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,

#7601

Ludwig Göransson

#54789

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (42 years)

Ludwig Emil Tomas Göransson is a Swedish composer, conductor, songwriter, and record producer. He has scored films such as Fruitvale Station, the Rocky franchise entries Creed and Creed II, Venom, Tenet, Turning Red, and Oppenheimer. He also composed the current fanfares for Warner Bros. Pictures and the new Star Wars brand logo. For his work on the 2018 superhero film Black Panther, he won the Academy Award for Best Original Score and the Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media. He further scored the second Black Panther film, 2022's Wakanda Forever, earning a nomination for ...

#7602

Kichitaro Negishi

#104700

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

is a Japanese film director. Although his films are admired by critics in Japan for their intelligence, Negishi has received little international recognition for his work. He has not been credited with a distinctive style but he has been called a subtle director who often elicits strong performances from his actors. He won the award for Best Director at the 3rd Yokohama Film Festival for Enrai and Crazy Fruit.

#7603

Bobby Watson

#90503

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Robert Michael Watson Jr. , known professionally as Bobby Watson, is an American saxophonist, composer, and educator. Early life Watson was born in Lawrence, Kansas, United States, and grew up in Kansas City, Kansas. He had four brothers. Watson credits his father as one of his greatest inspirations. His father played saxophone in addition to being a pilot and working for the Federal Aviation Administration. The family moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, for his father's work with the FAA. While Watson was in junior high school there, a jazz history class he took helped him realize he was a jazz ...

#7604

Nick Pickard

#113801

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Nicholas Pickard is an English actor. He is known for his portrayal of Tony Hutchinson in the Channel 4 soap opera Hollyoaks, a role he has held since its first episode in 1995; he remains the longest-serving cast member and in 2017, won the British Soap Award for Outstanding Achievement.

#7605

Betty Haag

#68614

Overall Influence

Betty Haag-Kuhnke, commonly referred to as Betty Haag, is an American music educator. Life She received Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from Indiana University Bloomington where she was the recipient of the Goodbody Fellowship and the Performer's Certificate. After graduation, she began playing professionally with the Atlanta Symphony. She later taught violin at Earlham College.

#7606

Dallas Frazier

#92927

Overall Influence

1939 - 2022 (83 years)

Dallas Frazier was an American country musician and songwriter who had success in the 1950s and 1960s. Life and career Frazier was born in Spiro, Oklahoma, on October 27, 1939, but was raised in Bakersfield, California. As a teenager, he played with Ferlin Husky and on the program Hometown Jamboree; and released his first single, "Space Command", at age 14 in 1954. As he told writer Edd Hurt in a 2008 profile for the music website Perfect Sound Forever, "We were part of The Grapes of Wrath. We were the Okies who went out to California with mattresses tied on the tops of their Model A Fords. My folks were poor.

#7607

Paul Ryan

#150907

Overall Influence

1948 - 1992 (44 years)

Paul Ryan was an English singer, songwriter and record producer. Biography Early life Born in Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire, England, Paul and his twin brother Barry were the sons of singer Marion Ryan.

#7608

Marjolein Lips-Wiersma

#113745

Overall Influence

Marjolein Silvia Lips-Wiersma is a New Zealand academic. She specializes in ethics, meaningful work and sustainability. She is currently a full professor at the Auckland University of Technology. Academic career Marjo Lips-Wiersma is Professor of Ethics and Sustainability Leadership at AUT. In 1999 she submitted a doctoral thesis titled The influence of 'spiritual meaning-making' on career choice, transition and experience at the University of Auckland. Her research takes place at the nexus of meaningful work, sustainability, hope and well-being.

#7609

Kana Hanazawa

#124168

Overall Influence

1989 - Present (37 years)

is a Japanese actress, voice actress and singer. A prolific voice performer in anime, she has amassed several film and television credits since her debut in 2003. She won the Seiyu Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2015, and won the Newtype Anime Awards for Best Voice Actress three times in 2015, 2017 and 2018.

#7610

Shimon Dotan

#128333

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Shimon Dotan is an Israeli film director, screenwriter, and producer. Biography Early life Shimon Dotan was born in Romania in 1949 and moved to Israel in 1959. He grew up in Moshav Arugot, an agricultural cooperative. He then served five years in the Israeli military as a Navy Seal and went on to get his BFA at Tel Aviv University, where his student films won Israel’s Best Short Film and Best Director Awards twice.

