Search People Result | Academic Influence

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

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

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

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

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

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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List of the most influential people in Computer Science,

#10551

Manuel Pérez García

#31886

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Manuel Pérez García is associate professor at the Department of History of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He is also Distinguished Researcher at Pablo de Olavide University of Seville . From 2013 to 2017 he was associate professor at the School of International Studies, Renmin University of China.

#10552

Henry Bird

#54169

Overall Influence

1909 - 2000 (91 years)

Henry Bird was an English artist from Northampton who painted murals and female nudes. He went to the Royal College of Art and then designed sets at the Old Vic, Sadler's Wells and Embassy Theatre. He taught art history and drawing at the University College of Wales and the Northampton School of Art.

#10553

Boris Sokolov

#171911

Overall Influence

#10554

Feng Gao

#171912

Overall Influence

#10555

David Tanner

#171938

Overall Influence

#10556

Supachai Tangwongsan

Supachai Tangwongsan

#121789

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Supachai Tangwongsan is a Thai emeritus professor of computer science at Mahidol University, Thailand. He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in electrical engineering at Purdue University with the Royal support of King Ananda Mahidol Foundation scholarship.

#10557

Caterina Ducati

#105462

Overall Influence

Caterina Ducati is a Professor of Nanomaterials in the Department of Materials at the University of Cambridge. She serves as Director of the University of Cambridge Master's programme in Micro- and Nanotechnology Enterprise as well as leading teaching in the Nanotechnology Doctoral Training Centre.

#10558

Amy Block Joy

#60517

Overall Influence

Amy Block Joy is an Emerita Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She is best known for exposing fraudulent activity in a California nutrition education program. She specializes in nutrition and health disparities of diverse populations, nutritional ecology, and ethics. She is an author and advocate for whistleblowers and employee rights. Joy was formerly a Cooperative Extension Specialist, Emeritus at the University of California, Davis

#10559

Miguel Ángel Ballesteros

#55659

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Miguel Ángel Ballesteros is a Spanish Army artillery officer. Ballesteros is an expert in geopolitics, security strategies and prevention of terrorism. Since June 2018, he serves as the 3rd Director of the Homeland Security Department.

#10560

John Keane

#60062

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

John Granville Colpoys Keane is a British artist, whose paintings have contemporary political and social themes. Life and work John Keane was born in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, England. He was educated at Wellington College and Camberwell School of Art .

#10561

Marco Ferrari

#171984

Overall Influence

#10562

Stefania Gnesi

#170899

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Stefania Gnesi is an Italian software engineer whose work focuses on formal methods, and the use of natural language and natural language processing in requirements analysis. She is a director of research at the Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione of the Italian National Research Council , where she heads the Formal Methods and Tools group.

#10563

Harvey Littleton

Harvey Littleton

#40350

Overall Influence

1922 - 2013 (91 years)

Harvey Littleton was an American glass artist and educator, one of the founders of the studio glass movement; he is often referred to as the "Father of the Studio Glass Movement". Born in Corning, New York, he grew up in the shadow of Corning Glass Works, where his father headed Research and Development during the 1930s. Expected by his father to enter the field of physics, Littleton instead chose a career in art, gaining recognition first as a ceramist and later as a glassblower and sculptor in glass. In the latter capacity he was very influential, organizing the first glassblowing seminar aimed at the studio artist in 1962, on the grounds of the Toledo Museum of Art.

#10564

Sidney Michaelson

#153937

Overall Influence

1925 - 1991 (66 years)

Sidney Michaelson FRSE FIMA FSA FBCS was Scotland's first professor of Computer Science. He was joint founder of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. As an author he is remembered for his analysis of the Bible.

#10565

Zhuang Liu

#172035

Overall Influence

#10566

Willem de Rooij

#83384

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Willem de Rooij is an artist and educator working in a variety of media, including film and installation. He investigates the production, contextualization and interpretation of images. Appropriations and collaborations are fundamental to De Rooij's artistic method and his projects have stimulated new research in art history and ethnography.

#10567

William Darrow

#12011

Overall Influence

William Darrow is a professor of public health at Florida International University. Before accepting a position at FIU in August 1994, Darrow served as Chief of the Behavioral and Prevention Research Branch, Division of STD/HIV Prevention, at the National Center for Prevention Services of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . Darrow has published over 100 scientific papers in professional journals, books, and research monographs.

#10568

Jinyi Qi

#76845

Overall Influence

Jinyi Qi is a professor at the Department of Biomedical Engineering in the University of California, Davis. He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2014 for contributions to statistical image reconstruction for emission-computed tomography. He graduated from Tsinghua University.

