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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Person Name

School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Engineering,

#1201

Dan Reneau

#35349

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Daniel Dugan Reneau, Jr. is the former president of Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, Louisiana, a position which he filled from July 1, 1987, until his retirement effective June 30, 2013. He was succeeded by Dr. Les Guice.

#1202

Richard Battin

#26449

Overall Influence

1925 - 2014 (89 years)

Richard "Dick" Horace Battin was an American engineer, applied mathematician and educator who led the design of the Apollo guidance computer during the Apollo missions during the 1960s. Battin was born on March 3, 1925, in Atlantic City, New Jersey to Martha Scheu and Horace L. Battin.

#1203

Vik Muniz

#8175

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Vik Muniz is a Brazilian artist and photographer. Initially a sculptor, Muniz grew interested with the photographic representations of his work, eventually focusing completely on photography. Primarily working with unconventional materials such as tomato sauce, diamonds, magazine clippings, chocolate syrup, dust, dirt, etc., Muniz creates works of art, referencing old master's paintings and celebrity portraits, among other things, and then photographs them. His work has been met with both commercial success and critical acclaim, and has been exhibited worldwide. He is currently represented by...

#1204

C. Sidney Burrus

#38652

Overall Influence

1934 - 2021 (87 years)

Charles Sidney Burrus was an American electrical engineer and the Maxfield and Oshman Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He is widely known for his contributions to digital signal processing, especially FFT algorithms, IIR filter design, and wavelets.

#1205

Thomas W. Parks

#37801

Overall Influence

1939 - 2020 (81 years)

Thomas W. Parks was an American electrical engineer and Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. He is best known for his contributions to digital signal processing, especially digital filter design and computation of the fast Fourier transform. His last work before retirement was in the area of demosaicing.

#1206

J. Francisco Serrano Cacho

#27455

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

José Juan Francisco Alfonso Serrano Cacho is a Mexican architect. Biography Serrano was son of the architect Francisco J. Serrano. He studied at Universidad Iberoamericana until 1960. Afterwards he worked together with José Nava in the bureau of his father. From 1960 to 1971 he taught at the Universidad Iberoamericana, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and at the Universidad La Salle. Some of his projects he realized in cooperation with Teodoro González de León and with Carlos Tejeda, and some buildings together with Susana García Fuertes.

#1207

Rafi Ahmed

#18634

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Rafi Ahmed is an Indian-American virologist and immunologist. He is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Emory University, where he is also the director of the Emory Vaccine Center and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Vaccine Research. In 2009, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

#1208

Chris Kyriakakis

#49378

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Chris Kyriakakis is a professor of electrical engineering, author, and inventor of audio technologies. He is the co-inventor of the Audyssey MultEQ digital room correction system. In 2004 he co-founded Audyssey Laboratories.

#1209

Satish Nagarajaiah

#30235

Overall Influence

Satish Nagarajaiah is an Indian-American academic professor, who teaches and conducts research in the departments of civil engineering and of mechanical engineering at Rice University. He was elected in 2019 to the United States National Academy of Inventors. He got elected in 2021 as Distinguished Member of American Society of Civil Engineers for achieving eminence in structural engineering, in 2017 as fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and in 2012 as fellow of ASCE's Structural Engineering Institute. He has been honored with the 2020 Nathan N. Newmark Medal, 2017 Reese Research Prize, 2015 Leon S.

#1210

Sachio Otani

#31810

Overall Influence

1924 - 2013 (89 years)

Sachio Otani was a noted Japanese architect. Biography Otani was born in Tokyo, and in 1946 graduated from the University of Tokyo. He began his career in Kenzo Tange's studio, where he helped design the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum . In 1960 he started his own practice, and has subsequently designed a number of memorable buildings including the Tokyo Children's Cultural Center , Kyoto International Conference Center , the Kanazawa Institute of Technology , and the Kawaramachi housing project in Kawasaki, Kanagawa .

