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,

#8401

Robert Cahalan

#96705

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Robert F. Cahalan is Emeritus Scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and previous Chief of the Laboratory for Climate and Radiation , Project Scientist of the Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment , and President of the International Radiation Commission of the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics during 2008–2012. His interests include climate change, energy balance, remote sensing, and solar radiation.

#8402

Michael Rotkowitz

#115066

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Michael Charles Rotkowitz is an applied mathematician best known for his work in decentralized control theory. He was a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he held appointments in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research , and was also affiliated with the Applied Mathematics & Statistics, and Scientific Computation Program .

#8403

Tu Mingjing

#105232

Overall Influence

1928 - 2019 (91 years)

Tu Mingjing was a Chinese materials scientist and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Biography Tu was born in Ba County, Sichuan , on 15 November 1928. He secondary studied at the Affiliated Secondary School of Tongji University. In 1947 he was accepted to Tongji University, where he graduated in 1951. Then he successively studied at the Harbin Institute of Technology and University of Science and Technology Beijing, earning a master's degree.

#8404

Miles Coolidge

#166234

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Miles Coolidge is a Canadian-American photographer and art-educator who teaches as a professor at the University of California, Irvine. Known for his focus on subjects that blur the line between architecture and landscape, Coolidge's work has also been known to engage the viewing space through its use of scale, in combination with its subject matter. His photographic projects have been exhibited internationally in numerous galleries and museums. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

#8405

Marco Di Renzo

#180509

Overall Influence

#8406

John J. Casbarian

#142026

Overall Influence

John J. Casbarian is an American architect, currently the Harry K. & Albert K. Smith Professor at Rice University. He is a Fellow at American Academy in Rome. He received a B.A. and B.Arch. from Rice University and a MFA in Design from the California Institute of the Arts.

#8407

Christine P. Hendon

#87291

Overall Influence

Christine P. Hendon is an electrical engineer and computer scientist and an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University in New York City. Hendon is a pioneer in medical imaging. She develops biomedical optics technologies, using optical coherence tomography and near infrared spectroscopy systems, that enable physicians to perform guided interventional procedures and allow for structure-function dissection of human tissues and organs. Her advances in imaging technologies have led to improved diagnostic abilities and treatments for cardiac arrhythmias as well as breast cancer and preterm birth.

#8408

John Cohen

#94429

Overall Influence

1932 - 2019 (87 years)

John Cohen was an American musician, photographer and film maker who performed and documented the traditional music of the rural South and played a major role in the American folk music revival. In the 1950s and 60s, Cohen was a founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers, a New York–based string band. Cohen made several expeditions to Peru to film and record the traditional culture of the Q'ero, an indigenous people. Cohen was also a professor of visual arts at SUNY Purchase College for 25 years.

#8409

Judith Lodge

#129449

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Judith Lodge is an American Canadian painter and photographer who often explores how the two mediums play off of and inform one another. Her abstract portraits of memories, situations, events, and people are inspired by the unconscious, dreams, journals, and nature. She has worked in Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto, Banff, Minnesota, and New York, where she has lived for more than thirty years.

#8410

Susan Stroman

#6043

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Susan P. Stroman is an American theatre director, choreographer, film director and performer. Her notable theater productions include Oklahoma!, The Music Man, Crazy for You, Contact, The Producers, The Frogs, The Scottsboro Boys, Bullets Over Broadway, POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive, and New York, New York.

#8411

Simon McBurney

#50828

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Simon Montagu McBurney is an English actor, playwright, and theatre and opera director. He is the founder and artistic director of the Théâtre de Complicité, London. He has had roles in the films The Manchurian Candidate, Friends with Money, The Last King of Scotland, The Golden Compass, The Duchess, Robin Hood, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Magic in the Moonlight, The Theory of Everything, and Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. He played Cecil the choirmaster in BBC's The Vicar of Dibley.

#8412

Monique Chyba

#89389

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Monique Chyba is a control theorist who works as a professor of mathematics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her work on control theory has involved the theory of singular trajectories, and applications in the control of autonomous underwater vehicles. More recently, she has also applied control theory to the prediction and modeling of the spread of COVID-19 in Hawaii.

#8413

Donald Scott Stewart

#143388

Overall Influence

Donald Scott Stewart is an American mechanical engineer, focusing in fluid mechanics and thermal sciences, currently the Shao Lee Soo Professor Emeritus at University of Illinois. Early life and education Stewart received a bachelor's degree in engineering science from State University of New York at Buffalo in 1976 and a doctorate in theoretical and applied science at Cornell University in 1981.

