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,

#3251

Toby Saks

#66934

Overall Influence

1942 - 2013 (71 years)

Toby Saks was an American cellist, the founder of the Seattle Chamber Music Society and a member of the New York Philharmonic. Music history Born in New York City to an immigrant family, Saks began music lessons at the age of five, first on the piano and then, at age nine, on the cello. She studied at New York's High School of Performing Arts and later at the Juilliard School with Leonard Rose. She gave prize-winning performances at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow and the Casals Competition in Israel. In 1964, she won a Young Concert Artists's award.

#3252

Burton Pike

#31004

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

Burton Pike was an American translator of Robert Musil, as well as a distinguished professor emeritus of comparative literature and Germanic languages and literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. Life and career Burton Pike was born on June 12, 1930. He did his undergraduate studies at Haverford College and received his PhD from Harvard University. He taught at the University of Hamburg, Cornell University, and Queens College and Hunter College of the City University of New York. He was also a visiting professor at Yale University.

#3253

Jason DeRose

#60321

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Jason DeRose is the Western Bureau Chief for National Public Radio News, based at NPR's west coast studios in Culver City, California. He edits news coverage by staff correspondents and from member station reporters and freelancers on the West Coast, as well as Alaska and Hawaii. Additionally, he oversees NPR's coverage of religion, LGBTQ+ rights, and Native/Indigenous rights.

#3254

Maxwell E. Mccombs

#98661

Overall Influence

#3255

Roy Ward Baker

#69105

Overall Influence

1916 - 2010 (94 years)

Roy Ward Baker was an English film director. He was known professionally as Roy Baker until 1967, when he adopted Roy Ward Baker as his screen credit. Early life Baker was born in Hornsey, London, where his father was a Billingsgate wholesale fish merchant. He was educated at a Lycée in Rouen, France, and at the City of London School.

#3256

Bill Irwin

#49009

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

William Mills Irwin is an American actor, clown, and comedian. He began as a vaudeville-style stage performer and has been noted for his contribution to the renaissance of American circus during the 1970s. He has made a number of appearances on film and television, and he won a Tony Award for his role in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. He is also known as Mr. Noodle on the Sesame Street segment Elmo's World, and he appeared in the Sesame Street film short Does Air Move Things?. He has regularly appeared as Dr. Peter Lindstrom on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and had a recurring role as "The Dick & Jane Killer" on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

#3257

Apoorva Mandavilli

#62162

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Apoorva Mandavilli is an American investigative journalist whose work has focused on medical science. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she joined The New York Times as a health and science writer. In the spring of 2019, she was writer-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin, where she joined a panel discussion on vaccine refusal while writing about containing a measles outbreak in Lowell, Massachusetts.

#3258

Steve Lacy

#66063

Overall Influence

1934 - 2004 (70 years)

Steve Lacy was an American jazz saxophonist and composer recognized as one of the important players of soprano saxophone. Coming to prominence in the 1950s as a progressive dixieland musician, Lacy went on to a long and prolific career. He worked extensively in experimental jazz and to a lesser extent in free improvisation, but Lacy's music was typically melodic and tightly-structured. Lacy also became a highly distinctive composer, with compositions often built out of little more than a single questioning phrase, repeated several times.

#3259

Alan White

#72659

Overall Influence

1924 - Present (102 years)

Alan White was an English novelist and journalist. He used his experiences as a Second World War commando leader in his writings. He also wrote using the names "Alec Haig", "James Fraser" and "Alec Whitney". Under the pseudonym "Joe Balham" he wrote seven novels based on The Sweeney television series. His novel The Long Day's Dying was made into a 1968 film directed by Peter Collinson. White wrote mysteries, as well as war and adventure novels. White died in Salisbury, Wiltshire in February 2003.

#3260

Bill Price

#58862

Overall Influence

1943 - 2016 (73 years)

Bill Price was an English record producer and audio engineer who worked with the Clash, the Sex Pistols, Guns N' Roses, Sparks, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Nymphs, the Waterboys, Mott the Hoople and Simon Townshend . He was chief engineer on the first three solo studio albums by Pete Townshend: Empty Glass , All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes and White City: A Novel .

