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

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Engineering,

#8451

Avinoam Kolodny

#181029

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Avinoam Kolodny is an Israeli professor of electrical engineering at Technion. He is an author and co-author of more than 160 books and peer-reviewed articles all of which were cited 6548 times.

#8452

Silvia Bolland

#181042

Overall Influence

Silvia Bolland is an American biomedical scientist serving as chief of the autoimmunity and functional genomics section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. She earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Cantabria and received postdoctoral training at Harvard and Rockefeller University. Her areas of research include the identification of new genetic modifiers of systemic autoimmune disease, dose effect of Toll-like receptor genes and its role in autoimmune pathologies, and inhibitory signaling pathways mediated by the IgG Fc receptor and the phosphoin...

#8453

Stephen Hunter

#69976

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Stephen Hunter is an American novelist, essayist, and film critic. Life and career Hunter was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and grew up in Evanston, Illinois. His father was Charles Francis Hunter, a Northwestern University speech professor who was murdered in 1975 by two male prostitutes. His mother was Virginia Ricker Hunter, a writer of children's books. After graduating from Northwestern in 1968 with a degree in journalism, he was drafted for two years into the United States Army. He served in The Old Guard in Washington, D.C., a unit that has both operational and ceremonial missions, the latter most notably being the guard force for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

#8454

Doreen Thomas

#75000

Overall Influence

Doreen Anne Thomas, is a mathematician and electrical and mechanical engineer. She is an emeritus professor of Mechanical Engineering at Melbourne University and director of the start-up company MineOptima.

#8455

Édgar Brenes

#171556

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Édgar Brenes is a Costa Rican architect and professor at the University of Costa Rica School of Architecture.

#8456

Pyotr Grushin

#75491

Overall Influence

1906 - 1993 (87 years)

Pyotr Dmitrievich Grushin was a Soviet rocket scientist and, from 1966, an academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Grushin graduated from Moscow Aviation Institute, where he participated in the development of the MAI Stal plane . Later, he became a chief designer of KB MAI , where he developed the light bomber BB-MAI and some other designs.

#8457

Ketevi Assamagan

#92682

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Kétévi Adiklè Assamagan is an African American engineer and physicist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2021. Assamagan founded the African School of Physics.

#8458

Elisa Riedo

#118111

Overall Influence

Elisa Riedo is a physicist and researcher known for her contributions in condensed matter physics, nanotechnology and engineering. She is the Herman F. Mark Chair Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering and the director of the picoForce Lab.

#8459

Alan M. Stretton

#144854

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

Alan Murdoch Stretton is an Australian civil engineer, project management manager, retired Adjunct Professor of Project Management at the University of Technology, Sydney and author. He is known for his work on the state of project management, and its history.

#8460

John Nesheim

#117962

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

John Nesheim is an American author, and venture capitalist who completed his career by teaching entrepreneurship for Cornell University and other universities in Asia and Europe. His research findings are used by entrepreneurs, investors, governments, universities, corporations, and Wall Street. Nesheim is the author of the book High Tech Startup.

#8461

Jacqueline Bishop

#36100

Overall Influence

Jacqueline Bishop is a writer, visual artist and photographer from Jamaica, who now lives in New York City, where she is a professor at the School of Liberal Studies at New York University . She is the founder of Calabash, an online journal of Caribbean art and letters, housed at NYU, and also writes for the Huffington Post and the Jamaica Observer Arts Magazine. In 2016 her book The Gymnast and Other Positions won the nonfiction category of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.

#8462

Thad Vreeland Jr.

#181095

Overall Influence

1924 - 2010 (86 years)

Thad Vreeland Jr. was an American materials scientist. He was Professor of Materials Science at the California Institute of Technology. Career Vreeland's career at Caltech began with his B.S., earned in 1949 and his Ph.D. in 1952. He served as Professor of Mechanical Engineering and then Professor of Materials Science from 1954 to 1991, and afterward Professor Emeritus.

#8463

David P. Handlin

#172991

Overall Influence

David P. Handlin is an American architect and architectural historian. Life and career Handlin was born in Boston, the son of the historians Oscar Handlin and Mary Flug Handlin. He studied at Harvard University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design and earned a doctorate from Cambridge University.