#8414

Malcolm Fraser

#89871

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Malcolm Fraser is an architect from Edinburgh, Scotland. He was the founder of Malcolm Fraser Architects, a firm of architects based in the Old Town of Edinburgh from 1993. The company entered liquidation on 21 August 2015 and Fraser worked with Halliday Fraser Munro Architects before setting up anew with Robin Livingstone as Fraser/Livingstone Architects in January 2019.

#8415

Amina Zoubeidi

#178841

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Amina Zoubeidi is a Canadian research scientist and prostate cancer researcher. She's a scientist at the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute and an associate professor in the Department of Urologic Sciences at the University of British Columbia. During her tenure at UBC, Zoubeidi and her research team developed the first drug that targets and blocks BRN2, thus stopping Neuroendocrine prostate cancer tumours and creating a possible treatment for the previously thought incurable disease.

#8416

Doug Elliott

#180609

Overall Influence

#8417

Charlie Haas

#51076

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Charles Doyle Haas II is an American professional and former amateur wrestler. He is best known for his time in World Wrestling Entertainment from 2000 to 2009 and Ring of Honor from 2010 to 2013. In WWE he was a member of Team Angle, which later became a Tag Team duo with Shelton Benjamin known as "The World's Greatest Tag Team".

#8418

Joshiy

#48944

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Joshiy is an Indian film director and screenwriter who works predominantly in Malayalam cinema and also directed Tamil, Hindi, Telugu and Kannada-language films. Joshiy is a pioneer of action thriller films in Malayalam cinema and his films are known for its stylized imagery, color grading and film noir.

#8419

Robert Henry Caverly

#170546

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Robert Henry Caverly from Villanova University, Villanova, PA was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2013 for contributions to modeling and design of radio frequency switching devices, and was elevated to Life Fellow in 2020, he became a Life Fellow of the IEEE.

#8420

Richard Meyer

#114851

Overall Influence

1919 - 2008 (89 years)

Richard Ernst Meyer was a mathematician and engineer. Born in Berlin, Germany, Meyer received his PhD in aeronautical engineering from ETH Zürich in 1946. He worked at the University of Manchester and in 1953, he got a job as a senior lecturer in aeronautical engineering at the University of Sydney. He studied turbines, which led him to the research of supersonic aeronautics and the theory of characteristics. Meyer did both theoretical and experimental research; he set up a supersonic laboratory in Australia. He was elected into the Australian Academy of Science in 1956.

#8421

Claudia Mazzà

#176743

Overall Influence

Claudia Mazzà is a professor of biomechanics at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Sheffield. Her research centres on biomechanics of human movement. She is the director of the EPSRC funded MultiSim project and a leading scientist in the Mobilise-D research project.

#8422

Liesl Folks

#148242

Overall Influence

Liesl Folks has been a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Arizona since 2019. She served as the provost for the University of Arizona from 2019 to 2023. Since 2023, she also serves as the Vice President for Semiconductor Strategy at the University of Arizona.

#8423

Derek Binns Ingham

#180672

Overall Influence

#8424

Polly Fordyce

#104325

Overall Influence

Polly Fordyce is an Associate Professor of Genetics and Bioengineering and fellow of the ChEM-H Institute at Stanford University. Her laboratory's research focuses on developing and applying new microfluidic platforms for quantitative, high-throughput biophysics and biochemistry and single-cell genomics.

#8425

Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Blagonravov

#119391

Overall Influence

1933 - 2020 (87 years)

Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Blagonravov was a Soviet and Russian military engineer and designer who worked on the designs of armoured vehicless. Major general of Engineering and Technical Service . Born the son of a military engineer who worked on tank designs during the time of the Second World War, Blagonravov followed in his father's footsteps. After studying at the Military Academy of the Armoured Forces, he began a long association with the academic study of problems relating to mechanised military vehicles. He taught and researched at the academy after graduation, and also served briefly as a deputy battalion commander in the 4th Guards Tank Division.

#8426

Christine Ortiz

#171895

Overall Influence

Christine Ortiz is the dean of graduate education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and Morris Cohen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. The goal of Ortiz's research program is a mechanistic-based understanding of tissue function, quality, and pathology. She is planning to create a new university, centered on project-based learning.