#7611

Lorraine Desmarais

#146323

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Lorraine Desmarais C.M. is a French-Canadian jazz pianist and composer. Early life and education Born in Montreal, she earned a Bachelor of Music and Master of Music in classical piano at Université de Sherbrooke. She studied with Armas Maiste at McGill University in 1978 and 1979, and later took lessons from Kenny Barron in New York. She has also been influenced by Chick Corea and Oscar Peterson.

#7612

Famoudou Konaté

Famoudou Konaté

#129536

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Famoudou Konaté is a Malinké master drummer from Guinea. Famoudou Konaté is a virtuoso of the djembe drum and its orchestra. One of only a handful of initiated masters of the Malinké drumming tradition, Famoudou is universally respected as one of the world's premiere djembe master drummers. He has dedicated his life to performing and preserving the music of his people, helping to elevate the djembe orchestra from its traditional roots to worldwide popularity.

#7613

Mulgrew Miller

#96061

Overall Influence

1955 - 2013 (58 years)

Mulgrew Miller was an American jazz pianist, composer, and educator. As a child he played in churches and was influenced on piano by Ramsey Lewis and then Oscar Peterson. Aspects of their styles remained in his playing, but he added the greater harmonic freedom of McCoy Tyner and others in developing as a hard bop player and then in creating his own style, which influenced others from the 1980s on.

#7614

Ted Curson

#107074

Overall Influence

1935 - 2012 (77 years)

Theodore Curson was an American jazz trumpeter. Life and career Curson was born in Philadelphia. He became interested in playing trumpet after watching a newspaper salesman play a silver trumpet. Curson's father, however, wanted him to play alto saxophone like Louis Jordan. When he was ten, he gained his first trumpet.

#7615

Henry Trewhitt

#108464

Overall Influence

1927 - 2003 (76 years)

Henry Lane "Hank" Trewhitt was an American author and journalist. Early life and education Trewhitt was born on April 17, 1927, on a farm in Cleveland, Tennessee. He received his journalism degree from the University of New Mexico in 1949. Soon after graduating, he worked for the Santa Fe New Mexican, where he covered the development of the first thermonuclear bomb at Los Alamos National Laboratory. At the age of 25, he won a Nieman Fellowship to Harvard University, making him the youngest person to do so at the time.

#7616

Bill Ward

#107616

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Bill Ward is an English actor. He is known for his soap opera roles as Charlie Stubbs in Coronation Street and James Barton in Emmerdale. Early life Ward was educated at Oundle School and Bristol University where he obtained a degree in Modern British History, and worked as an advertising executive before beginning his professional acting career in the 1980s.

#7617

Chris Columbus

#136152

Overall Influence

1902 - 2002 (100 years)

Joseph Christopher Columbus Morris , better known as Crazy Chris Columbo or just Chris Columbo, was an American jazz drummer. He was sometimes credited as Joe Morris on record, though he is no relation to free jazz guitarist Joe Morris or trumpeter Joe Morris.

#7618

Chau Nguyen

#72816

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Chau Nguyen is a former Vietnamese-American news anchor most recently seen with KHOU-TV, before stepping down in December 2007 to become a social worker. She is now the Chief Public Strategies office for the Houston Area Women's Center.

#7619

Davitt Moroney

#145397

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Davitt Moroney is a British-born and educated musicologist, harpsichordist and organist. His parents were of Irish and Italian extraction – his father was an executive with the Anglo-Dutch Unilever conglomerate. From 1968 onward, he undertook his undergraduate and graduate studies in musicology at King's College London, the faculty of which was headed by Thurston Dart, a great influence on the world of early music. Moroney later pursued advanced harpsichord studies with Kenneth Gilbert and Gustav Leonhardt. Moroney also holds performance and teaching diplomas from the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music.

#7620

Keyan Tomaselli

#153234

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Keyan Gray Tomaselli is a South African communication professor and author, currently Professor Emeritus and Fellow at University of KwaZulu-Natal, where he established and operated its Centre for Communication, Media and Society for 29 years until becoming a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at University of Johannesburg. He is also editor of the UKZN-UJ journal Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies and co-editor at UJ's journal Journal of African Cinemas. He is also a published author and has been largely collected by libraries.

