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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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Engineering,

#1501

Roger Montgomery

#42512

Overall Influence

1925 - 2003 (78 years)

Roger Montgomery was an American architect, and Professor at Washington University in St. Louis and University of California, Berkeley. Early life and education Roger Montgomery was born in New York City to parents Graham Livingston Montgomery and Anne Cook and lived in Greenwich Village until 1930, when he moved to Port Washington, Long Island. In 1945, he was accepted into the United States Army, where he served in an intelligence unit in occupied Germany as a radio operator.

#1502

Lallit Anand

#66025

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Lallit Anand is the Warren and Towneley Rohsenow Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . His research focuses on solid mechanics and large deformation plasticity theory. He has received numerous awards and accolades for his significant contributions to the field of applied mechanics and mechanical engineering.

#1503

Stefan Polónyi

#63697

Overall Influence

1930 - 2021 (91 years)

Stefan Polónyi was a Hungarian-born German civil engineer. Biography Polónyi studied civil engineering at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. He left Budapest for Cologne in 1956 and opened his office the following year, called Stefan Polónyi & Partner. In 1965, he became a professor of engineering at the Technical University of Berlin before he held the same position at the Technical University of Dortmund starting in 1971. There, he invented the "Dortmund model" of joint training for engineers and architects.

#1504

Albert Zomaya

#54532

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Albert Y. Zomaya is currently the Chair Professor of High Performance Computing & Networking and Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow in the School of Information Technologies, The University of Sydney. He is also the Director of the Centre for Distributed and High Performance Computing. He is currently the Editor in Chief of IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing and Springer's Scalable Computing and Communications. He was past Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Computers.

#1505

Aleksandar Kavčić

#62193

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Aleksandar Kavčić is a Serbian electrical engineer, university professor and philanthropist who is currently active as an Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Carnegie Mellon University since 2017 and as a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.

#1506

Alberto Carpinteri

#65264

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Alberto Carpinteri is an Italian professor and engineer. Biography Alberto Carpinteri is professor in science of construction, Visiting Professor at the Shantou University - College of Engineering and former full professor at the Polytechnic University of Turin. Alberto Carpinteri was also director of the National Institute of Metrological Research , member of the New York Academy of Sciences and President of many scientific institutions as the International Congress on Fracture, ICF , the European Structural Integrity Society, ESIS , the International Association of Fracture Mechanics for C...

#1507

Elza Erkip

#32992

Overall Influence

Elza Erkip is a Turkish-American electrical and computer engineer, professor and wireless technology researcher at New York University. Education Erkip received her B.S. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Middle East Technical University in Turkey, and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. She ranked among the top 1% of highly cited scholars in computer science from 2002 to 2012 according to Thomson Reuters.

#1508

Alberto Zanchetti

#74670

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (98 years)

#1509

Bohdan Kulakowski

#58015

Overall Influence

1942 - 2006 (64 years)

Bohdan Kulakowski was professor of mechanical engineering, Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University. Kulakowski was an internationally recognized expert in automatic control systems, computer simulations and control of industrial processes, systems dynamics, vehicle/road dynamic interaction and transportation systems. His fuzzy logic algorithm for avoiding skidding accidents was recognized in 2000 by Discover magazine as one of its top 10 technological innovations of the year.

#1510

Jón Atli Benediktsson

Jón Atli Benediktsson

#38719

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Jón Atli Benediktsson is the rector and president of the University of Iceland and professor in electrical and computer engineering at the university. His research fields are remote sensing, image analysis, pattern recognition, machine learning, data fusion, analysis of biomedical signals and signal processing. He has published over 400 scientific articles in these fields and is one of the most influential scientists in the world according to Publons’ lists in 2018 and 2019.

#1511

Jean-Pierre Dupuy

#26057

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Jean-Pierre Dupuy is a French engineer and philosopher. Biography Dupuy attended the Ecole polytechnique, where he graduated in 1965 and attended the Ecole des Mines. He was a professor of French and a researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information of Stanford University, California. He also taught social and political philosophy and the ethics of science and technology until 2006 at the École Polytechnique.

#1512

Moriba Jah

#34297

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Moriba Kemessia Jah is an American space scientist and aerospace engineer who describes himself as a "space environmentalist", specializing in orbit determination and prediction, especially as related to space situational awareness and space traffic monitoring. He is currently an associate professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin. Jah previously worked as a spacecraft navigator at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he was a navigator for the Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey, Mars Express, Mars Exploration Rover, and his last mission was the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

#1513

Ye Peijian

#37685

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Ye Peijian is a Chinese aerospace engineer. He is the Chief Commander and Chief Designer of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program. Early life and education Ye was born in Huzhuang Village, Taixing, Jiangsu, China, in January 1945. In 1962, he graduated from Huzhou Middle School in Huzhou, Zhejiang province.

