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 Engineering,

#601

Pancho Guedes

#11562

Overall Influence

1925 - 2015 (90 years)

Amâncio d'Alpoim Miranda "Pancho" Guedes was a Portuguese architect, sculptor and painter an educator. He is described as one of the earliest post-modernist architects in Africa and an archetype Eclectic Modernist.

#602

Horst Zuse

#14581

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Horst Zuse is a German computer scientist. Life Horst Zuse was born in 1945 as the son of the computer pioneer Konrad Zuse. He first studied electrical engineering at the Technical University of Berlin and later on completed his PhD on software metrics. Horst Zuse worked as a Privatdozent at the Technical University of Berlin and was professor at the Hochschule Lausitz , University of Applied Sciences. Besides software engineering, he has concentrated on the history of computer science.

#603

Kumpati S. Narendra

#9400

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Kumpati S. Narendra is an American control theorist, who currently holds the Harold W. Cheel Professorship of Electrical Engineering at Yale University. He received the Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award in 2003. He is noted "for pioneering contributions to stability theory, adaptive and learning systems theory". He is also well recognized for his research work towards learning including Neural Networks and Learning Automata.

#604

Gerhard Fettweis

#20144

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Gerhard Paul Fettweis is a German electrical engineer and university professor for telecommunications engineering. Gerhard's father Alfred Fettweis invented the Wave Digital Filter. With a scholarship from the prestigious Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, Gerhard Fettweis studied electrical engineering at RWTH Aachen University from 1981 to 1986, and received his Dr.-Ing. degree there in 1990. He then worked as a visiting scholar with IBM and TCSI Inc. in Berkeley. Since 1994, he has been holding the Vodafone Chair for Mobile Communications Systems at Dresden University of Technology. In...

#605

Hugh Herr

#12024

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Hugh Herr is an American rock climber, engineer, and biophysicist. Early life The youngest of five siblings of a Mennonite family from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Hugh Herr was a prodigy rock climber: by age 8, he had scaled the face of the Mount Temple in the Canadian Rockies, and by 17 he was acknowledged to be one of the best climbers in the United States.

#606

Thomas L. Magnanti

#11829

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Thomas Lee Magnanti is an American engineer and Institute Professor and former Dean of the School of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Magnanti served as the founding president of the Singapore University of Technology and Design from 2009 to 2017.

#607

Leila Araghian

#16470

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

Leila Araghian is an Iranian architect. She has a master's degree in architecture from the University of British Columbia, where she won the UBC Architecture Alumni Henry Elder Prize. She previously studied architecture in Iran, at Shahid Beheshti University.

#608

Fawwaz T. Ulaby

#23673

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Fawwaz T. Ulaby is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and formerly the Founding Provost and Executive Vice President of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology and R. Jamieson and Betty Williams Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan.

#609

Stuart Pugh

#22998

Overall Influence

1929 - 1993 (64 years)

Stuart Pugh was a British product designer from Halifax, UK. He is known for redefining Total Design , which had previously been coined by Ove Arup regarding integrated architecture and structural engineering, to instead map a structured and integrated process in the field of product design and development that included market and production processes.

#610

Peter Hirsch

#10884

Overall Influence

1925 - Present (99 years)

Sir Peter Bernhard Hirsch HonFRMS FRS is a British metallurgist who has made fundamental contributions to the application of transmission electron microscopy to metals. Biography Born in 1925, Hirsch lived in Germany until 1939; he was one of hundreds of Jewish children that escaped Germany via the various Kindertransport missions that saved many such children from the impending dangers of World War II and the Holocaust.

#611

Khaled S. Al-Sultan

#12971

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Dr. Khaled S. Al-Sultan was the fourth rector of King Fahd University for Petroleum and Minerals a public university in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia and the first to have graduated from the institution to hold this position. Dr. Al-Sultan is married and has two children.

#612

Chauncey Starr

#12549

Overall Influence

1912 - 2007 (95 years)

Chauncey Starr was an American electrical engineer and an expert in nuclear energy. Born in Newark, New Jersey, Starr received an electrical engineering degree in 1932 and a Ph.D. in physics in 1935 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

#613

Roland Rainer

#22284

Overall Influence

1910 - 2004 (94 years)

Roland Rainer was an Austrian architect. Born in Klagenfurt, Roland Rainer decided to become an architect when he was 18, so he studied at the Vienna University of Technology. His thesis was about the Karlsplatz in Vienna. Then, he left Austria visiting the Netherlands and the German Academy for Urban Design in Berlin. He became a Member of the ruling Nazi Party and endorsed their policies in his theoretical works. After World War II, he returned to Austria and continued writing, including his most famous work Urban design prose.

