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,

#3201

Phil Palmer

#50228

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Philip John Palmer is a British rock sideman and session guitarist who has toured, recorded, and worked with numerous artists. He is best known for his work with Eric Clapton and Dire Straits. Biography Palmer grew up in north London. Ray and Dave Davies of The Kinks were his uncles on his mother's side.

#3202

Brian Farrell

#48511

Overall Influence

1929 - 2014 (85 years)

Bernard Brendan "Brian" Farrell was an Irish author, journalist, academic and broadcaster. He presented programmes such as Today Tonight, and Prime Time on RTÉ. Early life Born in Manchester, England to Irish parents, Farrell moved to Dublin, Ireland during the Second World War. He was educated at Coláiste Mhuire, Dublin; University College Dublin and Harvard University. He married Marie-Thérèse Dillon in April 1955 while attending Harvard.

#3203

Dušan Zbavitel

#68860

Overall Influence

1925 - 2012 (87 years)

Dušan Zbavitel was a Czech indologist. Life Dušan Zbavitel studied Indology with Professor Vincenc Lesný at Charles University in Prague in 1945–1948. After defending his CSc dissertation in Bengali literature , he started as a researcher at the Oriental Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. He remained there until being forced out for political reasons in 1971 during the period of Communist "normalization" that followed the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. After 1971, he worked as a freelance translator, and in 1978 he started as a teacher of Sanskrit and Bengali at the School of Languages in Prague.

#3204

John Williams

#61233

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

John Christopher Williams is an Australian virtuosic classical guitarist renowned for his ensemble playing as well as his interpretation and promotion of the modern classical guitar repertoire. In 1973, he shared a Grammy Award in the Best Chamber Music Performance category with fellow guitarist Julian Bream for Together . Guitar historian Graham Wade has said that "John is perhaps the most technically accomplished guitarist the world has seen."

#3205

Robert D. Borsley

#79426

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Robert D. Borsley is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Essex, UK. He studied at the University College of North Wales and the University of Edinburgh, where he did his Ph.D. He worked at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, University College London, the IBM UK Scientific Centre in Winchester and University College Dublin, before becoming a lecturer in linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor in 1986. He was awarded a Personal Chair in 1997. In 2000, he moved to the University of Essex.

#3206

Kara DioGuardi

#27970

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Kara Elizabeth DioGuardi is an American songwriter, record producer, music publisher, A&R executive, and singer. She writes music primarily in the pop rock genre. DioGuardi has worked with many popular artists; sales of albums on which her songs appear exceed 160 million worldwide. DioGuardi is a 2011 NAMM Music for Life Award winner, 2009 NMPA Songwriter Icon Award winner, 2007 BMI Pop Songwriter of the Year, and has received 20 BMI Awards for co-writing the most performed songs on the radio.

#3207

Gillian Weir

#72090

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Dame Gillian Constance Weir is a New Zealand-British organist. Biography Weir was born in Martinborough, New Zealand, on 17 January 1941. Her parents were Clarice Mildred Foy and Cecil Alexander Weir. She received her schooling at Queen's Park School, Wanganui Intermediate, and Wanganui Girls' College. When she was 19, she was a co-winner of the Auckland Star Piano Competition, playing Mozart. A year later she won a scholarship of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music in London. There, she studied with the concert pianist Cyril Smith and the renowned organist Ralph Downes, and in her second year won the prestigious St.

#3208

Gennady Rozhdestvensky

#53915

Overall Influence

1931 - 2018 (87 years)

Gennady Nikolayevich Rozhdestvensky, CBE was a Soviet and Russian conductor. Biography Gennady Rozhdestvensky was born in Moscow. His parents were the noted conductor and pedagogue Nikolai Anosov and soprano Natalya Rozhdestvenskaya. His given name was Gennady Nikolayevich Anosov, but he adopted his mother's maiden name in its masculine form for his professional career so as to avoid the appearance of nepotism. His younger brother, the painter P.N. Anosov, retained their father's name.