#1211

James K. Baker

#13915

Overall Influence

James K. Baker and his wife Janet M. Baker are the co-founders of Dragon Systems. Together they are credited with the creation of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. James Baker is an expert in speech recognition technology and a Distinguished Career Professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

#1212

Helge Zimdal

#51676

Overall Influence

1903 - 2001 (98 years)

Helge Zimdal, originally Zimdahl was a Swedish architect and professor of architecture at Chalmers University of Technology, known for his many school buildings. Biography Helge Zimdal grew up in Alingsås, where his father Elis Zimdahl was mayor. Mother Nancy Beck was Danish by birth. In connection with Zimdal becoming a professor at Chalmers in 1951, he removed the h from his surname. Zimdal graduated from the school of architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 1927 and from the Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 1930. He participated in the Stockholm exhibition in 1930 with furniture and textiles, the furniture partly in collaboration with Carl-Axel Acking.

#1213

Bernd Girod

#26691

Overall Influence

Bernd Girod is a German-American engineer, the Robert L. and Audrey S. Hancock Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Girod is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Education and Career Girod received his M.S. in electrical engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and his Dr.-Ing in electrical engineering from the University of Hannover, Germany .

#1214

Rivka Oxman

#28728

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Rivka Oxman is an Israeli architect, researcher, and professor at the Technion Institute in Haifa. Her research interests are related to design and computation, including digital architecture and methods, and exploring their contribution to the emergence of new paradigms of architectural design and practice.

#1215

J. Carlos Santamarina

J. Carlos Santamarina

#62997

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

J. Carlos Santamarina is a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Clough Chair at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA. Biography Santamarina was born in Cordoba, Argentina, studied civil engineering at the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba , the University of Maryland and Purdue University .

#1216

Marc A. Rosen

#66180

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

#1217

Rolf Prof Dr Ing Dr Isermann

#66191

Overall Influence

#1218

Stephen Pearton

#63859

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Stephen Pearton is an American materials scientist, engineer, and Distinguished Professor at the University of Florida. Pearton's work focuses on the use of advanced materials in areas such as laser diodes, nanomaterial applications, and similar applications.

#1219

Stephen Holden

#523

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Stephen Holden is an American writer, poet, and music and film critic. Biography Holden earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Yale University in 1963. He worked as a photo editor, staff writer, and eventually became an A&R executive for RCA Records before turning to writing pop music reviews and related articles for Rolling Stone magazine, Blender, The Village Voice, The Atlantic, and Vanity Fair, among other publications. He first achieved prominence with his 1970s Rolling Stone work, where he tended to cover singer-songwriter and traditional pop artists. He joined the staff of Th...

#1220

Brendan Frey

#7752

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Brendan John Frey FRSC is a Canadian-born entrepreneur, engineer and scientist. He is Founder and CEO of Deep Genomics, Cofounder of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Professor of Engineering and Medicine at the University of Toronto. Frey is a pioneer in the development of machine learning and artificial intelligence methods, their use in accurately determining the consequences of genetic mutations, and in designing medications that can slow, stop or reverse the progression of disease.

#1221

Weng Cho Chew

#60512

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Weng Cho Chew is a Malaysian-American electrical engineer and applied physicist known for contributions to wave physics, especially computational electromagnetics. He is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University.

#1222

Richard Blahut

#25875

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Richard Blahut , former chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, is best known for his work in information theory . He received his PhD Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in 1972.

#1223

Shimon Y. Nof

#47741

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Shimon Y. Nof is a professor of Industrial Engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. He has held visiting positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at universities in Chile, the European Union, Hong Kong, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Philippines, Taiwan, and UK. He is the Director of the Production, Robotics and Integration Software for the Manufacturing & Management Center at Purdue.

#1224

John P. Costas

#20926

Overall Influence

1923 - 2008 (85 years)

John Peter Costas was an American electrical engineer. Costas invented, among other things, the Costas loop and Costas arrays. Biography Costas studied at Purdue University as an undergraduate. During World War II, he was involved in radar engineering, serving in the U.S. Navy as a radar officer. He was a graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where he worked on interference filtering and linear systems coding. While there, he worked with Norbert Wiener, R. M. Fano, J. B. Wiesner and Y. W. Lee. He worked for General Electric from 1951 until the early 1980s, and for Cogent Systems, Inc.

