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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Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Engineering,

#7901

T. Nakamura

#173348

Overall Influence

#7902

John D. Buckmaster

#102607

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

John David Buckmaster is an Emeritus Professor of Department of Aerospace Engineering at University of Illinois, specialized in the field of combustion He finished his bachelor's degree from Imperial College London in 1962 and completed PhD under the supervision of Geoffrey S. S. Ludford from Cornell University in 1969.

#7903

Rodney Priestley

#129095

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Rodney Dewayne Priestley is an American chemical engineer and professor at Princeton University. His research considers the phase transitions of polymers and their application in electronic devices and healthcare. In 2020 he was made the Princeton University Vice Dean of Innovation. He was named dean of The Graduate School effective June 1, 2022.

#7904

Branislava Peruničić

#171084

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Branislava Peruničić-Draženović is an Emeritus Professor of Control Engineering at the University of Sarajevo. She was elected to the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1986.

#7905

Sherry Harbin

#135143

Overall Influence

Sherry Lynn Voytik-Harbin is a professor in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering and Department of Basic Medical Sciences at Purdue University. Early life and education Harbin was born and raised in Indiana. As a senior at Central High School, she won the State Scholarly Writing Contest and was the recipient of a Storer Scholarship for Indiana University. Upon graduating in 1987, Harbin was expected to enroll at Harvard University and the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute for graduate work in experimental pathology but instead chose to explore Purdue University. She made contact with Pete Ko...

#7906

John Fisher

#96775

Overall Influence

John Fisher, CBE, FREng, FMedSci is a British biomedical engineer who was Director of the Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering until he stepped down from the role in Summer 2016. He remains Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Leeds.

#7907

Carl Weber

#22905

Overall Influence

1925 - 2016 (91 years)

Carl Weber was a theatre director and a professor of drama at Stanford University. He was Bertolt Brecht's directing assistant and a dramaturg and actor at the Berliner Ensemble theatre company in 1952. After Brecht's death in 1956, Weber remained as a director of the company. He directed in major theatres in Germany, America, Canada and elsewhere since 1957. He produced English translations of German dramatist Heiner Müller.

#7908

Ghassan Nasr

#130997

Overall Influence

Ghassan Nasr is an academic and translator. He obtained an MFA from the University of Arkansas. He also obtained an MA and a PhD from Indiana University. He is currently an assistant professor in the English department at DePauw University. Nasr is the translator of The Journals of Sarab Affan by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. This translation was runner-up for the 2008 Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. He has also translated the poetry of Saudi poet Fowziyah Abu-Khalid.

#7909

Christina Fragouli

#173488

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Christina Fragouli, from the University of California, Los Angeles, was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2016 for contributions to network coding.

#7910

James G. Henderson

#93777

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

James G. Henderson is a full professor at the School of Teaching, Learning and Curriculum Studies at Kent State University. He co-founded an education journal and has written several books and articles on curriculum design. He created the curriculum structure known as 3S Understanding.

#7911

Anne Noble

#70804

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Anne Lysbeth Noble is a New Zealand photographer and Distinguished Professor of Fine Art at Massey University's College of Creative Arts. Her work includes series of photographs examining Antarctica, her own daughter's mouth, and our relationship with nature.

#7912

Debbie Chachra

#139804

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Debbie Chachra is a materials scientist and a professor at Olin College. She specialises in biological materials and infrastructure. She is interested in innovations in engineering education and was one of the founding members of the materials faculty at Olin.

#7913

Emily S. Day

#168057

Overall Influence

Emily S. Day is an American biomedical engineer. She is an associate professor at the University of Delaware where her research team engineers nanoparticles to enable high precision therapy of diseases including cancers, blood disorders, and maternal/fetal health complications.

#7914

Harry G. Robinson III

#117982

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Harry G. Robinson III is an American architect, and professor of architecture and Dean Emeritus of the School of Architecture and Design at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He was a member of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts from 1994 to 2003, and served as its chairman from 2002 to 2003. He is also the first African American to be elected president of the National Architectural Accrediting Board, and the first African American elected president of the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards.

#7915

Fazil

#52251

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Abdul Hameed Muhammed Fazil , known mononymously as Fazil, is an Indian film director, producer, screenwriter and actor who works in Malayalam cinema, in addition to directing a handful of Tamil films. He made his directional debut with the 1980 film Manjil Virinja Pookkal.

#7916

Roger A. Lewis

#173581

Overall Influence

#7917

B. K. S. Iyengar

B. K. S. Iyengar

#5761

Overall Influence

1918 - 2014 (96 years)

Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar was an Indian teacher of yoga and author. He is founder of the style of yoga as exercise, known as "Iyengar Yoga", and was considered one of the foremost yoga gurus in the world. He was the author of many books on yoga practice and philosophy including Light on Yoga, Light on Pranayama, Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, and Light on Life. Iyengar was one of the earliest students of Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, who is often referred to as "the father of modern yoga". He has been credited with popularizing yoga, first in India and then around the worl...

#7918

He Yousheng

#161124

Overall Influence

1931 - 2018 (87 years)

He Yousheng was a Chinese hydrodynamicist and mechanical engineer. He was a professor of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and served as its party secretary from 1986 to 1992. A pioneer of shipbuilding theory in China, he was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

#7919

Michelle Pantoya

#173117

Overall Influence

Michelle L. Pantoya is an American mechanical engineer who studies combustion of solid fuels, such as nanocomposites of thermite. She is also an author of children's books on engineering. She is the J.W. Wright Regents Endowed Chair Professor in Mechanical Engineering at Texas Tech University.

#7920

Daniel Meadows

#54423

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Daniel Meadows is an English photographer turned maker of digital stories, and a teacher of photography turned teacher of participatory media. Life and career as photographer Meadows was born in Great Washbourne, Gloucestershire, "in the middle of nowhere on the edge of the Cotswolds", on 28 January 1952. Both of his parents had Suffolk origins; his father was a land agent for the Dumbleton Estate, in which the family lived; his mother developed multiple sclerosis when Daniel was young and this gradually became more acute. He spent his early years without television.

#7921

Wojciech Leśnikowski

Wojciech Leśnikowski

#99005

Overall Influence

1938 - 2014 (76 years)

Wojciech Grzegorz Leśnikowski , was a Polish–American architect, writer and educator. He oversaw and participated in the design and construction of numerous large-scale architectural projects around the world.

#7922

Cynthia Finelli

#172540

Overall Influence

Cynthia J. Finelli is an American engineering educator whose research includes publications on evidence-based education, on the effects of neurodiversity on engineering education, on the evaluation of group work, and on academic dishonesty. She is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan, where she also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Education.

#7923

Silvia Vignolini

#112959

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Silvia Vignolini is an Italian physicist who is Director of research at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces and Professor of Chemistry and Bio-materials in the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge. Her research investigates natural photonics structures, the self-assembly of cellulose and light propagation through complex structures. She was awarded the KINGFA young investigator award by the American Chemical Society and the Gibson-Fawcett Award in 2018.

#7924

Khandaker Mosharraf Hossain

#77339

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Khandaker Mosharraf Hossain is a Bangladesh Nationalist Party politician and geologist. He represented Comilla-2 constituency as a Jatiya Sangsad member during 1991–2006. Early life and education Hossain was born on October 1946 to a family of Khandakers in the village of Goyeshpur in Tipperah district, Bengal Presidency . He was the son of Khandaker Ashraf Ali and Hosne Ara Hasna Hena.

#7925

Cassandra Fraser

#86840

Overall Influence

Cassandra L. Fraser is an American synthetic chemist with an interest in biomedicine and sustainable design. She is a Full Professor of Chemistry at the University of Virginia. Early life and education Fraser completed her Bachelor of Arts degree at Kalamazoo College in 1984 and her master's degree at Harvard Divinity School. Following her PhD at the University of Chicago in 1993, she accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. Fraser conducted her postdoctoral studies under the guidance of Robert H. Grubbs.

#7926

Damon Centola

#115573

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Damon Centola is a sociologist and the Elihu Katz Professor of Communication, Sociology and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Director of the Network Dynamics Group and Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.

#7927

Carole Tucker

#118443

Overall Influence

Carole Tucker FLSW is a Professor at the School of Physics and Astronomy, Cardiff University. She is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales , and a member of the Institute of Physics and the Royal Astronomical Society. Her research focuses on astronomy instrumentation in the fields of far infra-red quasi-optics and spectroscopy. She is a member of the UK EPSRC THz Network, Teranet and a reviewer for the IEEE Transactions on Terahertz Science and Technology.

#7928

Elizabeth Opila

#171578

Overall Influence

Elizabeth Jane Opila is an American materials scientist who is the Rolls-Royce Commonwealth Professor of Engineering at the University of Virginia. Her research considers the development of materials for extreme environments. She was elected Fellow of the Electrochemical Society in 2013 and the American Ceramic Society in 2014.

#7929

John Harrison Wharton

John Harrison Wharton

#110295

Overall Influence

1954 - 2018 (64 years)

John Harrison Wharton was an American engineer specializing in microprocessors and their applications. Wharton designed the Intel MCS-51, one of the most implemented instruction set architectures of all time.

#7930

Ray Lightwood

#54371

Overall Influence

1922 - 2001 (79 years)

Raymond Lightwood was a British medical engineer who developed the first variable rate heart pacemaker, together with Leon Abrams at the University of Birmingham. Ray Lightwood was born in Coventry. He was educated at Birchfield Road School in Birmingham. During World War Two Lightwood received training at the Radar and Wireless training school at RAF Yatesbury and after initially serving in India as a ground and service engineer, he became a travelling engineer with South East Asia Command. He was also seconded to Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough to study captured radar equipment....

#7931

Wu Minsheng

#170248

Overall Influence

1946 - 2019 (73 years)

Wu Minsheng was a Chinese mechanical engineer. He served as Dean of Tsinghua University and President of Fuzhou University . Biography Wu Minsheng was born in August 1946 into a farming and fishing family in Pingtan County, Fujian, Republic of China. He entered the Department of Mechanical Engineering of Tsinghua University in 1965, and became a faculty member after graduating in 1970. He later studied in Germany and earned a Doctor of Engineering degree from RWTH Aachen University.

#7932

Elisabete A. Silva

#89578

Overall Influence

Elisabete A. Silva is a British-Portuguese planning theorist. She is a professor of spatial planning in the department of land economy at the University of Cambridge. Silva was the first woman to be promoted to Senior Lecturer, Reader and Professor in the Department's history.

#7933

Jerzy Krupka

#173767

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Jerzy Antoni Krupka is a Polish scientist who works at both Warsaw University of Technology and University of Western Australia. The main areas of his research are related to measurements of electromagnetic properties of materials at microwave frequencies and computational electrodynamic. Measurement instruments intended for measurements of the complex permittivity, the complex permeability and conductivity of electronic materials at microwave frequencies developed by Jerzy Krupka are used worldwide in research institutions and industry. In 2012 he was elevated to the grade of IEEE Fellow for contributions to high-frequency measurements of electromagnetic properties of materials.

#7934

Susannah York

#44855

Overall Influence

1939 - 2011 (72 years)

Susannah Yolande Fletcher , known professionally as Susannah York, was an English actress. Her appearances in various films of the 1960s, including Tom Jones and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? , formed the basis of her international reputation. An obituary in The Telegraph characterised her as "the blue-eyed English rose with the china-white skin and cupid lips who epitomised the sensuality of the swinging sixties", who later "proved that she was a real actor of extraordinary emotional range".

#7935

Alison Mears

#117097

Overall Influence

Alison Mears is a certified AIA LEED AP Architect and is the current head of the Healthy Materials Lab at Parsons The New School for Design. Mears was previously the director of the BFA Architecture and Interior Design Programs in the School of Constructed Environments and an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Parsons.

#7936

Brent Fultz

#158453

Overall Influence

Brent Fultz is an American physicist and materials scientist and one of the world's leading authorities on statistical mechanics, diffraction, and phase transitions in materials. Fultz is the Barbara and Stanley Rawn, Jr. Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science at the California Institute of Technology. He is known for his research in materials physics and materials chemistry, and for establishing the importance of phonon entropy to the phase stability of materials. Additionally, Fultz oversaw the construction of the wide angular-range chopper spectrometer instrument at the Spallat...

#7937

Hui Meng

#173479

Overall Influence

Hui Meng is a mechanical engineer whose research focuses on hemodynamics , particularly with respect to intracranial aneurysms. Educated in China, Germany, and the US, she is a University at Buffalo Distinguished Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and chief scientific officer of Neurovascular Diagnostics.

#7938

Gang Feng

#173799

Overall Influence

#7939

Harvey Jerome Brudner

Harvey Jerome Brudner

#100725

Overall Influence

1931 - 2009 (78 years)

Harvey Jerome Brudner was a theoretical physicist and engineer. He was the dean of science and technology of the New York Institute of Technology from 1962 to 1964. He was president of the Joyce Kilmer Centennial Commission, and the Highland Park, New Jersey Centennial Commission. He was an early proponent of using computers in the classroom. For many years he wrote on Babylonian mathematics.

#7940

Andrew Soward

#122995

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Andrew Michael Soward is a British fluid dynamicist. He is an emeritus professor at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Exeter. Education Soward was educated at Queens' College, Cambridge. He earned his PhD in 1969, under the supervision of Keith Moffatt.

#7941

Janis Swan

#117322

Overall Influence

Janis Elizabeth Swan is a New Zealand food process engineering academic. She is currently an emeritus professor at the University of Waikato. Academic and research career Educated at Horowhenua College in Levin, Swan went on to study biotechnology at Massey University, completing a Bachelor of Technology in 1969 and a Master of Technology in 1971. After working in industry for two years, she returned to Massey as a lecturer. She was awarded a Walter Mulholland Fellowship, which enabled her to undertake doctoral studies at the University of Waterloo in Canada, and she completed her PhD on the...

#7942

Greg Autry

#51955

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Greg Autry is an American space policy expert, educator, entrepreneur and author. He is the Clinical Professor and Director of the Thunderbird Initiative for Space Leadership, Policy, and Business at the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University. He previously served as Chair of the Safety Working Group on the COMSTAC; his two-year tenure ended in 2022. He was an assistant professor of Clinical Entrepreneurship in Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. Prior to that, he served as an adjunct professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine.

#7943

Ricardo L. Castro

#141264

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Ricardo L. Castro, is a Colombian-born, Canadian architectural photographer, critic, and educator. Known for his monographs on architects Rogelio Salmona and Arthur Erickson, his design philosophy was published in Syndetic Modernisms . Castro was elected Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada in 2010, and to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2015. He was awarded the 1990 Prix Paul-Henri Lapointe for architectural journalism by the Ordre des Architectes du Québec. A frequent contributor to Canadian Architect Magazine and ARQ Architecture Québec, photographic expositions o...

#7944

Laura Bottomley

#118023

Overall Influence

Dr. Laura Bottomley, from North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina, is an electrical engineer. In 2016. Bottomley was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for increasing student interest in STEM education. In 2007, she was awarded the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring. Bottomley is also a Fellow of the American Society of Engineering Education. In 2016, she appeared in a Super Bowl commercial entitled "Doing Good with STEM."

#7945

Antun Domic

#106983

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Antun Domic is a Chilean-American engineer and mathematician. Early life and education Domic obtained his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978, with a dissertation in partial differential equations.

#7946

Ana Falú

#106977

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Ana María Falú is an Argentine architect and a social activist for human rights and for women's rights. She has been Regional Director of the United Nations Development Fund for Women for the Andean Region and for Brazil and the Southern Cone Countries . She is a researcher and Professor at the National University of Córdoba , where she is the Director of the Housing and Habitat Research Institute . In the field of feminist action, she promoted numerous institutional initiatives and contributed to the establishment of women's rights to the city, to housing, and to the habitat. She is co-fou...

#7947

Tony McDonnell

#129177

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Tony McDonnell is a Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences. Specialising in space science and a recognised authority in cosmic dust, he was Professor of Space Sciences at the University of Kent and Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences at the Open University.

#7948

Murray Baron

#173918

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

#7949

David Cohen

#173922

Overall Influence

#7950

Anthony Kelly

#116387

Overall Influence

1929 - 2014 (85 years)

Anthony Kelly CBE FRS was a British materials scientist. Career He joined the Crystallography Research Group in the Cavendish Laboratory in 1950, after completing his physics undergraduate degree at the University of Reading. In the 50s, he held positions at the University of Illinois, the University of Birmingham, and Northwestern University, before returning to Cambridge in 1959 as lecturer in the department of metallurgy.

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