#1514

Harry Callahan

#17686

Overall Influence

1912 - 1999 (87 years)

Harry Morey Callahan was an American photographer and educator. He taught at both the Institute of Design in Chicago and the Rhode Island School of Design. Callahan's first solo exhibition was at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1951. He had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1976/1977. Callahan was a recipient of the Edward MacDowell Medal and the National Medal of Arts. He represented the United States in the Venice Biennale in 1978.

#1515

Kishor Shridharbhai Trivedi

#74981

Overall Influence

#1516

Malcolm Holzman

Malcolm Holzman

#52643

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Malcolm Holzman FAIA, is an American architect, who practices in New York City. He is a partner of Steinberg Hart and was founding partner of Holzman Moss Bottino Architecture and Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates . Holzman has planned, programmed, and designed over 130 projects for public use; including 35 library projects during the last five decades.

#1517

Melvin J. Glimcher

#45604

Overall Influence

1925 - 2014 (89 years)

Melvin Jacob Glimcher was an American pioneer in the development of artificial limbs. He helped develop the “Boston Arm,” the electronically-operated design of which was incorporated in many later prostheses.

#1518

Meredith Thring

#48730

Overall Influence

1915 - 2006 (91 years)

Meredith Wooldridge Thring was a British inventor, engineer, futurologist, professor and author. Education and career Thring was born in Melbourne, Australia, but moved to England when he was four years old. His school was Malvern College. He obtained a double first class degree in Mathematics and Physics at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1937. He then joined the British Coal Utilisation Research Association, becoming Head of its Combustion Research Laboratory. In 1940, he married Margaret Hooley , and they had two sons and one daughter.

#1519

Donhee Ham

#50253

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Donhee Ham is Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering at Harvard University and Fellow of Samsung Electronics. Biography and Work Ham is from Busan, South Korea. He received his B.S. in physics from Seoul National University in 1996, graduating atop the College of Natural Sciences with Presidential Prize. After fulfilling his military duty in South Korea in 1997, he went to Caltech, where he earned his M.S. in physics in 1999 and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 2002. His PhD thesis on statistical physics of electrical circuits won the Caltech Charles Wilts Prize given to the best Electrical Engineering dissertation.

#1520

Rebecca Richards-Kortum

#34895

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Rebecca Richards-Kortum is an American bioengineer and the Malcolm Gillis University Professor at Rice University. She is a professor in the departments of Bioengineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering, and she is the Director of Rice 360°: Institute for Global Health, and the Founder of Beyond Traditional Borders. She is the Director of the Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering, and serves as the advisor to the Provost on health-related research.

#1521

Hongxing Jiang

#63493

Overall Influence

Hongxing Jiang is a Chinese-American physicist and engineer working in the field of wide bandgap semiconductors and photonic devices. He is an original inventor of MicroLED. In 2000, the research team led by Hongxing Jiang and Jingyu Lin realized the operation of the first MicroLED and passive driving MicroLED microdisplay. In 2009, he and his colleagues at III-N Technology, Inc. and Texas Tech University patented and realized the first active driving high-resolution and video-capable microLED microdisplay in VGA format via heterogeneous integration of MicroLED array with CMOS active-matrix driver and the work was published in the following years.

#1522

Malcolm Slaney

#26601

Overall Influence

Malcolm Slaney is an American electrical engineer, whose research has focused on machine perception and multimedia analysis. He is a Fellow of the IEEE for "contributions to perceptual signal processing and tomographic imaging". He is a consulting professor at the Stanford University Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics and an affiliate faculty member in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Washington.

#1523

John H. Lienhard V

John H. Lienhard V

#55930

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

John Henry Lienhard V is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Water and Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on desalination, heat transfer, and thermodynamics. He has also written several engineering textbooks.

#1524

Erdal Arıkan

#21863

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Erdal Arıkan is a Turkish professor in Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. He is known for his implementation of polar coding. Career Academic background Arıkan briefly served as a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He joined Bilkent University as a faculty member in 1987.

#1525

Chu-yuan Lee

#62323

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Chu-yuan Lee is a Taiwanese architect born in Guangdong, Republic of China. He received his bachelor's degree from National Cheng Kung University and his master's from Princeton University in the US. He directed the design of Taipei 101, the world's tallest skyscraper at the time of completion, in 2004.