#1225

Joseph A. Paradiso

#29419

Overall Influence

Joseph Paradiso is the Alexander W. Dreyfoos Professor at MIT's Program in Media Arts and Sciences. He directs the MIT Media Lab's Responsive Environments Group, which explores how sensor networks augment and mediate human experience, interaction and perception. He received a B.S. in electrical engineering and physics summa cum laude from Tufts University, and a Ph.D. in physics from MIT with Prof. Ulrich Becker in the Nobel Prize-winning group headed by Prof. Samuel C.C. Ting at the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science.

#1226

Kathleen Howell

#40784

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Kathleen Connor Howell is an American scientist and aerospace engineer known for her contributions to dynamical systems theory applied to spacecraft trajectory design which led to the use of halo orbit in multiple NASA space missions. She is currently the Hsu Lo Distinguished Professor at Purdue University in the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics. In acknowledgment of her many achievements, Discover magazine recognized her in 2002 as one of the 50 most important women in science.

#1227

Irving Penn

#2616

Overall Influence

1917 - 2009 (92 years)

Irving Penn was an American photographer known for his fashion photography, portraits, and still lifes. Penn's career included work at Vogue magazine, and independent advertising work for clients including Issey Miyake and Clinique. His work has been exhibited internationally and continues to inform the art of photography.

#1228

Arthur Nowick

#47290

Overall Influence

1923 - 2010 (87 years)

Arthur S. Nowick was an American materials scientist. He made pioneering contributions to the study of internal friction, anelasticity, crystal defects and other subjects over a fifty-year career and helped develop materials science from a field focused on metals to one that encompasses all classes of materials.

#1229

Robert R Wolfe

#66850

Overall Influence

#1230

Vladimir Kaspé

#50305

Overall Influence

1910 - 1996 (86 years)

Vladimir Kaspé was an ethnic Russian, Mexican national architect, teacher, and writer. He was the younger brother of Simon Kaspe. He was married to Masha Shapiro. He was born in Harbin, China on 3 May 1910. He moved to Paris in 1926 and studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts from 1929 to 1935. There, his teacher was Georges Gromort. In 1942 he moved to Mexico.

#1231

Shōzō Uchii

#44632

Overall Influence

1933 - 2002 (69 years)

was a Japanese architect and academic authority on the works of Frank Lloyd Wright. Known for the design of landmark structures such as the Setagaya Art Museum, Oita City Museum of Art, and the Fukiage Palace, the residence on the grounds of the Tokyo Imperial Palace for the Emperor of Japan.

#1232

Anantha P. Chandrakasan

#66924

Overall Influence

#1233

Lale Akarun

#23886

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Lale Akarun is a Turkish electrical engineer and computer scientist researching sign language and gesture recognition, human–computer interaction, and biometrics. She is a professor in the computer engineering department and ex-vice rector at Boğaziçi University.

#1234

Michael Naimark

Michael Naimark

#20320

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Michael Naimark is an artist, inventor, and scholar in the fields of virtual reality and new media art. He is best known for his work in projection mapping, virtual travel, live global video, and cultural preservation, and often refers to this body of work as “place representation”.

#1235

Carver Mead

#59175

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

#1236

Robert Michael White

Robert Michael White

#24222

Overall Influence

1924 - 2010 (86 years)

Robert Michael White was an American electrical engineer, test pilot, fighter pilot, and astronaut. He was one of twelve pilots who flew the North American X-15, an experimental spaceplane jointly operated by the Air Force and NASA. As an engineer, he supervised the design and development of several modern military aircraft.

#1237

Mario Testino

#1315

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Mario Eduardo Testino Silva OBE HonFRPS is a Peruvian fashion and portrait photographer. His work has featured internationally in magazines such as Vogue, V Magazine, Vanity Fair and GQ. He has also created images for brands such as Gucci, Burberry, Versace, Michael Kors, Chanel, Stuart Weitzman, Carolina Herrera and Estée Lauder. Alongside his practice as a photographer, Testino has also worked as a creative director, guest editor, museum founder, art collector and collaborator, and entrepreneur. His professional work as a photographer has been dogged by numerous accusations of sexual haras...