#3261

Roman Coppola

#57596

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Roman François Coppola is an American director, screenwriter, producer. He is the son of Francis Ford Coppola and Eleanor Coppola. Coppola serves as president of the San Francisco-based film company American Zoetrope. He is also the founder and owner of The Directors Bureau, a commercial and music video production company.

#3262

Stephen Jones

#65672

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Stephen Jones is a Welsh journalist and the rugby correspondent for The Sunday Times since the 1970s. He covers rugby for The Times as well. He also contributes an occasional report on others sports like cricket, football, and golf, in addition to his main topic of rugby.

#3263

Frank Keating

#72660

Overall Influence

1937 - 2013 (76 years)

Francis Vincent Keating was an English sports journalist and author, who was best known for his regular columns in The Guardian newspaper. Keating was described as "a giant of sports journalism" by journalist Phil Shaw in his obituary for The Independent newspaper.

#3264

Milan Moguš

#65845

Overall Influence

1927 - 2017 (90 years)

Milan Moguš was a Croatian linguist and academician. Biography He was born in Senj, where he finished primary school and high school. In the academic year 1948/49 he attended in Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb and he graduated in 1953. In the same year he was elected as assistant to the academy's Institute for Language, and in 1956 he performed the same duties at the Faculty of Philosophy at University in Zagreb in the Department for Dialectology and History of Croatian. From 1961 until 1963 he was a lecturer in Croatian at University of Warsaw. He got his doctorate of philology sciences in 1962 at University in Zagreb.

#3265

Evan Parker

#57822

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Evan Shaw Parker is a British tenor and soprano saxophone player who plays free improvisation. Recording and performing prolifically with many collaborators, Parker was a pivotal figure in the development of European free jazz and free improvisation. He has pioneered or substantially expanded an array of extended techniques. Critic Ron Wynn describes Parker as "among Europe's most innovative and intriguing saxophonists...his solo sax work isn't for the squeamish."

#3266

Michael Branch

#71327

Overall Influence

1940 - 2019 (79 years)

Michael Arthur Branch, CMG was a British linguist and academic administrator. Studies Branch studied Hungarian, Swedish and Finnish at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, and completed his Bachelor of Arts degree, and then spent four years in Helsinki doing research, after which completed his doctorate at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies. He wrote his dissertation on Anders Johan Sjögren, entitled A. J. Sjögren — Studies of the North, which was published in Finland by the Finno-Ugrian Society in 1973. He showed that Sjögren’s work created ...

#3267

Jackie Cooper

#45022

Overall Influence

1922 - 2011 (89 years)

John Cooper Jr. was an American actor and director. Known as Jackie Cooper, he began his career performing in film as a child, and successfully transitioned to adult roles and directing in both film and television. At age nine, he became the only child and youngest person nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor, for the 1931 film Skippy. He was a featured member of the Our Gang ensemble in 1929–1931, starred in the television series The People's Choice and Hennesey , and played journalist Perry White in the 1978–1987 Superman films.

#3268

Jason Chervokas

#51270

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Jason Chervokas is an American journalist, educator, writer, commentator, entrepreneur and musician. Some of his writing focuses on cultural issues. Education Chervokas obtained his degree from Columbia College and the Columbia School of Journalism.

#3269

Roger Simon

#48842

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Roger Mitchell Simon is a writer and commentator, the chief political columnist of Politico and a New York Times best-selling author. He has won more than three dozen first-place awards for journalism, and is the only person to win twice the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award for commentary. His book on the 1996 presidential race, Show Time, became a New York Times best-seller.

#3270

Dave Stewart

#65670

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

David Lloyd Stewart is an English keyboardist and composer known for his work with the progressive rock bands Uriel, Egg, Khan, Hatfield and the North, National Health, and Bruford. Stewart is the author of two books on music theory and wrote a music column for Keyboard magazine for thirteen years. He has also composed music for TV, film and radio, much of it for Victor Lewis-Smith's ARTV production company. He has worked with singer Barbara Gaskin since 1981.

