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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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Communications,

#7001

Benny Bailey

#113464

Overall Influence

1925 - 2005 (80 years)

Ernest Harold "Benny" Bailey was an American jazz trumpeter. Biography A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Bailey briefly studied flute and piano before turning to trumpet. He attended the Cleveland Conservatory of Music. He was influenced by Cleveland native Tadd Dameron and had a significant influence on other Cleveland musicians, such as Albert Ayler, Bob Cunningham, Bobby Few, Bill Hardman, and Frank Wright. Bailey played with Tony Lovano, father of Joe Lovano.

#7002

Michael Jackson

#81900

Overall Influence

1958 - 2009 (51 years)

Michael Joseph Jackson was an American singer, songwriter, dancer, and philanthropist. Known as the "King of Pop", he is regarded as one of the most significant cultural figures of the 20th century. During his four-decade career, his contributions to music, dance, and fashion, along with his publicized personal life, made him a global figure in popular culture. Jackson influenced artists across many music genres. Through stage and video performances, he popularized complicated street dance moves such as the moonwalk, which he named, as well as the robot.

#7003

Lynne Bowen

#72931

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Lynne Bowen is a Canadian non-fiction writer, historian, professor, and journalist, best known for her popular historical books about Vancouver Island and British Columbia. Over the years, Bowen has won awards such as the Eaton's British Columbia Book Award , the Lieutenant Governor's Medal for Writing British Columbia History , and the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize .

#7004

Sylviane Granger

#161156

Overall Influence

#7005

William Emerson

#77585

Overall Influence

1923 - 2009 (86 years)

William Austin "Bill" Emerson Jr. was an American journalist who covered the Civil Rights Movement as Newsweek's first bureau chief assigned to cover the Southern United States and was later editor in chief of The Saturday Evening Post.

#7006

Sam Phillips

#102432

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Leslie Ann Phillips , better known by her stage name Sam Phillips, is an American singer and songwriter. Her albums include the critically acclaimed Martinis & Bikinis in 1994 and Fan Dance in 2001. She has also composed scores for the television shows Gilmore Girls, Bunheads, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

#7007

George MacDonald

#75682

Overall Influence

George MacDonald is a game designer who has worked primarily on role-playing games and in the computer game industry. Career George MacDonald started work on role-playing games while at college, by adding more detailed super powers to Gamescience's Superhero: 2044 RPG and ultimately creating his own original system which Steve Peterson typed up, and which eventually became the superhero RPG, Champions . MacDonald and Peterson had only enough money to print 1,500 copies of the game and hand-collated the pages, and they sold their new game at Pacific Origins 1981; they were surprised to see it sell very well, selling 1,000 of their 1,500 copies at the convention.

#7008

William E. Nagy

#161226

Overall Influence

#7009

Gary Lee Freed

#161237

Overall Influence

#7010

Olga Frolova

#107295

Overall Influence

1931 - 2018 (87 years)

Olga Pavlovna Frolova / Russian: Óльга Пáвловна Фролóва is a Russian orientalist who wrote her major works on the Japanese and Chinese linguistics. She is a professor and a public figure. She received such State Rewards as the Order of the Rising Sun in 2007, The Order of Merit for the Fatherland in 2010, etc. At present she is the head of the Oriental Branch at the Foreign Languages Department of Novosibirsk State University .

#7011

John Stewart

#100251

Overall Influence

1939 - 2008 (69 years)

John Coburn Stewart was an American songwriter and singer. He is known for his contributions to the American folk music movement of the 1960s while with the Kingston Trio and as a popular music songwriter of the Monkees' No. 1 hit "Daydream Believer" and his own No. 5 hit "Gold" during a solo career spanning 40 years that included almost four dozen albums and more than 600 recorded songs.

#7012

Camilla Williams

Camilla Williams

#106625

Overall Influence

1919 - 2012 (93 years)

Camilla Ella Williams was an American operatic soprano who performed nationally and internationally. After studying with renowned teachers in New York City, she was the first African American to receive a regular contract with a major American opera company, the New York City Opera. She had earlier won honors in vocal competitions and the Marian Anderson Fellowship in 1943–44.

#7013

John Gilmore

#98152

Overall Influence

1931 - 1995 (64 years)

John Gilmore was an American jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, and percussionist. He was known for his tenure with the avant-garde keyboardist/bandleader Sun Ra from the 1950s to the 1990s, and led The Sun Ra Arkestra from Sun Ra's death in 1993 until his own death in 1995.

#7014

Kevin Mahogany

#125117

Overall Influence

1958 - 2017 (59 years)

Kevin Bryant Mahogany was an American jazz vocalist who became prominent in the 1990s. Particularly known for his scat singing, his singing style has been compared with those of Billy Eckstine, Joe Williams and Johnny Hartman.