#614

Sanjay Mittal

#26888

Overall Influence

Sanjay Mittal is a Professor of computational fluid dynamics in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India. Early life and education After doing his B.Tech. from IIT Kanpur in 1988, he got enrolled at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities for M.S. program. He then received his Ph.D. and worked as a research associate under Tayfun Tezduyar.

#615

Martin Yarmush

#16281

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Martin L. Yarmush is an American scientist, physician, and engineer known for his work in biotechnology and bioengineering. After spending 4 years as a Principal Research Associate in Chemical Engineering at MIT, in 1988 he joined Rutgers University, where he currently holds the Paul and Mary Monroe Endowed Chair in Science and Engineering and serves as Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering. Yarmush is the founding director of the Center for Engineering in Medicine & Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also a Lecturer in Surgery and Bioengineering at Harvard Medical...

#616

David C. Munson

David C. Munson

#18155

Overall Influence

David C. Munson Jr. is an American university professor and administrator and the current president of the Rochester Institute of Technology. Previously, Munson was dean of the University of Michigan College of Engineering from 2006 to 2016. He also served as a professor of electrical engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of Michigan.

#617

Edmund Hillary

#1298

Overall Influence

1919 - 2008 (89 years)

Sir Edmund Percival Hillary was a New Zealand mountaineer, explorer, and philanthropist. On 29 May 1953, Hillary and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers confirmed to have reached the summit of Mount Everest. They were part of the ninth British expedition to Everest, led by John Hunt. From 1985 to 1988 he served as New Zealand's High Commissioner to India and Bangladesh and concurrently as Ambassador to Nepal.

#618

Peter L. Hagelstein

#19352

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Peter L. Hagelstein is an associate professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , affiliated with the Research Laboratory of Electronics . Hagelstein received a B.S. and M.S. in 1976 and Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1981, from MIT.

#619

Tomás Taveira

#14164

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Tomás Taveira is a Portuguese architect. He has a degree in architecture from the Technical University of Lisbon and owns a post-graduation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Some of his most recognizable works include the Amoreiras Towers in Lisbon, three of the new stadiums for the 2004 UEFA European Football Championship in Portugal and the Allianz Parque stadium in São Paulo, Brazil.

#620

Eduardo Catalano

#16742

Overall Influence

1917 - 2010 (93 years)

Eduardo Fernando Catalano was an Argentine architect. Life and career Born in Buenos Aires, Catalano went to the United States on a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 1945, after earning his second master's degree in architecture returned to Buenos Aires where he taught at the University of Buenos Aires and ran a private practice. Catalano then taught at the Architectural Association in London from 1950 to 1951, when he came back to the United States as a Professor of Architecture at the School of Design in Raleigh, North Carolina State University.

#621

Ridwan Kamil

#8685

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Mochamad Ridwan Kamil , alternatively Kang Emil is an Indonesian architect and politician who was the 15th Governor of West Java, the largest province of Indonesia. He was also the mayor of Bandung from 2013 to 2018. As an architect, he designed iconic structures in Indonesia and other countries in Asia with his Urbane architectural firm and lectured at the Department of Architecture, Bandung Institute of Technology.

#622

Alberto Pérez-Gómez

#17410

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Alberto Pérez-Gómez is an architectural historian and theorist known for taking a phenomenological approach to architecture. He lives in Montreal. Biography Born December 24, 1949, in Mexico City he graduated as an engineer and architect from the National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico. Afterwards he did postgraduate work at Cornell University. He then pursued graduate studies in the History and Theory of Architecture at the University of Essex where he received his Master of Arts in 1975 and Ph.D. in 1979. In 1987 he became a Canadian Citizen and a Quebec resident. In 1984, he won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award for his book Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science.

#623

Moti Bodek

#17668

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Moti Bodek is an Israeli architect. He is the CEO of Bodek Architects based in Tel Aviv and a Professor of Architecture at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem & at Tel Aviv University. Biography Moti Bodek was born and grew up in Haifa. He served in the Israeli security forces from 1979 to 1985. In 1989 he graduated with honors from the department of Environmental Design at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design Jerusalem, and in 1990 he earned his B.Arch. degree from the Faculty of Architecture in the Technion, Haifa.

#624

Stefano Soatto

#23419

Overall Influence

Stefano Soatto is professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles , in Los Angeles, CA, where he is also professor of electrical engineering and founding director of the UCLA Vision Lab.

#625

Robert D. Braun

#20758

Overall Influence

Robert David Braun is an American aerospace engineer and academic. He has served as the dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, the David and Andrew Lewis Professor of Space Technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the NASA Chief Technologist. Currently, Dr. Braun is the Space Sector Head at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory .

#626

Terunobu Fujimori

#29679

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Terunobu Fujimori is a Japanese architect and architectural historian. During the 1970s and 1980s he made studies of the city about early Western buildings and unusual occurrences, and did not turn to architecture until he was in his forties. His work is considered by many to be eccentric but is characterised by his use of natural materials.

#627

James C. Liao

#6429

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

James C. Liao is the Parsons Foundation Professor and Chair of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles and is the co-founder and lead scientific advisor of Easel Biotechnologies, LLC.

#628

Mung Chiang

#18227

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

#629

Annie Leibovitz

Annie Leibovitz

#409

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Anna-Lou Leibovitz is an American portrait photographer best known for her engaging portraits, particularly of celebrities, which often feature subjects in intimate settings and poses. Leibovitz's Polaroid photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, taken five hours before Lennon's murder, is considered one of Rolling Stone magazine's most famous cover photographs. The Library of Congress declared her a Living Legend, and she is the first woman to have a feature exhibition at Washington's National Portrait Gallery.

#630

Michele De Lucchi

Michele De Lucchi

#20152

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Michele de Lucchi is an Italian architect and designer. Biography De Lucchi was born in 1951 in Ferrara and graduated in architecture from Florence. During the period of radical and experimental architecture he was a prominent figure in movements such as Cavart, Studio Alchimia and Memphis.

#631

J. Halcombe Laning

#9116

Overall Influence

1920 - 2012 (92 years)

J. Halcombe "Hal" Laning Jr. was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer pioneer who in 1952 invented an algebraic compiler called George that ran on the MIT Whirlwind, the first real-time computer. Laning designed George to be an easier-to-use alternative to assembly language for entering mathematical equations into a computer. He later became a key contributor to the 1960s race to the Moon, with pioneering work on space-based guidance systems for the Apollo Moon missions. From 1955 to 1980, he was deputy associate director of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory.

#632

John J. Leonard

#19817

Overall Influence

John J. Leonard is an American roboticist and Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory , Leonard is a researcher in simultaneous localization and mapping, and was the team lead for MIT's team at the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, one of the six teams to cross the finish line in the final event, placing fourth overall.

#633

Michelle Khine

#33605

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Michelle Khine is an American bioengineer who is a distinguished scientist and innovator at the University of California, Irvine, co-founder of Fluxion Biosciences Inc., the scientific founder of the Shrink nano-technology platform, as well as the Assistant and Founding Professor of the School of Engineering at UC Merced. Khine, an associate biomedical engineering professor in the Henry Samueli School of Engineering, is responsible for experimenting with childhood toys Shrinky Dinks to build microfluidic channels. Her research has enabled technological advances in industries including biologic...

#634

K. H. Jürgen Buschow

#42894

Overall Influence

#635

Shanhui Fan

#36642

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Shanhui Fan is a Chinese-born American electrical engineer and physicist, with a focus on theoretical, computational and numerical aspects of photonics and electromagnetism. He is a professor of electrical engineering, and a professor of applied physics at Stanford University. He is the director of the Edward L. Ginzton Lab and Senior Fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy.

#636

Magnus Egerstedt

Magnus Egerstedt

#22662

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Magnus B. Egerstedt is a Swedish-American roboticist who is the Dean of the Henry Samueli School of Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. He was formerly the Steve C. Chaddick School Chair and Professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology.

#637

Carlo Ratti

#18752

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Carlo Ratti is an Italian architect, engineer, inventor, educator and activist. He is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he directs the MIT Senseable City Lab, a research group that explores how new technologies are changing the way we understand, design and ultimately live in cities. Ratti is also a founding partner of the international design and innovation office CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, which he established in 2004 in Torino, Italy, and now has a branch in New York City, United States. Ratti was named one of the "50 most influential designers in America" by F...

#638

Manfred Morari

#34992

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Manfred Morari is a world-leading control theorist who has made pioneering contributions to the theory and applications of Model Predictive Control, Internal Model Control and Hybrid Systems. His book on Robust Process Control is considered to be definitive text on the subject. He is currently Peter and Susanne Armstrong Faculty Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1977. Dr. Morari held positions at the University of Wisconsin, Madison , the California Institute of Technology , and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich ETH Zurich.

#639

George Karniadakis

George Karniadakis

#30697

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

George Em Karniadakis is a professor of applied mathematics at Brown University. He is a Greek-American researcher who is known for his wide-spectrum work on high-dimensional stochastic modeling and multiscale simulations of physical and biological systems, and is a pioneer of spectral/hp-element methods for fluids in complex geometries, general polynomial chaos for uncertainty quantification, and the Sturm-Liouville theory for partial differential equations and fractional calculus.

