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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School

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Engineering,

#7751

Terry Todd

#34630

Overall Influence

1937 - 2018 (81 years)

Terence Todd January 1, 1938 – July 7, 2018 Todd also held a career as a journalist on the staff of Sports Illustrated magazine, as well as doing commentary for CBS, NBC, ESPN and National Public Radio.

#7752

Peter Seidel

#139504

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (100 years)

Peter Seidel is an American architect-planner turned writer. Life Seidel moved from Ann Arbor, Michigan to Ohio to plan a new town outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. His plans for the new town never came to fruition, but he instead built an eco-community in Clermont County on 188 acres of land. Seidel's goal for this was a place where residents could get a feel of nature.

#7753

Jacobus Swart

#131044

Overall Influence

Jacobus Swart is a professor at State University of Campinas - UNICAMP, Campinas, Brazil and was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2014 for contributions to microelectronics education in Brazil.

#7754

Robert T. Coles

#116869

Overall Influence

1929 - 2020 (91 years)

Robert Traynham Coles, FAIA, was an architect, educator, and social justice activist. Coles was the first African American to win the Rotch Traveling Scholarship awarded by the Boston Society of Architects, the first African American Chancellor of the American Institute of Architects , the first AIA Vice-President for Minority Affairs, and a founding member of the National Organization of Minority Architects .

#7755

Jennifer Whyte

#57604

Overall Influence

Jennifer Whyte is Director of the John Grill Institute for Project Leadership and Head of School of Project Management at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her focus is on working with industry, policy and government to improve the way projects are conceived, set-up, delivered and add value. She had led research on systems integration, construction transformation, and project analytics.

#7756

Marilyn Smith

#171260

Overall Influence

Marilyn J. Smith is an American aerospace engineer. Smith earned her bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in aerospace engineering at Georgia Tech. Her studies were funded by Lockheed Martin. She also worked for McDonnell Douglas. Smith later joined the Georgia Tech faculty as professor and director of the Vertical Lift Research Center of Excellence. In 2016, she was elected a fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Smith was the 2022 recipient of the AIAA Aerodynamics Award.

#7757

John Pfahl

#76543

Overall Influence

1939 - 2020 (81 years)

John Pfahl was an American photographer. Life Pfahl was born in New York City and grew up in Wanaque, New Jersey. He is known for his landscape photography such as his 1974 "Altered Landscapes" series. He received a BFA from Syracuse University's College of Visual and Performing Arts and his MA from Syracuse University's S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. He taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York, from 1968 to 1983. Later he was professor at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. In 2012 he taught at the University at Buffalo, The State Universit...

#7758

Maria Watkins

#126486

Overall Influence

1918 - 2010 (92 years)

Marja "Maria" Ludwika Watkins was a defence electronics engineer, lecturer and President of the Women's Engineering Society. Early life Ziff was born on 2December 1918 in Vienna, Austria, and grew up in the Polish city of Lvov. Her parents were of Ukrainian descent; her father was director of a bank, and her mother was a research chemist at Lvov University.

#7759

Antonio Capone

#171315

Overall Influence

#7760

Donn B. Murphy

#56698

Overall Influence

1930 - 2022 (92 years)

Donn B. Murphy taught theatre and speech courses at Georgetown University from 1954 to 2000. At the invitation of Jacqueline Kennedy and Letitia Baldrige, he became a theatrical advisor to the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson Administrations for White House dramatic and music presentations in the East Room . He was a founding member of the National Theatre Corporation and was Vice-President and then President and Executive Director of the National Theatre in Washington, D.C. from 1974 to 2010.

#7761

Elliott Sclar

#96720

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Elliott D. Sclar is a professor of urban planning at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation . An economist and urban planner, he is the director of the Center for Sustainable Urban Development at Columbia University's Earth Institute. His research interests include urban economic development, transportation, and public service economics.

#7762

Sudhakar Yalamanchili

#171393

Overall Influence

Sudhakar Yalamanchili from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2014 for contributions to high-performance multiprocessor architecture and communication.

#7763

Moshe M. Barash

#171396

Overall Influence

Moshe M. Barash was the Ransburg Professor of Manufacturing and Professor of Industrial Engineering at Purdue University. He received his B.Sc. and Dipl.Ing. degrees in electrical engineering at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, and his Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Manchester, England. He published numerous research and technical papers in design, manufacturing systems, automatic planning and many other areas.