#8427

Chiao-Min Chu

#177327

Overall Influence

1919 - 1996 (77 years)

Chiao-Min Chu was a Chinese-American engineer. He was born on 3 March 1919. Chu received his bachelor's degree in engineering from National Wuhan University in 1939, and completed his subsequent education in the United States. He became a fellow of the University of Michigan in 1945, one year before he earned a master's degree in engineering. Upon the completion of his doctorate in 1952, Chu taught at the Detroit Institute of Technology as assistant and associate professor. In 1955, Chu returned to the University of Michigan as an associate research engineer. The following year, Chu began teaching at his alma mater as an assistant professor.

#8428

Billy Riggs

#95106

Overall Influence

William Warren Riggs or "Billy" Riggs is an author, city planner, entrepreneur and professor of Management at University of San Francisco, and an international expert in the areas of sustainable transport, technology, urban development and the future of cities. He is the author of the book, End of the Road: Reimagining the Street as the Heart of the City and Disruptive Transport: Driverless Cars, Transport Innovation and the Sustainable City of Tomorrow. He has worked as a professional planner, in venture capital for Just Business and a strategic consultant for various technology firms and startups.

#8429

Živko Popovski

#168523

Overall Influence

1934 - 2007 (73 years)

Živko Popovski was the most prominent Macedonian architect after the Second World War. He was a professor at the Architectural Faculty in Skopje. He worked with Dutch architects and CIAM alumni Jo_van_den_Broek and Jaap Bakema. His most famous works are the Skopje Shopping Center , Pensioner's Home in Ohrid, and the reconstructed Culture Center "Grigor Prlichev" in Ohrid.

#8430

William Stewart

#180741

Overall Influence

#8431

Tomi Janežič

#127110

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Tomi Janežič is a Slovenian theatre director, professor at the Academy for Theatre, Radio, Film, and Television in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a psychodrama psychotherapist. He is also one of the founders and the artistic director of the Studio for Research on the Art of Acting which runs its activities mostly at Krušče Workcenter for Artistic Research, Creation, Residency and Education in Krušče, Slovenia.

#8432

Esther Rodriguez-Villegas

#179154

Overall Influence

Esther Rodriguez-Villegas is a Spanish engineer, inventor and the Professor of Low Power Electronics at Imperial College London. Rodriguez-Villegas develops lightweight, low-power electronic devices for real-time monitoring of physiological signals. She was awarded the 2020 Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal for her work on wearable medical devices. In 2020, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

#8433

Limor Fried

#170762

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Limor Fried is an American electrical engineer and owner of the electronics hobbyist company Adafruit Industries. She is influential in the open-source hardware community, having participated in the first Open Source Hardware Summit and the drafting of the Open Source Hardware definition, and is known by her moniker ladyada, an homage to Lady Ada Lovelace.

#8434

Kuo-Chu Chang

#180819

Overall Influence

Kuo-Chu Chang is an electrical engineer. Chang completed his master's degree in electrical engineering in 1983 and his doctorate in the same subject in 1986, both at the University of Connecticut. After obtaining his master's, Chang began working as a senior research scientist for Booz Allen Hamilton. He left Booz Allen in 1992 for a faculty position at George Mason University. He has edited the Tracking/Navigation Systems and the Large Scale Systems sections of the IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, and served as associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics .

#8435

Wei Chen

#70327

Overall Influence

Wei Chen is a Chinese-American mechanical engineer known for her work on robust engineering design, robust design of experiments, metamodeling in design, uncertainty quantification, and design under uncertainty. She is the Wilson-Cook Professor in Engineering Design at Northwestern University, where she chairs the mechanical engineering department.

#8436

Mahmut Kandemir

#130438

Overall Influence

Mahmut Taylan Kandemir is a professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Penn State University. He is a member of the Microsystems Design Lab. Dr. Kandemir's research interests are in optimizing compilers, runtime systems, mobile systems, embedded systems, I/O and high performance storage, non volatile processors and memory, and latest trends in public cloud services. He is the author of more than 150 journal publications and over 650 conference/workshop papers in these areas. He graduated 32 Ph.D. and 20 masters students so far, and is currently advising/coadvising 15 Ph.D.

#8437

Felicia Hardison Londré

#98768

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Felicia Hardison Londré is Curators’ Professor of Theatre at the University of Missouri-Kansas City . She specializes in 19th and 20th-century American, French, and Russian theatre history, as well as in Shakespearean dramaturgy.

#8438

Jionghua Jin

#177029

Overall Influence

Jionghua Jin is a Chinese-American industrial engineer whose research involves quality engineering, advanced manufacturing, and data fusion. She is a professor of industrial and operations engineering at the University of Michigan, where she directs the manufacturing program in the division of integrative systems and design.

