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

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Engineering,

#1351

John B. Heywood

#61677

Overall Influence

John B. Heywood is a British mechanical engineer known for his work on automotive engine research, for authoring a number of field-defining textbooks on the internal combustion engine, and as the director of the Sloan Automotive Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .

#1352

Mischa Schwartz

#55559

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (98 years)

Mischa Schwartz is the Charles Batchelor Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University, which he joined in 1974 as professor of electrical engineering and computer science. He received the B.E.E. degree from the Cooper Union, New York, NY, in 1947, the M.E.E. degree from the Polytechnic Institute in 1949, and the Ph.D. degree in applied physics from Harvard University under the supervision of Philippe Le Corbeiller in 1951. He was the founding director of the NSF-sponsored Center for Telecommunications Research . He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, and a Fellow of the AAAS.

#1353

Ronald Adrian

#58711

Overall Influence

Ronald J. Adrian is the Ira A. Fulton Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Arizona State University's Fulton School of Engineering and heads the Laboratory for Energetic Flow and Turbulence. He is well known for his contributions to the field of fluid dynamics in the areas of wall turbulence, thermal convection, coherent structures in turbulence and laser instrumentation. He is the Associate editor of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, Co-editor of the Springer Series in Experimental Fluid Mechanics and Co-founder and editor of eFluids.com.

#1354

Nicholas Hytner

#3305

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Sir Nicholas Robert Hytner is an English theatre director, film director, and film producer. He was previously the Artistic Director of London's National Theatre. His major successes as director include Miss Saigon, The History Boys and One Man, Two Guvnors. He has also known for directing films such as The Madness of King George , The Crucible , The History Boys , and The Lady in the Van . Hytner was knighted in the 2010 New Year Honours for services to drama by Queen Elizabeth II.

#1355

Stanley Nattel

#70456

Overall Influence

#1356

Fumihiko Imamura

#31225

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Fumihiko Imamura is a Japanese academic, civil engineer, and Director of the International Research Institute of Disaster Science at Tohoku University in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture. After the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, Imamura was prominent amongst those who proposed that December 26 should be an international day of commemoration. He argued that the simple idea could be effective in preparing people for the giant waves.

#1357

Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz

Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz

#33449

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz, born in Rio de Janeiro on July 19, 1956, is one of Brazil's most noted physicists and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. The scientific director of the São Paulo Research Foundation and a full professor of quantum electronics at the Gleb Wataghin Physics Institute at the State University of Campinas , Brito Cruz is engaged in research in which he uses femtosecond lasers to study ultrafast phenomena.

#1358

Katie Bouman

#26435

Overall Influence

1988 - Present (36 years)

Katherine Louise Bouman is an American engineer and computer scientist working in the field of computer imagery. She led the development of an algorithm for imaging black holes, known as Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors , and was a member of the Event Horizon Telescope team that captured the first image of a black hole.

#1359

Carlos A. Felippa

#70628

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Carlos A. Felippa is a professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado. His research at Colorado concerns aerospace structures and structural analysis, with special interests in coupled field problems: elastoacoustics, aeroelasticity, control-structure interaction, thermomechanics and electrothermomechanics.

#1360

Kishor C. Mehta

#59919

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Kishor C. Mehta is recognized worldwide as an authority on wind engineering. He is the first person from the Texas Tech University to be elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering for his systematic studies of structural damage caused by windstorms and leadership in the development of structural design standards for wind loads. Mehta has chaired the American Society of Civil Engineers' task committee on wind loads and organized the 11th International Conference on Wind Engineering, held at Lubbock, Texas in June, 2003. He is also the past chairman of the National Research Counc...

#1361

Robert H. Scanlan

#49535

Overall Influence

1914 - 2001 (87 years)

Robert H. Scanlan was an American civil and aeronautical engineer who came to be widely recognized as a leader in the analysis of wind effects on large structures. Scanlan created the concept of flutter derivatives to aid in the representation of self-excited forces in theoretical models. His research in the area of bridge aerodynamics made possible the construction of larger, sturdier, and more cost-effective bridges. Scanlan worked in both industry and academia, and his employers included Republic Aviation, the Federal Aviation Administration, the French agencies CNRS and ONERA, Schlumberger, the Case Institute of Technology, Princeton University, and Johns Hopkins University.

