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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Ranking

List of the most influential people in Computer Science,

#12601

Herbert Cahn

#116357

Overall Influence

1915 - 2002 (87 years)

Herbert Adolf Cahn was a classical archaeologist, numismatist, coin-dealer and antiquities-dealer. He was awarded the medal of the Royal Numismatic Society in 1971. Born in Germany, he became a Swiss citizen in 1949.

#12602

John Walker

#28608

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

John Walker is an English painter and printmakermaker. He has been called "one of the standout abstract painters of the last 50 years." Education and early work Walker studied in Birmingham at the Moseley School of Art, and later the Birmingham School of Art and Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. Some of his early work was inspired by abstract expressionism and post-painterly abstraction, and often combined apparently three-dimensional shapes with "flatter" elements. These pieces are usually rendered in acrylic paint.

#12603

Bryant Freeman

#47820

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Bryant Freeman is a retired emeritus University of Kansas professor. He is primarily known for being the founder and director of the University of Kansas Institute of Haitian Studies, one of the few such institutes in a major university in the United States. Freeman received his Ph.D. in French from Yale University, specializing in the work of Jean Racine.

#12604

Amber Cowan

#172049

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Amber Cowan is an American artist and educator living and working in Philadelphia. Cowan creates fused and flameworked glass sculptures from cullet and recycled industrial glass. Career Cowan received her BFA in 3-Dimensional Design with an emphasis in Hot Glass from Salisbury University in 2004. She was the first woman to graduate from Salisbury University with this specific degree. She received her MFA in Glass/Ceramics from Tyler School of Art at Temple University in 2011.

#12605

David Conway

#94673

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

David Allen Conway is a British music historian, academic and writer. Early life Conway was born in London. His sister was Barbara Conway who became a journalist. He was educated at Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School, and studied economics and psychology as an undergraduate at King's College, Cambridge. He obtained a PhD degree under the supervision of John Klier at University College London, where he has been an Honorary Research Fellow since 2008.

#12606

Hong-jiang Zhang

#189282

Overall Influence

#12607

Annette Barbier

#178061

Overall Influence

1950 - 2017 (67 years)

Annette Louise Barbier was an American artist and educator. She worked with video art, net art, installation art, interactive performance, and emerging and experimental technologies since the 1970s. Themes in her work address "issues of home, defined locally as domesticity and more broadly as the ways in which we relate to our environment." An early work, "Home Invasion [1995]," incorporating critical dialogue and audio, is accessible from Leonardo. "Domestic space—formerly inviolable—is increasingly disrupted by electronic communication of all sorts, including radio, TV, email and the teleph...

#12608

Arnold H. Green

#55161

Overall Influence

1940 - 2019 (79 years)

Arnold H. Green was a history professor retired from teaching at Brigham Young University, where he specialized in the modern history of the Middle East, especially the eras of European colonization and of decolonization.

#12609

Harry Rozmiarek

#101363

Overall Influence

1939 - 2013 (74 years)

Harry Rozmiarek was a noted veterinarian, academic, and laboratory animal care specialist. Rozmiarek was born in Pulaski, Wisconsin. He graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1962 with a veterinary degree. He joined the United States Army and was assigned as an attending army veterinarian at Fort Myer, Virginia. Among his duties, Rozmiarek attended to Black Jack, the famous riderless horse in the funeral of President John F. Kennedy. He also consulted on the health of the Kennedy family dog and cared for some Irish deer that had been a gift to Kennedy from the people of Ireland. The...

#12610

Laura K. Schaefer

#186326

Overall Influence

Laura K. Schaefer is an American planetary scientist whose research concerns the atmospheres and atmosphere formation of exoplanets, and the effect of asteroid impacts on the formation of the Earth's atmosphere. She is an assistant professor of geological sciences at Stanford University.

#12611

Michael Ward

#27427

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Michael Ward is an English literary critic and theologian. His academic focus is theological imagination, especially in the writings of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and G.K. Chesterton. He is best known for his book Planet Narnia, in which he argues that Lewis structured The Chronicles of Narnia so as to embody and express the imagery of the seven heavens. On the fiftieth anniversary of Lewis's death, Ward unveiled a permanent national memorial to him in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey.

#12612

Sam Strong

#112762

Overall Influence

Sam Strong is an Australian theatre director and arts leader; he was the artistic director of Queensland Theatre Company and of Griffin Theatre Company . He has also been Chair of Circa and the Associate Artistic Director of Melbourne Theatre Company.

#12613

Simmie Knox

#32676

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Simmie Lee Knox is an American painter who painted the official White House portrait of former United States President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton. He was the first black American artist to receive a presidential portrait commission.