#8464

K. Bhagyaraj

#83794

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Krishnasaamy Bhagyaraj is an Indian director, actor, screenwriter, music director, producer and politician active mainly in Tamil films. He has also written and directed Hindi films and TV serials. As an actor, he has worked in more than 75 films and has directed more than 25 films. He won a Filmfare Best Actor Award for Mundhanai Mudichu . He received Lifetime Achievement Award in SIIMA . He is the editor of weekly magazine Bhagya and has also written several novels.

#8465

Gong Shengkai

#180720

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Gong Shengkai is a Chinese materials scientist who is a professor at the School of Materials Science and Engineering, Beihang University. Biography Gong was born in July 1956. After graduating from Northeast Institute of Technology , he earned his doctor's degree from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1988. He carried out postdoctoral research at Tsinghua University in 1988. In 1994 he was offered a faculty position in the School of Materials Science and Engineering, Beihang University.

#8466

Buddy Rogers

#78625

Overall Influence

1921 - 1992 (71 years)

Buddy Rogers , better known by the ring name "Nature Boy" Buddy Rogers, was an American professional wrestler who was one of the biggest professional wrestling stars in the beginning of the television era. His performances influenced future professional wrestlers, including "Nature Boy" Ric Flair, who used Rogers's nickname, as well as his look, attitude and finishing hold, the figure-four leglock. He was also known for his rivalry with Lou Thesz, both in and out of the ring.

#8467

Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr.

Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr.

#81210

Overall Influence

1910 - 2009 (99 years)

Thomas Toliver Goldsmith Jr. was an American television pioneer, the co-inventor of the cathode-ray tube amusement device, and a professor of physics at Furman University. Biography Goldsmith was born in Greenville, South Carolina, on January 9, 1910. His parents were Thomas and Charlotte Goldsmith, a real estate broker and concert pianist respectively. As a teenager, he built crystal radio sets, and continued his interest in engineering as a graduate of Furman University in Greenville. He received his B.S. at Furman University in Greenville in 1931, in physics, and his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1936 building an oscilloscope for his doctoral research, under the supervision of Dr.

#8468

Zhuang Weimin

#179380

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Zhuang Weimin is a Chinese architect who is a professor and dean of the School of Architecture, Tsinghua University. He is a member of the International Union of Architects , China Green Building Association , APEC Architect Project Monitoring Committee, Architectural Society of China , and UIA International Professional Practice Commission.

#8469

Lawrence I Grossman

#181235

Overall Influence

#8470

Hongxia Wang

#181247

Overall Influence

#8471

Erica Plambeck

#172066

Overall Influence

Erica L. Plambeck is an American operations researcher specializing in supply chain management and environmental sustainability. She is Charles A. Holloway Professor of Operations, Information & Technology in the Stanford Graduate School of Business, professor in the Stanford University Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, senior fellow in the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and the 2022–2023 Dhirubhai Ambani Faculty Fellow in Entrepreneurship at Stanford University.

#8472

Michael Yeargan

#70518

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Michael H. Yeargan is an American set designer for theatre and opera. Yeargan is a professor of Stage Design at the Yale School of Drama and has designed for opera companies all over the world, including the Washington Opera and the Dallas Opera. His scenic designs for Broadway include South Pacific, Cymbeline, Awake and Sing!, Seascape, The Light in the Piazza, The Gershwins' Fascinating Rhythm, Ah, Wilderness!, Hay Fever, It Had to Be You, A Lesson from Aloes, Dirty Linen & New-Found-Land, Something Old, Something New, Me Jack, You Jill, The Ritz, Bad Habits, and Women on the Verge of a Nerv...

#8473

Mamoru Watanabe

#181262

Overall Influence

#8474

Farrukh S. Alvi

#181301

Overall Influence

Dr. Farrukh S. Alvi is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Florida State University who works in the development and implementation of actuators, especially micro-fluidic actuators for flow and noise control applications in the aerospace industry. According to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, "Alvi’s Boeing-FSU team developed the actuators implemented in a fullscale supersonic store release sled test for the Holloman Air Force Base DARPA program—the first sled test of its kind and the first supersonic store release." His research provides insights on how to address shock boun...

#8475

Michael Orshansky

#155690

Overall Influence

Michael Orshansky is an American researcher in integrated circuit design, currently with University of Texas at Austin since 2003. He received his undergraduate education and Ph.D. at the UC Berkeley.