#1362

Dean Towle Mason

#70686

Overall Influence

#1363

Roger T. Howe

#55392

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Roger Thomas Howe is the William E. Ayer Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He earned a B.S. degree in physics from Harvey Mudd College and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981 and 1984, respectively. He was a faculty member at Carnegie-Mellon University from 1984-1985, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1985-1987, and at UC Berkeley between 1987-2005, where he was the Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor. He has been a faculty member of the School of Engineering at Stanford since 2005...

#1364

Angappa Gunasekaran

#70693

Overall Influence

#1365

Nitish V. Thakor

#59137

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Nitish V. Thakor is an American biomedical engineer and is a professor of Biomedical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University, a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a professor of Neurology at the Johns Hopkins University. He is also the director of the Singapore Institute for Neurotechnology at the National University of Singapore. Thakor is a leading researcher in Neuroengineering, having pioneered technologies for brain monitoring to prosthetic arms and neuroprostheses.

#1366

Geoffrey Broadbent

#41430

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

Geoffrey Broadbent is an English architect, academic and professor emeritus, and a prolific author in architectural theory, especially semiotics. He is professor emeritus at the School of Architecture at the University of Portsmouth, England. Among his best known works are the books Design in Architecture: Architecture and the Human Sciences and Emerging Concepts in Urban Space Design . He was born in Huddersfield.

#1367

Howard Raggatt

#30500

Overall Influence

Howard Raggatt is an Australian architect, member of the firm Ashton Raggatt McDougall, and best known for the design of the National Museum of Australia, opened in 2001.

#1368

Tie Jun Cui

#70858

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

#1369

Peter Blundell Jones

#45747

Overall Influence

1949 - 2016 (67 years)

Peter Blundell Jones was a British architect and architectural historian. He trained as an architect at the Architectural Association School, and held academic positions at the University of Cambridge and London South Bank University. He was a professor of architecture at the University of Sheffield from 1994 until his death in 2016.

#1370

Leik Myrabo

#51454

Overall Influence

Leik Myrabo is an aerospace engineering professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who retired from there in 2011. He made the first demonstrations of the use of ground-based lasers to propel objects, lifting them hundreds of feet. His goal was to use ground-based lasers to propel objects into orbit; possibly reducing orbit-flight costs by large factors.

#1371

Winfield Hill

#37526

Overall Influence

Winfield Hill is the Director of the Electronics Engineering Laboratory at the Rowland Institute at Harvard University. A self-proclaimed "electronics circuit-design guru" and trained physicist and electronic engineer, he co-authored the popular text The Art of Electronics with Harvard Physicist Paul Horowitz.

#1372

Rolf Drechsler

#27153

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Rolf Drechsler is an electrical engineer at the University of Bremen, Germany. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for his contributions in testing and verification of electronic circuits and systems.

#1373

Ada Karmi-Melamede

Ada Karmi-Melamede

#39560

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Ada Karmi-Melamede is a noted Israeli architect. Biography Karmi-Melamede was born on December 24, 1936, in Tel Aviv, in Mandate Palestine . She studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London from 1956 to 1959 and at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology from 1961 to 1962, being awarded her degree in 1963. She has taught extensively in the United States, first at Columbia University and then at Yale University and University of Pennsylvania .

#1374

Holt Ashley

#45849

Overall Influence

1923 - 2006 (83 years)

Holt Ashley was an American aeronautical engineer notable for his seminal research on aeroelasticity. Early life and education He was born in San Francisco, California. Ashley attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from which he received a Master of Science degree in aeronautical engineering in 1948 and later a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1951, also in aeronautical engineering.

#1375

J. Torkel Wallmark

#35357

Overall Influence

1919 - 2007 (88 years)

John Torkel Wallmark was a Swedish electrical engineer and researcher in semiconductor electronics and innovation technology. Torkel Wallmark was born in Stockholm. He graduated from the Royal Institute of Technology in 1944, became technology licentiate in 1947 and technology doctor in 1953. He was then a researcher at Radio Corporation of America in Princeton, US 1953–1964.

