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).

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List of the most influential people in Engineering,

#8301

Nedjib Djilali

#174454

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Nedjib Djilali is a Canadian engineering professor and researcher specializing in sustainable energy and thermofluid sciences. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Advanced Energy Systems Design and Computational Modelling at the University of Victoria. Djilali is a Highly Cited Researcher, and a fellow of both the Canadian Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society of Canada .

#8302

Peter Meineck

#81609

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Peter Meineck is Professor of Classics in the Modern World at New York University. He is also the founder and humanities program director of Aquila Theatre and has held appointments at Princeton University and University of South Carolina.

#8303

John Wall

#78827

Overall Influence

1932 - 2018 (86 years)

John Wall was an English design engineer, amateur astronomer, amateur telescope maker and member of the British Astronomical Association. He lived in Coventry, England. Biography Wall's aptitude for engineering won him an apprenticeship with Vickers Armstrong at the age of sixteen in the town of Crayford where he was born. He served in the army with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers in early 1950s and there became interested in telescopes and astronomy. He went on to become a design engineer at Vickers and, while working there in 1969, came up with the idea for an accurate mechani...

#8304

Christopher H. Bajorek

Christopher H. Bajorek

#173134

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Christopher Henry Bajorek is a data storage engineer noted for his leadership in developing and implementing magnetoresistive sensors into magnetic stripe readers, tape drives and hard disk drives. Early life and education Christopher Henry Bajorek was born in Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine, on November 26, 1943. His parents were George L. H. and Rosalia B. ; He married Janet Fullmer in 1965. They have two children: Peter C. and Jennifer L. Bajorek attended Pasadena City College before transferring to the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1967, a Master of Science , in electrical engineering in 1968; and a Ph.D.

#8305

Mooi Choo Chuah

#179100

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Mooi Choo Chuah from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for contributions to wireless network system and protocol design. In 2017, she was elected a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.

#8306

Kevin Morgan

#179131

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

#8307

Rick Lombardo

#95228

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Rick Lombardo is a prolific and award-winning American theatre director, playwright and adaptor. He is the former producing artistic director of San Jose Repertory Theatre, and the former Artistic Director of New Repertory Theatre in Watertown, Massachusetts. Lombardo is currently the artistic director of Penn State Center Stage, and the director of the School of Theatre at Penn State University and the Penn State College of Arts and Architecture.

#8308

Jing Qin

#179134

Overall Influence

#8309

Michael Lewis

#179164

Overall Influence

#8310

Edward Chang

#179197

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Edward Chang is a Taiwanese electrical engineer from National Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu, Taiwan. Chang was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2017 for his contributions to compound semiconductor heterojunction transistor technologies.

#8311

Thurmon E. Lockhart

Thurmon E. Lockhart

#175734

Overall Influence

Thurmon E. Lockhart is an American biomedical engineer, researcher and educator. He is the Inaugural MORE Foundation Professor of Life in Motion at Arizona State University, a guest professor at Ghent University in Belgium and, serves as a research affiliate faculty at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science. He is an associate editor of Annals of Biomedical Engineering and academic and guest editor of the Sensors journal He has worked significantly to bring research to practice with various businesses to reduce falls.

#8312

Helmut Holzapfel

#173813

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Helmut Holzapfel is a German scientist. He is Professor of Transportation Planning at University of Kassel, Germany. He studied Civil Engineering, Transportation Science and Urban Planning between 1968 and 1975 and completed his doctoral thesis, 'Trip Relationships in Urban Areas', in 1980.

#8313

Vivian Mushahwar

#173261

Overall Influence

Vivian K. Mushahwar is an American-Canadian biomedical engineer. She is a Canada Research Chair in Functional Restoration at the University of Alberta and Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.

#8314

Ching-Long Lin

#178806

Overall Influence

Ching-Long Lin is a Taiwanese mechanical engineer. Lin earned a Bachelor of Science degree from National Taiwan University in 1986. He then completed a master's degree at Stanford University in 1989, followed by a doctorate in 1994. Lin joined the University of Iowa faculty in 1997, where he later held the Edward M. Mielnik & Samuel R. Harding Professorship of Mechanical Engineering. Lin was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2014, "[f]or his contribution to multiscale flow physics and computational techniques, including pulmonary tracheobronchial and acinar flows, image-base...

