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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List of the most influential people in Communications,

#9001

Aaron Swartz

#169749

Overall Influence

Aaron Swartz is a British actor and theatre and film director who has appeared in plays, movies, commercials and television series in the United States and Europe. His first film appearance was in The Lords of Discipline, a 1983 film adaptation of the Pat Conroy novel; Swartz played a senior at an American military academy. In 1994, he played Cutter, the lead role in the video game Burn:Cycle. He appeared in 25 episodes of the documentary series I Shouldn't Be Alive and has directed two films that were sold to the BBC. He stars in the film Young Hunters: The Beast of Bevendean .

#9002

John Morris

#170848

Overall Influence

John William Morris is an American film screenwriter and producer best known for his collaborations with director Sean Anders, including Spirited , Daddy's Home , and We're the Millers . Career In 2005, he began his writing career by drafting the screenplay for the faux documentary film Never Been Thawed. In 2008, he co-wrote the raunchy comedy film Sex Drive. He co-wrote 2010's Hot Tub Time Machine and She's Out of My League. The following year, he wrote the family film Mr. Popper's Penguins.

#9003

Frederick Swann

Frederick Swann

#113965

Overall Influence

1931 - 2022 (91 years)

Frederick Lewis Swann was an American church and concert organist, choral conductor, composer, and president of the American Guild of Organists. His extensive discography includes both solo organ works and choral ensembles he has conducted.

#9004

Nottz

#82241

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Dominick J. Lamb, better known by his stage name Nottz , is an American hip hop producer and rapper from Norfolk, Virginia. Nottz has produced for some of the biggest names in hip hop, including Busta Rhymes, Rah Digga, Scarface, Snoop Dogg, Cassidy, Ghostface Killah, Kardinal Offishall, Royce da 5'9", Little Brother, The Game, Dwele, Termanology, Bilal, Asher Roth, Slaughterhouse, Pusha T, Torae, Rapsody, Shateish and Talib Kweli among many others.

#9005

Frank Gagliardi

#100150

Overall Influence

1931 - 2011 (80 years)

Frank Gagliardi was an American jazz drummer and percussionist, big band composer, arranger, director, and professor. He was the creator and director of the UNLV Jazz Ensemble from 1974 until 1996. Prior to that, he worked as the drummer and percussionist at the Sands Hotel, accompanying such notable performers as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Patti Page, Lena Horne, Steve Lawrence, Eydie Gorme, Joe Williams, Marlena Shaw and Joey Bishop among many others.

#9006

Mekia Cox

#96512

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Mekia Cox is an American actress and dancer, known for her recurring role as Sasha in the second and third seasons of The CW drama 90210, Dr. Robyn Charles in the NBC medical drama Chicago Med and her role as a dancer in the Michael Jackson concert series This Is It and the related film Michael Jackson's This Is It. In 2010, she co-starred as Lizzy Gilliam in the short-lived NBC spy drama Undercovers. She is also known for her role as Princess Tiana in the ABC fantasy drama Once Upon A Time and for her role as Detective Nyla Harper in the ABC police drama The Rookie.

#9007

Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf

#104408

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf is a German composer, editor and author. Career Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf was born in Mannheim, Germany, and studied composition with Brian Ferneyhough, Klaus Huber and Emanuel Nunes and music theory at the music academy in Freiburg where he graduated in 1992. At the same time, he studied musicology, philosophy with Jürgen Habermas and sociology at university. Later he was influenced by Habermas's antagonist Peter Sloterdijk and appropriated the idea of a philosophical explanation of the female orgasm from an email novel Sloterdijk had published three years earlier.

#9008

David Wilde

#150949

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

David Wilde is an English pianist and composer. As a boy he studied with Solomon and his pupil Franz Reizenstein, who had also studied composition with Hindemith and Vaughan Williams. A frequent soloist at the Henry Wood Proms, working with such conductors as Horenstein, Boulez, and Downes, he shared with Jacqueline du Pré the honour of opening the BBC's second TV Channel in the North of England with Sir John Barbirolli and the Hallé Orchestra in 1962. In the same year, Wilde won the Queen’s Prize and was invited to play at the Royal Concert in the Royal Festival Hall, with the Royal Liverpoo...