#1238

Lionel Tarassenko

Lionel Tarassenko

#32660

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Lionel Tarassenko, is a British engineer and academic, who is a leading expert in the application of signal processing and machine learning to healthcare. Tarassenko is President of Reuben College, Oxford.

#1239

Adolfo Pérez Esquivel

Adolfo Pérez Esquivel

#1309

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Adolfo Pérez Esquivel is an Argentine activist, community organizer, painter, writer and sculptor. He was the recipient of the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize for his opposition to Argentina's last civil-military dictatorship , during which he was detained, tortured, and held without trial for 14 months. He also received, among other distinctions, the Pacem in Terris Award.

#1240

Morris Cohen

#51806

Overall Influence

1911 - 2005 (94 years)

Morris Cohen , born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, United States, was a Jewish American metallurgist, who spent his entire career affiliated with MIT. He graduated from his undergraduate degree in 1933, receiving his doctorate three years later, and was appointed assistant professor of metallurgy in 1937. He was appointed Professor of Physical Metallurgy in 1946, and an Institute Professor in 1975. He took emeritus status in 1982.

#1241

Ernst Weber

#33555

Overall Influence

1901 - 1996 (95 years)

Ernst Weber , Austria-born American electrical engineer, was a pioneer in microwave technologies and played an important role in the history of the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, where in 1945 he founded the Microwave Research Institute . Weber was also the first president of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and one of the founders of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering .

#1242

Lynda Benglis

#13653

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Lynda Benglis is an American sculptor and visual artist known especially for her wax paintings and poured latex sculptures. She maintains residences in New York City, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Kastellorizo, Greece, and Ahmedabad, India.

#1243

Bikramjit Basu

#44643

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Bikramjit Basu is currently a full professor at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, specializing in Engineering Ceramics and Biomaterials Science. He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for science and technology, the highest science award in India, for the year 2013 in engineering science category. The prize was awarded for his "outstanding contributions encompassing theory and experiments to significantly expand our understanding of the in vitro cell functionality modulation on engineered bio-materials using electric field simulation approach". With a team of clinicians and ...

#1244

Barton Myers

#12833

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Barton Myers is an American architect and president of Barton Myers Associates Inc. in Santa Barbara, California. With a career spanning more than 40 years, Myers is a fellow of the American Institute of Architects and was a member of the Ontario Association of Architects while working in Canada earlier in his career.

#1245

Werner Gitt

#23264

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Werner Gitt is a German engineer and young earth creationist. Before retirement, he was Head of the Department of Information Technology at Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt. Biography Gitt was born in Stallupönen, East Prussia. He became an engineering professor at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, Germany's national institute for natural and engineering sciences. By the 1990s he was assuming a leadership role in the German creationist movement, through the publication of several influential creationist books. He was one of the leaders of the nondenominational Wort und Wissen society, the largest creationist society in Germany.

#1246

Brian Cantor

#16157

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Brian Cantor CBE FREng has been a long-serving university leader, is a visiting professor in the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford, and a consultant at the Brunel Centre for Advanced Solidification Technology at Brunel University. He was the vice-chancellor of the University of Bradford from 2013 to 2019. Prior to this appointment he was the vice-chancellor at the University of York from 2002 to 2013, and previously he was the head of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Division at the University of Oxford.

#1247

Razelle Kurzrock

#67423

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

#1248

Rashid Bashir

#46813

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

#1249

Hartmut Bossel

#42555

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Hartmut Bossel is a German environmental scientist and systems scientist. Bossel was a professor of environmental systems analysis and director of the Scientific Center for Environmental Systems Research and Environmental Systems Analysis Group at the University of Kassel, Germany, until his retirement in 1997.

#1250

Claire Deschênes

#42228

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Claire Deschênes is a Canadian mechanical engineer, an engineering professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering Université Laval, and a member of the Order of Canada. She is the first female professor of engineering at the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Laval University, and is an expert in hydraulic turbine technology, hydrodynamics, and fluid mechanics.

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