#7764

Sandhya Samarasinghe

#124162

Overall Influence

Sandhya Samarasinghe is a New Zealand engineering academic and currently a full professor at the Lincoln University. Academic career Samarasinghe earned a Master's of Science in Mechanical Engineering at Patrice Lumumba University, Moscow, and a Master's and PhD in Engineering at Virginia Tech. After her 1991 PhD thesis, titled 'Long-term creep modeling of wood using time temperature superposition principle' , she moved to Lincoln University, rising to full professor.

#7765

Herbert M. Sauro

#136951

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Herbert M. Sauro works in the field of metabolic control analysis and systems biology. Education and early life Sauro was born July 19, 1960, in Dyfed, Wales. He grew up in the village of Llangolman in Pembrokeshire and attended the Welsh comprehensive school Ysgol y Preseli.

#7766

Chekesha Liddell

#90272

Overall Influence

Chekesha M. Liddell Watson is an Associate Professor of Material Science and Engineering at Cornell University. She researches colloidal materials, and the relationship between micron and submicron length scales.

#7767

Nazanin Bassiri-Gharb

#86164

Overall Influence

Nazanin Bassiri-Gharb is a mechanical engineer in the field of micro and nano engineering and mechanics of materials. She is the Harris Saunders, Jr. Chair and Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. Bassiri-Gharb leads the Smart Materials, Advanced Research and Technology Laboratory at Georgia Tech. Her research seeks to characterize and optimize the optical and electric response of interferometric modulator displays. She also investigates novel materials to improve reliability and processing of IMOD.

#7768

Ramesh Karri

#100651

Overall Influence

Ramesh Karri is a researcher specializing in trustworthy hardware, high assurance nanoscale integrated circuits, architectures and systems. He is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering. Additionally, Karri is the co-founder of Trust-Hub, Embedded Security Challenge and NYU CRISSP center, the IEEE/ACM Symposium on Nanoscale Architectures and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Nanoscale Architectures. He is a member of NYU WIRELESS. He was awarded the Humboldt Fellowship and the National Science Foundation CAREER ...

#7769

Bernard Neal

#128705

Overall Influence

1922 - 2016 (94 years)

Bernard George Neal was a professor of structural engineering at Imperial College London and the winner of the All England croquet championship on 38 occasions. Croquet Bernard Neal won the Open Championship twice and the Men's Championship in 1967.

#7770

Mike Douglass

#62540

Overall Influence

Mike Douglass is an American urban planner scholar and social scientist known for his exploration of rural-urban linkages, migration and international economic competition, focusing on globalization and the rise of civil society in Asia. He is currently on 5-year joint appointment as professor with the Asia Research Institute and Lee Kuan Yew School for Public Policy, National University of Singapore .

#7771

Edgardo Rotman

#73195

Overall Influence

Edgardo Rotman is an international lecturer and author. He has done research and taught at the University of Buenos Aires, the University of El Salvador , Boston University, the University of Miami, the Max-Planck Institute for Criminal Law in Germany, and Harvard Law. He represents the United States at the International Penal and Penitentiary Foundation, where he has been a voting member of the Council since 1996.

#7772

Michael Carlebach

Michael Carlebach

#75370

Overall Influence

Michael L. Carlebach is an American photographer and historian known for his books on the subject of early American photojournalism; American Photojournalism Comes of Age and The Origins of Photojournalism in America, as well as his photographs of south Florida and the US. He was staff photographer for The Miami Herald for a brief time and taught at the University of Miami from 1978 to 2005.

#7773

Peter Trowbridge

#120105

Overall Influence

Peter Trowbridge is an Americanan landscape architect, Emeritus Professor, and former Chair of Landscape Architecture at Cornell University Education He received an AS from Alfred State University, a BS/BLA degree from Syracuse University, Environmental Science and Forestry, and a Master's in Landscape Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

#7774

David Pettifor

#119982

Overall Influence

1945 - 2017 (72 years)

David Godfrey Pettifor was the Isaac Wolfson Professor of Metallurgy at the University of Oxford from 1992 to 2011. He was also a Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford. He was the author of a book entitled Bonding and Structure of Molecules and Solids . He created "structure maps" which determine which crystal structure an alloy will form. He was a world authority on materials modelling and helped established the Oxford Materials Modelling Laboratory.

