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,

#8151

Arezoo Ardekani

#175968

Overall Influence

Arezoo M. Ardekani is an Iranian-American physicist who is a professor at Purdue University. Her research considers the flow of complex fluids. She was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2020 and a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2022.

#8152

Richard Williams

Richard Williams

#12529

Overall Influence

1933 - 2019 (86 years)

Richard Edmund Williams was a Canadian-British animator, voice actor, and painter. A three-time Academy Award winner, he is best known as the animation director on Who Framed Roger Rabbit -- for which he won two Academy Awards -- and as the director of his unfinished feature film The Thief and the Cobbler . His work on the short film A Christmas Carol earned him his first Academy Award. He was also a film title sequence designer and animator. Other works in this field include the title sequences for What's New Pussycat? and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and title and link...

#8153

Sharmila M. Mukhopadhyay

#130823

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Sharmila Mitra Mukhopadhyay is a professor of materials science and Director of the Center for Nanoscale Multifunctional Materials at Wright State University. In 2016 she was elected as a Jefferson Science Fellow, working as a science advisor to the United States Department of State.

#8154

Nicole Metje

#171204

Overall Influence

Nicole Metje PhD, MCInstCES, MASCE, FHEA is professor of infrastructure monitoring, head of the Power and Infrastructure Research Group, and deputy director for sensors of the UKCRIC National Buried Infrastructure Facility at the University of Birmingham. She plays a significant role in the development and application of sensors for buried infrastructure assessment and monitoring.

#8155

Bruce A. Peterson

#176899

Overall Influence

#8156

Robyn Clay-Williams

#89354

Overall Influence

Robyn Clay-Williams is an Australian academic and one of the first two women to serve as pilots in the Royal Australian Air Force . She joined the RAAF in 1979 and initially served in maintenance roles as women were not permitted to be pilots. After this restriction was lifted she completed pilot training in June 1988 and became a test pilot in 1993. Clay-Williams reached the rank of Wing Commander and led No. 85 Wing. After leaving the RAAF in 2003, she completed a doctorate. As of 2021, Clay-Williams was an Associate Professor at Macquarie University.

#8157

Charles Gorrie Wynne

#63484

Overall Influence

1911 - 1999 (88 years)

Charles Gorrie Wynne FRS was an English optics designer, a significant figure in optical lens design. He was born in Leicester and educated at Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys and Exeter College, Oxford, where his studies were interrupted by tuberculosis. He started work at a local lens manufacturing company, Taylor, Taylor and Hobson of Leicester. In 1943 he moved to work at Wray in Kent, where he worked until 1960, designing a wide range of significant optical systems. In 1960 he joined the Technical Optics Section at Imperial College, London as director of the Optical Design Group, a position he held until 1978.

#8158

Ankur Jain

#176988

Overall Influence

#8159

Louis Miles Muggleton

Louis Miles Muggleton

#69037

Overall Influence

1922 - 2015 (93 years)

Louis Miles Muggleton, FIET was a South African-born British Ionospheric Physicist and Electrical Engineer. Building on the work of Sir Edward Appleton in 1975 Muggleton's seminal work provided the international standard ITU model of radio wave absorption and reflection of the Heaviside layer of the Ionosphere. This model was based on jointly published work with Stamatis Kouris from the early 1970s.

#8160

Sally McArthur

#176348

Overall Influence

Sally L. McArthur is an Australian materials scientist who is Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Swinburne University of Technology and Research Scientist at CSIRO. Her research considers the development of novel biomaterials for biomedical, nutritional and environmental applications. She was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering in 2021.

#8161

Rebecca Lingwood

#169033

Overall Influence

Rebecca Julie Lingwood is the Provost and Professor of Fluid Dynamics at Brunel University London. She holds an affiliate position at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Lingwood was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2019.

#8162

Fritz Thurstone

#129945

Overall Influence

1932 - 2005 (73 years)

Frederick "Fritz" Thurstone was a pioneer in ultrasound technology, largely in the design of transducers for ultrasound imaging. He earned a B.S. degree in Physics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1953 and M.S. and Ph.D degrees both in electrical engineering from North Carolina State University in 1957 and 1961 respectively.

