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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Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Engineering,

#651

Gordon Agnew

#19539

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Gordon B. Agnew is a Canadian engineering professor at the University of Waterloo. Agnew's primary research interests are in the fields of encryption and data security. Education Agnew earned a B.A.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Waterloo in 1978 and a Ph.D. in 1982.

#652

Bilal M. Ayyub

#30418

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

#653

Neil Denari

#24339

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Neil Denari is an American architect, professor, and author. Based since 1988 in Los Angeles, Denari emerged in New York during the 1980s with a series of theoretical projects and texts based on the collapse of the machine aesthetic of Modernism. His office, Neil M. Denari Architects is dedicated to exploring the realms of architecture, design, urbanism, and all aspects of contemporary life. As a teacher for more than 20 years, Denari has held visiting professorships at UC Berkeley, Columbia, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Texas at Arlington. Denari is a tenured...

#654

Yahya Rahmat-Samii

#13381

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Yahya Rahmat-Samii is the Northrop Grumman Chair Professor in Electromagnetics at the electrical engineering department at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he teaches and conducts research on microwave transmission and radio antennas. Rahmat-Samii received his Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering in 1970 from the University of Tehran, Iran, and the Master of Science in 1972 and the Doctor of Philosophy degrees in electrical engineering in 1975 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before joining UCLA in 1989, he was a senior research scientist at...

#655

Christopher G. Atkeson

Christopher G. Atkeson

#19719

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Christopher Granger Atkeson is an American roboticist and a professor at the Robotics Institute and Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University . Atkeson is known for his work in humanoid robots, soft robotics, and machine learning, most notably on locally weighted learning.

#656

Edward Soja

#4088

Overall Influence

1940 - 2015 (75 years)

Edward William Soja was an urbanist, a postmodern political geographer and urban theorist. He worked on socio-spatial dialectic and spatial justice. Biography Edward Soja received his Ph.D. degree from Syracuse University. He worked for the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at UCLA since 1972, where he was a Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning. He had also been a visiting professor at the London School of Economics.

#657

Gwendolyn Boyd

#21289

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Boyd is an American scientist and university administrator. She served as president of Alabama State University from 2014 to 2016, and was previously national president of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority from 2000 to 2004. Before entering administration she worked as a mechanical engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

#658

William F. Schreiber

#18646

Overall Influence

1925 - 2009 (84 years)

William F. Schreiber was an American electrical engineer and professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Schreiber had served on the advisory committee of the Federal Communications Commission. In March 1969, he founded the imaging systems supplier ECRM , which designed a computer-based color printing system and an optical character recognition machine.

#659

Raimund Abraham

#19811

Overall Influence

1933 - 2010 (77 years)

Raimund Johann Abraham was an Austrian architect. Early life and formal education Raimund Johann Abraham was born in 1933 in Lienz, East Tyrol, Austria. Throughout a 40-year career, Abraham created visionary projects and built works of architecture in Europe and in the United States. From 1952 to 1958, Abraham studied at the Graz University of Technology. In 1959, he established a studio in Vienna, where he explored the depths and boundaries of architecture through building, drawing, and montage. Abraham's first book, the 1965 publication "Elementare Architektur" was made at a time of transition between architecture studies and practice.

#660

Tatau Nishinaga

#33641

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Tatau Nishinaga is the fifth president of Toyohashi University of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Nagoya University in 1967. He became a professor at the engineering faculty of Toyohashi University of Technology in 1977, the engineering faculty of Nagoya University in 1980, the engineering faculty of University of Tokyo in 1983, and the engineering and science faculty of Meijo University in 2000. In April 2002, he became the president of Toyohashi University of Technology.

#661

Hugh Stubbins

#12658

Overall Influence

1912 - 2006 (94 years)

Hugh Asher Stubbins Jr. was an architect who designed several high-profile buildings around the world. Biography Hugh Stubbins was born in Birmingham, Alabama, United States, and attended Georgia Institute of Technology before getting his master's degree from Harvard University's Graduate School of Design where he studied with Walter Gropius, a founder in Germany of the Bauhaus movement. He was to remain on the faculty there until 1972.

#662

Ares J. Rosakis

Ares J. Rosakis

#31713

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Ares J. Rosakis, Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. He was also the fifth Director of the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories, known as , and formerly known as Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, and was the Otis Booth Leadership Chair, of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science.