#3209

Elizabeth Jane Lloyd

#71954

Overall Influence

1928 - 1995 (67 years)

Elizabeth Jane Lloyd was a British artist and teacher. As an artist she worked in oils and watercolours, produced murals and also painted film sets. Biography Lloyd was born in London to a well-connected artistic family, her mother was a painter and several relatives were architects, including her grandfather, William Curtis Green. Lloyd attended Queen Anne's School in Caversham and began studying painting at the Chelsea School of Art in 1946. She then studied mural design at the Royal College of Art, RCA, from 1949 to 1952. Before she had even graduated from the RCA Lloyd completed several p...

#3210

Dal Yong Jin

#63146

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Dal Yong Jin is a media studies scholar. He is Distinguished SFU Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada where his research explores digital platforms, digital games, media history, political economy of communication, globalization and trans-nationalization, the Korean Wave, and science journalism. He has published more than 30 books and penned more than 200 journal articles, book chapters, and book reviews. Jin has delivered numerous keynote speeches, conference presentations, invited lectures, and media interviews on subjects such as digital platforms, video games, globalization, transnational culture, and the Korean Wave.

#3211

John Neville

#63095

Overall Influence

1925 - 2011 (86 years)

John Reginald Neville, CM, OBE was an English theatre and film actor who moved to Canada in 1972. He enjoyed a resurgence of international attention in the 1980s as a result of his starring role in Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen .

#3212

Jordi Graupera

#50316

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Jordi Graupera i Garcia-Milà is a Catalan philosopher. He works on self-determination and international relations. He works as a philosophy professor at the Ramon Llull University in Barcelona, teaching on globalization, cultural traditions, and creative thinking. He also works teaching history of social thought at the Open University of Catalonia.

#3213

John Wilson

#46821

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

John Richard Wilson is a British journalist and broadcaster. He is the son of former professional footballer and television sports presenter Bob Wilson. Life and career John Wilson was born in London in 1965. He attended Chancellor's School in Hertfordshire and studied at the then Dorset Institute of Higher Education, gaining a BA in English and Media awarded by the University of Southampton in 1988. He worked as a reporter on local newspapers in north London before beginning his radio career in 1990, presenting and reporting for the Radio 5 magazine show The Mix. He has presented numerous p...

#3214

Clinton LeSueur

#49483

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Clinton Bernard LeSueur is an American journalist and political aide. He has worked in Mississippi and Washington, D.C., and was the unsuccessful Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in Mississippi's 2nd congressional district in 2002 and 2004.

#3215

Alan Clayson

#60087

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Alan Clayson is an English singer-songwriter, author and music journalist. He gained popularity in the late 1970s as leader of the band Clayson and the Argonauts. In addition to contributing to publications such as Record Collector, Mojo and Folk Roots, he subsequently established himself as a prolific writer of music biographies. Among his many books are Backbeat, which details the Beatles' early career in Germany, Ringo Starr: Straight Man or Joker?, and biographies of Jacques Brel, the Yardbirds, Serge Gainsbourg and Edgard Varèse. Clayson has also contributed to The Guardian, The Sunday T...

#3216

Marvin Herzog

#72031

Overall Influence

1927 - 2013 (86 years)

Marvin I. Herzog was a Yiddish language Professor at Columbia University. Biography Marvin I. Herzog received his Ph.D. from Columbia under Uriel Weinreich. In 1967, he became the director, and then the editor-in-chief, of the Yiddish Atlas Project at Columbia University, which publishes, in conjunction with YIVO, The Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry .

#3217

Charles Strouse

Charles Strouse

#47801

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (98 years)

Charles Strouse is an American composer and lyricist best known for writing the music to such Broadway musicals as Bye Bye Birdie, Applause, and Annie. Life and career Strouse was born in New York City, to Jewish parents, Ethel and Ira Strouse, who worked in the tobacco business. A graduate of the Eastman School of Music, he studied under Arthur Berger, David Diamond, Aaron Copland and Nadia Boulanger.

#3218

Ayo Bamgbose

#30486

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Ayọ̀ Bámgbóṣé is an academic linguist, the first professor of Linguistics in Nigeria. He has made contributions to education and linguistics, achieving recognition in form of honours and election to offices in professional bodies.

#3219

William H. Dutton

William H. Dutton

#37093

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

William H. Dutton is former Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, Professor of Internet Studies, University of Oxford, and Fellow of Balliol College. He also has a chair in Michigan State University's Department of Media and Information, where he is Quello Professor of Media and Information Policy. He was previously a Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, which he joined in 1980, where he was elected President of the Faculty.