#8315

John L. Phillips

#179273

Overall Influence

#8316

Christopher L.-H. Huang

#179284

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Christopher L.-H. Huang FRSB is professor of cell physiology at the University of Cambridge. Christopher L.-H. Huang was awarded a Florence Heale Scholar to read Medicine and Physiology at The Queen's College, Oxford. He completed his preregistration clinical appointments in the Nuffield Department of Medicine, The John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. He then joined Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge as an MRC Scholar to complete a PhD in membrane biophysics, and then successively became an Assistant Lecturer and Lecturer in Physiology, Reader and finally the Professor of Cell Physiology at Cambridge, whilst being Fellow and Director of Medical Studies at Murray Edwards College.

#8317

Ann E. Elsner

#175837

Overall Influence

Ann E. Elsner is an American researcher and Distinguished Professor of Optometry, Indiana University Bloomington. Biography Elsner earned a B.A. degree from Indiana University Bloomington, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Oregon. In 1987, she joined the Schepens Eye Research Institute as a researcher. In 2005, she moved to Indiana University Bloomington and became a professor in the School of Optometry and director of the Borish Center for Ophthalmic Research. In the same year, she founded and became CEO of Aeon Imaging, a bioimaging technology firm.

#8318

Shelly Miller

#177453

Overall Influence

Shelly Lynn Miller is an American mechanical engineer who is a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research investigates indoor air quality and urban air pollution. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Miller studied the spread of COVID-19 and how to minimize the spread of coronavirus.

#8319

Kristina M. Johnson

Kristina M. Johnson

#159663

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Kristina M. Johnson is an American business executive and academic administrator. She previously served as the 13th chancellor of the State University of New York from 2017 to 2020 and the 16th president of Ohio State University from 2020 to 2023. She has knowledge in the development of optoelectronic processing systems, 3-D imaging, and color-management systems.

#8320

Xavier Intes

#155117

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Xavier Intes is a French professor of physics and biomedical engineering and co-director of the BioImaging Center at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Life and career Intes had obtained his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from University of Western Brittany in 1992, 1994, and 1998 respectively. In 1999 he joined Britton Chance's laboratory as a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania and under his mentorship studied biochemistry and biophysics of radiology. He also did postdoctoral training at the Department of Astronomy and Physics where Arjun Yodh was his mentor. From 2001-2003...

#8321

Alma Y. Alanís

#171995

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Alma Yolanda Alanís García is a Mexican electrical engineer and control theorist specializing in intelligent control, and in particular in the use of artificial neural networks for applications including the control of electric motors, robot manipulators, and unmanned aerial vehicles. She is a chair professor and researcher in the Department of Computational Sciences at the University of Guadalajara.

#8322

Nasir Hussain

#74440

Overall Influence

1931 - 2002 (71 years)

Mohammad Nasir Hussain Khan , better known as Nasir Hussain, was an Indian film producer, director, and screenwriter. With a career spanning decades, Hussain has been credited as a major trendsetter in the history of Hindi cinema. For example, he directed Yaadon Ki Baraat , which created the Hindi language masala film genre that defined Hindi cinema in the 1970s and 1980s, and he wrote and produced Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak , which set the Hindi language musical romance template that defined Hindi cinema in the 1990s. Akshay Manwani wrote a book on Hussain's cinema titled Music, Masti, Modernity:...

#8323

Tao Han

#179349

Overall Influence

#8324

Clive Leyman

#125625

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Clive Leyman is a Welsh aerodynamicist and was the chief aerodynamicist of Concorde. Early life He went to Neath Grammar School for Boys in Wales. He studied at Queen Mary College in London. Career BAC He joined the Bristol Aeroplane Company in 1957, which became BAC in 1960. He became the Chief Aerodynamicist at BAC. He worked with Jean Rech of Aérospatiale. Aerodynamic research for Concorde was notably carried out with the BAC 221, which had a droop nose, and the Dassault Mirage IV. Concorde had an ogee-shaped wing.

#8325

Mysskin

#78090

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Shanmugha Raja, known professionally as Mysskin, is an Indian film director, screenwriter, actor, singer, producer and composer. He made his directorial debut in 2006 with Chithiram Pesuthadi. His subsequent films Anjathe , Nandalala and Onaayum Aattukkuttiyum and Pisaasu received critical acclaim. He made his acting debut with Nandalala , where he portrayed a mentally disabled man. In 2023 he debuted as music director in the tamil movie named as Devil. He is considered a great auteur in Tamil Cinema.