#1376

M. Anthony Lewis

#51932

Overall Influence

M. Anthony Lewis is an American robotics researcher and currently serves as the Vice President of Hewlett-Packard and the head of Hewlett-Packard's Compute Lab for disruptive edge technologies. Formerly, he served as the Head of was the former Senior Director of Technology at Qualcomm Technologies and was the creator of Zeroth neural processing unit and its software API. He is past CEO of Iguana Robotics, a company specializing in the development of biomorphic robotics technologies.

#1377

Vilen Künnapu

#49257

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Vilen Künnapu is one of the most important Estonian architects of the last three decades, among the first postmodernist theoreticians and architects in the 1970s. He has worked on various buildings in Estonia and abroad.

#1378

Kourosh Kalantar-zadeh

#27758

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Kourosh Kalantar-zadeh is an Australian scientist involved in research in the fields of materials sciences, electronics, and transducers. He is best known for his works on two-dimensional semiconductors, ingestible sensors and liquid metals. He led his group to the invention of an ingestible chemical sensor: human gas sensing capsule.

#1379

Harold L. Martin

Harold L. Martin

#53219

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Harold L. Martin Sr. is an American engineer, educator, former chancellor of Winston-Salem State and current chancellor of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. He is the first alumnus in the history of North Carolina A&T to hold the position of Chancellor. Under his leadership, N.C. A&T has become the nation's largest historically black university , its top-ranked public HBCU and North Carolina's third most productive public research university. It has also increased its standing as a land-grant institution and doctoral research university.

#1380

Naomi Leonard

#33701

Overall Influence

Naomi Ehrich Leonard is the Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. She is the director of the Princeton Council on Science and Technology and an associated faculty member in the Program in Applied & Computational Mathematics, Princeton Neuroscience Institute, and the Program in Quantitative and Computational Biology. She is the founding editor of the Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems.

#1381

John G. Truxal

#44691

Overall Influence

1924 - 2007 (83 years)

John G. Truxal was an American control theorist and a Distinguished Teaching Professor, Emeritus at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Truxal was a member of the National Academy of Engineering and is noted for his numerous contributions to control theory, for which he received the Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award . He moved to the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn and became professor and chairman of the electrical engineering department there in 1957. Four years later, he was named vice president of the school, and held that position for 11 years.

#1382

Arthur J. Bond

#55699

Overall Influence

1939 - 2012 (73 years)

Arthur J. Bond was the dean of the School of Engineering and Technology at Alabama A&M University in Alabama, United States, and an activist in the cause of increasing black enrollment and retention in engineering and technology. He was a founding member of the National Society of Black Engineers and part of the team that fought for state funding of engineering at Alabama A&M University.

#1383

Thomas J. Webster

#67686

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Thomas J. Webster is an American biomedical engineer, researcher, and entrepreneur. Throughout his over 25-year academic career, his research group has produced several books and book chapters. He has over 1350 publications and has an H-index of 118. This high H-index places him amongst the top 1% of researchers in his field.

#1384

Dario Floreano

#21790

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Dario Floreano is a Swiss-Italian roboticist and engineer. He is Director of the Laboratory of Intelligent System at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and was the founding director of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research Robotics.

#1385

John Sterman

#15189

Overall Influence

John David Sterman is the Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management, and the current director of the MIT System Dynamics Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is also co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute. He is mostly considered as the current leader of the System Dynamics school of thought. He is the author of Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World.

#1386

Brian R. Lawn

#71122

Overall Influence

#1387

Josef Kaiser

#52095

Overall Influence

1910 - 1991 (81 years)

Josef Kaiser was an East German urban architect associated, in particular, with a number of the country's more high-profile building projects during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1946, following serious illness, he embarked on a career as an operatic tenor: five years later he returned to architecture.

#1388

Steven B Heymsfield

#71179

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

#1389

Shin Takamatsu

#42346

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Shin Takamatsu is a leading Japanese architect. After he obtained PhD from Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University, in 1980, he became a lecturer at Osaka University of Arts in 1981, an associate professor at Kyoto Seika University in 1987, a professor at Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University in 1997 and professor emeritus at Kyoto University in 2013. Takamatsu's futuristic looking buildings often use anthropomorphic or mechanical imagery.