#8476

William Federspiel

#180156

Overall Influence

William Federspiel is an American bioengineer. He is the John A. Swanson Professor of Bioengineering in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Medical Devices Laboratory at the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

#8477

Kimani Toussaint

#178437

Overall Influence

Kimani Christopher Toussaint, Jr. is an American engineer who is a professor and senior associate dean in the School of Engineering at Brown University. His research considers the development of quantitative nonlinear optical imaging methods and advanced optical techniques for nanotechnology, and the characterization of plasmonic nanostructure. He is a Fellow of Optica.

#8478

Lloyd M. Trefethen

#96646

Overall Influence

1919 - 2001 (82 years)

Lloyd MacGregor Trefethen was an American expert in fluid dynamics known for his invention of the heat pipe and his research on the Coriolis effect and card shuffling. He worked for many years as a professor of mechanical engineering at Tufts University.

#8479

Mohammad Reza Mohammadi

#181361

Overall Influence

#8480

Rula Halawani

#156969

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Rula Halawani is a Palestinian photographer and educator who lives and works in Jerusalem. She was born in East Jerusalem and received a BA in photography from the University of Saskatchewan and an MA in photographic studies from the University of Westminster. Before turning to visual arts, she worked as a freelance photojournalist for a number of magazines and newspapers. Halawani is director of the photography department at Birzeit University. In 2016, she was given a residency fellowship at the Camargo Foundation, in Cassis.

#8481

Neil McKeown

#133738

Overall Influence

Neil Bruce McKeown FRSE is a chemist who is currently Crawford Professor of Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh. Education He was educated at the University of East Anglia . Honours McKeown was awarded the Beilby Medal and Prize in 2008, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2017. He was awarded the Tilden Prize in 2017.

#8482

Jinsong Huang

#181385

Overall Influence

#8483

Homer Hurst

#179639

Overall Influence

1919 - 2011 (92 years)

Homer Theodore Hurst was a building industry innovator, award-winning professor, World War II veteran, and a founding member of the National Institute of Building Sciences. Early life and military Homer Hurst was born on October 25, 1919, in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas as one of nine children born to Theodore and Elva Harvey Hurst. Homer enlisted in the United States Navy in 1942, and served as a pilot in the South Pacific during World War II. Hurst married Beverly Arnold in 1944 and they had four children: Ted, Hyla, JaNan and Rhoda. Hurst continued in the Naval Reserves as a pilot for 2...

#8484

Joel C. Sercel

#173312

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Joel C. Sercel is an American aerospace engineer. He is the inventor of Omnivore Thruster, a new concept of propulsion technology for in-space transportation, of Optical Mining, a technology for extracting raw materials from asteroids, of the Radiant Gas Dynamic method of lunar water harvesting, and of the Sun Flower Power Tower architecture for capturing and converting solar power into electricity to be used in polar lunar regions. , his work and studies have led to eight US patents and seventeen published applications. An asteroid, Joelsercel, was named after him.

#8485

Satish Alekar

#100298

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Satish Vasant Alekar is a Marathi playwright, actor, and theatre director. A founder member of the Theatre Academy of Pune, and most known for his plays Mahanirvan , Mahapoor , Atirekee , Pidhijat , Mickey ani Memsahib , and Begum Barve , all of which he also directed for the Academy. Along with Mahesh Elkunchwar and Vijay Tendulkar he is considered among the most influential and progressive playwrights in modern Marathi and Indian theatre.

#8486

John Knapton

#175518

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

John Knapton was Professor of structural engineering at University of Newcastle from 1991 to 2001, and has written a number of textbooks on the subject of concrete construction. He has also worked as a consultant and expert witness in matters relating to concrete, including a report for Lloyds insurers on whether the design of the World Trade Center towers had contributed to their collapse on 9/11: he concluded that "the way they were designed and built actually prevented them from falling over and thus would have saved around 100,000 lives which would have been directly in their paths had th...

#8487

Anna Kuzemko

#143619

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Anna Arkadyevna Kuzemko is a Ukrainian scientist in the fields of botany, ecology, and nature conservation, Doctor of Biological Sciences , a leading researcher at the M.G. Kholodny Institute of botany, NAS of Ukraine. She is a member of the executive committee of the Eurasian Dry Grassland Group , a member of the International Working Group "European Vegetation Survey" and a member of the International Association for Vegetation Science .