#9009

Danny Young

#151581

Overall Influence

1986 - Present (40 years)

Danny Young is an English actor. He is best known for his portrayal of Warren Baldwin on the popular long-running soap Coronation Street, and for his participation in the celebrity ice skating show Dancing on Ice.

#9010

Tom Davis

#145062

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Tom Davis is an American journalist and academic on mental health issues. Career Journalism One of Davis' first jobs was as a reporter and columnist at The Princeton Packet when he was employed by the magazine in 1989, in 1990 he moved on to The Delaware State News where he worked for 3 years. He wrote for The Ocean County Observer before becoming a reporter at The Press of Atlantic City in 1993, a position he maintained for 5 years.

#9011

Marc Edwards

#175099

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Marc Edwards is a free jazz drummer who has played and recorded with artists such as Cecil Taylor, Charles Gayle, and David S. Ware. His influences include Charlie Parker and Buddy Rich. He is currently playing with a project with Weasel Walter, and with his own group, Marc Edwards Slipstream Time Travel, an afrofuturistic free jazz ensemble. Many of his solo works have a science fiction theme. He also plays in the band Cellular Chaos, his first foray into rock drumming.

#9012

Robert Beadell

#176625

Overall Influence

1925 - 1994 (69 years)

Robert Beadell was an American composer. Life After military service as a bandsman with the United States Marines during the Second World War, Beadell enrolled in the music program at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where his clarinet teacher, Dominick DiCaprio, encouraged him to study composition. At Northwestern his composition teachers were Robert Delaney and Anthony Donato, and he later studied with Leo Sowerby at the American Conservatory in Chicago, and with Darius Milhaud at Mills College. He first taught music theory and woodwinds at the Swinney Conservatory of Central ...

#9013

Melissa Aronczyk

#136520

Overall Influence

Melissa Aronczyk is a Canadian media studies scholar working in the United States. She is a member of the faculty of Rutgers University in the School of Communication and Information and affiliated faculty in Sociology and with the Eagleton Institute of Politics. Her expertise includes media and political promotion, corporate political advocacy, nationalism, and the political purposes of branding. Dr. Aronczyk has published three books, Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity from Oxford University Press in 2013,; Blowing Up the Brand: Critical Perspectives on Promotional Culture from Peter Lang, in 2010 .

#9014

Moses Hogan

#156397

Overall Influence

1957 - 2003 (46 years)

Moses George Hogan was an American composer and arranger of choral music. He was best known for his settings of spirituals. Hogan was a pianist, conductor, and arranger of international renown. His works are celebrated and performed by high school, college, church, community, and professional choirs today. Over his lifetime, he published 88 arrangements for voice, eight of which were solo pieces.

#9015

Adam Benjamin

#170156

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Adam Benjamin is an American jazz keyboardist and composer. He is a founding member of Kneebody, and leads an active career as a performer and writer. He has been recognized as a Rising Star in Jazz by Downbeat Magazine.

#9016

Vadim Abdrashitov

Vadim Abdrashitov

#77600

Overall Influence

1945 - 2023 (78 years)

Vadim Yusupovich Abdrashitov was a Russian film director. He was internationally renowned as one of Russian cinema's most notable independent directorss, with awards from the Berlin and Venice Film Festivals, and was a People's Artist of Russia.

#9017

John Levis

#179458

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

John M. Levis is an American academic and Angela B. Pavitt Professor in English at Iowa State University. Levis earned his master's and doctoral degrees from University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He founded the Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference and the associated PSLLT Proceedings in 2008, followed by The Journal of Second Language Pronunciation, first published in 2015.

#9018

Pip Eastop

#169336

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Pip Eastop is a virtuoso horn player from London, England. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music from 1974 to 1976, leaving to take up the position of Principal Horn with the Antwerp Philharmonic Orchestra .

#9019

Chris Fuller

#119233

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (44 years)

Christopher Elwin Fuller is an American film director, writer, producer, editor, actor and entrepreneur. His films have been compared to the early, avant-garde works of Gus Van Sant, Harmony Korine and Robert Bresson, though his peers consider him a rarity in that his films are entirely unique.