#1526

Antonio Nieto

#65607

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Antonio Nieto is an Earth Systems and Mining Engineer. Career Prof. Dr. Nieto is Director of the FLSmidth Mining and Minerals Technology and Research Center located in Salt Lake City, USA. Previously, Dr. Nieto served as Professor and JCI Chair in Minerals Resources and Reserves at The School of Mining Engineering, at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and as Associate Professor at Penn State, teaching courses on mining engineering, earth systems, economics engineering, computing modeling, sampling methods, and geostatistics. Prior to his academic and research career Nieto w...

#1527

Peter Swerling

#22907

Overall Influence

1929 - 2000 (71 years)

Peter Swerling was one of the most influential radar theoreticians in the second half of the 20th century. He is best known for the class of statistically "fluctuating target" scattering models he developed at the RAND Corporation in the early 1950s to characterize the performance of pulsed radar systems, referred to as Swerling Targets I, II, III, and IV in the literature of radar. Swerling also contributed to the optimal estimation of orbits of satellites and trajectories of missiles, anticipating the development of the Kalman filter. He also founded two companies, one of which continues hi...

#1528

Johann Borenstein

#62075

Overall Influence

Johann Borenstein is an Israeli roboticist and Professor at the University of Michigan. Borenstein is well known for his work in autonomous obstacle avoidance, and is credited with the development of the Vector Field Histogram.

#1529

Michael R. Hoffmann

#66091

Overall Influence

Michael R. Hoffmann is an American environmental engineer. He is currently the John S. and Sherry Chen Professor of Environmental Science at the California Institute of Technology. He is one of the most highly cited engineering researchers in the world.

#1530

Wael Ghonim

#4163

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Wael Ghonim is an Internet activist and computer engineer with an interest in social entrepreneurship. In 2011, he became an international figure and galvanized pro-democracy demonstrations in Egypt after his emotional interview following 11 days of secret incarceration by Egyptian police. During these 11 days, he was interrogated regarding his work as one of two administrators of the Facebook page, "We are all Khaled Said", which helped spark the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. Time magazine included him in its "Time 100" list of the 100 most influential people of 2011, and the World Economic F...

#1531

Jelena Kovačević

#45745

Overall Influence

Jelena Kovačević is a Serbian American engineering professor, whose research has focused on signal processing and data science. She was named the first female dean of the New York University Tandon School of Engineering at New York University in August 2018. In May 2023, she announced she will be stepping down effective August 2024.

#1532

Boris Murmann

#57605

Overall Influence

Boris Murmann is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at University of Hawaii. He is co-director and a founding faculty of the Stanford SystemX Alliance. He is the faculty director of Stanford's System Prototyping Facility .

#1533

Diane Lewis

#50404

Overall Influence

1951 - 2017 (66 years)

Diane Lewis was an American architect, author and academic. Biography Lewis received her bachelor's degree in architecture from Cooper Union in 1976. In 1977, Lewis was awarded the Rome Prize in architecture. Following her prestigious achievement she was employed at Richard Meier's office from 1977–78, followed by six years at I.M. Pei and Partners from 1978–83. Her mentor was the architect John Hejduk.

#1534

Felice Frankel

#28919

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Felice Frankel is a photographer of scientific images who has received multiple awards, both for the aesthetic quality of her science photographs and for her ability to effectively communicate complex scientific information in images.

#1535

Vasilis Ntziachristos

#40917

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Vasilis Ntziachristos is a Greek American biomedical engineer, scientist, and inventor best known for his development of fundamental and translational research tools for imaging tissues based on fluorescence and optoacoustics.

#1536

John Dixon Hunt

John Dixon Hunt

#22603

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

John Dixon Hunt is an English landscape historian whose academic career began with teaching English literature. He became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1994 and served as the department chair of landscape architecture and regional planning until June 2000, now being emeritus. One aspect of his work focuses on the time between the turn of the seventeenth through the end of the 18th centuries in France and England. He is the author of many articles, not only in landscape journals but also Apollo, Lincoln Center Theater Review, and Comparative Criticism, and chapters on topics including T.

#1537

Robert Kayen

#58691

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Robert Kayen is a civil engineer, geologist, and Industry Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He is a leading international expert in the fields of earthquake engineering, seismic soil liquefaction, and seismic displacement analysis of ground failures. Kayen's research focuses on geotechnical engineering, engineering characterization of natural hazards and extreme events, and earth science aspects of civil engineering. His works have been applied in earthquake engineering design of improved ground, building foundations, ...