#12614

Luís Simões da Silva

#160213

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Luís Alberto Proença Simões da Silva also known as Luis Simoes da Silva, is a Professor of Structural Mechanics at the Department of Civil Engineering of the Faculty of Science and Technology at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. He is head of the Civil Engineering Department and director of Institute for Sustainability and Innovation in Structural Engineering research centre financed by FCT evaluated in 2014 with excellent. He is also president of cmm .

#12615

Kitty Emery

#189319

Overall Influence

#12616

Wendy Ewart

#118629

Overall Influence

Wendy Ewart is a British scientist who worked for the Medical Research Council from 2008 to 2014. Education Ewart earned a BSc in physiology and biochemistry from the University of Southampton, and a PhD in neuroscience at the University of Bristol. She was later awarded an additional honorary doctorate from the University of Bristol after her retirement.

#12617

Allison Kirkman

#134365

Overall Influence

Allison Margaret Kirkman is a New Zealand sociology academic with interests in 'death and dying; gender, sexuality, ageing and health; health care work and workers.' In 2014 she was appointed the Vice Provost at Victoria University of Wellington before moving to become Pro-Vice Chancellor for the Division of Arts, Law, Psychology and Social Sciences at the University of Waikato. She was made an Emeritus Professor at the University of Waikato in 2022 in recognition of her work to set up a nursing programme at the university.

#12618

Gary Witherspoon

#49368

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Gary J. Witherspoon was a professor of Native American studies at the University of Washington. His area of expertise was the Navajo language and Navajo culture. Early life and education Born in 1943 in a Mormon family of Baltimore, Maryland, he attended Ohio State University then served on a Mormon religious mission to the Navajo beginning in 1962 for two years. He married in 1964 and became part of a Navajo family. He received his BS degree in political science from Brigham Young University in 1966.

#12619

Jack Rabin

#48814

Overall Influence

1945 - 2006 (61 years)

Jack M. Rabin was an American public administration scholar. Biography Early life and education Rabin received a B.A. in government and a M.A. in government from the University of Miami and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Georgia . His dissertation used Lawrence Kolhberg's moral development protocol to operationalize Chester Barnard's "zone of indifference" in organizations.

#12620

Claude Rapin

#47539

Overall Influence

Claude Rapin is an archaeologist and historian specializing in Central Asia, with special attention to Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. He is Director Emeritus for research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and is associated with the .

#12621

Joseph Lamelas

#189371

Overall Influence

Joseph Lamelas is a Cuban-American cardiothoracic surgeon, working in Miami, Florida, who developed the "Miami method", a technique for minimally invasive approach to aortic valve replacement and repair. Lamelas is the Chief of Cardiac surgery and Professor of Surgery at the University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine. He is board certified in general surgery, cardiac surgery and thoracic surgery, and surgical critical care, and is a member of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery and the Society of Thoracic Surgeons .

#12622

Janet C. Richards

#189375

Overall Influence

Janet C. Richards is a professor in the College of Education at the University of South Florida, Tampa, where she teaches courses in literacy theory and methods, writing, and qualitative research. Richards is the Senior Editor of Literacy Practice and Research; she has worked with classroom teachers and higher education faculty in Thailand, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Pakistan and Romania. A former elementary school classroom teacher, she writes extensively on preservice and inservice teachers’ communication skills.

#12623

Peter Johnsen

#82943

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Peter Berghsey Johnsen is an American scientist, administrator and adventurer. Education Johnsen received his bachelor's and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in zoology and continued his training as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania in neurobiology. He later completed an organizational leadership program at Harvard Kennedy School.

#12624

Brian Stewart

#175003

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Brian A. Stewart is an anthropological archaeologist, assistant professor of anthropology, and curator of Paleolithic archaeology at the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. He is also an honorary research fellow at the Rock Art Institute of the University of the Witwatersrand. His research focuses primarily on prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies of Africa, especially southern Africa. He is particularly interested in determining when, how, and where humans developed adaptive plasticity. Brian Stewart has directed excavations of many sites, mostly in Lesotho and South...

#12625

Thuy Tran

#168364

Overall Influence

Thuy Tran is an American politician and optometrist serving as a member of the Oregon House of Representatives for the 45th district. Elected in November 2022, she assumed office in January 2023. Early life and education Tran was born in South Vietnam and immigrated to the United States with her family as a child. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in biology from the University of California, Los Angeles, a Doctor of Optometry from Pacific University, and a Master of Business Administration from George Fox University.

#12626

MK Guth

#119248

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

MK Guth is an installation artist from Portland, Oregon, United States, whose work engages ritual and site of social interaction. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at museums, galleries, and festivals including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Swiss Institute, White Columns, and the Melbourne International Arts Festival among others. She is the recipient of the Betty Bowen Special Recognition Award and the Ford Family Foundation Fellowship.

