Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Communications,

#4801

Louis Black

#36718

Overall Influence

Louis Black is an American journalist and businessman who is the co-founder of The Austin Chronicle, an alternative weekly newspaper published in Austin, Texas, and was the newspaper's editor from its inception until his retirement on August 8, 2017. He has written over 600 articles in his column in that newspaper. Black is also the co-founder of the South by Southwest Festival, also located in Austin, although the festival operates separately from the Chronicle. He also is a founding partner in Toronto's North by Northeast music and film festival.

#4802

Laurel Touby

#62333

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Laurel Touby is an American journalist and investor. She is currently the Managing Director of Supernode Ventures, a venture capital firm in New York City. Touby is best known as the founder of Mediabistro, the journalism and publishing resource site that she sold to Jupitermedia in 2007 for $23 million. Following the sale of Mediabistro, Laurel began a second career as a New York City based start-up advisor and tech investor. She has also been a mentor for the tech incubator Techstars. In January 2015, she set up her own investor syndicate, Flatiron Investors, representing New York based pri...

#4803

Yuri Bashmet

#70241

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Yuri Abramovich Bashmet is a Russian conductor, violinist, and violist. Biography Yuri Bashmet was born on 24 January 1953 in Rostov-on-Don in the family of Abram Borisovich Bashmet and Maya Zinovyeva Bashmet . His paternal grandmother, Tsilya Efimovna, studied singing at the conservatory for two years in her youth. His maternal grandmother, Darya Axentyevna, interpreted native Hutsul songs.

#4804

Mark Rydell

#65297

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Mark Rydell is an American film director, producer, and actor. He has directed several Academy Award-nominated films including The Fox , The Reivers , Cinderella Liberty , The Rose , and The River . He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director for On Golden Pond .

#4805

Nicholas Maw

#86870

Overall Influence

1935 - 2009 (74 years)

John Nicholas Maw was a British composer. Among his works are the operas The Rising of the Moon and Sophie's Choice . Biography Born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, Maw was the son of Clarence Frederick Maw and Hilda Ellen Chambers. He attended the Wennington School, a boarding school, in Wetherby in the West Riding of Yorkshire. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was 14. He attended the Royal Academy of Music on Marylebone Road in London where his teachers were Paul Steinitz and Lennox Berkeley. He then studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and Max Deutsch.

#4806

Jack Lawrence

#82131

Overall Influence

1912 - 2009 (97 years)

Jack Lawrence was an American songwriter. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1975. Life and career Jack Lawrence was born in Brooklyn, New York to an Orthodox Jewish family of modest means as the third of four sons. His parents Barney Schwartz and Fanny Goldman Schwartz were first cousins who had run away from their home in Bila Tserkva, Ukraine to go to America in 1904.

#4807

John Standing

#89384

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Sir John Ronald Leon, 4th Baronet , known professionally as John Standing, is an English actor. Early life Standing was born in London, the son of Kay Hammond , an actress, and Sir Ronald George Leon, 3rd Baronet; a stockbroker descended from Sir Herbert Leon, the builder of Bletchley Park. He succeeded his father as the 4th baronet in 1964, but does not use the title. The Leon family were, until 1937, owners of Bletchley Park, the country house in Buckinghamshire used in the Second World War as a code-breaking centre.

#4808

Weng Marc Marc Lim

#120671

Overall Influence

#4809

Arthur P. Bochner

#29262

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Arthur P. Bochner is an American communication scholar known for his research and teaching on intimate relationships, qualitative inquiry, narrative, and autoethnography. He holds the rank of Distinguished University Professor at the University of South Florida. Bochner is the former President of the National Communication Association and former Vice-President of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. Among his publications are two books, two edited collections, and more than 100 book articles, chapters, and essays on communication theory, family and interpersonal communication, ...

#4810

Charlie Simpson

Charlie Simpson

#69366

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (41 years)

Charles Robert Simpson , known professionally as Charlie Simpson, is an English singer, songwriter, and musician from Suffolk. He is a member of the BRIT Award winning pop-punk band Busted and he is also lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist in the post-hardcore band Fightstar. AllMusic has noted that Simpson is "perhaps the only pop star to make the convincing transition from fresh-faced boy bander to authentic hard rock frontman". Simpson is a multi-instrumentalist, playing guitar, bass, keyboard, piano and drums.

