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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Person Name

School

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Computer Science,

#12201

Mary Walling Blackburn

#173953

Overall Influence

Mary Walling Blackburn is an artist, writer, and feminist who works and lives between New York, where she is an artist and director of the Anhoek School and its sister radio station WMYN, and Dallas where she teaches art at Southern Methodist University. She is also described as "“a singer, a tutor, a choreographer, a documentary filmmaker, a tourist, a critic and a translator” with a strong but politically uncategorizable activist streak."

#12202

Devendra Singh

#21163

Overall Influence

1938 - 2010 (72 years)

Devendra Singh was a professor of Psychology at the University of Texas, known largely for his research regarding the evolutionary significance of human attraction. Biography Singh was born in 1938 in Urai, India. Having first taken degrees in philosophy and psychology , he completed his PhD at Ohio State University in 1966. Singh took up teaching positions at Wright State University and North Dakota State University before moving to the University of Texas at Austin in 1969.

#12203

Cheryl Goldsleger

#108985

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Cheryl Goldsleger is an American artist and educator. She has resided in Athens, Georgia, since 1977. Early life and education Goldsleger was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and began her formal education in art in 1969 at the Philadelphia College of Art where she received a full scholarship. In 1971 she attended Temple University's Tyler School of Art in Rome. She earned her degree of Master of Fine Arts from Washington University in St. Louis in 1975.

#12204

Jack Smith

#66969

Overall Influence

1928 - 2011 (83 years)

Jack Smith was a British realist and, later, abstract artist. Life Jack Smith was born in 1928 in Sheffield, Yorkshire. Smith studied at Sheffield College of Art , Saint Martin's School of Art and the Royal College of Art . At the RCA, Smith studied under John Minton, Ruskin Spear and Carel Weight.

#12205

Martin Kersels

#91962

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Martin Kersels is an American contemporary artist. Kersels' work is largely installation based, incorporating sculpture, photography and video. Kersels is a professor of sculpture and director of graduate studies at the Yale School of Art.

#12206

Rick Lowe

#37238

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Rick Lowe is a Houston-based artist and community organizer, whose Project Row Houses is considered an important example of social-practice art. In 2014, he was among the 21 people awarded a MacArthur "genius" fellowship.

#12207

J. P. Yadav

#121193

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Jay Parkash Yadav is Vice-Chancellor, Indira Gandhi University, Rewari since April 3, 2022 to April, 2025. He is an Indian biologist and professor of genetics best known for his research on genetics. He was awarded Prof. R.P. Roy Young Scientist by Society of Cytology and Genetics, India.

#12208

Gilad Bracha

#186971

Overall Influence

#12209

Peter R. Neumann

#186973

Overall Influence

#12210

Dominik Graf

#110795

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Dominik Graf is a German film director. He studied film direction at University of Television and Film Munich, from where he graduated in 1975. While he has directed several theatrically released feature films since the 1980s, he more often finds work in television, focussing primarily on the genres police drama, thriller and crime mystery, although he has also made comedies, melodramas, documentaries and essay films. He is an active participant in public discourse about the values of genre film in Germany, through numerous articles, and interviews, some of which have been collected into a bo...

#12211

Lei Ge

#186996

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

#12212

Squeak Carnwath

#104404

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Squeak Carnwath is a contemporary American painter and arts educator. She is a Professor Emerita of Art at University of California, Berkeley. Background Carnwath has explained "Squeak" as "a childhood name that stuck".

#12213

John Rich

#119420

Overall Influence

1925 - 2012 (87 years)

John Rich was an American film and television director. He directed Colonel Humphrey Flack, I Married Joan, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Hogan's Heroes, Something So Right, Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., Where's Raymond?, Mister Ed, The Dick Van Dyke Show, All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Maude, Good Times, Barney Miller, Newhart, Benson, The Brady Bunch, and Gilligan's Island. His feature film credits include Wives and Lovers, Boeing Boeing, The New Interns, Roustabout and Easy Come, Easy Go . He also participated in the live telecast of the opening-day ceremonies of Disneyland in 1955.

#12214

Omar Wasow

#182397

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Omar Tomas Wasow is an assistant professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Political Science. He is co-founder of the social networking website BlackPlanet. Life Wasow grew up in a multi-ethnic family. His father, Bernard, is of German Jewish heritage, and his mother, Eileen, is African-American. Bernard was a civil rights activist who participated in the Freedom Summer Project, which entailed registering Black voters in Mississippi. Wasow's paternal grandfather was the mathematician Wolfgang R. Wasow. Both Wolfgang Wasow and Omar Wasow's paternal grandmother are of German Jewish heritage.

#12215

Stephanie Syjuco

#69396

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Stephanie Syjuco , is a Filipino-American conceptual artist and educator. Born in the Philippines, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1977. Syjuco received her MFA from Stanford University in 2005, and BFA in Sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1995. She currently lives and works in Oakland, California.

#12216

Sewell Sillman

#85502

Overall Influence

1924 - 1992 (68 years)

Sewell Sillman was an American painter, educator, and print publisher. He co-founded Ives-Sillman, Inc. alongside partner Norman Seaton Ives, which published silkscreen prints and photographs in monographic art portfolios.