#12627

Sidney Moko Mead

Sidney Moko Mead

#33034

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (99 years)

Sir "Sidney" Hirini Moko Haerewa Mead is a New Zealand anthropologist, historian, artist, teacher, writer and prominent Māori leader. Initially training as a teacher and artist, Mead taught in many schools in the East Coast and Bay of Plenty regions, and later served as principal of several schools. After earning his PhD in 1968, he taught anthropology in several universities abroad. He returned to New Zealand in 1977 and established the first Māori studies department in the country. Mead later became a prominent Māori advocate and leader, acting in negotiations on behalf of several tribes and sitting on numerous advisory boards.

#12628

Edward L. Loper Sr.

#125155

Overall Influence

1916 - 2011 (95 years)

Edward Leroy Loper Sr. was an African American artist and teacher from Delaware, best known for his vibrant palette and juxtaposition of colors. He taught painting for almost 70 years. Early life and education Loper was born to a poor family on the east side of Wilmington, Delaware, in a racially mixed section known as Frogtown. At the time of his birth, his mother was 16. Loper was raised primarily by his maternal grandmother. Growing up, he did not receive formal artistic training. He attended Howard High School, where he was an All-State football and basketball player. At the time, this was the only high school in Delaware that African Americans were allowed to attend.

#12629

Borbala Biro

#105022

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Borbala Biro is a Hungarian soil biologist and lecturer at the Szent-István-University in Gödöllö. She participates in research into the use of biofectors with the University of Hohenheim. Biro attended vocational college in Kisvárda; the Natural Science Faculty of the University of Kossuth Lajos specialising in terrestrial ecology; obtained habilitation for Plant Cultivation and Horticulture at the West Hungarian University in Mosonmagyaróvár, and a doctorate of the Hungarian Academy of Science.

#12630

John E. Dowell Jr.

#163829

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

John Edward Dowell Jr. is an American printmaker, etcher, lithographer, painter, and professor of printmaking at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. Life and education Dowell was born in Philadelphia, and grew up in a housing project there. As a child, he explored art with his brother by copying the work in Lone Ranger comics.

#12631

Bill Beckley

#58263

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Bill Beckley is an American narrative and conceptual artist. Early life Born in Hamburg, Pennsylvania, a small farming town in the Amish countryside, Bill Beckley attended college at Kutztown University from 1964 to 1968 and in 1970 received a Master of Fine Arts from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. There he studied with Italo Scanga, who introduced him to former students and friends, including Bruce Nauman, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, and Marcia Tucker, then a curator at the Whitney Museum. Marcia Tucker introduced his work to Athena Spear, a curator at the Allen Memorial Art Museum in O...

#12632

Keren Cytter

#96093

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Keren Cytter is an Israeli visual artist and writer. Biography Cytter, born 22 August 1977, spent her childhood in Israel and went on to study visual arts at the Avni Institute of Art and Design, Tel Aviv. After finding success in various galleries in her home country, she moved to Amsterdam on a scholarship from De Ateliers where she studied with Willem de Rooij and Marlene Dumas. Her scope of work includes film, video installations, performance, drawings and photography. She is also a writer of novels, theatre plays and poetry.

#12633

Helen Johnson

#123508

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Helen Johnson is an Australian artist producing large-scale paintings who also works as a lecturer, researcher and curator. Her artworks and practice reflect her views on colonialism, consumerism, the environment and personal accountability.

#12634

Angela Dufresne

#111169

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Angela Dufresne is a Brooklyn based American artist known for paintings that explore narrative in a variety of ways. Dufresne holds a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute, MO and an MFA from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA. She is currently faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design.

#12635

Gwyn Pritchard

#184844

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Gwyn Pritchard is a British composer, ensemble and festival director, and teacher. Life Pritchard was born in Yorkshire and brought up on a farm near Marlborough, Wiltshire. His parents were not musicians, but his family inherited a piano when he was 11 and he began to teach himself to play and to compose. At 13 he also took up the cello, developing quickly, and in 1966 he was accepted to the Royal Scottish Academy in Glasgow to study the instrument with Joan Dickson, and composition with Dr Frank Spedding. After graduating he worked briefly as Director of Music at Salisbury Cathedral School, then as a freelance cellist in London.

#12636

Kui-juan Jin

#184534

Overall Influence

Kui-juan Jin is a Chinese physicist. Jin studied optics at Shandong University. After completing her bachelor's degree, Jin pursued a doctorate at the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Jin engaged in postdoctoral research under the direction of Gerald Mahan at the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, then moved to Lund University, where she was advised by Koung-An Chao. Jin subsequently returned to China and IOPCAS, becoming a full professor in 2004. In 2012, Jin was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society, "[f]or her significant contribution i...