#7015

Bob Hardy

#123785

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Robert Byron Hardy is an English musician and the bassist for the Glasgow-based band Franz Ferdinand. Biography Hardy grew up in the outskirts of Bradford and attended Bradford Grammar School. Hardy is an artist with an interest in music while friend and bandmate Alex Kapranos is a musician interested in art; this is one of the primary reasons for how their friendship was established. Through Hardy's friends from the Glasgow School of Art, Kapranos developed an interest in the work of the Dadaists and the Russian Constructivists. Many of the earlier shows of the band would come about thanks t...

#7016

Timothy R. Levine

#45947

Overall Influence

Timothy R. Levine is an American communication professor, prolific researcher, and theorist. He is Distinguished Professor and Chair of Communication Studies at University of Alabama at Birmingham. Levine is credited as one of the most central and prolific researchers in the field of Communication Studies, is known for his work as the creator of truth-default theory, his developmental work on the veracity effect, and editing of the encyclopedia of deception. He is the author of Duped, published by The University of Alabama Press.

#7017

Annick De Houwer

#134528

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Annick De Houwer is a Belgian linguist, academic, researcher and author. She is the Initiator and Director of the Harmonious Bilingualism Network . De Houwer's research has focused on early child bilingualism and the role of input in bilingual acquisition and on bilingual families' well-being. She has authored the books Bilingual Development in Childhood; Bilingual First Language Acquisition; An Introduction to Bilingual Development; and The Acquisition of Two Languages from Birth: a Case Study. She was co-series editor of Trends in Language Acquisition Research and series editor of IMPACT: Studies of Language in Society.

#7018

Rainer Kussmaul

#114338

Overall Influence

1946 - 2017 (71 years)

Rainer Kussmaul was a German Grammy Award-winning violinist and conductor. Kussmaul was born in Mannheim and studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart. He was professor in Freiburg, first concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic and led the Berliner Barocksolisten. He died in Freiburg at age 70.

#7019

Joseph Turow

#41459

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Joseph Turow is the Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. His research specialises in marketing, new media and privacy. A 2005 New York Times Magazine article referred to him as “probably the reigning academic expert on media fragmentation." In 2010, the New York Times called Turow “the ranking wise man on some thorny new-media and marketing topics."

#7020

Patrick Chauvel

#157668

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Patrick Chauvel is an independent war photographer whose career began when he was just 17 years old. He has covered more than twenty conflicts all over the world, including the Six-Day War and the Vietnam War. In 1995 he was awarded the World Press Photo commendation for Spot News Stories for his coverage of the Battle of Grozny during the First Chechen War.

#7021

Bob Haggart

#109701

Overall Influence

1914 - 1998 (84 years)

Robert Sherwood Haggart was an American dixieland jazz double bass player, composer, and arranger. Although he is associated with dixieland, he was one of the finest rhythm bassists of the Swing Era.

#7022

Grandpa Jones

#90919

Overall Influence

1913 - 1998 (85 years)

Louis Marshall Jones , known professionally as Grandpa Jones, was an American banjo player and "old time" country and gospel music singer. He was inducted as a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1978.

#7023

Osmo Vänskä

#91614

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Osmo Antero Vänskä is a Finnish conductor, clarinetist, and composer. Biography Vänskä started his musical career as an orchestral clarinetist with the Turku Philharmonic . He then became the principal clarinet of the Helsinki Philharmonic from 1977 to 1982. During this time, he started to study conducting with Jorma Panula at the Sibelius Academy, where his classmates included Esa-Pekka Salonen and Jukka-Pekka Saraste. In 1982, he won the International Besançon Competition for Young Conductors.

#7024

Christoph Poppen

#112731

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Christoph Poppen is a German conductor, violinist and academic teacher. Career Poppen was born in Münster. As a violinist, he was awarded first prize in the Kocian Violin Competition age 14. He studied the violin with Kurt Schäffer at the Robert Schumann Hochschule, later with Oskar Schumsky, Nathan Milstein, and Joseph Gingold.

#7025

Joseph Byrd

#78452

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Joseph Hunter Byrd Jr. is an American composer, musician and academic. After first becoming known as an experimental composer in New York City and Los Angeles in the early and mid-1960s, he became the leader of The United States of America, an innovative but short-lived band that integrated electronic sound and radical political ideas into rock music. In 1968 he recorded the album The American Metaphysical Circus, credited to Joe Byrd and the Field Hippies. After working as a record producer, arranger, and soundtrack composer, he became a university teacher in music history and theory.