#640

Vijay Kumar

#27165

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Vijay Kumar is an Indian roboticist and UPS foundation professor in the School of Engineering & Applied Science with secondary appointments in computer and information science and electrical and systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, and became the new Dean of Penn Engineering on 1 July 2015.

#641

Carlo Montemagno

#14918

Overall Influence

1956 - 2018 (62 years)

Carlo Montemagno was an American engineer and expert in nanotechnology and biomedical engineering, focusing on futuristic technologies to create interdisciplinary solutions for the grand challenges in health, energy and the environment. He has been considered one of the pioneers of bionanotechnology. Some of his fundamental contributions include the development of biomolecular motors for powering inorganic nanodevices while at Cornell and muscle-driven self-assembled nanodevices while at UCLA.

#642

Oleksandr Zelenskyy

#32734

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Oleksandr Semenovych Zelenskyy is a Ukrainian mining scientist and mathematician who specializes in the automation of geological and surveying support. He is a professor and a doctor of technical sciences. Zelenskyy has been the head of the Kryvyi Rih State University's Department of Cybernetics and Computing Hardware since 1995. His son, Volodymyr Zelenskyy is currently serving as the 6th President of Ukraine.

#643

Frank L. Lewis

#35137

Overall Influence

Frank L. Lewis is an American electrical engineer, academic and researcher. He is a professor of electrical engineering, Moncrief-O’Donnell Endowed Chair, and head of Advanced Controls and Sensors Group at The University of Texas at Arlington . He is a member of UTA Academy of Distinguished Teachers and a charter member of UTA Academy of Distinguished Scholars.

#644

Vlado Milunić

#32746

Overall Influence

1941 - 2022 (81 years)

Vladimir Milunić was a Czech architect. He was noted for designing the "Dancing House" in Prague with Frank Gehry. He also taught at the Czech Technical University in Prague. Early life Milunić was born in Zagreb, Republic of Yugoslavia , on 3 March 1941, to a family of Croatian descent. His family moved to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic when he was 15 or 16. Regarding his nationality, he later stated that he was Czechoslovak and felt Yugoslavian, "as a protest against primitive nationalism". Milunić studied architecture at the Czech Technical University in Prague , graduating in 1966.

#645

Adolfo Natalini

#36543

Overall Influence

1941 - 2020 (79 years)

Adolfo Natalini was an Italian architect. Biography Natalini founded the architectural company Superstudio in 1966 along with Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, Gian Piero Frassinelli, Alessandro and Roberto Magris, and Alessandro Poli.

#646

Jonathan Borofsky

Jonathan Borofsky

#6780

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Jonathan Borofsky is an American sculptor and printmaker who lives and works in Ogunquit, Maine. Early life and education Borofsky was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University in 1964, after which he continued his studies at France's Ecole de Fontainebleau and received his Master of Fine Arts from Yale University in 1966. He lived in Manhattan until a teaching position at the California Institute of the Arts brought him to Los Angeles in 1977. He resided in Venice and Tuna Canyon, Los Angeles from 1977 to 1992, In the 1960s, Borofsky'...

#647

Egor Popov

#37237

Overall Influence

1913 - 2001 (88 years)

Egor Pavlovich Popov was a structural and seismic engineer who helped transform the design of buildings, structures, and civil engineering around earthquake-prone regions. A relative of inventor Alexander Stepanovich Popov, Egor Popov was born in Kiev, Russian Empire and after moving to the United States of America in 1927, he eventually earned a B.S. from UC Berkeley, his master's degree from MIT and his doctorate degree from Stanford in 1946.

#648

Payam Heydari

#15584

Overall Influence

Payam Heydari is an Iranian-American Professor who is noted for his contribution to the field of radio-frequency and millimeter-wave integrated circuits. Education Heydari attended Sharif University of Technology in Tehran and received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering in 1992 and 1995, respectively. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from the University of Southern California in 2001. In 1997, he worked at Bell-labs, Lucent Technologies on noise analysis in high-speed CMOS integrated circuits fields. In 1998 he worked at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center on gradient-based optimiza...

#649

Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl

#27599

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl is an Iranian-American academic, structural engineer and professor at University of California, Berkeley. He was one of the leading structural engineers to investigate the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on the September 11 attacks.

#650

Karl Spangenberg

#27816

Overall Influence

Karl Spangenberg was an American engineer, social scientist, academic, futurist, writer, and visionary. Affiliations Spangenberg was a member of the American Physical Society and became an IRE Associate in 1934, Senior Member in 1945, and Fellow in 1949.

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