#7621

Gregory Clark

#85151

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Gregory Clark is an American scholar and teacher working in rhetorical studies and American cultural criticism. He retired from academic work in 2021. His work is both theoretical and critical, developing concepts of how influence works that he then uses to study capacities for influence inherent in American cultural practices.

#7622

Susan Tifft

#97533

Overall Influence

1951 - 2010 (59 years)

Susan Tifft was an American journalist, author, and educator. Early life and education Tifft was born to Austin and Elizabeth Tifft in Rumford, Maine, on February 14, 1951. She grew up there and in St. Louis, where her father moved for his work in the early 1960s. She had a younger brother and sister, as well as an older brother who died as a child in Maine. Tifft later said of her childhood that she felt that she "grew up in a Currier & Ives Christmas card, more in the 19th century than in the 20th."

#7623

Theodor Uppman

#143103

Overall Influence

1920 - 2005 (85 years)

Theodor Uppman was an American operatic baritone. He is best known for his creation of the title role in Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd. Uppman, of Swedish descent, was born in San Jose, California, and studied voice at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and privately with Beverley Peck Johnson in New York City. He made his professional debut in 1941 with the Northern California Symphony Orchestra. His career was sparked by his 1947 concert performance as Pelléas in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra under Pierre Monteux, and Maggie Teyte as Mélisande.

#7624

Jeremy Castro Baguyos

#73617

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Jeremy Castro Baguyos is a musician-researcher specializing in the realization of live interactive computer music. Based at the University of Nebraska at Omaha , he is a Professor of Music. His most notable contributions to the field are in the area of live performance combined with interactive computer technology. For the state of Nebraska , Baguyos established the state's first interactive computer music ensemble, Ensemble A.M.I. , in conjunction with its first and only electronic music festival featuring interactive computer music, Virtual Music Week. For his own instrument, the double b...

#7625

Frunze Dovlatyan

#107860

Overall Influence

1927 - 1997 (70 years)

Frunze Vaghinaki Dovlatyan was an Armenian film director, screenwriter and actor. Biography Frunze Dovlatyan was born in Gavar, Soviet Armenia. He was a theater actor before becoming a director. He starred as an actor in Armenian provincial theatres from 1941 and then in Gabriel Sundukian Drama Theatre of Yerevan, where he was awarded Stalin Prize for his performance in the role of Hrayr in the play Ays astgherë mern en . In 1959, he graduated from the directing department of the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, where he studied under Sergei Gerasimov. His most well-known film is Barev, yes em , which received the State Prize of the Armenian SSR.

#7626

Adriana Farmiga

#95180

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Adriana Farmiga is an American visual artist, curator, and professor based in New York City. She serves as a programming advisor for the non-profit La Mama Gallery in the East Village, and is the current Associate Dean at Cooper Union School of Art.

#7627

Angel Gil-Ordoñez

Angel Gil-Ordoñez

#113003

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

#7628

Deborah Jowitt

#84040

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Deborah Jowitt is an American dance critic, author, and choreographer. Her career in dance began as a performer and choreographer. Jowitt has received several awards for her work, including a Bessie for her work in dance criticism.

#7629

Nieves Herrero

#131755

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Nieves Herrero Cerezo is a Spanish journalist, television presenter, and writer. Career Beginnings: TVE Born in Madrid, Nieves Herrero graduated in Journalism from the Complutense University of Madrid in 1980, and in Law from the European University of Madrid in 2010. After her beginnings in the press, she went to Antena 3 Radio and arrived at Televisión Española as editor of the morning program hosted by Jesús Hermida, and of which she became deputy director. The show earned her the nickname "Chica Hermida", which she shared with other media professionals in the following years, such as...

#7630

Paul Kantor

#95863

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Paul Kantor is an American violin teacher. Kantor is a professor at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. He continues the pedagogical lineage of Dorothy DeLay. He is often selected to participate as a jury member for international violin competitions.