#3220

Tīmoti Kāretu

#46598

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Sir Tīmoti Samuel Kāretu is a New Zealand academic of Māori language and performing arts. He served as the inaugural head of the Department of Māori at the University of Waikato, and rose to the rank of professor. He was the first Māori language commissioner, between 1987 and 1999, and then was executive director of Te Kohanga Reo National Trust from 1993 until 2003. In 2003, he was closely involved in the foundation of Te Panekiretanga o te Reo, the Institute of Excellence in Māori Language, and served as its executive director. He is fluent in Māori, English, French and German.

#3221

Claire Hardaker

#78074

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Claire Hardaker is a British linguist. She is senior lecturer at the Department of Linguistics and English Language of Lancaster University, United Kingdom. Her research involves forensic linguistics and corpus linguistics. Her research focuses on deceptive, manipulative, and aggressive language in a range of online data. She has investigated behaviours ranging from trolling and disinformation to human trafficking and online scams. Her research typically uses corpus linguistic methods to approach forensic linguistic analyses.

#3222

Tony Trew

#83951

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Tony Trew is a South African politician and discourse analyst. He was one of the editors of the seminal book Language and control , which helped establish critical linguistics as an academic field.

#3223

Antonín Bartoněk

#54760

Overall Influence

1926 - 2016 (90 years)

Antonín Bartoněk was a Czech classical philologist and a specialist in Mycenaean studies. Bartoněk studied classical philology at the Masaryk University in Brno. Since his graduation in 1952, he worked at this university, first as an assistant, since 1962 as a lecturer, since 1968 as a professor. Since 1990 he has also taught as a professor at the Palacký University in Olomouc. At the Universities of Vienna, Heidelberg, Graz, Amsterdam and Cambridge, he took on long-term visiting professorships.

#3224

Jon Hendricks

#52916

Overall Influence

1921 - 2017 (96 years)

John Carl Hendricks , known professionally as Jon Hendricks, was an American jazz lyricist and singer. He is one of the originators of vocalese, which adds lyrics to existing instrumental songs and replaces many instruments with vocalists, such as the big-band arrangements of Duke Ellington and Count Basie. He is considered one of the best practitioners of scat singing, which involves vocal jazz soloing. Jazz critic and historian Leonard Feather called him the "Poet Laureate of Jazz", while Time dubbed him the "James Joyce of Jive". Al Jarreau called him "pound-for-pound the best jazz singer o...

#3225

Bardhyl Demiraj

#81908

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Bardhyl Demiraj is an Albanian linguist and Albanologist. He is considered one of the leading experts in the study of Albanian etymology. Biography Bardhyl Demiraj was born on 29 March 1958 in Tirana, the son of linguist Shaban Demiraj. He studied Albanian language and literature at the University of Tirana from 1977 to 1981, earning a master's degree in 1982. From 1984 to 1986, he specialized in Indo-European, Romanian and Balkan linguistics at the University of Vienna. From 1991 to 1993, he did postgraduate research at the University of Bonn, earning a doctorate in Tirana in 1994 after a di...

#3226

José van Dam

#79797

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Joseph, Baron Van Damme , known as José van Dam, is a Belgian bass-baritone. At the age of 17, he entered the Brussels Royal Conservatory and studied with Frederic Anspach. A year later, he graduated with diplomas and first prizes in voice and opera performance. He made his opera début as the music teacher Don Basilio in Gioacchino Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia at the Paris Opera in 1961, and remained in the company until 1965, when he sang his first major role, Escamillo from Bizet's Carmen. He then sang for two seasons at Geneva, La Scala, Covent Garden, and in Paris. At Geneva, Van Dam sang in the première of Milhaud's La mère coupable in 1966.

#3227

Antonio Pappano

#63694

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Sir Antonio Pappano is an English-Italian conductor and pianist. He is currently music director of the Royal Opera House and of the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. He is scheduled to become chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra in 2024.

#3228

Paul Ryan

#69145

Overall Influence

1943 - 2013 (70 years)

Paul Louis Ryan was an American video artist and communications theorist. His video art encompassed water studies and demonstrations of what Ryan called “a yoga of relationships” or Threeing, culminating in his theoretical development of the Peircean relational circuit and Earthscore notational system.