#7775

Bill Hewlett

#94505

Overall Influence

1913 - 2001 (88 years)

William Redington Hewlett was an American engineer and the co-founder, with David Packard, of the Hewlett-Packard Company . Early life and education Hewlett was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where his father taught at the University of Michigan Medical School. In 1916 the family moved to San Francisco after his father, Albion Walter Hewlett, took a similar position at Stanford Medical School, located at the time in San Francisco. He attended Lowell High School and was the 1929-1930 Battalion Commander of the school's Army JROTC program. He was accepted at Stanford University as a favor to his ...

#7776

Vanessa Wood

#169055

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (43 years)

Vanessa Claire Wood is an American engineer who is a professor at the ETH Zurich. She holds a chair in Materials and Device Engineering and serves as Vice President of Knowledge Transfer and Corporate Relations.

#7777

Martin McDonagh

Martin McDonagh

#37351

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Martin Faranan McDonagh is a British-Irish playwright and filmmaker. He is known for his absurdist black humour which often challenges the modern theatre aesthetic. He has received numerous accolades including an Academy Award, six BAFTA Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, three Olivier Awards, and nominations for five Tony Awards.

#7778

Allan Wild

#118988

Overall Influence

1927 - 2019 (92 years)

Allan Arthur Wild was a New Zealand architect and architecture academic. He was a founding member of the Architectural Group in Auckland, which made an important contribution to modern architecture in New Zealand, and later served as head of the School of Architecture at the University of Auckland from 1969 to 1993.

#7779

Owen Roizman

#18513

Overall Influence

1936 - 2023 (87 years)

Owen Roizman was an American cinematographer. He received five Academy Award nominations for Best Cinematography, for the films The French Connection , The Exorcist , Network , Tootsie , and Wyatt Earp . He served on the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and was president of the American Society of Cinematographers.

#7780

Rick L. Edgeman

#83088

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Rick L. Edgeman is an American statistician and quality professional, and Professor of Sustainability & Performance at AU Herning and in the Interdisciplinary Center for Organizational Architecture, at Aarhus University, School of Business and Social Sciences.

#7781

Hiroshi Mori

#62913

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Hiroshi Mori is a Japanese writer and engineer. He is known for writing mystery novels – particularly his debut work The Perfect Insider, which won him the first Mephisto Prize in 1996 – but he considers himself to be a researcher as well as craftsman.

#7782

Xi Zhang

#90967

Overall Influence

Xi Zhang is a Full Professor and the Founding Director of the Networking and Information Systems Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University. He is a Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to quality of service in mobile wireless networks. His research interests include statistical delay-bounded QoS provisioning for multimedia mobile wireless networks, edge computing, finite blocklength coding theory, in-network caching, and offloading over 5G mobile wireless networks.

#7783

Lothar Osterburg

#90649

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Lothar Osterburg is a German-born, New York-based artist and master printer in intaglio, who works in sculpture, photography, printmaking and video. He is best known for photogravures featuring rough small-scale models of rustic structures, water and air vessels, and imaginary cities, staged in evocative settings and photographed to appear life-size to disorienting, mysterious or whimsical effect. New York Times critic Grace Glueck writes that Osterburg's rich-toned, retro prints "conjur[e] up monumental phenomena by minimal means"; Judy Pfaff describes his work as thick with film noir–like a...

#7784

Stephen Gedney

#156990

Overall Influence

Stephen D. Gedney is an American electrical engineer, currently the chair and Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Colorado Denver's College of Engineering, Design and Computing. Gedney is a pioneer in computational electromagnetic techniques. He is most widely known for his development of the Uniaxial Perfectly Matched Layer media method, the complex-frequency shifted convolutional PML, along with J. Alan Roden, and his contributions to the Locally Corrected Nystrom method. Gedney's papers and textbook on the finite difference time domain technique in particular are widely cited.

#7785

Torleiv Maseng

#73103

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Torleiv Maseng was a Norwegian engineer, who made some contribution to the Global System for Mobile Communications project. His work included the standard use of channel estimation and the combination of equalization, error correcting codes and modulation in which the Viterbi algorithm was used by all components.

#7786

Bambang Hidayat

#43374

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Bambang Hidayat is an Indonesian scientist known for promoting astronomy nationally and internationally. His work has focused on the study of binary stars and galactic structure. The minor star Hidayat , discovered in 1977, was named after him by Cornelis Johannes van Houten and Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld. He has over forty papers published to his name and has written several astronomy textbooks.