#8163

Sally Aitken

#107861

Overall Influence

Sally Nora Aitken is a Professor and Associate Dean of Research and Innovation at the University of British Columbia. In 2017, Aitken was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Career After earning her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, Aitken joining the faculty at Oregon State University. She was then offered a position at the University of British Columbia as a NSERC Industrial Research Chair. In 2001, Aitken helped start the Centre for Forest Conservation Genetics at UBC alongside Tongli Wang.

#8164

Hwang Jun-seok

#132453

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Hwang Jun-seok is a South Korean engineer. He currently serves as a Director and Dean of the Technology Management, Economics and Policy Program and of the International Information Technology Policy Scholarship Program at the Seoul National University and Associate Professor at the Seoul National University.

#8165

Harry Kwatny

#177048

Overall Influence

Harry Kwatny is an American mechanical engineer, the current S. Herbert Raynes Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Drexel University, and a published author.

#8166

Jaroslav Pollert

#177099

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Jaroslav Pollert is a Czech slalom canoeist and civil engineer who competed from the late 1980s to the mid 2000s. He won four gold medals in the C2 team event at the ICF Canoe Slalom World Championships . He also won a gold and a silver medal in the same event at the European Championships.

#8167

Marcel Borgers

#177100

Overall Influence

#8168

James Pulliam

#146511

Overall Influence

1925 - 2005 (80 years)

James Pulliam was a noted Modernist architect in the Greater Los Angeles Area of Southern California. Works Pulliam was known for a "cut into box" style exhibited by the All-State Savings and Loan building in Glendale, California, and original Bronco Student Union Building at Cal Poly Pomona in 1976, and the interior remodeling of the San Pedro Municipal Ferry Building to house the Los Angeles Maritime Museum. Noted architectural historian David Gebhard cited a house he designed in Beverly Hills as "monumental," and the Bronco Student Center at Cal Poly Pomona as the best building on campus.

#8169

Jean-Claude Golvin

#51505

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Jean-Claude Golvin is a French archaeologist and architect. He specializes in the history of Roman amphitheatres and has published hundreds of reconstruction drawings of ancient monuments. Golvin is a researcher with the CNRS at the Bordeaux Montaigne University.

#8170

Fred Baker

#175300

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Frederick J. Baker , is an American engineer, specializing in developing computer network protocols for the Internet. Biography Baker attended the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology from 1970 to 1973. He developed computer network technology starting in 1978 at Control Data Corporation , Vitalink Communications Corporation, and Advanced Computer Communications.

#8171

Lucyna Nyka

#170545

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Lucyna Nyka is a Polish architect, full professor at Gdańsk University of Technology. Dean of the Faculty of Architecture , head of Department of Marine and Industrial Architecture, in 2008-2016 a vice-dean for Research

#8172

James Garrison

#126079

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

James Garrison is an American architect and educator who lives, practices, and teaches in Brooklyn, New York. He has two children: Emma Garrison, a marine biologist, and Brendan Garrison, a writer. Growing up in western Pennsylvania, Garrison witnessed the destruction of nature by surface mining and clear-cutting. This led to his passion for ecological protection and an even greater understanding of sustainability in architecture. In 1971, James attended the Syracuse University School of Architecture and there researched new forms of urban housing under the mentorship of Werner Seligman, graduating with design honors.

#8173

Payam Heydari

#177168

Overall Influence

#8174

James A Anderson

#177171

Overall Influence

#8175

José E. Cavazos

#143011

Overall Influence

José Enrique Cavazos is a Mexican-American physician-scientist. He is a professor and assistant dean of the MD/PhD program at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. Early life and education Jose Enrique Cavazos was born in Monterrey, Nuevo León. He completed a M.D., cum laude at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education. In 1993, he earned a Ph.D., cum laude in neuroscience under the guidance of Thomas Sutula at the University of Wisconsin–Madison . He completed an internship in internal medicine the same year at UW. In 1996, he completed a residency in neurology at Duke University.

#8176

Abena Joan Brown

Abena Joan Brown

#145082

Overall Influence

1928 - 2015 (87 years)

Abena Joan Brown was an African-American businesswoman and theater producer who founded the Creative Arts Foundation in Chicago to enable black artists to work. Known as the "mother of Chicago's black arts community", she received honors and awards for her work in both theater and social programs. Brown was inducted into the Chicago Women's Hall of Fame and interviewed as a subject of the archival program The HistoryMakers.

#8177

María Inés Valla

#175776

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

María Inés Valla is an Argentine electronic and power engineer specializing in power electronics and nonlinear control for electric power systems. She is a professor of electrical engineering at the National University of La Plata, affiliated with the National Scientific and Technical Research Council Institute for Research in Electronics, Control and Signal Processing .

#8178

Pao Houa Her

#104667

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (44 years)

Pao Houa Her is a Hmong-American photographer whose works are primarily centered around the history and lived experiences of the Hmong people. Her's photography consists of greenery and geographic images. She is also a professor at the University of Minnesota and teaches Introduction to Photography.

#8179

Jianjun Cheng

#175669

Overall Influence

Jianjun Cheng is a Chinese material scientist. Early life and education Cheng completed his Bachelor of Science degree at Nankai University in 1993 before moving to North America for his graduate studies. In 1996, he completed his master's degree at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and later earned his PhD in Materials Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

#8180

Chris Killip

#42349

Overall Influence

1946 - 2020 (74 years)

Christopher David Killip was a Manx photographer who worked at Harvard University from 1991 to 2017, as a Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies. Killip is known for his black and white images of people and places especially of Tyneside during the 1980s.

#8181

George Biros

#177243

Overall Influence

George Biros is a Greek-American engineer, currently the W. A. "Tex" Moncrief Professor in Simulation-Based Engineering Endowed Chair #2 at the University of Texas at Austin.

#8182

Andrew L. Moore

#109225

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Andrew Lambdin Moore is an American photographer and filmmaker known for large format color photographs of Detroit, Cuba, Russia, the American High Plains, and New York's Times Square theaters. Moore's photographs employ the formal vocabularies of architectural and landscape photography and the narrative approaches of documentary photography and journalism to detail remnants of societies in transition. His photographic essays have been published in monographs, anthologies, and magazines including The New York Times Magazine, Time, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Harper's Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Fortune, Wired, and Art in America.

#8183

Laura Fabris

#86606

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Laura Fabris is a professor at Polytechnic University of Turin, formerly associate professor for materials science and engineering at Rutgers University, New Jersey, United States. Life Fabris studied chemistry at the University of Padua and finished her master's studies with her master's thesis "Artificial Photosynthetic Reaction Centers: Paramagnetic Intermediates Detected by EPR Spectroscopy" in 2001. She then received her doctoral degree in chemical sciences in April 2006 from the same university. The title of her dissertation was "Peptide Monolayers on Gold Nanoparticles and Surfaces". From 2006 to 2009, she was then a postdoc at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

#8184

Nick Newman

#119832

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

John Nicholas "Nick" Newman is an American naval architect noted for his contributions to marine hydrodynamics. Together with David Evans, he initiated the International Workshop on Water Waves and Floating Bodies. He is also known for his contribution in the development of the wave–structure interaction code WAMIT. He is currently emeritus professor of Naval Architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#8185

Ioannis Pavlidis

#167965

Overall Influence

Ioannis Thomas Pavlidis is a Greek American scholar. He is the distinguished Eckhard-Pfeiffer Professor of Computer Science at the University of Houston, founder, and director of the Affective and Data Computing Laboratory, formerly known as the Computational Physiology Lab .

#8186

Karen Rafferty

#168424

Overall Influence

Karen Rafferty is the Head of the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Queen's University Belfast. She works with virtual and augmented reality for health care and automation.

#8187

Lars Nielsen

#173881

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Lars Nielsen is a Swedish engineer. Nielsen pursued graduate study at Lund University, where he completed a master's degree in engineering physics in 1979, followed by a doctorate in automatic control six years later. He has taught at Linköping University since 1992, where he was appointed Sten Gustafsson chair in vehicular systems. Nielsen was the 2013 recipient of the Håkan Frisinger Award, a prize of the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations.

#8188

Zoka Zola

#172675

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Zoka Zola is a Croatian architect and teacher who operates her own studio in Chicago, Illinois. She has license to work as an architect in the US, the UK, and Croatia. Her most notable work is the Pfanner House for which she received the Home of the Year Award named as the best house in North America by Architecture Magazine. Kenneth Frampton's publication the American Masterworks: Houses of the 20th and 21st Centuries lists this house among the 43 houses constructed in the USA since 1985. She is also a professor at the School of Architecture at University of Illinois, Chicago. Her firm is als...

#8189

Yin Xiaowei

#169538

Overall Influence

1973 - 2019 (46 years)

Yin Xiaowei was a Chinese materials scientist, known for his research in composite materials. He served as Professor of Materials Science at Northwestern Polytechnical University, and Executive Vice Dean of the Graduate School of the university.

#8190

Richard Chisolm

Richard Chisolm

#106694

Overall Influence

Richard Chisolm is an cinematographer and film-maker based in Baltimore, Maryland. Chisolm is most experienced in documentaries and actuality-style dramas. He has done additional camera work for feature films, television series, commercials and corporate and educational videos.

#8191

Bruce E. Logan

#172373

Overall Influence

Bruce Ernest Logan is an American civil and environmental engineer who serves as the Kappe Professor of Environmental Engineering and the Evan Pugh University Professor in Engineering at Pennsylvania State University . He is also the director of Penn State's Engineering Energy and Environmental Institute and their Hydrogen Energy Center. His main research interest is in the development of water infrastructure technology, and his lab has developed devices that can produce electricity from wastewater. He is also known for his work developing microbial fuel cells. Since 2013, he has been the edit...

#8192

Haldun Ozaktas

#177364

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Haldun Ozaktas from the Bilkent University, Bilkent, Turkey was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2014 for contributions to transforms for signal processing in optics.

#8193

Bob Lutz

#122658

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Robert Anthony Lutz is a Swiss-American automotive executive. He served as a top leader of all of the United States Big Three automobile manufacturers, having been in succession executive vice president of Ford Motor Company, president and then vice chairman of Chrysler Corporation, and vice chairman of General Motors.

#8194

Wojciech Buliński

#177387

Overall Influence

1929 - 2021 (92 years)

Wojciech Włodzimierz Buliński was a Polish architect and professor who was dean of the Faculty of Architecture at Tadeusz Kościuszko University of Technology from 1987 to 1993. He is noted as among the first architects in Poland to begin designing in the modernist style after the 'thaw' and decline of socialist realism which followed the death of Joseph Stalin and Bolesław Bierut.

#8195

Werner Lorenz

#145852

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Werner Lorenz is a German structural engineer and a historian of construction technology. He held the chair for the construction history and structural preservation at the BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg, where he has been an honorary professor for the construction history since his retirement. He was also managing director of the Berlin engineering office Lorenz & Co. from 1999 to 2018 .

#8196

Nina Tandon

#170481

Overall Influence

Nina Marie Tandon is an American biomedical engineer. She is the CEO and co-founder of EpiBone. She currently serves as an adjunct professor of Electrical Engineering at Cooper Union and is a senior fellow at the Lab for Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering at Columbia. She was a 2011 TED Fellow and a 2012 senior TED Fellow.

#8197

Nathan Amanquah

Nathan Amanquah

#170073

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Nathan Amanquah is an engineer, a Web developer and educator who is currently the acting dean of engineering at Ashesi University. He was the acting dean of academic affairs at Ashesi University in 2010 when he filled in for Nana Araba Apt in her absence. Before he joined Ashesi University as an assistant professor in 2004, he worked as a systems analyst at The Bulk Oil Storage and Transportation Company Limited Ghana, a communications engineer at SSB Bank, Ghana, and electronics instructor at Accra Polytechnic. Amanquah has contributed massively to the design and development of the computer science and engineering programs at Ashesi University.

#8198

Paul Caponigro

#77436

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Paul Caponigro , is an American photographer from Boston, Massachusetts. Early life Caponigro started having interests in photography at age 13. However, he also had a strong passion in music and began to study music at Boston University College of Music in 1950, before eventually deciding to focus on studying photography at the California School of Fine Art.

#8199

Mi Lu

#130925

Overall Influence

Mi Lu is an engineer and professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She is noted for her contributions in computer arithmetic, parallel algorithms, computer architectures, and computer networks. She has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in Texas A&M University since 1987. She is the author of the book Arithmetic and Logic in Computer Systems and book chapters in Handbook of Bioinspired Algorithms and Applications and Biocomputing.

#8200

Andrew Pullan

#176479

Overall Influence

1963 - 2012 (49 years)

Andrew John Pullan was a New Zealand mathematician specialising in bio-electrical modelling. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. Academic career After attending Aorere College in Māngere, Pullan received a scholarship to the University of Auckland where he studied mathematics before moving to the engineering school to work on biomedical engineering finite-element models of the heart and models of electrical activity in the gastrointestinal tract. His 1988 doctoral thesis was titled Quasilinearised infiltration and the boundary element method with Professor Ian Collins as his supervisor.

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