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.

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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 Criminology,

#201

Deborah Denno

#121754

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Deborah West Denno is an American legal scholar and criminologist who studies the intersection of biology, neuroscience, and criminal law. She is the Arthur A. McGivney Professor of Law at the Fordham University School of Law, where she is also the founding director of the Neuroscience and Law Center. In 2007, she was named one of the fifty most influential women lawyers in the United States by the National Law Journal. She is known for her writings on the constitutionality of certain methods of capital punishment, such as lethal injection. A 2006 article in the Washington Post described her ...

#202

Cindy Fazey

#24551

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Cindy Fazey is a criminologist and former Chief of Demand Reduction for the United Nations Drug Control Programme. She has been Professor of International Drug Policy at the University of Liverpool since 1998. Fazey has spoken in the past of "the complete failure of national and international drugs policies." She has also noted that the organization of the international drug control apparatus makes it difficult to reform the system. On 24 February 2004, Fazey gave a speech at the Perspective on Cannabis conference at Liverpool titled Can you hear the grass growing? Cannabis and the repatriatio...

#203

Harry Levine

#190535

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Harry Gene Levine is an American sociologist known for his research on alcohol and illicit drugs in American society. He is a professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. His work has included studies on marijuana arrests in New York City, which have found that such arrests are more common there than in any other city in the world, and that they were much more common from 1998 to 2007 than from 1988 to 1997. He has also found that over the 15 years leading up to 2011, far more of those arrested in New York City for marijuana possession were black than were Latino or white .

#204

Herbert L. Packer

1925 - 1972 (47 years)

Herbert Leslie Packer was an American law professor and criminologist. His key work is the book The Limits of the Criminal Sanction , which proposed two models of the criminal justice system, the crime control model and the due process model. These models were extremely influential in criminology and criminal policy debates.

#205

Franz Exner

1881 - 1947 (66 years)

Franz Exner was an Austrian-German criminologist and criminal lawyer. Alongside Edmund Mezger, Hans von Hentig and Gustav Aschaffenburg, he was a leading and in some respects a pioneering representative of the German school of criminology in the first half of the twentieth century. During the 1920s and 1930s Exner produced pioneering work on the interface between Criminology and Sociology. He became a controversial figure among subsequent generations because of the extent to which during the 1930s and 1940s his ideas evolved towards National Socialist ideology, notably with regard to so-call...

#206

Douglas Kelley

1912 - 1958 (46 years)

Lt. Colonel Douglas McGlashan Kelley was a United States Army Military Intelligence Corps officer who served as chief psychiatrist at Nuremberg Prison during the Nuremberg War Trials. He worked to ascertain defendants' competency before they stood trial.

#207

Weston J. Morrow

#208

Ruth Peterson

1900 - Present (124 years)

Ruth Delois Peterson is an American sociologist and criminologist known for her work on racial and ethnic inequality and crime. She earned her PhD in sociology from University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1983. Peterson is emerita professor of sociology at the Ohio State University, former director of the Criminal Justice Research Center , and former president of the American Society of Criminology . She is the namesake of the American Society of Criminology's Ruth D. Peterson Fellowship for Racial and Ethnic Diversity.

#209

Thorsten Sellin

1896 - 1994 (98 years)

Johan Thorsten Sellin was a Swedish American sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, a penologist and one of the pioneers of scientific criminology. Biography Sellin was born in Örnsköldsvik in Västernorrland County, Sweden and came to Canada with his parents when he was 17 years old. He received his bachelor's degree from Augustana College in Illinois when he was 19. He went on to receive a master's degree and doctoral degree in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1922 until becoming Professor Emeritus in 1967.

#210

Edwin Sutherland

Edwin Sutherland

1883 - 1950 (67 years)

Edwin Hardin Sutherland was an American sociologist. He is considered one of the most influential criminologists of the 20th century. He was a sociologist of the symbolic interactionist school of thought and is best known for defining white-collar crime and differential association, a general theory of crime and delinquency. Sutherland earned his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1913.

#211

Walter Reckless

1898 - 1988 (90 years)

Walter Reckless was an American criminologist known for his containment theory . Biography Reckless earned his PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago. While at the Chicago school, he joined with sociologists Robert Park and Ernest Burgess in conducting observation studies of crime in Chicago, Illinois. This research led to his dissertation, The Natural History of Vice Areas in Chicago , which was published as "Vice in Chicago" - a landmark sociological study of fraud, prostitution, and organized crime in the city's "vice" districts.