#7026

Mika Tosca

#29465

Overall Influence

Mika Tosca is a climate scientist and faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research concerns ways in which art and design can impact communication about climate science to more effectively address climate change. Tosca also contributes to science communication, including through science-art initiatives, and she is an advocate for Trans people in STEM, academia, and the media.

#7027

Uri Caine

#104150

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Uri Caine is an American classical and jazz pianist and composer. Biography Early years The son of Burton Caine, a professor at Temple Law School, and poet Shulamith Wechter Caine, Caine began playing piano at seven and studied with French jazz pianist Bernard Peiffer at 12. He later studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where he came under the tutelage of George Crumb. He also gained a greater familiarity with classical music in this period and worked at clubs in Philadelphia.

#7028

Chrysanthos Nicholas Dellarocas

#161825

Overall Influence

#7029

Kathy E. Kram

#161834

Overall Influence

#7030

Stretch Johnson

#102937

Overall Influence

1915 - 2000 (85 years)

Howard Eugene "Stretch" Johnson was a tap dancer and social activist. In 1936, he joined his brother Bobby and his sister, Winnie, one of the featured dancers at the Cotton Club, to form an act called the Three Johnsons, which was featured in New Faces of 1936 and the Duke Ellington Revue of 1937 at the Apollo Theater. He later acted in a Harlem production of Clifford Odets play Waiting for Lefty.

#7031

Gillian Murphy

#161894

Overall Influence

#7032

Roy Z

#73533

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Roy Z is an American guitarist, songwriter and record producer, best known for his work with Bruce Dickinson , Halford, and Judas Priest. He also is the founder of Tribe of Gypsies, a Latin-influenced hard rock band. Roy also helped write and produce the band Life After Death in 1996.

#7033

Mark Donohue

#122473

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Mark Donohue is a British-Australian linguist. He deals with the description of Austronesian, Papuan, and Sino-Tibetan languages. He obtained a B.A. in linguistics at the Australian National University in Canberra. In 1996, he defended his doctoral dissertation entitled The Tukang Besi language of Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia. From 2009 to 2017, he was an associate professor at the Australian National University. In 2017, he was employed by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages.

#7034

Harald Noreng

#103790

Overall Influence

1913 - 2006 (93 years)

Harald Noreng was a Norwegian literary researcher and lexicographer. Personal life He was born on the island of Hisøya in the municipality of Hisøy in 1913. He was the son of boat builder Johan Wilhelm Hanssen and Kathrine Marie Pettersen . He changed his last name from Hanssen to Noreng in 1933. In February 1941 he married jurist Alice Schwabe-Hansen . They had two children, Øystein Noreng and Astrid Noreng Sjølie .

#7035

Bobby Koelble

#72502

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Bobby Koelble is an American guitarist who performs in the death metal, blues, funk and jazz genres, and as a freelance studio musician. He is probably best known for his performances with the death metal band Death. The album he played on, Symbolic, was regarded by Joel McIver of British music magazine Record Collector "as close to flawless as metal gets."

#7036

J. Bruce Tomblin

#141369

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

James Bruce Tomblin is a language and communication scientist and an expert on the epidemiology and genetics of developmental language disorders . He holds the position of Professor Emeritus of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Iowa.

#7037

Jerzy Semkow

#134453

Overall Influence

1928 - 2014 (86 years)

Jerzy Semkow was a Polish conductor. Semkow was born in Radomsko, Poland, later took French citizenship and resided in Paris. He studied in Cracow and Leningrad. His conducting mentors included Erich Kleiber, Bruno Walter, and Tullio Serafin. He was an assistant conductor with Yevgeny Mravinsky with the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra.

#7038

Rob Zombie

#73218

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Rob Zombie is an American singer, songwriter, record producer, filmmaker, and actor. His music and lyrics are notable for their horror and sci-fi themes, and his live shows have been praised for their elaborate shock rock theatricality. He has sold an estimated 15 million albums worldwide.

#7039

William Russo

#112820

Overall Influence

1928 - 2003 (75 years)

William Joseph Russo was an American composer, arranger, and musician from Chicago, Illinois, United States. History A student of jazz pianist Lennie Tristano, Russo wrote orchestral scores for the Stan Kenton Orchestra in the 1950s, including 23 Degrees N 82 Degrees W, Frank Speaking, and Portrait of a Count. He composed Halls of Brass for the brass section, without woodwinds or percussion. The section recording this piece included Buddy Childers, Maynard Ferguson and Milt Bernhart. In 1954, Russo left the Kenton Orchestra and continued private composition and conducting studies, then moved ...