#10569

Iraj Zandi

#53787

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Iraj Zandi is Emeritus Professor of Systems & National Center Professor of Resource Management & Technology in the Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering, University of Pennsylvania . National Center Chair is housed jointly in the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Wharton School of Business. Zandi joined the faculty at UPenn in 1966 as an Associate Professor of Civil and Urban Engineering. In 1971 he was the founding chair of the graduate Ph.D. program on Energy Management and Power at the University of Pennsylvania He has advised 22 Ph.D. dissertations and numerous M.S.

#10570

Victor Pasmore

#12928

Overall Influence

1908 - 1998 (90 years)

Edwin John Victor Pasmore, CH, CBE was a British artist. He pioneered the development of abstract art in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s. Early life Pasmore was born in Chelsham, Surrey, on 3 December 1908. He studied at Summer Fields School in Oxford and Harrow in west London, but with the death of his father in 1927 he was forced to take an administrative job at the London County Council. He studied painting part-time at the Central School of Art and was associated with the formation of the Euston Road School. After experimenting with abstraction, Pasmore worked for a time in a lyrical figur...

#10571

Gopal Gupta

#139708

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Gopal Gupta is an Erik Jonsson Professor and the head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas. Education Gupta has received a B.Tech. degree in computer science from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India in 1985. He received an M.S. degree in computer science from The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1987. He also has a Ph.D. degree in computer science from The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, which he received in 1991.

#10572

Kori Inkpen

#158866

Overall Influence

Kori Marie Inkpen is a Canadian computer scientist specializing in human-computer interaction at Microsoft Research. A consistent theme of her research has been the interaction of children with computers.

#10573

Beverley A. Orser

#149660

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Beverley Anne Orser is a Canadian anesthesiologist. As a professor at the University of Toronto, Orser was elected a member of the National Academy of Medicine for "her discovery of the unique pharmacological properties of extrasynaptic GABA-A receptors and their mechanistic role in anesthetic- and inflammation-induced impairment of memory, and for her leadership in academic anesthesiology.

#10574

Chris Smith

#91689

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Christopher E. Smith is an American legal academic who is a specialist in correctional law. He succeeded lawyer and political activist Zolton Ferency as Michigan State University's faculty specialist on constitutional rights in criminal justice. He teaches courses on criminal justice, law, and public policy in Michigan State's School of Criminal Justice.

#10575

Michael Hess

#172137

Overall Influence

#10576

Julia Silge

#127167

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Julia Silge is an American data scientist and software engineer. She has developed tools for statistical modelling in the R programming language, including the text mining package tidytext. Silge currently works for Posit, formerly known as RStudio.

#10577

S K Singh

#172168

Overall Influence

#10578

Katherine Borden

#171608

Overall Influence

Katherine Borden PhD FRSC is a researcher of Molecular Biology at the University of Montreal in Quebec, Canada. She has worked on finding new cancer treatments using pre-existing drugs, and was inducted as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2022.

#10579

Shigeru Saito

#172208

Overall Influence

#10580

Gang Hu

#172212

Overall Influence

#10581

Shirin Neshat

#58044

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian visual artist who lives in New York City, known primarily for her work in film, video and photography. Her artwork centers on the contrasts between Islam and the West, femininity and masculinity, public life and private life, antiquity and modernity, and bridging the spaces between these subjects.

#10582

Shawn Wong

#21102

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Shawn K. Wong is a Chinese American author and scholar. He has served as the Professor of English, Director of the University Honors Program , Chair of the Department of English , and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Washington, where he has been on the faculty since 1984 and teaches courses covering critical theory, Asian American studies, which he is considered a pioneer in, and fiction writing. Wong received his undergraduate degree in English at the University of California Berkeley and a master's degree in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University .

#10583

Gary Bradski

#170612

Overall Influence

Gary Bradski is an American scientist, engineer, entrepreneur, and author. He co-founded Industrial Perception, a company that developed perception applications for industrial robotic application and has worked on the OpenCV Computer Vision library, as well as published a book on that library.

#10584

Chris Wilcox

#172235

Overall Influence

#10585

Lila Tretikov

#120505

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Lila Tretikov is a Russian–American engineer and manager. Early life and education Tretikov was born in Moscow, Soviet Union. Her father is a mathematician, and her mother was a filmmaker. After moving to New York City at age 15, she learned English while waitressing and attended the University of California, Berkeley, but left before completing her degree. Her majors were computer science and art, and she researched machine learning.

#10586

Gevork Minaskanian

#91626

Overall Influence

Gevork Minaskanian is an American research professor in the Department of Chemistry at Virginia Commonwealth University and Co-founder/Vice President of Synthetic Chemistry at Aderis Pharmaceuticals who was a contributor to the development of rotigotine and Neupro . Rotigotine is a drug developed to mimic the actions of dopamine in the brain to help cope with restless legs syndrome and the abnormal movements found in Parkinson's disease patients. This drug is an alternative to oral medications for treatment of Parkinson's disease, considered by the VCU Department of Chemistry as "an unpreced...