#7631

Janet Dean Fodor

#170461

Overall Influence

#7632

Caroline Shaw

#79982

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (44 years)

Caroline Adelaide Shaw is an American composer of contemporary classical music, violinist, and singer. She is best known for the a cappella piece Partita for 8 Voices, for which she won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Shaw received the 2022 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for her Narrow Sea.

#7633

George Adams

#136522

Overall Influence

1940 - 1992 (52 years)

George Rufus Adams was an American jazz musician who played tenor saxophone, flute and bass clarinet. He is best known for his work with Charles Mingus, Gil Evans, Roy Haynes and in the quartet he co-led with pianist Don Pullen, featuring bassist Cameron Brown and drummer Dannie Richmond. He was also known for his idiosyncratic singing.

#7634

Bill Finegan

#104619

Overall Influence

1917 - 2008 (91 years)

William James Finegan was an American jazz bandleader, pianist, arranger, and composer. He was an arranger in the Glenn Miller Orchestra in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Life and career Born in Newark, New Jersey, United States, Finegan grew up in a household full of piano players. While growing up in Rumson, New Jersey, he attended Rumson-Fair Haven High School and taught orchestration to schoolmate Nelson Riddle, and he studied piano with Elizabeth Connelly, piano and musicianship with flautist/alto saxophonist Rudolph John Winthrop , himself a student of Engelbert Humperdinck. He spent t...

#7635

Nicola Benedetti

Nicola Benedetti

#109004

Overall Influence

1987 - Present (39 years)

Nicola Joy Nadia Benedetti is an Italian-Scottish classical solo violinist and festival director. Her ability was recognised when she was a child, including the award of BBC Young Musician of the Year when she was 16. She works with orchestras in Europe and America as well as with Alexei Grynyuk, her regular pianist. Since 2012, she has played the Gariel Stradivarius violin. She became the first woman to lead the Edinburgh International Festival when she was made Festival Director on 1 October 2022.

#7636

Shubha Mudgal

#74756

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Shubha Mudgal is an Indian musician, composer, singer, and multi instrumentalist known for her works in Hindustani classical music, Indian pop, and Tamil cinema. Her repertoire includes the genres of khyal, thumri, dadra. She has received the Padma Shri in 2000.

#7637

Michelle DiBucci

#160335

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Michelle DiBucci is an American composer born in 1961 who writes scores for opera, theater, dance, film, and TV. She has composed several of the scores featured in Wendigo, Carrier, Gêmeas and Creepshow. She is primarily a theater composer, with more than 30 credits.

#7638

Martin Galling

#157539

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Martin Galling is a German pianist, harpsichordist and chamber musician. Galling first took cello lessons and studied the piano from 1945 at the Peter Cornelius Conservatory of Mainz with Louise Wandel. He studied at the Hochschule für Musik Mainz, counterpoint with Günter Raphael, and chamber music and musicology with Günter Kehr. In 1956 he was in the master class of Hans Leygraf, followed by concerts in Germany and tours of Western Europe, the U.S., Israel and Japan. Galling was a soloist on numerous tours of the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra under Karl Münchinger, and collaborated with Helmuth Rilling.

#7639

Martin Gotthard Schneider

#114316

Overall Influence

1930 - 2017 (87 years)

Martin Gotthard Schneider was a German theologian, church musician, Landeskantor , songwriter, and academic teacher. He is known for prize-winning songs of the genre Neues Geistliches Lied, such as "Danke" and "Ein Schiff, das sich Gemeinde nennt".

#7640

Mark Dingemanse

#64787

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (43 years)

Mark Dingemanse is a Dutch linguist and an Africanist. He is an associate professor in Language and Communication at the Centre for Language Studies of Radboud University Nijmegen. Dingemanse obtained a MA degree in African Languages and Cultures at Leiden University in 2006, and a PhD degree in arts in 2011 at Radboud University Nijmegen. He is also a Senior Investigator in the Multimodal Language and Cognition research group at the Nijmegen Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Dingemanse performed linguistic fieldwork in eastern Ghana and did comparative research on various languages.

#7641

Makanda Ken McIntyre

#150731

Overall Influence

1931 - 2001 (70 years)

Makanda Ken McIntyre was an American jazz musician, composer and educator. In addition to his primary instrument, the alto saxophone, he played flute, bass clarinet, oboe, bassoon, double bass, drums, and piano.