#663

John Dabiri

#16907

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

#664

Wen-mei Hwu

#14622

Overall Influence

Wen-mei Hwu is the Walter J. Sanders III-AMD Endowed Chair professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research is on compiler design, computer architecture, computer microarchitecture, and parallel processing. He is a principal investigator for the petascale Blue Waters supercomputer, is co-director of the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center , and is principal investigator for the first NVIDIA CUDA Center of Excellence at UIUC. At the Illinois Coordinated Science Lab, Hwu leads the IMPA...

#665

Lajos Hanzo

#42964

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Lajos Hanzo FREng is an electronics engineer, Professor and Chair of Telecommunications at the University of Southampton, and a former Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Press. Education Lajos was born in Hungary and studied at the Technical University of Budapest, graduating with his master's degree in Electronics in 1976 and his Ph.D. in 1983. In 1980–81, he conducted research at the University of Erlangen - Nuremberg in Germany. He then returned to Hungary and, in 1986, moved to Southampton University in the UK.

#666

Grigori Tokaty

#14245

Overall Influence

1913 - 2003 (90 years)

Grigory Aleksandrovich Tokaev also known as Grigory Tokaty; was a Soviet rocket scientist and politician. Eventually turned anti-communist, he defected to the United Kingdom and became a long-standing critic of Stalin's USSR.

#667

Ian F. Akyildiz

Ian F. Akyildiz

#25064

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Ian F. Akyildiz received his BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, in 1978, 1981 and 1984, respectively. Currently, he is the President and CTO of the Truva Inc. since March 1989. He retired from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech in 2021 after almost 35 years service as Ken Byers Chair Professor in Telecommunications and Chair of the Telecom group.

#668

Kamran Eshraghian

#16231

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Kamran Eshraghian is an electronics engineer notable for working on VLSI in Australia. He has worked on CMOS VLSI design. Personal life Kamran Eshraghian was born in Tehran on 13 June 1945, in a Baha'i family. On his father side, he is related to the Afnan families through his grandmother. In 1957, his parents decided to leave Iran for Indonesia and Singapore as Baha'i pioneers. On 5 May 1959, he left Singapore to do his schooling in Adelaide, South Australia arriving in Perth on 6 May 1959 and Adelaide the next day 7 May 1959. He was married on 13 May 1967 to Deidre Lynett Eyers, who died due to prolonged illness on 2 January 1989.

#669

José Tribolet

#20315

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

José Manuel Nunes Salvador Tribolet is a Portuguese engineer, and Professor of Information Systems at the Instituto Superior Técnico - University of Lisbon, Portugal, who became known for his work on speech coding in the late 1970s.

#670

Sou Fujimoto

#22404

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

is a Japanese architect. Born in Hokkaido in 1971, he graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1994, and established his own office, Sou Fujimoto Architects, in 2000. Noted for delicate light structures and permeable enclosures, Fujimoto designed several houses, and in 2013, was selected to design the temporary Serpentine Gallery pavilion in London. In 2021, Fujimoto received the master's degree from l’École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris.

#671

Vic Hayes

#13248

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Victor "Vic" Hayes is a former Senior Research Fellow at the Delft University of Technology. His role in establishing and chairing the IEEE 802.11 Standards Working Group for Wireless Local Area Networks has led to him being referred to by some as the "Father of Wi-Fi". Hayes is a graduate of the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, where he studied electrical engineering.

#672

Tommaso Toffoli

#4410

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Tommaso Toffoli is an Italian-American professor of electrical and computer engineering at Boston University where he joined the faculty in 1995. He has worked on cellular automata and the theory of artificial life , and is known for the invention of the Toffoli gate.

#673

Missy Cummings

#22883

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Mary Louise "Missy" Cummings is an American academic who is a professor at Duke University and director of Duke's Humans and Autonomy Laboratory. She was one of the United States Navy's first female fighter pilots. In November 2021, Dr. Cummings joined the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration .

#674

Kaveh Madani

#16001

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Kaveh Madani is a scientist, activist, and former Iranian politician. He previously served as the Deputy Head of Iran's Department of Environment . He also served as the Vice President of the United Nations Environmental Assembly Bureau from 2017 to 2018.

#675

Josef Paul Kleihues

#31925

Overall Influence

1933 - 2004 (71 years)

Josef Paul Kleihues was a German architect, most notable for his decades long contributions to the "critical reconstruction" of Berlin. His design approach has been described as "poetic rationalist".

#676

Ali Hajimiri

#17634

Overall Influence

Ali Hajimiri is an academic, entrepreneur, and inventor in various fields of engineering, including electrical engineering and biomedical engineering. He is the Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology .

#677

Elia Kazan

#139

Overall Influence

1909 - 2003 (94 years)

Elias Kazantzoglou , known as Elia Kazan , was an American film and theatre director, producer, screenwriter and actor, described by The New York Times as "one of the most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history".

#678

José Oubrerie

#31895

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

José R. Oubrerie is a French architect, educator, and author. He was a protégé of Le Corbusier. Education Oubrerie studied painting at the Ecole des Beux-Arts in Nantes, and architecture at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts , in Paris, France. Since 1970, Oubrerie is registered in the Ordre des Architect, Paris, France, and an American Institute of Architects honorary member.

#679

Rainer Waser

#16935

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Rainer Waser is a German professor of Electrical Engineering at RWTH Aachen University. He is also director of the section Electronic Materials at the Peter Grünberg Institute which is located on the campus of Jülich Research Center . His research and teaching is on solid-state chemistry and defect chemistry to electronic properties and modelling, the technology of new materials and the physical properties of construction components.

#680

Sara Ishikawa

#16636

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Sara Ishikawa is an architect and academic specializing in people-space relationships. She is a professor emerita at the College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley. She is co-author of A Pattern Language, The Oregon Experiment and Houses Generated By Patterns.

#681

António Câmara

#27298

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

António Câmara is a professor at the Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa and has been a visiting professor at both Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He was a Senior Consultant to the Expo '98 project and Senior Advisor to the National Geographical Information System . He was a member of the engineering team which studied and evaluated the Alqueva Dam's environmental impact. He has been YDreams CEO and founder since the company was created in June 2000. In 2006, Câmara was awarded with the Pessoa.

#682

Stefan Kuryłowicz

Stefan Kuryłowicz

#32086

Overall Influence

1949 - 2011 (62 years)

Stefan Kuryłowicz was a Polish architect and professor who is widely credited with transforming the architecture and skyline of Warsaw, Poland, in the twenty years following the collapse of Communism in 1989. Media reports have called Kuryłowicz "one of the most influential Polish architects." He and the late architect Jacek Syropolski created the architecture company, Kurylowicz & Associates.

#683

Radenka Maric

#11931

Overall Influence

Radenka Maric is an Bosnian-American engineer and academic who became the 17th president of the University of Connecticut on September 28, 2023. She was the first internal candidate to be named president since Harry J. Hartley in 1990 and is the institution’s second female president. She had served as interim president of the University of Connecticut since February 1, 2022 and previously served as UConn's vice president for research and innovation.

#684

V. Ramgopal Rao

#10111

Overall Influence

Venu Ramgopal Rao is an Indian academic currently serving as the Vice Chancellor of Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani. He was previously the Director of IIT, Delhi. He was the P.K.Kelkar Chair Professor in Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay before joining IIT Delhi as the Director. Rao has more than 500 publications in various journals, and over 50 patents in the areas of Electron devices and Nanoelectronics. Rao was the first elected chairman for the Indian Section of the American Nano Society. He is also the recipient of multiple prize...

#685

Roger Dean

#3056

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

William Roger Dean is an English artist, designer, and publisher. He began painting posters and album covers for musicians in the late 1960s. The groups for whom he did the most art are the English rock bands Yes and Asia.

#686

Rob Krier

#27651

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Rob Krier was a Luxembourgish sculptor, architect, urban designer, and theorist. He was a professor of architecture at Vienna University of Technology, Austria. From 1993 to mid-2010s he worked in partnership with architect Christoph Kohl in a joint office based in Berlin, Germany.

#687

Warner T. Koiter

#26671

Overall Influence

1914 - 1997 (83 years)

Warner Tjardus Koiter was an influential mechanical engineer and the Professor of Applied Mechanics at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands from 1949 to 1979. Life and education Warner Tjardus Koiter was born in Amsterdam. After primary and secondary education, he enrolled into Delft University of Technology in 1931, graduating with honours as a mechanical engineer in 1936.

#688

Georgios B. Giannakis

Georgios B. Giannakis

#32337

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Georgios B. Giannakis is a Greek-American Computer Scientist, engineer and inventor. He has been an Endowed Chair Professor of Wireless Telecommunications, he was Director of the Digital Technology Center, and at present he is a McKnight Presidential Chair with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota.

#689

Gerhard M. Sessler

#24626

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Gerhard M. Sessler is a German inventor and scientist. He is Professor emeritus at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology of the Technische Universität Darmstadt. Together with James E. West, he invented the foil electret microphone at Bell Laboratories in 1962 and together with Dietmar Hohm the silicon microphone in 1983.

#690

Ann Dowling

#22395

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

#691

Ranko Radović

#37284

Overall Influence

1935 - 2005 (70 years)

Ranko Radović was a Montenegrin and Yugoslav architect, professor and theoretician of architecture. He taught contemporary architecture and urbanism at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Architecture between 1972 and 1992. In 1996 he founded the Novi Sad School of Architecture, a division within the University of Novi Sad.

#692

Rangasami L. Kashyap

#20574

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Rangasami Lakshminarayan Kashyap was an Indian applied mathematician and a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Purdue University. He developed the Ho-Kashyap rule, an important result in pattern recognition.

#693

Jerzy Sołtan

#27480

Overall Influence

1913 - 2005 (92 years)

Jerzy Sołtan was a Polish architect who worked with Le Corbusier and was the Robinson Jr., Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he taught from 1959 until his retirement in 1979. In addition, "between 1968 and 1970 he worked in partnership with Albert Szabo ...with whom he designed several houses in New Hampshire and Massachusetts." His teaching was first recognized by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture when he received the ACSA Distinguished Professor Award in 1986–87. The American Institute of Architects and the Associa...

#694

Mark Kryder

#22161

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Mark Howard Kryder was Seagate Corp.'s senior vice president of research and chief technology officer. Kryder holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and physics from the California Institute of Technology.

#695

George Baird

#20201

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

George Baird was a Canadian architect, scholar, and architectural educator. He is widely recognized for his roles as: professor at the Royal College of Art and the Architectural Association School of Architecture, professor and director at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, as well as professor, chair and dean at the University of Toronto Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. Baird's contributions to the disciplines of architecture and urban design extend from his professional practice, Baird Sampson Neuert Architects, to his theoretical publications on the subject of urban public space.

#696

Andrea Alù

#27789

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Andrea Alù is an Italian American scientist and engineer, currently Einstein Professor of Physics at The City University of New York Graduate Center. He is known for his contributions to the fields of optics, photonics, plasmonics, and acoustics, most notably in the context of metamaterials and metasurfaces. He has co-authored over 650 journal papers and 35 book chapters, and he holds 11 U.S. patents.

#697

George Rankine Irwin

#26250

Overall Influence

1907 - 1998 (91 years)

George Rankin Irwin was an American scientist in the field of fracture mechanics and strength of materials. He was internationally known for his study of fracture of materials. Early life and education George R. Irwin was born in El Paso, Texas. His family moved to Springfield, Illinois where he went to school.

#698

Guy Doumeingts

#17565

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Guy Doumeingts is a French engineer, Emeritus professor at the University of Bordeaux 1 and former Director of "Laboratoire d’Automatique, Productique Signal et Image" control theory, known for the development of the GRAI method and his contributions to the field of Enterprise modelling.

#699

Alexei Bogomolov

#34315

Overall Influence

1913 - 2009 (96 years)

Alexei Fyodorovich Bogomolov was a Soviet and Russian scientist and a specialist in the field of radio engineering. Biography Alexei Fyodorovich Bogomolov was born on 2 June 1913 in the village of Sitskoye, Smolensk Governorate. From 1923 he lived in Moscow. In 1927 he graduated from a secondary school, and in 1929 he graduated from the 1st Moscow Institute of Labor Education. During 1929—1932 he worked in "Stroyelektro" as electrician, brigadier and senior electrician. In 1937 he graduated from Moscow Power Engineering Institute and began working on his doctoral thesis on the topic of power...

#700

Guillermo Sapiro

#23652

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Guillermo Sapiro is an Israeli-Uruguayan computer scientist, electrical engineer and professor who has made notable contributions to image processing. He worked at The University of Minnesota for 15 years before becoming a professor at Duke University. He has also worked at Hewlett Packard Labs researching image processing and is known for being one of the people who originally developed the LOCO-I Compression Algorithm for lossless image compression while he was working there. He has also made significant contributions towards the development of the rotobrush tool in Adobe After Effects, which has been included in After Effects since version CS5.

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