#7040

Glen Hardin

#93813

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Glen Dee Hardin is an American piano player and arranger. He has performed and recorded with such artists as Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley, Emmylou Harris, John Denver, and Ricky Nelson. Career Hardin was born in Wellington, Texas, a small town in the Texas panhandle. After getting out of the Navy in 1959, Hardin began his musical career in Long Beach, California, and soon joined the house band at the Palomino Club in North Hollywood, called "Country Music's most important West Coast club" by the Los Angeles Times. It featured such performers as Buck Owens, Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Linda Ronsta...

#7041

Vijay Iyer

#70839

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Vijay Iyer is an American composer, pianist, bandleader, producer and writer based in New York City. The New York Times has called him a "social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway". Iyer received a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Grammy nomination, and the Alpert Award in the Arts. He was voted Jazz Artist of the Year in the DownBeat magazine international critics' polls in 2012, 2015, 2016, and 2018. In 2014, he received a lifetime appointment as the Franklin D.

#7042

Alan Clark

#75194

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Alan Clark is an English musician who was the first keyboardist and co-producer of the rock band Dire Straits. In 2018, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a significant member of the band.

#7043

Terry Fox

#101531

Overall Influence

1943 - 2008 (65 years)

Terry Alan Fox was an American Conceptual artist known for his work in performance art, video, and sound. He was of the first generation conceptual artists and he was a central participant in the West Coast performance art, video and Conceptual Art movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Fox was active in San Francisco and in Europe, living in Europe in the latter portion of his life.

#7044

Iosif Kheifits

#92149

Overall Influence

1905 - 1995 (90 years)

Iosif Yefimovich Kheifits was a Soviet film director, winner of two Stalin Prizess , People's Artist of USSR , Hero of Socialist Labor . Member of the Communist Party of Soviet Union since 1945. Life and career Kheifets was born 17 December 1905 in Minsk. In 1927 he graduated from the Leningrad Technical-screen art, and in 1928 - cinema faculty of Institute of History of Art. In 1928, Iosif Kheifets came to work at the film studio "Sovkino" . In film, he first made his debut as a screenwriter, with Aleksandr Ivanov and Aleksandr Zarkhi he created the scripts for films "Moon on the left" and "...

#7045

Bernard Jean

#127315

Overall Influence

1948 - 2017 (69 years)

Bernard Jean is a Canadian oboist, english horn player, conductor, and music educator. He has held principal oboist positions with several important Canadian orchestras, including the Quebec Symphony Orchestra and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. In 1972 he co-founded the Quebec Woodwind Quintet; a group he played and recorded with for the next 15 years. In 1987 he founded the St Louis de France Ensemble, a group which he has conducted and recorded works by Caplet, Constant, Milhaud, and Patch. He has also performed as a soloist with the National Arts Centre Orchestra among other notable ensembles.

#7046

Arthur C. Brooks

Arthur C. Brooks

#52604

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Arthur C. Brooks is an American author, public speaker, and academic. Since 2019, Brooks has served as the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Nonprofit and Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and at the Harvard Business School as a Professor of Management Practice and Faculty Fellow. Previously, Brooks served as the 11th President of the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of thirteen books, including Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier with co-author Oprah Winfrey , From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness a...

#7047

Dale Clevenger

#113178

Overall Influence

1940 - 2022 (82 years)

Dale Clevenger was an American musician who was the Principal Horn of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1966 until his retirement in June, 2013. Before joining the CSO, he was a member of Leopold Stokowski's American Symphony Orchestra and the Symphony of the Air directed by Alfred Wallenstein. He was also principal horn of the Kansas City Philharmonic. Prior to his death, he taught horn at the Jacobs School of Music in Indiana University.

#7048

Constance DeJong

Constance DeJong

#156358

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Constance DeJong is an American visual artist who works in the margin between sculpture and painting/drawing. Her predominate medium is metal with light as a dominant factor. She is currently working in New Mexico and is a professor of sculpture at the University of New Mexico. DeJong received a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Art Fellowship in 1982. In 2003, she had a retrospective at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History. That same year, Constance DeJong: Metal was published and released by University of New Mexico Press. Her work has been described by American art critic Dave Hi...

#7049

Cachao

#106525

Overall Influence

1918 - 2008 (90 years)

Israel López Valdés , better known as Cachao , was a Cuban double bassist and composer. Cachao is widely known as the co-creator of the mambo and a master of the descarga . Throughout his career he also performed and recorded in a variety of music styles ranging from classical music to salsa. An exile in the United States since the 1960s, he only achieved international fame following a career revival in the 1990s.

#7050

Todd Duncan

#91181

Overall Influence

1903 - 1998 (95 years)

Robert Todd Duncan was an American baritone opera singer and actor. One of the first African-Americans to sing with a major opera company, Duncan is also noted for appearing as Porgy in the premier production of Porgy and Bess .

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