#10587

Michelle Ozbun

#118072

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Michelle Adair Ozbun is an American molecular virologist who is the Maralyn S. Budke Endowed Professor in Viral Oncology at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. Her research considers cancer biology and how human papillomavirus infections cause pathology including their contributions to cancers.

#10588

Fakhreddin Azimi

#54954

Overall Influence

Fakhreddin Azimi is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut. Selected publications The Quest for Democracy in Iran: a Century of Struggle against Authoritarian Rule ; Iran: The Crisis of Democracy, 1941-53 ; revised paperback edition in process;

#10589

Alex Sigal

#167969

Overall Influence

Alex Sigal is a South Africa–based virologist at the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban, South Africa, Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, and University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. His work concentrates on evolution and persistence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. His laboratory was the first to isolate the live B.1.351 variant of SARS-CoV-2 first detected in South Africa. Sigal’s laboratory was also the first to report results on the ability of the Omicron variant to escape antibody neutralization in individuals who had two doses of the Pfizer BNT162b2 vaccine as well as ...

#10590

Donatella Sciuto

#171129

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Donatella Sciuto is an Italian electronic engineer and academic administrator, the rector of the Polytechnic University of Milan. Her research involves embedded systems, low-power electronics, and multicore Very Large Scale Integration, with applications including smart buildings.

#10591

Aftab Ahmed

#80326

Overall Influence

1949 - 2006 (57 years)

Aftab Ahmed was a Bangladeshi academic. He served as the 5th vice-chancellor of National University of Bangladesh. On 23 September 2006, Ahmed was assassinated at his Dhaka residence. Mofiqul Hasan Tripti, an influential politician of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, was arrested for the crime in August 2018.

#10592

Jacques Servin

#24413

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Jacques Servin is an American media artist and activist. He is one of the leading members of The Yes Men, a culture jamming activist group. Their exploits in "identity correction" are documented in the films The Yes Men , The Yes Men Fix the World , and The Yes Men Are Revolting . As Ray Thomas, he is a co-founder of RTMark.

#10593

Shoba Ranganathan

#171953

Overall Influence

Shoba Ranganathan is an Indian Australian biochemist who is a professor of bioinformatics at Macquarie University. Her research considers computational biology and bioinformatics, genome annotation and structural bioinformatics.

#10594

Harold O'Neil

#97664

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Harold O'Neil is an American psychologist. Career His interest in technology began at Florida State University, where, in the late 1960s, he obtained his degree in experimental psychology, conducting research in their computer-assisted instruction laboratory. He moved to the University of Texas at Austin, where he co-directed their computer-assisted instruction lab and attained tenure. In 1975, O'Neil was recruited to join the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency , where he ran a program on computer-based learning, including PLATO IV .

#10595

Teresa Przytycka

#118058

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Teresa Maria Przytycka is a Polish-American computational biologist who works as a senior investigator in the Computational Biology Branch of the National Center for Biotechnology Information , where she heads the Algorithmic Methods in Computational and Systems Biology section. She started her research career in parallel algorithms; at the NCBI, her research takes a computational approach to problems in systems biology involving cancer, gene regulation, and the analysis of massive data.

#10596

Betty Churcher

#45667

Overall Influence

1931 - 2015 (84 years)

Elizabeth Ann Dewar Churcher was an Australian arts administrator, best known as director of the National Gallery of Australia from 1990 to 1997. She was also a painter in her own right earlier in her life.

#10597

David A. Wheeler

#172343

Overall Influence

#10598

William S. Penn

#58013

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

William S. Penn is a writer and English professor at Michigan State University. Life William S. Penn is an urban mixed-blood Nez Perce. Born and raised in the West, he has lived in many different regions of the United States, as well as in England. He was educated at the University of California at Davis and at Syracuse University. He previously taught at the State University of New York at Oswego and at Hostos Community College in the South Bronx. He teaches courses in the oral tradition, comedy and cultural survival, the literatures of the Americas, and creative writing.

#10599

Weisong Shi

#172368

Overall Influence

Weisong Shi is a Professor and Department Chair of Computer and Information Sciences at University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware. He is an internationally renowned expert in Edge Computing and Autonomous Vehicles. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2016 for his contributions to distributed systems and Internet computing. In 2022, he received the Most Influential Scholar Award in the field of the Internet of Things by AI 2000. The 2022 winners are among the most-impactful scholars from the top venues of their respective subject fields between 20...

#10600

Tony Cokes

#91478

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Tony Cokes is an American visual artist and educator. Early life and education Cokes was born in Richmond, Virginia. He studied photography and creative writing at Goddard College, and received an MFA degree in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University.

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