#7642

Karel Svoboda

#125274

Overall Influence

1938 - 2007 (69 years)

Karel Svoboda was a Czech composer of popular music. He wrote music for many TV series in the 1970s. Works Karel Svoboda was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia and began his career as a pop composer after abandoning medicine in his third year of university. He became a member of the rock band "Mefisto" in 1963 where he played piano. Later, he composed music for the Laterna Magika theatre in Prague and for many Czech singers. In 1969 he wrote a song titled "Lady Carneval" for Karel Gott, a major Czech pop star. Svoboda wrote a total of 80 songs for Gott, including and "Die Biene Maja". His long-...

#7643

Marjorie Nicholson

#128042

Overall Influence

1914 - 1997 (83 years)

Marjorie Nicholson , was a British socialist activist. Born in the Benwell area of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Nicholson grew up in Kenton, then in Middlesex. She was educated at Harrow High School before winning a scholarship to St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she received a degree in modern history. While at the university, she became interested in socialism, and joined the Oxford University Labour Club.

#7644

Peter Vaill

#22937

Overall Influence

Peter Brown Vaill was an organizational change theorist who published widely in the fields of organizational behavior, organization development , and leadership studies, including the intersection of spirituality and leadership.

#7645

Nina Dorliak

#130062

Overall Influence

1908 - 1998 (90 years)

Nina Lvovna Dorliak was a Russian soprano and a voice teacher at the Moscow Conservatory. She is known for forming a duo with pianist Sviatoslav Richter in recitals and recordings. Life Nina Dorliak was born in Saint Petersburg. Her mother was Xenia Nikolayevna Dorliak , a maid of honour of Empress Marie Feodorovna, and later a singer and voice teacher at the Moscow Conservatory. Her father was the financier Lev Fabianovitch Dorliak , whose father had emigrated from France to Russia during the reign of Alexander II of Russia. She attended the Petrischule, a German school in Saint Petersburg. ...

#7646

Henry Grimes

#113733

Overall Influence

1935 - 2020 (85 years)

Henry Grimes was an American jazz double bassist and violinist. After more than a decade of activity and performance, notably as a leading bassist in free jazz, Grimes completely disappeared from the music scene by 1970. Grimes was often presumed to have died, but he was discovered in 2002 and returned to performing.

#7647

Enanisho

#127571

Overall Influence

ʿEnanishoʿ was a monk, philosopher, lexicographer and translator of the Church of the East who flourished in the 7th century. Biography ʿEnanishoʿ was from the region of Adiabene. He and his brother Ishoʿyahb studied at the school of Nisibis at the same time as the future patriarch Ishoʿyahb III . His brother went on to become bishop of Shenna, while he entered the monastery of Mar Abraham on Mount Izla. He later made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and the monasteries of Scetis in Egypt, becoming well acquainted with Greek literature and Egyptian monasticism. Upon his return he joined the mona...

#7648

Lynn Mahoney

#77104

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Lynn Mahoney is an American university president, author, and social historian. Mahoney is the president of San Francisco State University since July 2019, and is the first woman to hold this role. Her scholarly work has focused on United States history, women's history, feminism, race studies, and ethnicity. She is the author of Elizabeth Stoddard and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Culture ; a book about novelist and poet Elizabeth Stoddard.

#7649

Midori

#110461

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Midori Goto, who performs under the mononym Midori, is a Japanese-born American violinist. She made her debut with the New York Philharmonic at age 11 as a surprise guest soloist at the New Year's Eve Gala in 1982. In 1986 her performance at the Tanglewood Music Festival with Leonard Bernstein conducting his own composition made the front-page headlines in The New York Times. Midori became a celebrated child prodigy, and one of the world's preeminent violinists as an adult.

#7650

Lesli Linka Glatter

Lesli Linka Glatter

#68706

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Lesli Linka Glatter is an American film and television director. She is best known for her work on the AMC drama series Mad Men and the Showtime series Homeland. For her work in these two shows, she has received eight Primetime Emmy Award nominations and 7 Directors Guild of America Awards nominations, winning the latter 3 times. She has also received a nomination for Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film for Tales of Meeting and Parting .

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions