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

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Engineering,

#1451

Mohamed Gad-el-Hak

Mohamed Gad-el-Hak

#51410

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Mohamed Gad-el-Hak is an engineering scientist. He is currently the Inez Caudill Eminent Professor of biomedical engineering and professor of mechanical and nuclear engineering at Virginia Commonwealth University.

#1452

Carlos Alberto Brebbia

#73205

Overall Influence

#1453

Margrit Kennedy

#27987

Overall Influence

1939 - 2013 (74 years)

Margrit Kennedy was a German architect, professor, environmentalist, author and advocate of complementary currencies and an interest- and inflation-free economy. In 2011, she initiated the movement Occupy Money.

#1454

John Choma

#54357

Overall Influence

John Choma was Professor and Chair of Electrical Engineering-Electrophysics at the University of Southern California. Choma held B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Pittsburgh. His graduate theses were:"Design of a Transistor Phasemeter," M.S. Thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1965."Stability Analysis of Class C Transistor Amplifiers," Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1969.Choma joined the USC faculty in 1980. He taught undergraduate and graduate courses in electrical circuit theory, filters, and analog integrated electronics, and advi...

#1455

Weng Cheng-yi

#34372

Overall Influence

Weng Cheng-yi is a Taiwanese mechanical engineer. Weng earned a doctorate in mechanical engineering from the University of Rochester. He joined the National Cheng Kung University faculty in 1980. Weng became president of NCKU in 1997. He was the inaugural chairman of the Aviation Safety Council, serving from 25 May 1998 to 19 May 2000. He was minister of the National Science Council from 20 May 2000 to 6 March 2001. Days after taking office, Weng was criticized by members of the Legislative Yuan for being unaware of council proceedings. An anonymous legislator accused Weng of plagiarism in June 2000.

#1456

Kiki Smith

#8242

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Kiki Smith is a German-born American artist whose work has addressed the themes of sex, birth and regeneration. Her figurative work of the late 1980s and early 1990s confronted subjects such as AIDS, feminism, and gender, while recent works have depicted the human condition in relationship to nature. Smith lives and works in the Lower East Side, New York City, and the Hudson Valley, New York State.

#1457

William Cheswick

#13071

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

William R. "Bill" Cheswick is a computer security and networking researcher. Education Cheswick graduated from Lawrenceville School in 1970 and received a B.S. in Fundamental Science in 1975 from Lehigh University. While at Lehigh, working with Doug Price and Steve Lidie, Cheswick co-authored the Senator line-oriented text editor.

#1458

Malcolm C. Smith

#31970

Overall Influence

Malcolm Clive Smith FREng, FIEEE is a British electrical engineer. He is a professor of control engineering at the University of Cambridge. He is notable for his contributions to feedback control and systems theory. He is also the inventor of the inerter, used in mechanical network synthesis.

#1459

John Rettaliata

#34032

Overall Influence

1911 - 2009 (98 years)

John Theodore Rettaliata was a fluid dynamicist who was president of Illinois Institute of Technology for 21 years, from 1952 to 1973, and served on President Dwight D. Eisenhower's National Aeronautics and Space Council, the predecessor to NASA. He received the American Society of Mechanical Engineers/Pi Tau Sigma joint Gold Medal in 1942, received the Distinguished Alumnus Award of Johns Hopkins University, was a National Honorary Member of the Triangle Fraternity, and held a lifetime position on the Museum of Science and Industry Board of Trustees. He also held the distinction of being one of the first people to fly in a jet aircraft.

#1460

Mike Rother

#52177

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Mike Rother is an American researcher. He introduced the widespread business practices of Value Stream Mapping and Toyota Kata . He has been affiliated with the Industrial Technology Institute , the University of Michigan College of Engineering, the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation , and the Technical University Dortmund.

#1461

Keller Easterling

#40548

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Keller Easterling is an American architect, urbanist, writer, and professor. She is Enid Storm Dwyer Professor and Director of the MED Program at Yale University. Biography She earned both her B.A. and M.Arch from Princeton University School of Architecture and has taught architectural design and history at Parsons The New School for Design, Pratt Institute, and Columbia University. She is Enid Storm Dwyer Professor of Architecture and director of the MED program at Yale University. Easterling is a contemporary writer working on the issues of urbanism, architecture, and organization in relatio...

#1462

David James Skellern

#33073

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

David Skellern is an Australian electronic engineer and computer scientist credited, along with colleagues, for the first chip-set implementation of the IEEE 802.11a wireless networking standard. He is credited with a number of important technology innovations. developed with colleagues which include John O'Sullivan, Terence Percival and Neil Weste, and in particular the first chip-set implementation of the IEEE 802.11a wireless networking standard. This innovation has been described as a revolution in world communications, allowing high speed wireless communications.

#1463

Amit Agrawal

#54989

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Amit Agrawal is an Indian engineer and an institute chair professor at the department of mechanical engineering of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He leads a group of scientists who are involved in the development of next-generation diagnostic microdevices.

#1464

Finn Geipel

#56767

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Finn Geipel is a German Architect and Urbanist. He is co-founder of the architecture and urban planning office LIN. Life Geipel studied architecture from 1981 to 1987 at the University of Stuttgart. In 1983, together with Bernd Hoge and Jochen Hunger, he founded Labfac, Laboratory for Architecture, a network of architects and artists. In 1987, collaboration with Nicolas Michelin began a new chapter of Labfac in Paris.

#1465

Hojjat Adeli

#59754

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Hojjat Adeli from Ohio State University, Columbus, OH was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2012 for contributions to computational intelligence in infrastructure engineering and also an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2019, Hojjat Adeli was distinguished with the Robert Moskovic Award in recognition of an outstanding contribution to Computational Intelligence and Smart Structures given by the ESIS TC12 technical committee of the European Structural Integrity Society.

#1466

John H.L. Hansen

John H.L. Hansen

#59329

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

John H.L. Hansen is professor of electrical engineering and associate dean for research in Erik Jonsson School of Engineering & Computer Science, at the University of Texas at Dallas . He is also the University Distinguished Chair in Telecommunications Engineering, and holds a joint appointment as professor in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. He is the son of Henrik Hansen, Danish wrestling champion who won a bronze medal in Greco-Roman wrestling, welterweight class, at the 1948 Summer Olympics in London.

#1467

Claire F. Gmachl

#36273

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Claire F. Gmachl is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University. She is best known for her work in the development of quantum cascade lasers. Education and honors Gmachl earned her M.Sc. in physics from the University of Innsbruck in 1991. She went on to receive her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Vienna in 1995, graduating sub auspiciis Praesidentis . Her studies focused on integrated optical modulators and tunable surface-emitting lasers in the near infrared. From 1996 to 1998, she was a postdoctoral member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories.

#1468

Stanisław Bolkowski

#62268

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Stanisław Bolkowski is a Polish scientist, professor, engineer, academic teacher, former deputy chairman of the Electrotechnical Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences , former president of the Association of Polish Electrical Engineers , author of academic and technical textbooks on electrical engineering, electrician.

#1469

Yahya Rahmat‐samii

#73644

Overall Influence

#1470

Robert Wood

#57536

Overall Influence

Robert J. Wood is a roboticist and a professor of electrical engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, and is the director of the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory. At Harvard, he directs the NSF-funded RoboBees project, a 5-year project to build a swarm of robotic bees.

#1471

Siegfried K. Wiedmann

#43988

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Siegfried K. Wiedmann is a German electrical engineer noted for his contributions to semiconductor technologies for integrated circuits. Wiedmann was born in Plochingen, Germany. He received the Diplom-Ingenieur and Doctor-Ingenieur degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Applied Sciences Stuttgart, then worked at the IBM Laboratories in Böblingen, Germany and in the United States, ultimately becoming an IBM Fellow. Together with Horst H. Berger, Wiedmann received the 1977 IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award "for the invention and exploration of the Merged Transistor Log...

#1472

Ivan Štraus

#45238

Overall Influence

1928 - 2018 (90 years)

Ivan Štraus was a Bosnian architect. Life Born in 1928, in Kremna, Zlatibor county, Serbia, to a Slovenian father and mother from Herzegovina. He identified as a "Bosnian of Slovenian and Herzegovinian descent".

#1473

Robert Somol

#38760

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Robert E. Somol Jr. is an architectural theorist and was director of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 2007 to 2022. His writing has been centrally-linked to "post-critical" architectural theory at the turn of the 21st century; the concept is similar to that of postcritique found in literary criticism.

#1474

Rudolf Kingslake

#36271

Overall Influence

1903 - 2003 (100 years)

Rudolf Kingslake was an English academic, lens designer, and engineer. Kingslake was born in London, England in 1903 as Rudolf Klickmann. The latter is in all probability a re-transcription from Cyrillic of the traditional German-Jewish "Glückmann" meaning "lucky man". Kingslake studied optical design at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, under the eminent optical designer and theoretician Alexander Eugen Conrady, earning a master's degree, subsequently marrying Professor Conrady's daughter, Hilda Conrady Kingslake, a prominent English-American researcher in the field of optics.

#1475

Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani

#44032

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani is an architect, architectural theorist and architectural historian as well as a professor emeritus for the History of Urban Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich . He practices and promotes a formally disciplined, timelessly classic, and aesthetically sustainable form of architecture, one without modernist or postmodernist extravagances. As an author and editor of several acclaimed works of architectural history and theory, his ideas are widely cited.

#1476

Nirmal Bose

#51831

Overall Influence

Nirmal Bose was a professor in the Pennsylvania State University Electrical Engineering Department, from 1986 until his death. Before joining the Penn State faculty, he taught at Syracuse University and the University of Pittsburgh.

#1477

Arun G. Phadke

#49991

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Arun Phadke is a University Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech. Along with fellow Virginia Tech professor James Thorp, Dr. Phadke received The Franklin Institute's 2008 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering for their contributions to the power industry, particularly microprocessor controllers and Phasor measurement unit technology in electric power systems.

#1478

Paul Schneider-Esleben

#35251

Overall Influence

1915 - 2005 (90 years)

Paul Maximilian Heinrich Schneider von Esleben , known as Paul Schneider-Esleben, was a German architect who worked in the modernist movement, mostly on airports, throughout the 1960s. Early life Paul Schneider was born in 1915 in Düsseldorf to Maria Anna Elisabeth and , an architect, as the second of seven siblings and was raised Catholic.

#1479

Jan-Ove Palmberg

#31928

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Jan-Ove Palmberg, born 1943, is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Linköping University. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Chalmers University of Technology in 1969 and 1975 respectively. He was appointed a Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Linköping University in 1975. In 1983–1990 he was the Dean of the Institute of Technology, in 2003-2006 he was the Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and in 2007 he was the Head of the Department of Management and Engineering.

#1480

Bob Van Reeth

#40521

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Bob Van Reeth , who usually signs as bOb Van Reeth, is a Belgian architect. Biography Bob Van Reeth started working as an architect in 1965 with designing buildings in Mechelen and Kalmthout. In 1972, he became a teacher at the Nationaal Hoger Instituut voor Bouwkunst in Antwerp. The same year, he started the group Krokus with Jean-Paul Laenen and Marcel Smets. The group worked on the restoration of the old centre of Mechelen.

#1481

Pierre Veltz

#26471

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Pierre Veltz is a French academic. Veltz holds an engineering degree from École Polytechnique and a PhD in social sciences from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. After beginning his career as an urban planner, he went into academic life and consulting. He founded and headed LATTS, an interdisciplinary research group, at the crossroads of technical and sociological research. From 1981 to 1991, he was the Dean of Research at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, one of the leading French Grandes écoles. From 1999 to 2004, he was the Director of this School. He also chaired Par...

#1482

Kathryn Beers

#19149

Overall Influence

Kathryn L. Beers is an American polymer chemist. Beers is Leader of the Polymers and Complex Fluids group in the Materials Science and Engineering Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Her research interests include microreactors and microfluidics, advances in polymer synthesis and reaction monitoring, macromolecular separations, integrated and high throughput measurements of polymeric materials, degradable and renewable polymeric materials, and sustainable materials.

#1483

Fredrik Gustafsson

#41792

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Fredrik Gustafsson is a Swedish professor of sensor informatics at Linköping University. Background Fredrik Gustafsson was born in Aneby, Sweden. In 1988 he obtained a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and in 1992 a doctorate degree in automatic control, both at Linköping University. He was appointed professor of communication systems in 1999 and of sensor informatics in 2005 at Linköping University.

#1484

Ronald W. Schafer

#41718

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Ronald W. Schafer is an American electrical engineer notable for his contributions to digital signal processing. After receiving his Ph.D. degree at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968, he joined the Acoustics Research Department at Bell Laboratories, where he did research on digital signal processing and digital speech coding. In 1974 he joined the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he became a professor in electrical engineering, until leaving to join Hewlett-Packard in March 2005.

#1485

Östen Mäkitalo

#36288

Overall Influence

1938 - 2011 (73 years)

Östen Mäkitalo was a Swedish electrical engineer. He is considered to be the one of the most important developers in modern times together with Laila Ohlgren, both engineers at Telia. Together they developed the Nordic Mobile Telephone system and were the leading figures, representing Telia and Sweden, in the meetings with the other Nordic countries to find a common standard. Later they developed GSM and led the meetings to find a European and later world standard for mobile communication. They are many times considered the developer of the cellular phone and mobile telephony.

#1486

Miriam Rafailovich

#45078

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Miriam Rafailovich is an American materials engineering researcher. She is the director of the Garcia Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at Stony Brook University as well as former co-director of the Chemical and Molecular Engineering program at Stony Brook University. Her publications focus mainly on nanoscale materials engineering, including nanofibers, supercritical carbon dioxide, and biodegradable polymers.

#1487

Kaushik Roy

#74179

Overall Influence

#1488

Dale A. Anderson

#54525

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Dale A. Anderson is an American aerospace engineer, computational fluid dynamicist, researcher, author and professor. He pioneered research in computational fluid dynamics with his work at Iowa State University , alongside John C. Tannehill and Richard H. Pletcher. Anderson was the Professor of Aerospace Engineering, Vice President for Research, and Dean of Graduate Studies at the University of Texas at Arlington, United States. He is best known for his overall contributions to the field of computational fluid dynamics .

#1489

Carrie Mae Weems

#11057

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Carrie Mae Weems is an American artist working in text, fabric, audio, digital images and installation video, and is best known for her photography. She achieved prominence through her early 1990s photographic project The Kitchen Table Series. Her photographs, films and videos focus on serious issues facing African Americans today, including racism, sexism, politics and personal identity.

#1490

Michael Horodniceanu

Michael Horodniceanu

#37665

Overall Influence

1944 - 2023 (79 years)

Michael Horodniceanu was a Romanian-born American civil engineer who served as traffic commissioner of New York City. He was also the president of MTA Capital Construction. Early life and education Horodniceanu was born in Bucharest, Romania, and emigrated to Israel at age 16. He served in the military there and graduated from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

#1491

Felix Novikov

#44830

Overall Influence

1927 - 2022 (95 years)

Felix Aronovich Novikov was a Soviet and Russian architect. In 1991, he was awarded the honorary title of People's Architect of the USSR, becoming the last awardee of the title. His architectural projects span the period between the 1950s and the 1980s. The earlier ones belong to the mainstream tradition of the Soviet architecture, however, starting from the 1960s, Novikov's projects became innovative. His main projects included Krasnopresnenskaya metro station , residential buildings on embankments of the Yauza , and the building of the Palace of Young Pioneers, all in Moscow.