#4811

Mieczysław Weinberg

#79686

Overall Influence

1919 - 1996 (77 years)

Mieczysław Weinberg was a Polish-born Soviet composer and pianist. Names Much confusion has been caused by different renditions of the composer's names. In official Polish documents made before he moved to the Soviet Union, his name was spelled as Mojsze Wajnberg, and in the world of Yiddish theater of antebellum Warsaw he was likewise known as Moishe Weinberg . After he moved to the Soviet Union, he was and still is known in Russian as Moisey Vaynberg . Among close friends in Russia, he would also go by his Polish diminutive "Mietek".

#4812

Ian Bousfield

#101312

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Ian Bousfield is an English musician who has held positions as Principal Trombone with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra and the Hallé Orchestra. Also a pedagogue, Bousfield is an instructor in the music division at the Hochschule der Künste in Bern, Switzerland.

#4813

Julia Bishop

#120760

Overall Influence

Julia Bishop is an English Baroque violin specialist. She was a member of The English Concert for six years, and has toured the world with most of the UK's leading period instrument orchestras. She has appeared as an orchestral leader and concerto soloist with the Gabrieli Consort, Brandenburg Consort, Florilegium early music ensemble and the Hanover Band. Bishop has taught baroque violin techniques at the Royal Academy of Music, London.

#4814

Ben Davis

#82803

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Ben Davis is an Australian sports presenter and reporter. Davis is currently a sports presenter and reporter on Seven News Brisbane. He has previously been a drive presenter on 4BC in Brisbane. Career Davis started his career at the Ten Network as a part-time cadet whilst he completed a degree in Communications at the University of Technology, Queensland. In 1995 at the age of 21, he finished his studies and an opportunity came up with Seven News in Brisbane.

#4815

Jean-Claude Gérard

#94082

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Jean-Claude Gérard, a flutist born in Angers, he studied with Gaston Crunelle and later with Marcel Moyse studied flute at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris with Marcel Moyse.

#4816

Karel Husa

#79263

Overall Influence

1921 - 2016 (95 years)

Karel Husa was a Czech-born classical composer and conductor, winner of the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Music and 1993 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. In 1954, he emigrated to the United States and became an American citizen in 1959.

#4817

Christine Oliver

#120846

Overall Influence

#4818

Phil Upchurch

#78789

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Philip Upchurch is an American jazz and blues guitarist and bassist. Career Upchurch started his career working with the Kool Gents, the Dells, and the Spaniels, before going on to work with Curtis Mayfield, Otis Rush, and Jimmy Reed. He then returned to Chicago to play and record with Woody Herman, Stan Getz, Groove Holmes, B.B. King, and Dizzy Gillespie.

#4819

Lisa Travis

#112850

Overall Influence

Lisa deMena Travis is a researcher and educator in the field of linguistics, specializing in syntax and in the study of Austronesian languages such as Malagasy and Tagalog. She is currently a professor of linguistics at McGill University. Her 1984 proposal of the Head Movement Constraint, which seeks to account for limitations on the movement of syntactic heads in question formation, has become a cornerstone of generative linguistics.

#4820

Clara Deser

#71208

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Clara Deser is an American climate scientist. She is a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research where she leads the Climate Analysis Section. Deser was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2021.

#4821

Matthew Seeger

#85864

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Matthew W. Seeger is a Professor of Communication and Dean Emeritus at Wayne State University. Education Matthew W. Seeger completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Evansville in 1979. Seeger developed an interest in crisis communication while covering the Air Indiana Flight 2016 crash that was carrying the University of Evansville’s basketball team, the Purple Aces for the school newspaper. Soon after, he received his M.A. in Communication Theory from Northern Illinois University. In 1983, Seeger received his Ph.D. in Communication Theory and Research from Indiana University.

#4822

John Ford

#90477

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

John Ford is a British musician. He relocated to the United States in the mid-1980s and now resides on the North Shore of Long Island, New York. John Ford has toured and recorded with Velvet Opera, The Strawbs, Hudson/Ford and The Monks. His versatility has let him play a wide range of venues from folk clubs to large scale international rock venues.