#212

Cesare Lombroso

Cesare Lombroso

1835 - 1909 (74 years)

Cesare Lombroso was an Italian eugenicist, criminologist, phrenologist, physician, and founder of the Italian school of criminology. He is considered the founder of modern criminal anthropology by changing the Western notions of individual responsibility.

#213

Alexandre Lacassagne

Alexandre Lacassagne

1843 - 1924 (81 years)

Alexandre Lacassagne was a French physician and criminologist who was a native of Cahors. He was the founder of the Lacassagne school of criminology, based in Lyon and influential from 1885 to 1914, and the main rival to Lombroso's Italian school.

#214

Alfredo Niceforo

1876 - 1960 (84 years)

Alfredo Niceforo was an Italian statistician and scientific racist. Biography Niceforo was born in Castiglione di Sicilia, Catania, Italy, and died March 2, 1960, in Rome. He was an Italian sociologist, criminologist, and statistician who posited the theory that every person has a “deep ego” of antisocial, subconscious impulses that represent a throwback to precivilized existence. Accompanying this ego, and attempting to keep its latent delinquency in check, according to his concept, is a “superior ego” formed by man's social interaction. This theory, which he published in 1902, bears some re...

#215

Mikhail Nikolaevich Gernet

Mikhail Nikolaevich Gernet

1874 - 1953 (79 years)

Mikhail Nikolaevich Gernet was a Russian and Soviet criminologist and legal historian who is considered the founder of sociological criminology in Russia. Gernet taught law at Moscow State University from 1897 on, where he notably opposed the death penalty and introduced the concept of resocialization into Russian criminal law scholarship. In 1911, he took up a post at the Psychoneurological Institute in Moscow. After the Russian Revolution and until his death, he taught at Moscow University again, where he contributed to the Stalinist legal codifications of the 1930s and developed a class-sp...

#216

Heleno Fragoso

1926 - 1985 (59 years)

Heleno Cláudio Fragoso was a Brazilian professor of Criminal Law and Criminology. Biography Heleno Cláudio Fragoso was born in Nova Iguaçú. He lectured at the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro. He served as the Vice President of the International Association of Penal Law and of the International Commission of Jurists. In 1966, he was a visiting instructor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice .

#217

Panchanan Ghoshal

1908 - 1990 (82 years)

Panchanan Ghoshal was a Bengali writer, criminologist and social worker. Career Ghoshal was born in a Zaminder family of Naihati, Presently in North 24 Parganas in British India. He passed M.Sc. in Zoology and Ph.D. in Psychology. Criminology was his special paper. While Ghoshal served in Jorasanko police station, Rabindranath Tagore inspired him to write on the subject of crime and criminals. He retired as Deputy Inspector General from Indian Imperial Police service. He was first Indian to be awarded a doctorate degree in Criminal psychology.

#218

Mike Mitka

#219

Michael Hindelang

1945 - 1982 (37 years)

Michael J. Hindelang was an American criminologist. Early life and education Hindelang was born in Detroit. He received his B.A. in psychology in 1966 and his master's degree in 1967, both from Wayne State University. He received his doctorate in criminology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1969.

#220

Willem Bonger

1876 - 1940 (64 years)

Willem Adriaan Bonger was a Dutch criminologist and sociologist. He is considered an early Marxist criminologist which through his work, criminology stood out as an autonomous science, making its interrelationship with sociology more evident according to a scientific approach.

#221

Lorenzo Tenchini

1852 - 1906 (54 years)

Lorenzo Tenchini was born in Brescia and studied Medicine in Pavia where he became lecturer of Anatomy in 1880. In 1881, at the age of 29 years, he was appointed Professor of Anatomy at the University of Parma. In this city Tenchini began to study the morphology of the brains of criminals, later founding the "Museum of Criminal Anthropology". He collected brains of delinquents and their wax masks and studied the relationship between neuroanatomy and criminality. He promoted the building of a lunatic asylum in the province of Parma and was interested in social medicine, including the pellagra scourge in Northern Italy.

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