#1390

Andrew A. Frank

#42772

Overall Influence

Andrew Alfonso Frank is an emeritus American professor of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering at University of California, Davis . He is recognized as the father of modern plug-in hybrids, and coined the term Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle .

#1391

Edmund Bacon

#16059

Overall Influence

1910 - 2005 (95 years)

Edmund Norwood Bacon was an American urban planner, architect, educator, and author. During his tenure as the executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission from 1949 to 1970, his visions shaped today's Philadelphia, the city of his birth, to the extent that he is sometimes described as "The Father of Modern Philadelphia". He authored the seminal urban planning book Design of Cities.

#1392

Michael J Black

#71304

Overall Influence

#1393

Leroy Chang

#33019

Overall Influence

1936 - 2008 (72 years)

Leroy L. Chang was an experimental physicist and solid state electronics researcher and engineer. Born in China, he studied in Taiwan and then the United States, obtaining his doctorate from Stanford University in 1963. As a research physicist he studied semiconductors for nearly 30 years at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, New York. This period included pioneering work on superlattice heterostructures with Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leo Esaki.

#1394

James R. Wait

#63475

Overall Influence

1924 - 1998 (74 years)

James R. Wait was a Canadian electrical engineer and engineering physicist. In 1977, he was elected as a member of National Academy of Engineering in Electronics, Communication & Information Systems Engineering for his contributions to electromagnetic propagation engineering as it affects communication and geophysical exploration.

#1395

Sossina M. Haile

#34699

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Sossina M. Haile is an American chemist, known for developing the first solid acid fuel cells. She is a professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University, Illinois, US. Haile received the National Science Foundation National Young Investigator Award , Humboldt Fellowship , Fulbright Fellowship , and AT&T Cooperative Research Fellowship . The Humboldt and Fulbright fellowships supported her research at the Max Planck Institut für Festkörperforschung [Institute for Solid State Research], Stuttgart, Germany . She earned the 2001 J.B. Wagner Award of the High Temperature ...

#1396

Ronald Brunskill

#38667

Overall Influence

1929 - 2015 (86 years)

Ronald William Brunskill OBE was an English academic who was Reader in Architecture at the University of Manchester. He was an authority on the history of architecture and particularly on British vernacular architecture.

#1397

Eva Vecsei

#41739

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Eva Hollo Vecsei is a Hungarian-Canadian architect. She began her career in Budapest and emigrated to Montreal in 1957, where she established Vecsei Architects with her husband in 1984. Biography Vecsei was born Eva Hollo in 1930 in Vienna. She completed a Bachelor of Architecture at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, graduating in 1952. After graduating, she taught at the university's architectural school until 1953 as an assistant professor. In 1954 she designed housing for miners in Tatabánya and during 1955–1956 she worked on a school and housing projects.

#1398

Roman Słowiński

#36970

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Roman Słowiński is a Polish computer scientist and professor. Since 2019 he has been Vice President of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is a Professor and Founding Chair of the Laboratory of Intelligent Decision Support Systems at the Institute of Computing Science, Poznań University of Technology, Poland. Since 2003 he is also a professor at the Systems Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.

#1399

Carme Pigem

#56927

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Carme Pigem Barceló is a Spanish architect, a member of the Pritzker Prize-winning architectural firm RCR Arquitectes, together with Ramón Vilalta and Rafael Aranda. Biography Between 1977 and 1979, she studied at the School of Fine arts of Olot, and in 1987 graduated in architecture at ETSA Vallés. In 1987 she founded RCR Arquitectes together with Ramón Vilalta and Rafael Aranda.

#1400

John Jonas

#33658

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

John J. Jonas was born in Montreal and graduated from McGill University with a bachelor's degree in Metallurgical Engineering in 1954. He later attended Cambridge University on an Athlone Fellowship and received a Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Sciences in 1960. On returning to Montreal, he began teaching "mechanical metallurgy" at McGill and built up a research laboratory that includes a number of specialized testing machines and is particularly well equipped for experimental investigations in the field of high temperature deformation.

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