#4823

Mark Lewis

#19418

Overall Influence

Mark Lewis is an American hard rock/heavy metal music producer. Originally from the Southern Maryland area, he once lived in the Orlando, Florida area. Now Mark works as a producer, engineer, and mixer at his own studio in Nashville, Tennessee.

#4824

George Young

#69719

Overall Influence

1946 - 2017 (71 years)

George Redburn Young was an Australian musician, songwriter and record producer. He was a founding member of the bands The Easybeats and Flash and the Pan, and was one-half of the songwriting and production duo Vanda & Young with his long-time musical collaborator Harry Vanda, with whom he co-wrote the international hits "Friday on My Mind" and "Love Is in the Air", the latter recorded by John Paul Young .

#4825

Paul Raymond

#98090

Overall Influence

1945 - 2019 (74 years)

Paul Martin Raymond was an English keyboardist and guitarist, best known for playing in UFO and Michael Schenker Group. Raymond was the replacement for Christine McVie when she left Chicken Shack to join Fleetwood Mac in 1969.

#4826

Gene Lees

#85388

Overall Influence

1928 - 2010 (82 years)

Frederick Eugene John Lees was a Canadian music critic, biographer, lyricist, and journalist. Lees worked as a newspaper journalist in his native Canada before moving to the United States, where he was a music critic and lyricist. His lyrics for Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Corcovado" , have been recorded by such singers as Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Queen Latifah, and Diana Krall.

#4827

Steve White

#84986

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Steven Douglas White is an English drummer who has worked extensively with Paul Weller and The Style Council among others. Musical career White was given a small drum as a child by his uncle and upon joining his local Boys' Brigade he began to learn his craft. As with White's bandmate Paul Weller, he was given full support from his parents who went out of their way to help their son develop. White spent his youth having lessons from the late George Scott of Wanstead and learning from recordings of Buddy Rich and Louis Bellson. White later took lessons with drumming teacher Bob Armstrong at Bob's Masterclass studio, then in Hornchurch, Essex.

#4828

Mo Foster

#66975

Overall Influence

1944 - 2023 (79 years)

Michael Ralph "Mo" Foster was an English multi-instrumentalist, record producer, composer, solo artist, author, and public speaker. Through a career spanning over half a century, Foster toured, recorded, and performed with dozens of artists, including Jeff Beck, Gil Evans, Phil Collins, Ringo Starr, Joan Armatrading, Gerry Rafferty, Brian May, Scott Walker, Frida of ABBA, Cliff Richard, George Martin, Van Morrison, Dr John, Hank Marvin, Heaven 17 and the London Symphony Orchestra. He released several albums under his own name, authored a humorous book on the history of British rock guitar, wr...

#4829

Rob Kling

#32509

Overall Influence

1944 - 2003 (59 years)

Rob Kling was a North American professor of Information Systems and Information science at the School of Library and Information Science and adjunct professor of computer science, Indiana University, United States. He directed the interdisciplinary Center for Social Informatics , at Indiana University. He is considered to have been a key founder of social analyses of computing and a leading expert on the study of social informatics.

#4830

Marshall Thompson

Marshall Thompson

#89865

Overall Influence

1925 - 1992 (67 years)

James Marshall Thompson was an American film and television actor. Early years Thompson was born in Peoria, Illinois. He and his parents, Dr. and Mrs. Laurence B. Thompson, moved to California when he was a year old. He attended University High School where he was a classmate of Norma Jean Baker, later to be known worldwide as Marilyn Monroe. Thompson enrolled at Occidental College with plans to become a dentist, but he switched to divinity studies.

#4831

Will Lee

#63107

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Will Lee is an American bassist known for his work on the Late Show with David Letterman as part of the CBS Orchestra and before that "The World's Most Dangerous Band" when Letterman hosted the NBC "Late Night" show.

#4832

Thomas Hampson

#85570

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Thomas Walter Hampson is an American lyric baritone, a classical singer who has appeared world-wide in major opera houses and concert halls and made over 170 musical recordings. Hampson's operatic repertoire spans a range of more than 80 roles, including the title roles in Mozart's Don Giovanni, Rossini's Guillaume Tell and Il barbiere di Siviglia, Thomas' Hamlet, and Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin. The center of his Verdi repertoire remains Posa in Don Carlo, Germont in La traviata, the title roles in Macbeth and Simon Boccanegra, and more recently also Amfortas in Wagner's Parsifal and Scarpia...