#3271

Jonathan Dimbleby

Jonathan Dimbleby

#49331

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Jonathan Dimbleby is a British presenter of current affairs and political radio and television programmes, author and historian. He is the son of Richard Dimbleby and younger brother of television presenter David Dimbleby.

#3272

Ray Evans

#56230

Overall Influence

1915 - 2007 (92 years)

Raymond Bernard Evans was an American songwriter. He was a partner in a composing and song-writing duo with Jay Livingston, known for the songs they composed for films. Evans wrote the lyrics and Livingston wrote the music.

#3273

John W. Du Bois

#79266

Overall Influence

John W Du Bois is a professor of linguistics at University of California, Santa Barbara. He is specialised in discourse and grammar, sociocultural linguistics, linguistic anthropology, spoken corpus linguistics, Mayan linguistics, English linguistics, and evolutionary linguistics.

#3274

Caroline Heycock

#95523

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Caroline Heycock is a Scottish syntactician and professor of linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. Heycock received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991, with a dissertation entitled Layers of predication: The non-lexical syntax of clauses.

#3275

Bruno della Chiesa

#49312

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Bruno della Chiesa is a linguist of Italian, French and German descent, who describes himself as an "engaged cosmopolitan". He teaches at Harvard University and is considered one of the main founders of educational neuroscience, is known to have coined the terms "neuromyth" and "neuro-hijacking" and has established theories on the "motivational vortex" and on the “tesseracts in the brain” . He also created the international science fiction festival Utopiales.

#3276

Elizabeth McGovern

Elizabeth McGovern

#53126

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Elizabeth Lee McGovern is a British-American actress. She has received many awards, including a Screen Actors Guild Award, three Golden Globe Award nominations, and one Academy Award nomination. Born in Evanston, Illinois, McGovern spent most of her early life in Los Angeles. After attending the American Conservatory Theater and the Juilliard School, she made her feature film debut in Ordinary People . For her role as Evelyn Nesbit in the musical film Ragtime , she received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She subsequently had lead roles in a number of major stu...

#3277

Helmut Krcmar

#15543

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Helmut Krcmar holds the Chair for Information Systems in the Department of Informatics at the Technical University of Munich , Germany since 2002 with a joint appointment to TUM School of Management. Krcmar served as Dean of the Faculty of Informatics from 10/2010 until 09/2013. In July 2018 he was elected Vice Dean TUM School of Management and Founding Dean TUM Campus Heilbronn. He is academic director of the SAP University Competence Center @ TUM. Krcmar has supervised more than 100 Ph.D. students. He is also speaker of the directory board of Fortiss GmbH, Research Institute of the Free Sta...

#3278

Jonathan Lynn

#43837

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Jonathan Lynn is an English stage and film director, producer, writer, and actor. He directed the comedy films Clue, Nuns on the Run, My Cousin Vinny, and The Whole Nine Yards. He also co-created and co-wrote the television series Yes Minister.

#3279

Elizabeth Cowper

#51953

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Elizabeth Cowper is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Toronto. Career She received her PhD from Brown University in 1976. She then took up a position at the University of Toronto, where she remained until she retired from teaching and administration in June 2014. A Workshop on Contrast in Syntax was organized in her honor upon her retirement.

#3280

Ralph Thomas

#68822

Overall Influence

1915 - 2001 (86 years)

Ralph Philip Thomas MC was an English film director. He is perhaps best remembered for directing the Doctor series of films. His brother, Gerald Thomas, was also a film director, probably best remembered for the Carry On... film series, and his son is the Academy Award-winning film producer, Jeremy Thomas.

#3281

Urmas Sutrop

#59977

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Urmas Sutrop is an Estonian linguist. He graduated from high school in 1974 and in 1984 from the University of Tartu with a biology degree. His thesis was titled "Ardisia crispa A. DC. lehe baktersõlme siseste taimerakkude peenehitus." Near fifteen years after his first dissertation, he was awarded a PhD in philosophy by the University of Konstanz.

#3282

Peggy Speas

#83366

Overall Influence

Margaret "Peggy" Speas is a linguist who works on syntax, specifically evidentiality and Navajo. She is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Speas received her PhD in Linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986. Speas's work focuses on differences between elicitation, documentation and linguistic data analysis on North American Native Languages. She also works with preservation of Navajo and is a founding member of the Navajo Language Academy.