#3229

Whitney "Strix" Beltrán

#59721

Overall Influence

Whitney "Strix" Beltrán is a narrative designer and Project Narrative Director at Hidden Path Entertainment. Her writing and design career includes the indie game Bluebeard's Bride. She also founded the advocacy initiative Gaming as Other to promote inclusivity in the gaming community.

#3230

Warren M. Washington

Warren M. Washington

#21437

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Warren Morton Washington is an American atmospheric scientist, a former chair of the National Science Board, and currently a Distinguished Scholar at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

#3231

Adam Hochberg

#63337

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Adam Hochberg is a radio correspondent for National Public Radio based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Hochberg reports on a broad range of issues in the Southeast. Since he joined NPR in 1995, Hochberg has traveled the region extensively, reporting on its changing economy, demographics, culture, and politics. He covered the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, followed candidates in three Presidential elections, and reported on more than a dozen hurricanes. He's also appeared as a guest on the popular NPR program Wait Wait… Don't Tell Me!.

#3232

Jon Ronson

#28898

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Jon Ronson is a British-American journalist, author, and filmmaker whose works include Them: Adventures with Extremists , The Men Who Stare at Goats , and The Psychopath Test . He has been described as a gonzo journalist, becoming a faux-naïf character in his stories. He produces informal but sceptical investigations of controversial fringe politics and science. He has published nine books and his work has appeared in publications such as The Guardian, City Life and Time Out. He has made several BBC Television documentary films and two documentary series for Channel 4.

#3233

Harmony Korine

#43750

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Harmony Korine is an American filmmaker, actor, photographer, artist, and author. His methods feature an erratic, loose and transgressive aesthetic, exploring taboo themes and incorporating experimental techniques, and works with art, music, fashion and advertising.

#3234

Jason Reynolds

#25045

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (43 years)

Jason Reynolds is an American author of novels and poetry for young adult and middle-grade audience. Born in Washington, D.C., and raised in neighboring Oxon Hill, Maryland, Reynolds found inspiration in rap and had an early focus on poetry, publishing several poetry collections before his first novel in 2014, When I Was The Greatest, which won the John Steptoe Award for New Talent.

#3235

Sorin Stati

#80483

Overall Influence

1932 - 2008 (76 years)

Sorin Stati was a Romanian linguist, born in Bucharest on 1 February 1931, and died in Paris in 2008. He held for a number of years the chair of linguistics at the University of Bucharest; then, due to a conflict with the official regime, which imposed a brutal control over academics, he moved to Italy where he obtained temporary lectureships at the University of Padova and University of Venice. He then obtained the chair of linguistics at the University of Messina and then migrated to the University of Bologna where he held the chair of linguistics.

#3236

Mike Joyce

#64527

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Michael Adrian Paul Joyce is an English drummer. He is best known for being the drummer for the Smiths from October 1982 to 1987. Career While the Smiths provided Joyce with his first taste of success, he had previously drummed for Manchester band The Hoax and Northern Irish punk rock group Victim. Immediately after the break-up of the band in 1987, Joyce and Smiths bassist Andy Rourke played with Sinéad O'Connor. They, along with Craig Gannon, also provided the rhythm section for two singles by Smiths' singer Morrissey – "Interesting Drug" and "The Last of the Famous International Playboys" and their B-sides.

#3237

Atsuhiko Yoshida

#34126

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Atsuhiko Yoshida is a Japanese classical scholar best known for his research on parallels between Indo-European and Japanese mythology. Biography Atsuhiko Yoshida was born on 22 December 1934. He received his degrees in classical studies at Seikei University and the University of Tokyo. Yoshida subsequently researched at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, where he came under the influence of Georges Dumézil. He subsequently worked as a visiting lecturer at the University of Geneva and the University of California, Los Angeles. Returning to Japan, Yoshida became a professor at Seikei University.

#3238

Robert Zelnick

#71478

Overall Influence

1940 - 2019 (79 years)

Carl Robert Zelnick was an American journalist, author and professor of journalism at the Boston University College of Communication, and winner of two Emmy Awards and two Gavel Awards. Career Early in his career, Zelnick worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, and the Anchorage Daily News, and was executive editor of the Frost–Nixon interviews.