#9020

Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph

#170896

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph is a South African composer, pianist and teacher. She was the first woman in South Africa to obtain a doctorate in composition. She arranged the composition of the South African national anthem and also wrote its final verse.

#9021

Lyndon Watts

#144487

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Lyndon Jeffrey Frank Watts is an Australian bassoonist. He is principal bassoonist of the Münchner Philharmoniker and an academic teacher. Professional career Watts studied the bassoon from 1988 and completed his senior school education at Newington College in 1993. He collaborated with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra from 1992 to 1993, winning prizes at Australian competitions. From 1994 he studied at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München with Eberhard Marschall and, in 2000, finished his master's degree with distinction.

#9022

Valery Klimov

#172034

Overall Influence

1931 - 2022 (91 years)

Valery Klimov was a Russian violinist. Biography Klimov was born in October 16, 1931 Kyiv . He began to study music under the guidance of his father - conductor and teacher Alexander Ignatievich Klimov. From the age of 7 he studied at the Odessa Music Boarding School for Gifted Children with Pyotr Stolyarsky . Starting in 1945, he studied with B.Z. Mordkovich. In 1949 he performed public concerts featuring repertoire by Alexander Glazunov, W.A. Mozart and Felix Mendelssohn. There he met David Oistrakh whom he studied with at the Moscow Conservatory.

#9023

Tanis S'eiltin

#171447

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Tanis Maria S'eiltin is a Tlingit installation artist, painter, printmaker, and sculptor. Early life and career S'eiltin was born into a family of artists. She learned from her mother, who weaved Chilkat robes and sewed skins into garments. As a child, she often visited Tlingit relatives in Haines, Alaska.

#9024

Włodzimierz Zakrzewski

#129795

Overall Influence

1916 - 1992 (76 years)

Włodzimierz Zakrzewski was a Polish painter, graphician and poster artist. He was a professor of Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, founder and director of Front Poster Studio of Ludowe Wojsko Polskie , member of the Group of Realists .

#9025

Karl Engel

#162895

Overall Influence

1923 - 2006 (83 years)

Karl Engel was a Swiss pianist. In 1952 Engel was awarded the second prize at the Queen Elisabeth competition. Throughout his concert career, he cultivated the art song repertory and worked extensively on works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven and Robert Schumann. He also held a professorship at Musikhochschule Hannover for three decades.

#9026

Susan Yelavich

#108412

Overall Influence

Susan Yelavich is a design scholar, critic, curator and professor emerita of design studies at Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York City. Career Academic Yelavich was director of the MA design studies program at Parsons from 2012 to 2018. She is a member of Scientific Committee for Design at the Polytechnic University of Milan; and has taught frequently in Poland under the auspices of the New School's Transregional Center for Democratic Studies in Wroclaw, the School of Form in Poznan, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, with the support of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.

#9027

Joe Cobb

#153332

Overall Influence

1916 - 2002 (86 years)

Joe Frank Cobb was an American child actor, most notable for appearing as the original "fat boy" in the Our Gang comedies from 1922 to 1929. Early life and career Born in Shawnee, Oklahoma, on November 7, 1916, Cobb auditioned for producer Hal Roach's Our Gang comedy series at the age of five in 1921. He first worked with the series in 1922, appearing in The Champeen and The Big Show .

#9028

Mark Lewis

#171945

Overall Influence

Mark Lewis is an Australian documentary film and television producer, director and writer. He is famous for his film Cane Toads: An Unnatural History and for his body of work on animals. Unlike many other producers of nature films, his films do not attempt to document the animals in question or their behaviors but rather the complex relationships between people and society and the animals they interact with.

#9029

Andreas Schmidt

#168392

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Andreas Schmidt is a German classical bass-baritone in opera and concert. Career Andreas Schmidt studied church music with his father Hartmut Schmidt and singing with Ingeborg Reichelt and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

#9030

Christian Elsner

#165145

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Christian Elsner is a German tenor in opera and concert, and an academic voice teacher at the Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe. He focused first on lied and oratorio, then entered the opera stage in roles such as Handel's Tabarco and Mozart's Pedrillo. From 2007, he also performed roles such as Wagner's Siegmund and at international opera houses and festivals.