#12217

Edward A. Fox

#187007

Overall Influence

#12218

Peter Harvey

#31037

Overall Influence

1944 - 2013 (69 years)

Peter Michael St Clair Harvey was an Australian journalist and broadcaster. Harvey was a long-serving correspondent and contributor with the Nine Network from 1975 to 2013. Career Harvey studied his journalism cadetship with the Sydney newspaper The Daily Telegraph and won a Walkley Award in 1964. He worked at radio stations 2UE and 2GB before moving to London and working for BBC Radio. He then went on to The Guardian and the American Newsweek magazine as a reporter in Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

#12219

Peter Berek

#53024

Overall Influence

Peter Berek is a Professor of English and Shakespearean scholar at Amherst College. He also served as the dean of faculty and provost of Mount Holyoke College from 1990 to 1998. He was the interim president of Mount Holyoke College in Fall 1995.

#12220

David W. Kennedy

#187020

Overall Influence

#12221

Julianne Swartz

#94834

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Julianne Swartz is a New York-based artist. She is known for immersive installations, architectural interventions and sculptures that bring sound, optics and kinetics into play to create alternative, multisensory experiences. She uses utilitarian materials to warp, reshape or deepen perception, generating unexpected, ephemeral and participatory experiences out of common situations. Critics suggest that her work inhabits liminal areas, both literally and conceptually, bridging the perceptible and evanescent, public and private, visual and embodied, affective and technical. Art in America critic Peter R.

#12222

Zhimin Lu

#127461

Overall Influence

Zhimin Lu is a Chinese-American biologist and oncologist. He is a professor, Kuancheng Wang Distinguished Chair, and Dean of Institute of Translational Medicine at Zhejiang University. Prior to joining Zhejiang University in 2019, he was the Ruby E. Rutherford Distinguished Professor and the director of Cancer Metabolism Program at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

#12223

Christen A. Smith

#118139

Overall Influence

Christen A. Smith is an associate professor of anthropology and African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and the director of the university's Center for Women’s and Gender Studies. She is also the founder of Cite Black Women.

#12224

Catherine Wagner

#103973

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Catherine Wagner is an American photographer, professor and conceptual artist. Wagner has created large-scale, site-specific public artworks for the cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, and Kyoto, Japan. Her work is represented in major national and international collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Wagner's process involves the investigation of what art critic David Bonetti called "the syste...

#12225

Daniel M. Romero

#169429

Overall Influence

Daniel M. Romero is a Colombian-American computer scientist and Associate Professor in the University of Michigan School of Information and the Center for Study of Complex Systems. He is known for his work on social networks and information diffusion.

#12226

Mark Saroyan

#102226

Overall Influence

1960 - 1994 (34 years)

Mark Andrew Saroyan was a professor of Islamic and Soviet studies, focusing on religion and ethnicity in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Saroyan received his B.A. in history from Princeton University. He later began studying Soviet politics at UC Berkeley in 1986. In 1990 he became one of the first doctorate students of Berkeley's Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies program. After his graduation, Saroyan was hired as an assistant professor of political science at Harvard. At the same time he was diagnosed with a fatal illness. Though he took his position at Harvard, due to his worsening state Saroyan returned to Berkeley in 1993.

#12227

Andrew Cockburn

#186214

Overall Influence

Andrew Cockburn is currently working as a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He is in charge of the Human Computer Interactions Lab where he conducts research focused on designing and testing user interfaces that integrate with inherent human factors.

#12228

June Wayne

#77891

Overall Influence

1918 - 2011 (93 years)

June Claire Wayne was an American painter, printmaker, tapestry innovator, educator, and activist. She founded Tamarind Lithography Workshop , a then California-based nonprofit print shop dedicated to lithography.

#12229

Mohammad Ghodsi

#133938

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Mohammad Ghodsi is an Iranian computer scientist, electrical engineer, and professor. Ghodsi is also the project director of FarsiTeX, a Persian typesetting language derived from TeX. He was the team leader for the Iranian national team participating in the International Olympiad in Informatics for several years. He was also chosen as the top professor in Iran and has received his prize from ex-president Mohammad Khatami .

#12230

John Leonora

#70396

Overall Influence

1928 - 2006 (78 years)

John Leonora was an endocrinologist and faculty member at Loma Linda University. His research focused on the role of hypothalamic "factors" for indirectly controlling the metabolism of such avascular tissues as dental enamel, dentin, and the Islands of Langerhans .

#12231

Ron Logan

#59342

Overall Influence

1938 - 2022 (84 years)

Ronald Logan was an American businessman who served as executive vice president of Walt Disney Entertainment . After retiring from the company in 2001, he was formally a professor at the University of Central Florida Rosen College of Hospitality Management in Orlando, Florida, United States.