#4833

José Cura

#79974

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

José Luis Victor Cura Gómez is an Argentine operatic tenor, conductor, director, scenographer and photographer known for intense and original interpretations of opera characters, notably Otello in Verdi’s Otello, Samson in Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila, Canio in Ruggero Leoncavallo's Pagliacci, Stiffelio in Giuseppe Verdi's Stiffelio and many others.

#4834

Adam Godley

#79903

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Adam N. Godley is an English-American actor. He has been nominated for two Tony Awards and four Laurence Olivier Awards for his performances on the New York and London stages, including Private Lives in 2001, The Pillowman in 2002, Anything Goes in 2011, and The Lehman Trilogy in 2019. He made his Broadway debut in 2002 in a revival of Noël Coward's Private Lives for which he earned a Theatre World Award for Outstanding Broadway debut. In 2011, he returned to Broadway in the musical Anything Goes for which he earned a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical nomination. In 2021, The Le...

#4835

Robert Duffield

#81332

Overall Influence

1935 - 2000 (65 years)

Robert Duffield was a journalist who served as foreign editor of The Australian from 1968 until 1974. His single most memorable work was Rogue Bull, a 1979 biography of Lang Hancock. Duffield won the Clarion Prize at the 1988 WA Media Awards. He spent his last years as a lecturer at the Western Australian Institute of Technology, now Curtin University. He inspired a whole generation of journalists from the first journalism school in WA. Those students have fanned out around the world with many still active in journalism. He died in August 2000. This was followed by a wake in Surry Hills Sydney where his Australian Newspaper colleagues toasted him and his career.

#4836

Otto von Sadovszky

Otto von Sadovszky

#73458

Overall Influence

1925 - 2004 (79 years)

Otto J. von Sadovszky was a Hungarian-American anthropologist who worked at California State University, Fullerton in southern California for most of his career until his retirement. He is best known for his linguistic work attempting to link Native American languages of California to languages spoken in Siberia.

#4837

Allan Schwartzberg

#80139

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Allan Schwartzberg is an American musician and record producer. He has been a member of the rock band Mountain, Peter Gabriel's first solo band, toured with Brecker Brothers' Dreams, B. J. Thomas, Linda Ronstadt, Stan Getz band, and the Pat Travers band. He has experienced success as a prolific session musician, through recordings made from the 1970s through today. He has also played on multi genre hits such as Gloria Gaynor "Never Can Say Goodbye", considered the first disco record, James Brown's "Funky President", Harry Chapin's "Cat's in the Cradle", Tony Orlando & Dawn's Tie A Yellow Ribb...

#4838

Rob Mounsey

#58287

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Rob Mounsey is an American musician, composer, and arranger. Music career Mounsey was born in Berea, Ohio, and grew up in Seattle, Washington, spending a few years each in Findlay and Granville, Ohio. At the age of 17, he was awarded a 1970 BMI Student Composer Award for his orchestral work Ilium, New York, Is Divided into Three Parts. He attended Berklee College of Music in Boston from 1971 to 1975.

#4839

Adel Iskandar

#74834

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Adel Iskandar is a British-born Middle East media scholar, postcolonial theorist, analyst, and academic. He is currently an Associate Professor of Global Communication at Simon Fraser University in Canada. The author and co-author of several works on Arabic language media, Iskandar's work has contributed both to the political economy of communication and the cultural impact of media. His most prominent works deal with analyses of the Arabic satellite station Al Jazeera, digital dissidence, global communication theory, and decolonization.

#4840

Bill Payne

#43035

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

William H. Payne is an American pianist who, with Lowell George, co-founded the American rock band Little Feat. He is considered by many other rock pianists, including Elton John, to be one of the finest American piano rock and blues musicians. In addition to his trademark barrelhouse blues piano, he is noted for his work on the Hammond B3 organ. Payne is an accomplished songwriter whose credits include "Oh, Atlanta". Following the death of Little Feat drummer Richie Hayward on August 12, 2010, Payne is the only member of the group from the original four-piece line-up currently playing in the...