#8439

Giorgina Madìa

#172674

Overall Influence

1904 - Present (122 years)

Giorgina Madìa was an Italian physicist and electrical engineer, specializing in electrical communications, and a member of the Italian resistance during World War II. Biography Her parents were Ernesto and Olga Ferrari.

#8440

R. K. Chetty Pandipati

#171241

Overall Influence

Radha Krishnaiah Chetty Pandipati is an Electronics and Communications Engineer and author. Pandipati works at NASA as a contractor. Biography Pandipati was born in India. After receiving his undergraduate education at Andhra University, Kakinad, India, where he earned his B.E. degree, he joined Indian Space Research Organization, in 1972. While working there, he pursued his graduate studies and earned Ph.D. degree from Indian Institute Science, Bangalore, India, in 1978. He then joined the staff of Caltech, Pasadena, USA as a research fellow in 1979.

#8441

T. S. Nagabharana

T. S. Nagabharana

#98248

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Talakadu Srinivasaiah Nagabharana , commonly known as T. S. Nagabharana, is an Indian film director, in the Kannada film industry and a pioneer of parallel cinema. He is one of the few film directors to have straddled the mainstream and parallel cinema worlds.

#8442

Margaret Ackerman

#173101

Overall Influence

Margaret Ackerman is an American engineer who is a professor at Dartmouth College. Ackerman develops high throughput tools to evaluate the antibody response in disease states. She oversees biological and chemical engineering in the Thayer School of Engineering.

#8443

Takeyoshi Tanuma

#34510

Overall Influence

1929 - 2022 (93 years)

Takeyoshi Tanuma was a Japanese photographer. In 2019, the Japanese government honoured him with the Order of Culture, making him the first photographer to receive the order.

#8444

Maurice Noble

#32173

Overall Influence

1910 - 2001 (91 years)

Maurice James Noble was an American animation production designer, background artist and layout designer whose contributions to the industry spanned more than 60 years. He was a long-time associate and right-hand man of animation director Chuck Jones, especially at Warner Bros. in the 1950s. His work contributed to such cartoon classics as Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, What's Opera, Doc? and the Road Runner series.

#8445

Laurel Larsen

#170886

Overall Influence

Laurel G. Larsen is an Associate professor of Earth Systems Science for the Department of Geography and Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley where she also heads the Environmental Systems Dynamics Laboratory. Her areas of expertise include hydroecology, geomorphology, complex systems, and environmental modeling.

#8446

Paula Whitman

#177824

Overall Influence

1960 - 2006 (46 years)

Paula Whitman was an Australian architect, academic, writer, and Australian Institute of Architects chapter president—the first woman to hold the position since its inception in 1888—who made a significant contribution to Australian architectural education, and as an advocate for Australian women in architecture. The Australian Institute of Architects’ Paula Whitman Leadership in Gender Equity Prize is named in her honour.

#8447

Anthony Treadwell

#170038

Overall Influence

1922 - 2003 (81 years)

Anthony Lawrance Treadwell was an early member of the Wellington Architectural Centre and an accomplished modernist architect, architectural educator and painter. His architectural work has been published in numerous articles in New Zealand Home and Building, the Arts Year Book, the Journal of the N.Z.I.A. and the Wellington Architectural Centre's Design Review.

#8448

Robert Heath

#180998

Overall Influence

#8449

Hans-Busso von Busse

#141840

Overall Influence

1930 - 2009 (79 years)

Hans-Busso von Busse was a German architect and academic. He designed, among others, the in Erding and a restaurant at the Evangelische Akademie Tutzing. Selected buildings 1957: Residence Riedmayer on Starnberger See 1961–1966: Heilig-Geist-Kirche in Waakirchen-Schaftlach1962: Kongress Centre at the Rose Garden, Coburg1963: Erlöserkirche, Erding1969–1972: Gemeindeakademie of the Lutheran Church Franken in Schwarzenbruck-Rummelsberg1970: Swimming hall in Rheine/Westfalen1970–1972: Apartment house in München-Schwabing1980: Restaurant for the Evangelische Akademie Tutzing1987–1992: Passenger ...

#8450

Graham Smith

#103634

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Graham Smith is a photographer from Middlesbrough, England, who was particularly active in photographing Middlesbrough and the north-east of England in the 1970s and 1980s. Smith curtailed his career as a photographer in 1990, since when he has been a professional woodworker.

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