#1492

Gustav Peichl

#48712

Overall Influence

1928 - 2019 (91 years)

Gustav Peichl was an Austrian architect and caricaturist. Life He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna until 1953 and worked in the office of Roland Rainer. To pay for architectural school, he drew caricatures under a pseudonym to protect his identity from the Red Army, which occupied Austria at the time. He first used the name Pei initially and later by the name under which he was best known, Ironimus. He later drew cartoons for major newspapers such as Kurier, Express, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Presse.

#1493

Thomas H. Lee

#38316

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Thomas H. Lee is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Lee's research focus has been on gigahertz-speed wireline and wireless integrated circuits built in conventional silicon technologies, particularly CMOS; microwave; and RF circuits.

#1494

Frederick I. Ordway III

#22869

Overall Influence

1927 - 2014 (87 years)

Frederick Ira Ordway III was an American space scientist and author of visionary books on spaceflight. Ordway was educated at Harvard University and completed several years of graduate study at the University of Paris and other universities in Europe. He owned a large collection of original paintings depicting astronautical themes. He was a member of many leading professional societies and was the author, co-author, or editor of more than thirty books and over three hundred articles.

#1495

Hermann Kaufmann

Hermann Kaufmann

#57857

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Hermann Kaufmann is an Austrian architect. Early life Hermann Kaufmann was born in 1955 in Reuthe, Bregenzerwald and comes from a family with a long tradition in the carpentry business. At that time it was a matter of course to help in the parental business where he got to know great directly the possibilities and the fascination of the building material wood but also the way of technical thinking what moulded essentially his work as an architect. The decision to study architecture was also influenced by his uncle Leopold Kaufmann, outrider in wood constructions and protagonist of the architectural development in Vorarlberg, under whom he learned as intern the hand tools of an architect.

#1496

Kumbakonam Ramamani Rajagopal

#74343

Overall Influence

#1497

Nigel Priestley

Nigel Priestley

#62793

Overall Influence

1943 - 2014 (71 years)

Michael John Nigel Priestley was a New Zealand earthquake engineer. He made significant contributions to the design and retrofit of concrete structures, and developed the first displacement-based method of seismic design.

#1498

Frederick P. Salvucci

Frederick P. Salvucci

#46178

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Frederick "Fred" Peter Salvucci is an American civil engineer and educator, who specializes in transportation issues. Salvucci was the Secretary of Transportation for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts under Governor Michael Dukakis, serving a total of 12 years. He is currently a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics.

#1499

Yusuf A. Hannun

#65044

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Yusuf Awni Hannun is an American molecular biologist, biochemist, and clinician. He is known for the discovery that sphingolipids have signaling functions. Early life Yusuf Awni Hannun was born in Saudi Arabia of Palestinian parents, Mrs. Aida Ashur-Hannun and Dr. Awni Hannun. He received his early education in Beirut at the International College and earned a Bachelor of Science at the American University of Beirut in 1977. Following his undergraduate degree, Hannun continued at the American University of Beirut, obtaining an MD with distinction in 1981 and completing his internship and a res...

#1500

Eduard Sekler

#45474

Overall Influence

1920 - 2017 (97 years)

Eduard Franz Sekler was an architectural historian and Osgood Hooker Professor of Visual Art Emeritus and professor of architecture emeritus at Harvard University. Biography A native of Vienna, Eduard Sekler earned his professional degree with distinction in architecture from its Vienna University of Technology, before studying under Rudolf Wittkower at the School of Planning and Regional Research in London, and receiving his PhD in the history of art at London University's Warburg Institute. Sekler came to Harvard in 1960, at the invitation of Josep Lluis Sert, later co-founding the univers...

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