and is currently performing with Public Image Ltd. He was raised and educated in Bristol, England and was once married to Neneh Cherry.

#6187

Saul Goodman

#113335

Overall Influence

1907 - 1996 (89 years)

Saul Goodman was the principal timpanist of the New York Philharmonic from 1926 to 1972. Career Goodman was born in New York, the son of Polish Jewish emigrants, Abraham L. Goodman and Yetta Feigenbaum Goodman. He grew up in Brooklyn, and learned under the instruction of Alfred Friese. At the age of 19, Goodman succeeded Friese as principal timpanist in the New York Philharmonic. Goodman was a member of the faculties at the Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Montréal and the Juilliard School of Music where he taught many who went on to become timpanists in symphony orchestras around the wor...

#6188

Martin Koch

#124861

Overall Influence

Martin Koch is a British music supervisor, orchestrator, conductor, and composer who won the 2009 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Orchestrations and was a co-winner of the 2009 Tony Award for Best Orchestrations for Billy Elliot the Musical, sharing the honor with Michael Starobin and Tom Kitt of Next to Normal.

#6189

H. Robert Reynolds

#105583

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

H. Robert Reynolds is an American musician, conductor and academic. He is currently the principal conductor of the Wind Ensemble at the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California, where he holds the H. Robert Reynolds Professorship in Wind Conducting.

#6190

Kevin Feige

#39078

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Kevin Feige is an American film and television producer, and the president of Marvel Studios and the primary producer of the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise since 2007. The films he has produced have a combined worldwide box office gross of over , making him the highest grossing producer of all time, with Avengers: Endgame becoming the highest-grossing film at the time of its release.

#6191

Klaus Düwel

#62557

Overall Influence

1935 - 2020 (85 years)

Klaus Düwel was a German philologist who specialized in Germanic studies. A professor at the University of Göttingen, he was recognized as one of the world's leading experts on Germanic Antiquity.

#6192

Carol Rhodes

#125135

Overall Influence

1959 - 2018 (59 years)

Carol Mary Rhodes was a Scottish artist known for paintings and drawings of landscapes and marked by human intervention. Rhodes was born in Edinburgh, but spent her infancy and youth in Serampore, India. She moved to the UK in her mid teens and studied fine art at the Glasgow School of Art. Graduating in 1982 she became politically active around issues of disarmament, feminism and social justice. Her focus returned to painting around 1990, and she developed her distinctive idiom of aerial-view, ‘man-made’ landscapes around 1994. These began to be exhibited in the United Kingdom and internationally, and entered many public collections.

#6193

Grete Sultan

#93984

Overall Influence

1906 - 2005 (99 years)

Grete Sultan was a German-American pianist. Biography Sultan was born in Berlin into a musical family of Jewish heritage. From an early age she studied piano with American pianist Richard Buhlig, and later with Leonid Kreutzer and Edwin Fischer. In 1933, after the Nazis came to power in Germany, her ethnicity led to her being banned from playing in public. She was allowed to only appear in concerts of the Jüdischer Kulturbund.

#6194

Roy Rada

#89194

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Roy F Rada is a professor emeritus whose research in computer science and information systems appeared in journal articles from 1979 till 2022. Early life and education Rada was born in Vienna, Austria in 1951. He graduated from Yale University in 1973 with a B.Sc. in Psychology, from Baylor College of Medicine in 1977 with a M.D., and from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1981 with a Ph.D. in Computer Science. Rada was licensed to practice medicine from 1977 to 1988.

#6195

Bright Sheng

#85124

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Bright Sheng is a Chinese-born American composer, pianist and conductor. Sheng has earned many honors for his music and compositions, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001; he also was a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. His music has been commissioned and performed by virtually every major American symphony orchestra, in addition to the Orchestre de Paris, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Russian National Orchestra, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Natio...

#6196

Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards

#96846

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Jonathan Edwards is an American country and folk singer-songwriter best known for his 1971 hit single "Sunshine". Early years Jonathan Edwards was born John Evan Edwards on July 28, 1946, in Aitkin, Minnesota. At the age of six, he moved with his family to Virginia, where he grew up. At the age of eight, he began singing in church and learning to play piano by ear. While attending Fishburne Military School, he began playing guitar and composing his own songs. As a teenager he began performing in front of audiences.

#6197

Gianluigi Gelmetti

#112274

Overall Influence

1945 - 2021 (76 years)

Gianluigi Gelmetti OMRI, was an Italian-Monégasque conductor and composer. Early life Gianluigi Gelmetti was born on 11 September 1945 in Rome, Italy. When 16-years old, Sergiu Celibidache let him conduct an orchestra, then took him as a pupil. He subsequently studied with Franco Ferrara and Hans Swarowsky. In 1967 he won the “Firenze” prize.

#6198

Raffaella Zanuttini

#123983

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Raffaella Zanuttini is an Italian linguist whose research focuses primarily on syntax and linguistic variation. She is a Professor of Linguistics at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Education and career Zanuttini completed her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1991 under Anthony Kroch and Richard S. Kayne, with a dissertation entitled Syntactic Properties of Sentential Negation. A Comparative Study of Romance Languages. Zanuttini was first an Assistant Professor and then an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University Prior to beginning her tenure at Yale in 2008.

#6199

Peter Schneider

#63985

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Peter Schneider is an Austrian conductor and opera administrator. Schneider served as kapellmeister of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, Düsseldorf-Duisburg from 1961 to 1968; general music director of the Bremer Philharmoniker from 1978 to 1985; opera director and general music director of Nationaltheater Mannheim from 1985 to 1987; and general music director of the Bayerische Staatsoper orchestra, München from 1993 to 1998.

#6200

Sudha Ram

#143983

Overall Influence

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions