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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List of the most influential people in Engineering,

#8201

James G. Brasseur

#172646

Overall Influence

James G. Brasseur from the Pennsylvania State University, was awarded the status of Fellow in the American Physical Society, after he was nominated by the Division of Fluid Dynamics in 2009, for advancements in knowledge of nonclassical interscale interactions in turbulence and in large-eddy simulation of the high Reynolds number boundary layer, and for interdisciplinary contributions to gastro-intestinal medicine by integrating physiology, mechanics, and mathematical modeling.

#8202

David Pommerenke

#177540

Overall Influence

David Pommerenke is an electrical engineer from the Graz University of Technology. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for his work with system-level electrostatic discharge technology.

#8203

James Ferguson

#177543

Overall Influence

#8204

David McCurdy Baird

#105877

Overall Influence

1920 - 2019 (99 years)

David McCurdy Baird was a Canadian geologist, photographer, and academic. He was the older brother of Dr. Kenneth Baird. Early life and education Baird was born in Fredericton, New Brunswick in July 1920. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1941 from the University of New Brunswick, a Master of Science degree in 1943 from the University of Rochester, and a Ph.D. in 1947 from McGill University.

#8205

Timothy Behrens

#104842

Overall Influence

1937 - 2017 (80 years)

Timothy John Behrens was a British painter who spent most of his professional life as a painter and a writer abroad, in Greece, Italy, and Spain. Early life Timothy John Behrens was born in London on 2 June 1937, the son of Michael Behrens, a financier, and later co-owner of Ionian Bank, and his wife Felicity. They lived in a Nash terrace overlooking Regent's Park, and in 1949 bought Culham Court, a large house in Berkshire on the river Thames. He was educated at Eton and the Slade School of Fine Art.

#8206

Choong Eui Song

#171302

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Choong Eui Song is a South Korean organic chemist. Biography Song was born and raised in Seoul. He received his B.S. degree from Chung-Ang University in 1980, and received a diploma and a Ph.D. at RWTH Aachen University in Germany.

#8207

Anne Ferran

#110182

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Anne Ferran is an Australian photographer. Background Anne Ferran was born on 10 May 1949 in Sydney, New South Wales. Ferran began exhibiting her photographic work in the early 1980s. In 1986 she relocated to Europe after being awarded a Visual Arts Board travel grant from an Australian committee. She then took up a six-month residency at the Power Studio at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. Ferran returned from overseas to Sydney to complete her Masters of Fine Arts, but then shifted to Melbourne in 1995 only a year after graduating. In 2003 she received a residency in London from the Australian Council.

#8208

Knut Brautaset

#143408

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Knut Brautaset is a Norwegian engineer. He worked as a civil engineer in Detroit, Michigan from 1965 to 1970. When moving back to Norway in 1970, he was hired at the Southern Norway Technical School, which changed its name to Agder Regional College of Engineering . From 1982 to 1989 he was the rector of this Grimstad-based college. When Agder University College was created through a merger of the region's colleges in 1994, Brautaset became the first rector there, and served until 2000. He has also been the board chairman of the Norwegian Centre for International Cooperation in Higher Educatio...

#8209

Linda Day Clark

#118275

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Linda Day Clark is a photographer, professor, and curator noted for capturing everyday life in African American rural and urban environments, particularly in Gee's Bend. Her work has been shown in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Lehman College, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and The Smithsonian's Anacostia Community Museum.

#8210

Ahmad Tafazzoli

Ahmad Tafazzoli

#23369

Overall Influence

1937 - 1997 (60 years)

Ahmad Tafazzoli was an Iranian Iranist and professor of ancient Iranian languages and culture at Tehran University. One of his most important books is Pre-Islamic Persian Literature. Jaleh Amouzegar contributed in editing it.

#8211

Belle Wei

#138773

Overall Influence

Belle W. Y. Wei is an American electrical engineer and educator. she is Carolyn Guidry Chair in Engineering Education and Innovative Learning at San José State University. Her other positions include Charles W. Davidson College of Engineering’s Don Beall Dean of Engineering at San José State University and Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at California State University, Chico.

#8212

Dennis Michael Sullivan

#170609

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Dennis Michael Sullivan is an electrical engineer from the University of Idaho, Moscow. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2013 for his contributions to time domain electromagnetic simulation.

#8213

Karen Christman

#177206

Overall Influence

Karen Leigh Christman is an American bioengineer who is the Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and the Pierre Galletti Endowed Chair for Bioengineering Innovation at University of California, San Diego. Her research considers regenerative medicine and tissue engineering. She was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors in 2023.

#8214

Patricia Saldaña Natke

Patricia Saldaña Natke

#170542

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Patricia Saldaña Natke is an American architect, the founding partner and president of UrbanWorks, Ltd., a Chicago-based architecture, interiors, and urban planning firm. Biography Saldaña Natke is a founding partner of UrbanWorks, an architecture, planning, and interior design firm in Chicago. She has completed over 5,000 units of housing, six mixed-income developments, office and university projects, and over 65 public school renovations, additions, and new construction.

#8215

R. J. Scaringe

#176450

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (43 years)

Robert "RJ" Scaringe is an American entrepreneur and engineer, the founder and CEO of electric vehicle manufacturer Rivian. Scaringe's net worth is estimated at US$1.7 billion as of December 2021. Early life and education Robert Joseph Scaringe was born on January 19, 1983. His father, also named Robert Scaringe, is an engineer and founder of Mainstream Engineering Corporation. Scaringe grew up a car enthusiast, restoring them in his neighbor's garage. After learning of the great negative environmental effects of cars, however, he decided to focus his life on creating a more sustainable and e...

#8216

Walter Bobbie

#18190

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Walter Bobbie is an American theatre director, choreographer, and occasional actor and dancer. Bobbie has directed both musicals and plays on Broadway and Off-Broadway, and was the Artistic Director of the New York City Center Encores! concert series. He directed the long-running Broadway revival of the musical Chicago. His most well-known acting role was Nicely-Nicely Johnson in the 1992 Broadway revival of Guys and Dolls.

#8217

Pedro Aibéo

#133793

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Pedro Aibéo is a Portuguese-born internationally awarded architect, civil engineer, a researcher in Architectural Democracy, local politician in Finland. He is the founder & CEO of the Gamified Cohousing Oy, founder and Artistic Director of the “Cidadania” theatre+games group, a professional Musician at Homebound, the founder and Chairman of the World Music School Helsinki, a drawing teacher at Croquis Nights and a bestseller Graphic Novelist.

#8218

Heike Vallery

#101733

Overall Influence

Heike Vallery is a German mechanical engineer whose research involves the development of robot legs and exoskeletons to assist in human walking, including applications in prosthetics and medical rehabilitation. She is a professor of biomechanical engineering at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, and Alexander von Humboldt Professor at RWTH Aachen University.

#8219

Sara Bronin

#86240

Overall Influence

Sara Cecilia Bronin is an American lawyer, professor, and architect. She is the chair of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. Early life and education Bronin graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2001, where she earned degrees in architecture and the Plan II honors program. She attended Magdalen College, Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. While there, she co-founded the Oxonian Review and served as its publisher. In 2003, she graduated with a master's degree in economic and social history. She earned a Truman Scholarship for public service, which she used for law school. ...

#8220

Lieven De Lathauwer

#60408

Overall Influence

Lieven De Lathauwer from the KU Leuven, Belgium was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for contributions to signal processing algorithms using tensor decompositions. He was elected as a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2017, "for fundamental contributions to theory, computation, and application of tensor decompositions". He received a PhD in engineering from KU Leuven in 1997.

#8221

André Taylor

#170027

Overall Influence

André Taylor is an American scientist who is an associate professor of chemical engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering. Taylor works on novel materials for energy conversion and storage. He was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2010, and named as one of The Community of Scholars' Most Influential Black Researchers of 2020.

#8222

Leo Fender

#105302

Overall Influence

1909 - 1991 (82 years)

Clarence Leonidas Fender was an American inventor known for founding the Fender Musical Instruments Corporation and designing the company's early models, the Fender Telecaster, Fender Precision Bass, and Fender Stratocaster. In January 1965, he sold Fender to CBS, and later founded two other musical instrument companies, Music Man and G&L Musical Instruments.

#8223

Clementine Chambon

#109777

Overall Influence

Clementine Chambon is a chemical engineer at Imperial College London, who works on energy solutions for energy-deprived countries. She is the Chief Technology Officer of Oorja Development Solutions, a social enterprise that focused on providing clean energy access to off-grid communities in rural India.

#8224

David Dye

#140792

Overall Influence

David Dye is a Professor of Metallurgy at Imperial College London. Professor Dye specialises in fatigue and micromechanics of aerospace and nuclear materials, mainly Ni/Co superalloys, Titanium, TWIP steel, and Zirconium alloys.

#8225

Tequila Harris

#168539

Overall Influence

Tequila Harris is an American mechanical engineer and professor. She is Professor of Manufacturing at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. She works on polymer processing and mechanical system design.

#8226

W. Mack Grady

#134402

Overall Influence

W. Mack Grady is an American engineer, currently the Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Baylor University, Josey Centennial Professor Emeritus in Energy Resources at Cockrell School of Engineering, University of Texas at Austin and also a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

#8227

Richard Ross

#107815

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Richard Ross is an American photographer. He is best known for his body of work Juvenile in Justice, which has documented the U.S. juvenile justice system for the last 8 years. The project has been produced with the support of the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In 2007 Ross was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship to finish Architecture of Authority.

#8228

Don Mitchell

#110039

Overall Influence

Don Mitchell was an American aircraft designer. He was a Scottish immigrant, arriving in the United States in 1922. He built his first airplane seven years later and founded an airplane manufacturing company in 1937.

#8229

Geoff Winningham

#107138

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Geoffrey Lea Winningham is an American photographer, journalist, and filmmaker best known for his photographs and documentary films focusing on Texas and Mexican culture. Geoff's work was first recognized in the early 1970s when he published the book Friday Night in the Coliseum, featuring his photographs of professional wrestling and recorded conversations with wrestlers and fans. The book was followed in 1972 by a 16mm, black and white documentary film of the same title.

#8230

Kai Zhang

#177998

Overall Influence

#8231

Dai Roberts

#90654

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Dai Roberts is a British sculptor, print and installation artist. He taught at Coventry University, and was teaching at Richmond University in 2011. Further reading The Marmite Painting PrizeBraziers International Artists WorkshopRojaraku Spatial Art LaboratoryNoon Day Demons

#8232

Panos Antsaklis

Panos Antsaklis

#116779

Overall Influence

Panos Antsaklis is the H. Clifford and Evelyn A. Brosey Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame and also Concurrent Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Engineering and of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics. He is a graduate of the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and holds MS and PhD degrees from Brown University.

#8233

Ahmed Rashad Abdel-khalik

#147430

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Ahmed Rashad Abdel-khalik is an American scholar who was born in Egypt. He is the V. K. Zimmerman Professor of International Accounting, Professor of Accountancy, and Director of the V. K. Zimmerman Center for International Education and Research in Accounting at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

#8234

Grace Parraga

#173314

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Grace–Eve Párraga is a Canadian lung-imaging scientist. She is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Lung Imaging to Transform Outcomes at the University of Western Ontario. Early life and education Parraga was born in 1961. She completed her Bachelor of Science and Master's degree in biochemistry from the University of Western Ontario and her PhD at the University of Washington.

#8235

Jiashu Zhang

#178097

Overall Influence

#8236

Burt Rutan

#113893

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Elbert Leander "Burt" Rutan is a retired American aerospace engineer and entrepreneur noted for his originality in designing light, strong, unusual-looking, and energy-efficient air and space craft. He designed the record-breaking Voyager, which in 1986 was the first plane to fly around the world without stopping or refueling, and the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer, which in 2006 set the world record for the fastest and longest nonstop non-refueled circumnavigation flight in history. In 2004, Rutan's sub-orbital spaceplane design SpaceShipOne became the first privately funded spacecraft to ent...

#8237

Wellington Reiter

Wellington Reiter

#109090

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Wellington "Duke" Reiter , FAIA, is an American architect and urban designer, and a Senior Adviser at Arizona State University. Biography Reiter graduated with a B. Arch. from Tulane University in 1981, and an M. Arch. from the Harvard University School of Design in 1986. He founded a consultancy, Urban Instruments , and was Professor of Practice at MIT . He was Dean of the School of Design at Arizona State University . From 2008 to 2010 he was President of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago , before returning to ASU in 2011, serving in a variety of roles, currently as 'Senior Adviser ...