#12637

Harriete Estel Berman

#125640

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Harriete Estel Berman is an American artist known for her sculptures and jewelry made from post-consumer, recycled household goods, and her satirical explorations of women's roles in society. Early life and education Berman was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She attended Syracuse University, and was granted a BFA in 1974. In 1980, she earned an MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University.

#12638

Noriko Mizuta

#39677

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

is a scholar of comparative literature and a poet. She is the trustee of Jōsai University Educational Corporation in Japan. She was awarded the Pro Cultura Hungarica prize in 2011 and the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of Hungary in 2013.

#12639

Ya-Jun Pan

#182540

Overall Influence

Ya-Jun Pan is a Chinese and Canadian mechanical engineer whose research involves robust and nonlinear control for teleoperation and multi-agent systems. She is a professor of mechanical engineering at Dalhousie University, where she directs the Advanced Control and Mechatronics Laboratory.

#12640

Michelle Coombs

#108993

Overall Influence

Michelle Lynn Coombs is a geologist at the Alaska Volcano Observatory . She was the Scientist-in-Charge from 2016 to 2023. Coombs is a fellow of the Geological Society of America. Education 1994: B.A. Geology 2001: Ph.D. Geology

#12641

Tiffany Schmidt

#91483

Overall Influence

Tiffany M. Schmidt is an American researcher and chronobiologist, currently working as an associate professor of Neurobiology at Northwestern University. Schmidt, who works in Evanston, Illinois, studies the role of retinal ganglion cells to determine how light can affect behavior, hormonal changes, vision, sleep, and circadian entrainment.

#12642

Edward Marsland

#120547

Overall Influence

1923 - 1996 (73 years)

Edward Abson Marsland was a British academic who served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Birmingham. Marsland received his early education at King Edward's School, Birmingham. He graduated with a PhD from the Faculty of Medicine of Birmingham University in 1950. His thesis was 'A histological investigation of amelogenesis in rats, with special reference to maturation'.

#12643

Kamal Choudhary

#188231

Overall Influence

Kamal Choudhary is an Indian American physicist and computational materials scientist in the thermodynamics and kinetics group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He is most notable for establishing the NIST-JARVIS infrastructure for data-driven materials design and Materials informatics. He is also an associate editor of the journals npj Computational Materials and Scientific Data.

#12644

Lee Jang-moo

#100894

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Lee Jang-Moo is a professor of Seoul National University in the department of Mechanical Engineering and the current president of Seoul National University since July 2006.

#12645

Stacy Berg Dale

#189494

Overall Influence

#12646

Dilwar Hussain

#71820

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Dilwar Hussain is an independent British consultant working on social policy, Muslim identity and Islamic reform in the modern world. He formerly taught MA courses on Islam and Muslims at the Markfield Institute of Higher Education.

#12647

Henrik Gottlieb

#139981

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Henrik Gottlieb is a Danish linguist and translation scholar, who is most known for his work in audiovisual translation. He is an associate professor emeritus at the University of Copenhagen. Education and career Gottlieb was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1953. After finishing school in 1971, he worked as a subtitler for Danish public service broadcaster Danmarks Radio and TV 2 in the 1980s and 1990s. He later enlisted at University of Copenhagen from where he got his MA in 1991, with a thesis titled Tekstning - Synkron billedmedieoversættelse . He went on to work as a research assistant ...

#12648

Danilo Zavrtanik

Danilo Zavrtanik

#90063

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Danilo Zavrtanik is a Slovenian physicist and professor. Born in Nova Gorica, he graduated in 1979 from the Faculty for Natural Sciences and Technology of the University of Ljubljana. In 1987, he obtained his PhD by defending a doctoral dissertation on "Angular distribution analysis of the reaction π−p -> π−π+n". From 2006 he is a full professor of physics at the University of Nova Gorica and the head of the Laboratory for Astroparticle Physics.

#12649

Laura Roa

#168705

Overall Influence

Laura María Roa Romero is a Spanish biomedical engineer, and a University Professor in the Biomedical Engineering Group at the University of Seville, which she founded in 1986. She has a doctorate from the University of Seville, earned in 1980.

#12650

Marjan van den Akker

#186540

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Janna Magrietje van den Akker is a Dutch computer scientist and operations researcher specializing in scheduling algorithms with applications including transportation and software engineering. She is an associate professor in the Department of Information and Computing Sciences at Utrecht University, where she directs the Utrecht AI & Mobility Lab and Robust Rail Lab. She also holds a research affiliation with KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.

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