#8488

Janet Scott

#157362

Overall Influence

1964 - 2022 (58 years)

Janet L. Scott was a South African chemist who was Professor of Sustainable Chemistry at the University of Bath. She also worked as the Director of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Centre for Doctoral Training in Sustainable Chemical Technologies.

#8489

Heiner Goebbels

#98449

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Heiner Goebbels is a German composer, conductor and professor at Justus-Liebig-University in Gießen and artistic director of the International Festival of the Arts Ruhrtriennale 2012–14. His composition Stifters Dinge received five votes in a 2017 Classic Voice poll of the greatest works of art music since 2000, and writers for The Guardian ranked his composition Hashirigaki the ninth greatest classical composition of the same period.

#8490

M. Elizabeth Cannon

#181524

Overall Influence

#8491

Parham Aarabi

#179783

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Parham Aarabi is a professor and entrepreneur from Toronto, Canada. Career Aarabi is a professor at University of Toronto and Canada Research Chair in Internet Video, Audio, and Image Search. He has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He is the inventor of numerous patents and author of over 80 publications most of which focus on audio, image and video processing. His recent work has focused on new image processing techniques that detect faces and facial features, as well as new video search technologies for online video-sharing websites. He is the founder and CEO of ModiFace, a leading provider of Augmented Reality technology which was acquired in 2018 by L'Oreal.

#8492

Allison Hubel

#180392

Overall Influence

Allison Hubel is an American mechanical engineer and cryobiologist who applies her expertise in heat transfer to study the cryopreservation of biological tissue. She is a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota, where she directs the Biopreservation Core Resource and the Technological Leadership Institute, and is president-elect of the Society for Cryobiology.

#8493

Steve Sailer

#14802

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Steven Ernest Sailer is an American far-right writer and blogger. A former columnist for National Review and correspondent for UPI, he is currently a columnist for Taki's Magazine and VDARE, a website associated with white supremacy. Since 2014, his personal blog, iSteve, has appeared in The Unz Review.

#8494

Nasir Ahmed

#181562

Overall Influence

#8495

Masao Kinoshita

#171478

Overall Influence

1925 - Present (101 years)

Masao Kinoshita was an American landscape architect. Kinoshita was born in Los Angeles, California, then spent his childhood in Japan, returning to the U.S. in 1940. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he was first interned in Arkansas, but subsequently served as an interpreter in the United States Army. He received his BA in Architecture from Cornell University in 1955, then received a fellowship to study in Japan, and in 1957 was awarded a Master of Science in Japanese History from Kyoto University. He then worked for the firms of Isoya Yoshida and Eero Saarinen in Birmingham, Michigan.

#8496

Thomas J. Schriber

#101389

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Thomas J. Schriber is an American academic, and Professor of Technology and Operations at the Ross School of Business. He is particularly known for his work on "Simulation using General Purpose Simulation System ."

#8497

Harry Saltzman

#30415

Overall Influence

1915 - 1994 (79 years)

Herschel "Harry" Saltzman was a Canadian theatre and film producer. He is best remembered for co-producing the first nine of the James Bond film series with Albert R. Broccoli. He lived most of his life in Denham, Buckinghamshire, England.

#8498

Thomas D. Kirsch

#39342

Overall Influence

Thomas Dean Kirsch is an American physician, scientist, and writer whose career has focused on disaster preparedness and response. He has been described as “…an expert in disaster research, planning and response, and disaster and wilderness medicine… both nationally and internationally”.

#8499

Darren Woods

#167951

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Darren W. Woods is an American businessman who is the chief executive officer and chairman of ExxonMobil since January 1, 2017. His salary exceeds $20,000,000 per year. Early life and education Woods was born in Wichita, Kansas. He earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University, followed by an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

#8500

Paulo Lozano

#146512

Overall Influence

Paulo Lozano is an aerospace engineer focusing in space propulsion, electrospray thrusters, micro- and nanofabrication, space mission design, small satellite technology development, ion beams, and additive manufacturing. He is currently the M. Aleman-Velasco Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, as well as Director of the Space Propulsion Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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