#3283

Atticus Ross

#30570

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Atticus Matthew Cowper Ross is an English musician, record producer, composer, and audio engineer. Along with Trent Reznor, he won the Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Social Network in 2010. In 2013, the pair won a Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media for their soundtrack to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In 2021, alongside Jon Batiste, they won the Golden Globe and Academy Award for the soundtrack for Pixar's Soul.

#3284

Kirk Douglas

#47874

Overall Influence

1916 - 2020 (104 years)

Kirk Douglas was an American actor and filmmaker. After an impoverished childhood, he made his film debut in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers with Barbara Stanwyck. Douglas soon developed into a leading box-office star throughout the 1950s, known for serious dramas, including westerns and war films. During his career, he appeared in more than 90 films and was known for his explosive acting style. He was named by the American Film Institute the 17th-greatest male star of Classic Hollywood cinema.

#3285

Roger Williams

#40725

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Roger Bevan Williams, MBE is a Welsh organist and musicologist. In 2010, he retired as Master of Ceremonial Music and Organist to the University of Aberdeen, a music department in which he had been a member for over 30 years.

#3286

Geoff Collinson

#98770

Overall Influence

Geoff Collinson is an Australian horn player and was the head of the brass department at the University of Melbourne. He was the principal horn with the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra from 1990 until 2000; he was also guest principal horn of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Queensland Symphony Orchestra, and the Australian Chamber Orchestra. He is the founder and one of the directors of the Melbourne International Festival of Brass.

#3287

María Olivia Mönckeberg

María Olivia Mönckeberg

#68195

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

María Olivia Mönckeberg Pardo is a Chilean journalist, essayist, and academic. She received the National Prize for Journalism in 2009. She is a full professor at the University of Chile and has been the director of its since 2010. Her work has focused on investigative journalism, and she has written several books which caused great impact at the time of their publication.

#3288

John Bundrick

#69431

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

John Douglas "Rabbit" Bundrick is an American keyboardist. He is best known for his work with the rock band The Who and associations with others including Eric Burdon, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Roger Waters, Free and Crawler. Bundrick is noted as the principal musician for the cult film The Rocky Horror Picture Show. In the mid-1970s, he was a member of the short-lived group Mallard, formed by ex-members of Captain Beefheart's Magic Band. He is also known as a composer and has recorded solo albums. He was also a member of the Texas group Blackwell, who had a hit single in 1969 entitled "Won...

#3289

Derek Thompson

#42325

Overall Influence

1986 - Present (40 years)

Derek Kahn Thompson is a self-described "progressive" American podcaster and journalist. He is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Hit Makers: How to Succeed in an Age of Distraction. Early life Derek Thompson was born in McLean, Virginia, the son of Robert Thompson and Petra Kahn, both deceased. Before graduating from high school, he appeared in several theatrical productions at the Folger Shakespeare Theater and the Shakespeare Theater. After attending the Potomac School, Thompson graduated from Northwestern University in 2008.

#3290

Christian S. Jensen

#96714

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Christian S. Jensen is a Danish computer scientist who is a professor at Aalborg University. Jensen's research focuses on temporal, spatial, spatio-temporal, geo-textual, and multidimensional data; data management, analytics, machine learning; data models, query languages, database design, query and update processing and optimization, and indexing.

#3291

Alex Haley

#37550

Overall Influence

1921 - 1992 (71 years)

Alexander Murray Palmer Haley was an American writer and the author of the 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family. ABC adapted the book as a television miniseries of the same name and aired it in 1977 to a record-breaking audience of 130 million viewers. In the United States, the book and miniseries raised the public awareness of black American history and inspired a broad interest in genealogy and family history.