#1538

Sorab K. Ghandhi

Sorab K. Ghandhi

#65071

Overall Influence

1928 - 2018 (90 years)

Sorab K. Ghandhi was a professor Emeritus at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute known for his pioneering work in electrical engineering and microelectronics education, and in the research and development of Organometallic Vapor Phase Epitaxy for compound semiconductors. He was the recipient of the IEEE Education Award "For pioneering contributions to semiconductor and microelectronics education" in 2010.

#1539

Sheila O'Donnell

#47099

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Sheila O'Donnell is an Irish architect who co-founded the O'Donnell & Tuomey partnership in 1988. Her work has been cited as "thoughtful and inspired, rigorous and whimsical" by her Honorary Fellowship sponsor.

#1540

Henrik Lund

#41147

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Henrik Lund is a Danish engineer and professor at Aalborg University. Life and research activity Lund studied engineering at Aalborg university and other universities and obtained a Master's degree in 1985. In 1990 he finished his PhD and in 2009 he became Dr.Techn. In 1990 he was named assistant professor at Aalborg University, got associate professor in 1993 and became full professor in 2006.

#1541

Kit Parker

#32524

Overall Influence

Kevin Kit Parker is a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army Reserve and the Tarr Family Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics at Harvard University. His research includes cardiac cell biology and tissue engineering, traumatic brain injury, and biological applications of micro- and nanotechnologies. Additional work in his laboratory has included fashion design, marine biology, and the application of counterinsurgency methods to countering transnational organized crime.

#1542

Alexis Belonio

#50771

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Alexis T. Belonio is a professor, engineer, scientist, innovator and inventor from the Philippines. He was "the first Filipino to receive the Rolex Award for Enterprise" in 2008 for his invention of a low-cost and environment friendly rice husk stove. Belonio was included by the Rolex watchmaking company on its list of 10 model innovators in November 2008. He serves as the incumbent chair of the Agricultural Engineering and Environmental Management department of Central Philippine University.

#1543

Michelle Effros

#25119

Overall Influence

Michelle Effros is the George Van Osdol Professor of Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. She has made significant contributions to data compression. Early life and education Effros earned her bachelor's degree at Stanford University in 1989. She was awarded the Stanford University Frederick Emmons Terman Engineering Scholastic Award for excellence in engineering. She remained there for her graduate studies, earning a master's degree in 1990 and a PhD in 1994. She worked under the supervision of Robert M. Gray. She spent 1988 and 1989 at Hughes Aircraft Company, studying modulation schemes and future space technology.

#1544

J. Mordaunt Crook

J. Mordaunt Crook

#37869

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Joseph Mordaunt Crook, , generally known as J. Mordaunt Crook, is an English architectural historian and specialist on the Georgian and Victorian periods. He is an authority on the life and work of the Victorian architect William Burges, his biography published in 1981, and reissued in 2013, has been described as "one of the most substantial studies of any Victorian architect".

#1545

Italo Rota

#43259

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Italo Rota is an Italian architect. Biography Born in Milan in 1953, he obtained a degree in Architecture at Milan Polytechnic University in 1982. Before that, he had started off in the architecture firms of Franco Albini and Vittorio Gregotti. During his four-year apprenticeship with Gregotti, he worked on his project for the Calabria University . He took part in the publishing of the magazine Lotus International in collaboration with architect Pierluigi Nicolin. Following this experience, the press and books became particularly important in Rota’s life, leading him to the development of a personal collection.

#1546

Robert Legget

#36350

Overall Influence

1904 - 1994 (90 years)

Robert Ferguson Legget was a civil engineer, historian and non-fiction writer. He is internationally known for his contributions to engineering, geology and building research and standardization. He is credited with the establishment of co-operation among Canadian geotechnical engineers, geologists and pedologists.

#1547

Taylor Hardwick

Taylor Hardwick

#22236

Overall Influence

1925 - 2014 (89 years)

Taylor Hardwick was an American architect, interior designer, filmmaker, and educator who designed hundreds of buildings throughout northeast Florida, predominantly in and near the city of Jacksonville.

#1548

Ashton Graybiel

#75937

Overall Influence

#1549

George Z. Voyiadjis

#64206

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

George Zino Voyiadjis is an American civil engineer. He has been on the faculty of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, since 1980, and is Boyd Professor and Bingham C. Stewart Distinguished Professor in its department of civil and environmental engineering. He specializes in mechanics of materials and damage mechanics, and the numerical modeling thereof.

#1550

Ralph Semmel

#46970

Overall Influence

Ralph D. Semmel is an American engineer and computer scientist. He became the eighth director of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland on July 1, 2010. Biography A native of Monroe, New York, Semmel earned a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering from the United States Military Academy at West Point, a Master of Science degree in systems management from the University of Southern California, a Master of Science degree in computer science from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

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