#8238

Robert A. Kraft

Robert A. Kraft

#32477

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Robert A. Kraft was an American religious historian who was the Berg Professor of Religious Studies Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. He is known for his pioneering work in the application of computing to the study of ancient literature and for his significant contributions to the study of early Judaism and early Christianity. Kraft was president of the Society of Biblical Literature in 2006.

#8239

Manimaran Govindarasu

#139821

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Manimaran Govindarasu is a Ross Martin Mehl and Marylyne Munas Mehl Professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Iowa State University. He holds B.E. in computer science and engineering from Bharathidasan University , an MTech in computer technology from the Indian Institutes of Technology , and Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institutes of Technology . He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for contributions to security of power grids.

#8240

Tammy Ma

#161330

Overall Influence

Tammy Ma is an American plasma physicist who works on inertial confinement fusion at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Education and career Ma studied aerospace engineering at the California Institute of Technology, graduating in 2005. She went to the University of California, San Diego for graduate study, earning a master's degree in 2008 and completing her Ph.D. in 2010.

#8241

Jȧnos M. Beér

#178124

Overall Influence

#8242

Lixia Zhang

#178126

Overall Influence

#8243

Henry Liu

#177278

Overall Influence

1936 - 2009 (73 years)

Henry Liu was an American civil engineer and the president of Freight Pipeline Company , now known as EcologicTech. Liu earned his PhD in civil engineering from Colorado State University with research on fluid mechanics, and then worked as a professor of civil engineering at University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri for over 20 years. At MU, he was also director of the Capsule Pipeline Research Center, a joint state/industry initiative funded by the National Science Foundation to develop capsule pipeline technology to transport freight; an innovative application of pipelines to transfer s...

#8244

Bryony James

#178134

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Bryony Joanne James is a professor of engineering who is currently based at the University of Waikato. Academic career After a 1997 PhD titled 'The oxidation reactions of heterogeneous carbon cathodes used in the electrolytic production of aluminium' at the University of Auckland, James joined the staff, rising to full professor.

#8245

R. Sen Gupta

#178140

Overall Influence

#8246

Anousheh Ansari

Anousheh Ansari

#120809

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Anousheh Ansari is an Iranian American engineer and co-founder and chairwoman of Prodea Systems. Her previous business accomplishments include serving as co-founder and CEO of Telecom Technologies, Inc. . The Ansari family is also the title sponsor of the Ansari X Prize. On September 18, 2006, a few days after her 40th birthday, she became the first Iranian in space. Ansari was the fourth overall self-funded space tourist, and the first self-funded woman to fly to the International Space Station. Her memoir, My Dream of Stars, co-written with Homer Hickam, was published by Palgrave Macmillan ...

#8247

Gabriella Cincotti

#177650

Overall Influence

Gabriella Cincotti is an Italian optical engineer whose research has included the development of photonic devices and their application in medical imaging. She is a professor of engineering at Roma Tre University, in the Department of Civil, Computer Science and Aeronautical Technologies Engineering, and the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Photonics Journal.

#8248

Harvey Fierstein

Harvey Fierstein

#33390

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Harvey Forbes Fierstein is an American actor, playwright, and screenwriter, known for his distinctive gravelly voice. He is best known for his theater work in Torch Song Trilogy and Hairspray and film roles in Mrs. Doubtfire, Independence Day, and as the voice of Yao in Mulan and Mulan II. Fierstein won two Tony Awards, Best Actor in a Play and Best Play, for Torch Song Trilogy. He received his third Tony Award, Best Book of a Musical, for the musical La Cage aux Folles and his fourth, the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical, for playing Edna Turnblad in Hairspray, a role he revived in its...

#8249

Anne Basting

#48427

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Anne Davis Basting, is an American gerontologist working as a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Peck School of the Arts. Her work centers around aging, memory, and dementia, both from the point of view of the elderly and that of society; and of the uses of theater, storytelling, and other arts in eldercare. She is one of the 2016 MacArthur Fellows .

#8250

Robert H. Ossoff

#168774

Overall Influence

Robert Henry Ossoff is an American physician-scientist and otolaryngologist. He is a professor emeritus at Vanderbilt University Medical Center where he previously held the Guy M. Maness Professorship of Laryngology and Voice.

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