#12232

Tomoko Ohta

#187056

Overall Influence

#12233

Angeliki Pantazi

#180371

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (44 years)

Angeliki Pantazi is a Greek researcher in neuromorphic computing and in applications of control theory to computer data storage systems, for IBM Research in Zurich. Education and career Pantazi studied electrical engineering and computer technology at the University of Patras, where she earned a diploma in 1996 and a Ph.D. in 2005. She has been affiliated with IBM Research in Zurich since 2002, and became a permanent member of the research staff in 2006.

#12234

Yufang Jin

#176984

Overall Influence

Yufang Jin is an assistant professor of remote sensing and ecosystem change at UC Davis's Department of Land, Air and Water Resources, and associate environmental scientist at the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. Her research uses satellite imaging and other techniques to track and model how landscapes and ecosystems change.

#12235

John Wang

#187095

Overall Influence

#12236

Oleka K. Udeala

#104650

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Oleka Kelechi Udeala is a Nigerian professor of pharmacy and university administrator. He was the ninth Vice Chancellor of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and the first head of the faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Port Harcourt.

#12237

Don Berry

#118379

Overall Influence

1932 - 2001 (69 years)

Don George Berry was an American author and artist best known for his trilogy of historical novels about early settlers in the Oregon Country. Described as one of "Oregon's best fiction writers of the post-World War II generation", and a "Forgotten Beat", Berry's second novel, Moontrap , was nominated for the National Book Award in 1963.

#12238

M. Grace Burke

#182149

Overall Influence

Mary Grace Burke is an American materials scientist who is an emeritus professor at the University of Manchester. She was awarded the 2020 International Metallographic Society Henry Clifton Sorby Award and is the President of the Royal Microscopical Society.

#12239

Salamat Hashim

#43147

Overall Influence

1942 - 2003 (61 years)

Salamat Hashim , also known as Hashim Salamat, was a Filipino militant who served as leader of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. He is the founder of the group. Early life and education Hashim was born in Midsayap, Cotabato on July 7, 1939, to a religious family, one of seven siblings. At age six, he was taught by his mother on how to read the Quran. In the 1950s, Hashim received formal elementary and high school education and was an honor student.

#12240

Kevin Gross

#187102

Overall Influence

#12241

Pedro Lasch

#27378

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Pedro Lasch is a visual artist born in Mexico City, and based in the U.S. since 1994. He produces works of conceptual art, institutional critique, social practice, and site-specific art, as well as paintings, photographs, prints, and works in traditional media.

#12242

George Connell

#97466

Overall Influence

1930 - 2015 (85 years)

George Edward Connell, was a Canadian academic. Born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Connell studied at Upper Canada College in Toronto and graduated in 1947. He then attended the University of Toronto, earning a BA in biochemistry in 1951 and a PhD in 1955.

#12243

Sanjay Raman

#175462

Overall Influence

Sanjay Raman is an electrical engineer. He is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Virginia Tech, where he is also associate vice president of Virginia Tech in the National Capital Region. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2013 for his work on adaptive microwave and millimeter-wave integrated circuits.

#12244

Dilip Kumar

#187121

Overall Influence

#12245

James A. Jones

#187128

Overall Influence

#12246

Paul Lee

#178136

Overall Influence

Paul Lee is a British director, producer and executive. He is currently the CEO of the television and movie studio . He founded the BBC's U.S. cable network BBC America and ran ABC Family, ABC Entertainment and ABC Studios for the Walt Disney Company. During his tenure, Lee is credited with championing racial diversity and changing the face of American television with hit shows including Black-ish, Scandal, How to Get Away with Murder, American Crime, The Goldbergs, Quantico and Fresh Off the Boat.

#12247

Steve Allen

#148909

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Stephen Allen is an English radio presenter. He hosted the early morning breakfast show on LBC until 2023 and was the station's longest-serving presenter. Radio career Allen first worked as a nightclub disc jockey where he met long-time friend Dale Winton and subsequently joined the United Biscuits Network, a radio station broadcasting to workers in the United Biscuits factories. His voice was heard in Scotland, Liverpool, Manchester and London.

#12248

Bjarne Stugu

#187136

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

#12249

Asha Bowen

#184809

Overall Influence

Associate Professor Asha Bowen is an Australian Paediatric Infectious Diseases clinician-scientist and a leading voice and advocate for children's health and well-being. She is Head of the Department of Infectious Diseases at Perth Children's Hospital, Head of the Healthy Skin and ARF Prevention team and Program Head of the End Rheumatic Heart Disease program at the Telethon Kids Institute. Bowen leads a large body of skin health research in partnership with healthcare workers and community in the Kimberley while expanding her team and work to understand skin health in urban Aboriginal children better.

#12250

Jeffrey Gramlich

#65590

Overall Influence

Jeffrey D. Gramlich is a professor of accounting, a Howard D. and B. Phyllis Hoops Endowed Chair in Accounting, and a director of the Hoops Institute of Taxation Research and Policy at Washington State University . Previously, Gramlich served as the L.L. Bean/Lee Surace Endowed Chair at the University of Southern Maine. He has been a guest professor at Copenhagen Business School on several occasions. Earlier in his academic career he was a professor at the University of Hawaii's Shidler College of Business Administration.

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