#3292

Tobe Hooper

#39851

Overall Influence

1943 - 2017 (74 years)

Willard Tobe Hooper was an American filmmaker, best known for his work in the horror genre. The British Film Institute cited Hooper as one of the most influential horror filmmakers of all time. Born in Austin, Texas, Hooper's feature film debut was the independent Eggshells , which he co-wrote with Kim Henkel. The two reunited to co-write The Texas Chain Saw Massacre , which Hooper also directed. The film went on to become a classic of the genre, and was described in 2010 by The Guardian as "one of the most influential films ever made." Hooper subsequently directed the horror film Eaten Alive , followed by the 1979 miniseries Salem's Lot, an adaptation of the novel by Stephen King.

#3293

Adam Kilgarriff

Adam Kilgarriff

#57527

Overall Influence

1960 - 2015 (55 years)

Adam Kilgarriff was a corpus linguist, lexicographer, and co-author of Sketch Engine. Life His parents were booksellers. He spent one year as a volunteer in Kenya 1978–1979 then began studying at Cambridge University, graduating with a first class BA degree in philosophy and engineering in 1982. His first job was as a Housing Officer for the London and Quadrant Housing Trust. At the same time he studied at the South West London College. In 1987, he left his job and started an MSc in intelligent knowledge-based systems at the University of Sussex, from where he graduated the following year, co...

#3294

Mark N. Tompkins

#98275

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Mark N. Tompkins is a Canadian-born film and theater painter and scenic artist. His matte painting career began in the U.S. in 1999, when his name appears in numerous feature films, TV and games cinematics. He is best known for his scenic design sets and scenery in "I, Robot", "Fantastic Four", "Fifty Shades of Grey", "Godzilla" and many more.

#3295

Jorge Camacho

#66880

Overall Influence

1934 - 2011 (77 years)

Jorge R. Camacho Lazo was a Cuban painter. Born in Havana in 1934, Camacho left his law studies in 1951 to dedicate himself to painting despite the fact that he never studied art. By the end of the 1940s, Camacho and his friend, Carlos M. Luis were well versed in contemporary painting. It was Carlos who introduced him to the paintings of Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy and Giorgio de Chirico. In 1953, Camacho travelled to Mexico, where he lived for a year and met his colleague José Luis Cuevas- they both investigated the sources of Mayan culture. Camacho's first major influence was the Wifredo Lam exhibit at the University of Havana in 1955.

#3296

Péter Eötvös

#56258

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Péter Eötvös is a Hungarian composer, conductor and teacher. Eötvös was born in Székelyudvarhely, Transylvania, then part of Hungary, now Romania. He studied composition in Budapest and Cologne. From 1962, he composed for film in Hungary. Eötvös played regularly with the Stockhausen Ensemble between 1968 and 1976. He was a founding member of the Oeldorf Group in 1973, continuing his association until the late 1970s. From 1979 to 1991, he was musical director and conductor of the Ensemble InterContemporain . From 1985 to 1988, he was principal guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

#3297

Jimmy Miller

#58722

Overall Influence

1942 - 1994 (52 years)

James Miller was an American record producer and musician. While he produced albums for dozens of different bands and artists, he is known primarily for his work with several key musical acts of the 1960s and 1970s.

#3298

Chris Botti

#45294

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Christopher Stephen Botti is an American trumpeter and composer. In 2013, Botti won the Grammy Award in the Best Pop Instrumental Album category, for the album Impressions. He was also nominated in 2008 for his album Italia and received three nominations in 2010 for the live album Chris Botti in Boston. Four of his albums have reached the No. 1 position on the Billboard jazz albums chart.

#3299

Paul V. Kroskrity

Paul V. Kroskrity

#73053

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Paul V. Kroskrity is an American linguistic anthropologist known primarily for his contributions to establishing and developing language ideology as a field of research. He is professor of anthropology, applied linguistics, and American Indian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the past President of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology and past Chair of the American Indian Studies program at the University of California, Los Angeles.

#3300

Geert Booij

#94876

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Geert Evert Booij is a Dutch linguist and emeritus professor of linguistics at the University of Leiden. He is credited as the creator of construction morphology. Career Booij previously taught at the Vrije Universiteit and University of Amsterdam and has been a member of the National Research Council for Humanities since 1997. He was the Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Leiden between 2005 and 2007. He is a winner of Humboldt Research Award and an Honorary Member of the Linguistic Society of America.

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