#9031

James Curnow

#168239

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

James Curnow is a composer of music for concert bands, brass bands, vocal and instrumental solos and ensembles. Curnow has also written arrangements of music pieces such as Trumpet Voluntary. He has taught at both public schools and on college and university levels.

#9032

Neil Rolnick

#163271

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Neil Burton Rolnick is an American composer and educator living in New York City. Life Rolnick was born in Dallas, Texas, and studied English literature at Harvard University where he received a BA in 1969. He then turned to music, studying composition first at the San Francisco Conservatory in 1973–74Marshall 2001Oteri and Rolmick 2013

#9033

Roland Wiggins

#84842

Overall Influence

1932 - 2019 (87 years)

Roland Arlington Wiggins was an American music theorist and educator. His many students included John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Yusef Lateef, Sonny Fortune, Barry Harris, Archie Shepp, Buster Williams, Jimmy Owens, and Billy Taylor.

#9034

John Hill

#169089

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

John Arthur Hill is an American musical theater actor who is most well known for his role of Jason McConnell in the Off-Broadway run of Bare: A Pop Opera. He also developed a following on his former website "John Hill Online" with his videos entitled "Johnny and Kooks", comedic videos he made with his friend Katharine Leonard. The pair released a single on iTunes entitled "About You". He grew up in San Antonio, Texas and currently resides in Los Angeles, California where he is producing television programs.

#9035

Karl-Heinz Smuda

Karl-Heinz Smuda

#111931

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Karl-Heinz Smuda is a German radio journalist, media-expert, ghostwriter and major in the German Air Force. He was speaker of the NATO detachment in Siauliai and the German detachment of EUFOR RD Congo in Kinshasa/ DR Congo.

#9036

Wang Zhiliang

#128583

Overall Influence

1928 - 2023 (95 years)

Wang Zhiliang was a Chinese-Australian literary translator who had been honored by the Government of the Russian Federation. Wang rendered a great number of Russian literary works into Chinese for almost five decades, including 30 novels.

#9037

Isabel Noronha

#161689

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Isabel Helena Vieira Cordato de Noronha is a film director from Mozambique. Biography Noronha was born in 1964 in Lourenço Marques , in Mozambique, during the Portuguese colonial period. Her father was a doctor, who was born in Goa when it was under Portuguese rule, which lasted until 1961, and her mother is from Mozambique.

#9038

Zakhar Bron

#108514

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Zakhar Bron is a Russian violinist and violin pedagogue of Jewish, Polish and Romanian descent. His students have included Vadim Repin, Gwendolyn Masin, Daniel Hope, Maxim Vengerov, Vadim Gluzman, Priya Mitchell, Igor Malinovsky, Alexandre Da Costa, Denis Goldfeld, Daishin Kashimoto, Tamaki Kawakubo, Mayuko Kamio, Mayu Kishima, Soyoung Yoon, Christoph Seybold, Sayaka Shoji, Nikolai Madoyev , Hadar Rimon and David Garrett.

#9039

Robert Aldridge

#171520

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Robert Livingstone Aldridge is an American composer, professor, and current Head of Composition professor, and former Director of Music at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. He has written over eighty works for orchestra, opera, musical theater, dance, and various chamber ensembles that have been performed in the United States, Europe, and Japan. He is widely known for his opera Elmer Gantry, based on Sinclair Lewis's 1927 novel of the same name. which was completed in 2007 and won Best Engineered Album and Best Contemporary Classical Composition in the 54th Annual Gra...

#9040

Eric Miller

#116848

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Eric Miller is an American house music DJ, record producer and remixer. As E-Smoove, he worked for a number of years with Steve "Silk" Hurley and Maurice Joshua, before he hit the U.S. Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart in 1998 with "Deja Vu", which climbed to No. 16. The song reached No. 63 on the UK Singles Chart. His next U.S. dance chart entry came in 2002, when "Insatiable" hit No. 1. "Insatiable" was released under the pseudonym Thick Dick. It peaked at No. 35 in the UK. Both tracks featured lead vocals by his wife Latanza Waters.