#7787

Andrew Stanton

#45854

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Andrew Ayers Stanton is an American filmmaker and voice actor based at Pixar, which he joined in 1990. His film work includes co-writing and co-directing Pixar's A Bug's Life , directing Finding Nemo and its sequel Finding Dory , WALL-E , and the live-action film, Disney's John Carter , and co-writing all four Toy Story films and Monsters, Inc. .

#7788

Goutam Ghose

#46226

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Goutam Ghose is an Indian film director, Actor, music director and cinematographer, who works primarily in Bengali cinema. He is the only Indian to have received the "Vittorio Di Sica" Award, Italy, in 1997.

#7789

William Klein

#51171

Overall Influence

1926 - 2022 (96 years)

William Klein was an American-born French photographer and filmmaker noted for his ironic approach to both media and his extensive use of unusual photographic techniques in the context of photojournalism and fashion photography. He was ranked 25th on Professional Photographers list of 100 most influential photographers.

#7790

David Armstrong

#171856

Overall Influence

#7791

Sudip Mazumder

#169220

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Sudip K. Mazumder is a UIC Distinguished Professor and is the Director of Laboratory for Energy and Switching-Electronics Systems in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago . He has over 30 years of professional experience and has held R&D and design positions in leading industrial organizations, and has served as technical consultant for several industries. He also serves as the president of NextWatt LLC, a small business organization that he set up in 2008.

#7792

Rakhesh Singh Kshetrimayum

Rakhesh Singh Kshetrimayum

#167783

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Rakhesh Singh Kshetrimayum , FIET, SMIEEE is an electrical engineer, educator and Professor in the department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati. Biography He earned his first class BTech degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 2000 and his Ph.D. degree from the School of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Nanyang Technological University Singapore in 2005. His doctoral advisor was Lei Zhu. He is currently a Professor of EEE at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati and was the former Head of C...

#7793

Louis-Christophe Zaleski-Zamenhof

Louis-Christophe Zaleski-Zamenhof

#52027

Overall Influence

1925 - 2019 (94 years)

Louis-Christophe Zaleski-Zamenhof was a Polish-born French civil and marine engineer, specializing in the design of structural steel and concrete construction. He was a grandson of the Polish Jewish L. L. Zamenhof, the inventor of the international auxiliary language Esperanto. From the 1960s until his death, Zaleski-Zamenhof lived in France.

#7794

Feng Gao

#171912

Overall Influence

#7795

Felipe Correa

#124069

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Felipe Correa is a New York-based architect, urbanist, author, and professor. He is the founder and managing partner of the design practice Somatic Collaborative. He is the Vincent and Eleanor Shea Professor at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. He also previously served as faculty at Harvard Graduate School of Design as an assistant professor , associate professor , and as director of the Master of Architecture in Urban Design program . Correa's writing, research, and design work have been widely published and exhibited.

#7796

David A. Hodges

#171924

Overall Influence

#7797

R. Iris Bahar

#116444

Overall Influence

R. Iris Bahar is Department Head of Computer Science at the Colorado School of Mines. Previously, she was professor at the School of Engineering at Brown University. Her interests include computer architecture; computer-aided design for synthesis, verification and low-power applications; and design, test, and reliability issues for nanoscale systems.

#7798

Mary Anne White

#130166

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Mary Anne White is a Canadian materials scientist who is the Harry Shirreff Professor of Chemical Research at Dalhousie University. Her research considers novel solar thermal materials and their application in renewable energy devices. She is the author of a textbook titled Physical Properties of Materials. She was appointed an Officer to the Order of Canada in 2016.

#7799

Thomas Sinkjær

#146238

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Thomas Sinkjær R is a Danish scientist and professor of neuroscience and technology at the Department of Health Science and Technology of Aalborg University, Denmark. He is the Secretary General of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters and an elected fellow of the Danish Academy of Technical Sciences.

#7800

Maximilian Schell

Maximilian Schell

#30944

Overall Influence

1930 - 2014 (84 years)

Maximilian Schell was an Austrian-born Swiss actor, who also wrote, directed and produced some of his own films. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the 1961 American film Judgment at Nuremberg, his second acting role in Hollywood. Born in Austria, his parents were involved in the arts and he grew up surrounded by performance and literature. While he was still a child, his family fled to Switzerland in 1938 when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, and they settled in Zurich. After World War II ended, Schell took up acting and directing full-time. He appeared in numerous German films,...

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