#4841

Eldar Ryazanov

#44318

Overall Influence

1927 - 2015 (88 years)

Eldar Aleksandrovich Ryazanov was a Soviet and Russian film director, screenwriter, poet, actor and pedagogue whose popular comedies, satirizing the daily life of the Soviet Union and Russia, are celebrated throughout the former Soviet Union and former Warsaw Pact countries.

#4842

Minnie Pearl

#59068

Overall Influence

1912 - 1996 (84 years)

Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon , known professionally as her stage character Minnie Pearl, was an American comedian who appeared at the Grand Ole Opry for more than 50 years and on the television show Hee Haw from 1969 to 1991.

#4843

Artavazd Peleshyan

Artavazd Peleshyan

#82226

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Artavazd Peleshyan is an Armenian director of essay films, a documentarian in the history of film art, a screenwriter, and a film theorist. He is renowned for developing a style of cinematographic perspective known as distance montage, combining perception of depth with oncoming entities, such as running packs of antelope or hordes of humans. Filmmaker Sergei Parajanov has referred to Peleshyan as "one of the few authentic geniuses in the world of cinema". Peleshyan was awarded the title of Merited Artist of the Armenian SSR in 1979, and Merited Artist of the Russian Federation in 1995.

#4844

Willie Ruff

#94228

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Willie Henry Ruff Jr. is an American jazz musician, specializing in the French horn and double bass, and a music scholar and educator, primarily as a Yale professor from 1971 to 2017. Personal life He was born in Sheffield, Alabama.

#4845

Nancy Wilson

#46498

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Nancy Lamoureux Wilson is an American musician. She rose to fame alongside her older sister Ann as a guitarist and backing and occasional lead vocalist in the rock band Heart. Raised in Bellevue, Washington, Wilson began playing music as a teenager. During college, she joined her sister who had recently become the singer of Heart. The first hard rock band fronted by women, Heart released numerous albums throughout the late 1970s and 1980s; the albums Dreamboat Annie , and Little Queen generated chart singles such as "Magic Man", "Crazy on You", and "Barracuda". The band also had commercial s...

#4846

Wendy Ayres-Bennett

#96754

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Wendy Ayres-Bennett is a British linguist, Professor of French Philology and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, England, and Professorial Fellow in Linguistics at Murray Edwards College. She has a BA and MA in Modern Languages from Girton College and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. Her doctoral thesis was "Vaugelas and the development of the French language: theory and practice". After her doctorate she spent a year as a Junior Research Fellow at St Hilda's College, Oxford and was appointed as an Assistant Lecturer , then Lecturer and Reader , in the French Department at Cambridge.

#4847

Bruce Fowler

#81255

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Bruce Lambourne Fowler is an American trombonist and composer. He played trombone on many Frank Zappa records, as well as with Captain Beefheart and in the Fowler Brothers Band. He composes and arranges music for movies, and has been the composer, orchestrator, or conductor for many popular films.

#4848

Rob Morrison

#78806

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Rob Morrison is an American former television journalist and news anchor. Career Morrison began his broadcasting career as a combat correspondent while serving in the U.S. Marine Corps. He was a radio disc jockey and news anchor and reporter while stationed on Okinawa, Japan, in the early 1990s. As a civilian, he began his career at WGMC-TV in Worcester, Massachusetts. He later worked at WWLP-TV in Springfield, Massachusetts, and in Hartford, Connecticut. As a foreign correspondent, he reported from Iraq and Qatar during the Second Gulf War; Afghanistan, where he embedded with the Marines du...

#4849

Brian Joseph

#116164

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Brian D. Joseph is an American linguist specializing in historical linguistics. He is a Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics and the Kenneth E. Naylor Professor of South Slavic Linguistics at Ohio State University. His research interests include language change, Greek linguistics, Balkan linguistics, and morphological theory. He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019.

#4850

Huw Edwards

#98439

Overall Influence

Huw Edwards is a Welsh conductor. Edwards' conducting career began at age seventeen when he became music director of the Maidstone Opera Company in England. He later attended the University of Surrey, where he conducted the college orchestra along with an ensemble that he formed himself. At age twenty-three, he won a conducting competition which sent him to Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He then held a lecturer position at Northwestern University in Chicago, where he was also a doctoral candidate. Edwards was conductor and music director of the Portland Youth Philharmonic from 1995 to 2002 followed by the Seattle Youth Symphony from 2002 to 2005.

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