#9041

Amit Kumar

#124842

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Amit Kumar is an Indian playback singer, actor, music composer. Kumar launched his own music production company, named Kumar Brothers Music. He predominantly worked in Bollywood and regional film songs since the 1970s, including 150 Hindi and Bengali compositions by R. D. Burman. After Burman's death in 1994, citing a lack of quality music composition, Kumar withdrew from playback singing and concentrated on live orchestra shows. In addition to singing in Hindi, has also performed in Bengali, Bhojpuri, Odia, Assamese, Marathi and Konkani. He is the eldest son of singer-actor Kishore Kumar.

#9042

Charles Earland

Charles Earland

#125829

Overall Influence

1941 - 1999 (58 years)

Charles Earland was an American jazz organist. Biography Earland was born in Philadelphia and learned to play the saxophone in high school. He played tenor with Jimmy McGriff at the age of 17 and in 1960 formed his first group. He started playing the organ after playing with Pat Martino, and joined Lou Donaldson's band from 1968 to 1969.

#9043

Adrian Moore

#177552

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Adrian Moore is an electroacoustic music composer born January 1969 in Nottingham, UK, and currently living in Sheffield, UK. He is director of the University of Sheffield Sound Studios. Biography Moore studied at the City University, London and the University of Birmingham with Jonty Harrison. His works are available from Empreintes DIGITALes

#9044

Irene B. Vogel

#175904

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Irene B. Vogel is an American linguist, specializing in phonology. She is a professor in the University of Delaware Linguistics and Cognitive Science Department, best known for her work on the phonology-syntax interface.

#9045

Jorge Mester

#132323

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Jorge Mester is a Mexican conductor of Hungarian ancestry. He has served as the artistic director for the Orquesta Filarmónica de Boca del Río, Veracruz, since it was founded in 2014. Biography He studied conducting with Jean Morel at the Juilliard School in New York City, and worked with Leonard Bernstein at the Berkshire Music Center and with Albert Wolff. In 1955 he made his debut with the National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico and in 1960 made his opera debut with Salome at the Spoleto Festival in Italy.

#9046

John Moore

#121288

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

John Moore is an Irish film director and producer whose credits include the action war film Behind Enemy Lines and A Good Day to Die Hard. Early life and education Moore was born in Dundalk, Ireland, and attended Rathmines College of Commerce, where he attained a degree in Media Arts. Upon completing his course, Moore genuinely believed that he wouldn't go on to work within the medium of film, but after a few years, that promptly changed.

#9047

Sotaro Kita

#102418

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

is a professor in the Department of Psychology at The University of Warwick. Kita's work focuses on the psycholinguistic properties of gestures accompanying speech, relations between spatial language and cognition, language development, and sound symbolism.

#9048

Raymond Renard

#163753

Overall Influence

1925 - 2020 (95 years)

Raymond Renard was a Belgian writer and linguist who earned a doctorate in philosophy from the Université libre de Bruxelles in 1954. Publications Arthur Cantillon. Sa vie, son œuvre Maurice Maeterlinck et l'Italie. Renommée et influence Points de Départ... Essais de Morale L'enseignement des langues vivantes par la méthode audio-visuelle et structuro globale de St-Cloud-Zagreb Sépharad. Le monde et la langue judéo-espagnole des Séphardim Introduction à la méthode verbo-tonale de correction phonétique Initiation phonétique à l'usage des professeurs de langues La méthodologie SGAV d'enseigneme...

#9049

Guto Puw

#165988

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Guto Pryderi Puw is a Welsh composer, university lecturer and conductor. He is considered to be one of the most prominent Welsh composers of his generation and a key figure in current Welsh music. Puw's music has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and been featured on television programmes for the BBC and S4C. He has twice been awarded the Composer's Medal at the National Eisteddfod.

#9050

Gus Johnson

#160718

Overall Influence

1913 - 2000 (87 years)

Gus Johnson was an American swing drummer in various jazz bands, born in Tyler, Texas, United States. After learning to play drums from his next-door neighbor, Johnson occasionally played professionally at the age of ten in the Lincoln Theater, and performed in various local groups, most notable McDavid's Blue Rhythm Band. Upon graduating from Booker T. Washington High School, Johnson moved to Kansas City, where he took up drumming full-time. He joined Jay McShann's Orchestra in 1938, with his music career being interrupted by his conscription into the military in 1943.

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