#3239

James Moore

#26258

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

James Moore is a historian of science at the Open University and the University of Cambridge and visiting scholar at Harvard University, is noted as the author of several biographies of Charles Darwin. As a Cambridge research scholar and a member of the teaching staff at the Open University, he has studied and written about Darwin since the 1970s, co-authoring with Adrian Desmond the major biography Darwin, and also writing The Darwin Legend, The Post-Darwinian Controversies, and many articles and reviews.

#3240

Peter Laufer

#40500

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Peter David Laufer is an independent American journalist, broadcaster and documentary filmmaker working in traditional and new media. He is the James Wallace Chair in Journalism at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication.

#3241

Anne Sofie von Otter

#65813

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Anne Sofie von Otter is a Swedish mezzo-soprano. Her repertoire encompasses lieder, operas, oratorios and also rock and pop songs. Early life Von Otter was born in Stockholm, Sweden. Her father was Göran von Otter, a Swedish diplomat in Berlin during World War II. She grew up in Bonn, London and Stockholm. She studied in Stockholm and at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, where her teachers included Vera Rózsa. In 1982, she won second prize in the ARD International Music Competition.

#3242

Peter Kalischer

#72129

Overall Influence

1915 - 1991 (76 years)

Peter Kalischer was an American journalist best known for his reporting of the early stages of the Vietnam War in the 1960s as a television correspondent for CBS News. Career Kalischer covered the Korean War, writing multiple articles about it.

#3243

Wreckless Eric

#52277

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Eric Goulden , known as Wreckless Eric, is an English rock and new wave singer-songwriter, best known for his 1977 single "Whole Wide World" on Stiff Records. More than two decades after its release, the song was included in Mojo magazine's list of the best punk rock singles of all time. It was also acclaimed as one of the "top 40 singles of the alternative era 1975–2000".

#3244

Gwen Verdon

#41035

Overall Influence

1925 - 2000 (75 years)

Gwyneth Evelyn "Gwen" Verdon was an American actress and dancer. She won four Tony Awards for her musical comedy performances, and she served as an uncredited choreographer's assistant and specialty dance coach for theater and film. Verdon was a critically acclaimed performer on Broadway in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, having originated many roles in musicals, including Lola in Damn Yankees, the title character in Sweet Charity and Roxie Hart in Chicago.

#3245

Jimmy Heath

#52462

Overall Influence

1926 - 2020 (94 years)

James Edward Heath , nicknamed Little Bird, was an American jazz saxophonist, composer, arranger, and big band leader. He was the brother of bassist Percy Heath and drummer Albert Heath. Biography Heath was born in Philadelphia on October 25, 1926. His father, an auto mechanic, played the clarinet, performing on the weekends. His mother sang in a church choir. The family frequently played recordings of big band jazz groups around the house. Heath's sister was a pianist, while his brothers were bassist Percy Heath and drummer Albert Heath .

#3246

Bernard Willson

#45647

Overall Influence

1919 - 1994 (75 years)

Harold Bernard Willson was a British linguist and noted academic, who during the Second World War was the first person to decrypt the Italian Navy Hagelin C-38 code machine. He was the father of television presenter and motoring journalist Quentin Willson.

#3247

Georgia M. Green

#77337

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Georgia M. Green is an American linguist and academic. She is an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research has focused on pragmatics, speaker intention, word order and meaning. She has been an advisory editor for several linguistics journals or publishers and she serves on the usage committee for the American Heritage Dictionary.

#3248

Jill Nelson

#37520

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Jill Nelson is a prominent African-American journalist and novelist. She has written several books, including the autobiographical Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience, which won an American Book Award. She was Professor of Journalism at the City College of New York from 1998 to 2003.

#3249

Susan King

#71879

Overall Influence

Susan King is an American journalist and currently the Dean and John Thomas Kerr Distinguished Professor at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Education King received a bachelor's degree in English from Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York in 1969. King then received a master's degree in mass communications from the Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut in 1973, where she is currently a member of the Board of Trustees.

#3250

Paul Schmidt

#61068

Overall Influence

1934 - 1999 (65 years)

Paul Francis Schmidt was an American translator, poet, playwright, and essayist. Biography He graduated from Nashua High School in 1951, Colgate University in 1955, and studied at Harvard University.

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