#8326

Dai Yongnian

#148510

Overall Influence

1929 - 2022 (93 years)

Dai Yongnian was a Chinese engineer who was a professor at Kunming University of Science and Technology, and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Biography Dai was born in Kunming, Yunnan, on 9 February 1929, while his ancestral home was in Tonghai County. In 1947, he was admitted to the Department of Mining and Metallurgy, Yunnan University. He joined the Yunnan Democratic Youth League in December 1948, and joined the Chinese Communist Party in August 1949. He had served in the People's Liberation Army since 1949, during the Chinese Civil War. He returned to Yunnan University in 1950 and taught there after graduation.

#8327

Sun Zhongliang

#173625

Overall Influence

1936 - 2019 (83 years)

Sun Zhongliang was a Chinese electrical engineer and professor at Southeast University who specialized in extremely high frequency research. He was an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a recipient of the State Science and Technology Progress Award .

#8328

Erico Spinadel

#161134

Overall Influence

1929 - 2020 (91 years)

Erico Spinadel was an Austrian and Argentine industrial engineer who specialized in Wind Power. Spinadel was born in Vienna, and obtained his PhD at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2004.

#8329

Nikolay Sevastyanov

Nikolay Sevastyanov

#106520

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Nikolai Sevastianov graduated from the Aerodynamics and Space Exploration Department of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1984. In 1984 he took a job at NPO Energia as an engineer and rose through the ranks to the position of a deputy general designer. Since 2000 he has been director general of Gascom joint-stock company. In May 2005 – June 2007 he was President of Energia corporation.

#8330

Padmaja Subbarao

#111398

Overall Influence

Padmaja Subbarao is a Canadian respirologist and scientist in physiology and experimental medicine. She is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Pediatric Asthma and Lung Health at the University of Toronto and the Associate Chief of Clinical Research at SickKids Hospital.

#8331

Clara Barker

#173895

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Clara Michelle Barker is a British engineer and material scientist. In 2017 she received the Points of Light award from the UK Prime Minister's Office for her volunteer work raising awareness of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues. The outcome of this was her rise as a significant role model to the LGBT+ community.

#8332

Susan Strasberg

Susan Strasberg

#65534

Overall Influence

1938 - 1999 (61 years)

Susan Elizabeth Strasberg was an American stage, film, and television actress. Thought to be the next Hepburn-type ingenue, she was nominated for a Tony Award at age 18, playing the title role in The Diary of Anne Frank. She appeared on the covers of LIFE and Newsweek in 1955. A close friend of Marilyn Monroe and Richard Burton, she wrote two best-selling tell-all books. Her later career primarily consisted of slasher and horror films, followed by TV roles, by the 1980s.

#8333

Eleanor Schofield

Eleanor Schofield

#171637

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Eleanor Josephine Schofield is the Head of Conservation & Collections Care at the Mary Rose Trust. She is an honorary Professor at the University of Kent. In 2015 she was selected as one of the Royal Society of Chemistry 175 Faces of Chemistry.

#8334

Helen Greiner

#169258

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Helen Greiner is a co-founder of iRobot and former CEO of CyPhy Work, Inc., a start-up company specializing in small multi-rotor drones for the consumer, commercial and military markets. Ms Greiner is currently the CEO of Tertill Corporation.

#8335

Lesia L. Crumpton-Young

#173674

Overall Influence

Lesia L. Crumpton-Young is an American engineer and academic administrator. Served as the 13th president of Texas Southern University from 2021 to 2023. She was previously the provost and chief academic officer of Morgan State University.

#8336

Andrew Jackson

#179631

Overall Influence

#8337

Dax Charles

#73228

Overall Influence

Dax Charles is a former NCAA Division II national champion wrestler and current wrestling coach at Colorado State University Pueblo. He has also been elected to the Division II Hall of Fame. In 1992, he became the first winner of a national championship title in the 150 lb class at the then University of Southern Colorado. He has also been awarded All American Honors in 1991, 1992 and 1994 including All American Academic honors in 1994.

#8338

Giulia Tagliabue

#179671

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (41 years)

Giulia Tagliabue is an Italian engineer specialized in nanophotonics. She is a professor at EPFL's School of Engineering, where she leads the Laboratory of Nanoscience for Energy Technologies . Career Tagliabue studied mechanical engineering at University of Udine and received her Master degree in 2009. The same year, she also received a Diploma from the School of Advanced Studies at the University of Udine. In 2009, she joined John Thome's laboratory at EPFL as a research assistant and then in 2010 moved to ETH Zurich to work as a graduate student with Dimos Poulikakos. She obtained a PhD in mechanical engineering in 2015 with a thesis on nanophotonic engineering for energy devices.

#8339

Rose Mutiso

#141252

Overall Influence

1986 - Present (40 years)

Rose M. Mutiso is a Kenyan activist and materials scientist. She is co-founder and CEO of The Mawazo Institute. She is the research director of the Energy for Growth Hub. She was short listed for the 2020 Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award.

#8340

Irene Beyerlein

#61180

Overall Influence

Irene Jane Beyerlein is an American materials scientist who is the Mehrabian Interdisciplinary Endowed Chair at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a Fellow of the Materials Research Society.

#8341

Kristin Yvonne Rozier

#114661

Overall Influence

Kristin Yvonne Rozier is an American aerospace engineer and computer scientist whose research investigates formal methods including temporal logic and model checking for the formal verification of safety-critical systems, especially those involving air transport, unmanned aerial vehicles, and air traffic control. She is Black & Veatch Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Mathematics at Iowa State University, where she heads the Laboratory for Temporal Logic.

#8342

Dieter Weichert

#179711

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Dieter Weichert is a German mechanical engineer specialising in solid mechanics and polymer rheology. From 1995 to 2013 he was the Director of the Institute for General Mechanics of RWTH Aachen. External links BiographyInstitute for General Mechanics of RWTH Aachen

#8343

Sina Rabbany

#176657

Overall Influence

Sina Y. Rabbany is the Jean Nerken Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Hofstra University, dean of the Fred DeMatteis School of Engineering and Applied Science, founding director of the school's Bioengineering program, and adjunct associate professor of bioengineering at the Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University. Under his tenure, the DeMatteis School's fast growth led to the school's planned expansion into a new Science and Innovation Center. His research concerns cellular and tissue engineering of the vascular system and investigates the impact of the biophysical microenvironment on the structure and function of endothelial cells.

#8344

Laura Heyderman

#178758

Overall Influence

Laura Jane Heyderman is a physicist, materials scientist, academic and Professor of Mesoscopic Systems at the Department of Materials, ETH Zurich and Paul Scherrer Institute. Her research is focused on magnetism and magnetic materials.

#8345

Julie Swann

#91773

Overall Influence

Julie LeAnne Swann is an American systems engineer and operations researcher who studies optimization-based improvements to supply chains, logistics, health care, the mathematical modelling of infectious disease, and disaster relief. She is A. Doug Allison Distinguished Professor and head of the Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at North Carolina State University. She was elected President-Elect of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences in 2023

#8346

Lin Cai

#124905

Overall Influence

Lin Cai is a Chinese-Canadian telecommunications engineer known for her work on topology control in wireless networks and in the applications of wireless communications to self-driving cars. She was educated at the University of Waterloo and is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Victoria.

#8347

Stephen Prince

#129101

Overall Influence

1955 - 2020 (65 years)

Stephen Robert Prince was an American film critic, historian and theorist. He was a Professor of Communication Studies and was a Professor of Cinema at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University . His books include The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa and Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies .Prince was frequently cited as an expert in East Asian cinema by Criterion and can often be heard in commentary tracks in their collections.

#8348

Andrew Lau

#72010

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Andrew Lau Wai-keung is a Hong Kong film director, producer, and cinematographer. Lau began his career in the 1980s and 1990s, serving as a cinematographer to filmmakers such as Ringo Lam, Wong Jing and Wong Kar-wai. In the 1990s, Lau decided to have more creative freedom as a cinematographer by becoming a film director and producer. Apart from making films in his native Hong Kong, Lau has also made films in China, Korea and the United States. A highly prolific filmmaker, Lau has made films in a variety of genres, and is most notable in the West for his action and crime films which include ...

#8349

Yuri Berlin

#121743

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Yuri Alfredovich Berlin is an American physical chemist of Soviet origin. He is a research professor in the department of chemistry at Northwestern University. Education Yuri Berlin received his master's degree in Physics from the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute in 1968, studying luminescence of aromatic molecules dissolved in organic liquids. During the period 1968-1974, Berlin worked as a research fellow at the Institute of Chemical Physics, the USSR Academy of Science, and in 1974 completed his PhD studies at the Moscow Institute for Physics and Technology under the supervision of Victor Talrose.

#8350

Deborah Thurston

#73839

Overall Influence

Deborah Lee Thurston is an American civil engineer specializing in the engineering design process and sustainable engineering. She is Gutsgell Professor Emerita of Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

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