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,

#1651

Jonathan Miller

Jonathan Miller

#1217

Overall Influence

1934 - 2019 (85 years)

Sir Jonathan Wolfe Miller CBE was an English theatre and opera director, actor, author, television presenter, humourist and physician. After training in medicine and specialising in neurology in the late 1950s, he came to prominence in the early 1960s in the comedy revue Beyond the Fringe with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett.

#1652

João Filgueiras Lima

João Filgueiras Lima

#71512

Overall Influence

1931 - 2014 (83 years)

João Filgueiras Lima was a Brazilian architect, also known as Lelé. He won the Grand Prize of the Biennale of Architecture an Engineering in Madrid to Mexico.

#1653

Aylin Yener

#41919

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Aylin Yener holds the Roy and Lois Chope Chair in engineering at Ohio State University, and she is currently the President of the IEEE Information Theory Society. Dr. Yener is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Professor of Integrated Systems Engineering, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Affiliated Faculty at the Sustainability Institute, and Affiliated Faculty at the Translational Data Analytics Institute, all at Ohio State University.

#1654

Bahram Javidi

#78633

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

#1655

Gabriel Guarda

#61268

Overall Influence

1928 - 2020 (92 years)

Gabriel Guarda , was a Chilean historian and architect. Career He studied architecture at the Catholic University of Chile. He was part of the editorial committee of the journal Historia after it was established in 1961. In 1984, he received the Chilean National History Award.

#1656

Günter Blöschl

#51711

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Professor Günter Blöschl is an Austrian hydrologist, engineer and academic. In 2020, Blöschl was elected as a member of the US National Academy of Engineering for international leadership in the prediction and management of extreme hydrological events.

#1657

Dell K. Allen

#77535

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Dell K. Allen is an American engineer, and Professor Emeritus of manufacturing engineering at Brigham Young University . The Society of Manufacturing Engineers named their Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award after him.

#1658

Mick Rock

#4020

Overall Influence

1948 - 2021 (73 years)

Michael David Rock was a British photographer. He photographed rock music acts such as Queen, David Bowie, Waylon Jennings, T. Rex, Syd Barrett, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and The Stooges, The Sex Pistols, Ozzy Osbourne, The Ramones, Joan Jett, Talking Heads, Roxy Music, Thin Lizzy, Geordie, Mötley Crüe, Blondie and Third Eye Blind. Often referred to as "The Man Who Shot the Seventies", he shot most of the memorable photos of Bowie as Ziggy Stardust in his capacity as Bowie's official photographer. Rock's work is held in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

#1659

Steven P. DenBaars

Steven P. DenBaars

#75333

Overall Influence

Steven P. DenBaars is an American material scientist, electrical engineer, and academic. He is a professor of Materials and Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the executive director of the Solid State Lighting and Energy Electronics Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also a Fellow of National Academy of Inventors , and was selected as a Member of National Academy of Engineering in 2012 for contributions to gallium nitride-based materials and devices for solid state lighting and displays.

#1660

Sarah Wigglesworth

#49841

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Sarah Wigglesworth MBE RDI is a British award-winning architect and was a Professor of Architecture at the University of Sheffield until 2016. Career Wigglesworth founded Sarah Wigglesworth Architects in 1994. Her practice has a reputation for sustainable architecture and an interest in using alternative, low energy materials. One of the practice's best known buildings is the Straw Bale House in Islington, London. The building was designed as a house for Wigglesworth and her partner Jeremy Till, and an office occupied by Sarah Wigglesworth Architects, using straw bales, cement-filled sandbags, silicon-faced fibreglass cloth and gabions filled with recycled concrete.

#1661

Hassan Niknafs

#60626

Overall Influence

Hassan Niknafs is an Iranian Azerbaijani mechanical engineer and academic administrator. He became president of Khazar University in 2015. Niknafs was dean of the school of engineering and applied sciences at Khazar University from 2013 to 2015.

#1662

Martin Smith

#66189

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Martin Smith is a former Professor of Robotics at Middlesex University in north London, UK. He is also a former President of the Cybernetics Society in the UK . Smith was awarded Freedom of the City of London, and was awarded the Public Awareness of Physics Award by the Institute of Physics.

#1663

James Longuski

#46387

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

James Michael Longuski is an American scientist, inventor, writer, and educator known for his contributions to astrodynamics and space mission design. After working as a space mission designer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA, Longuski has served as a professor at Purdue University School of Aeronautics and Astronautics since 1988.

#1664

Jean-Baptiste Waldner

#30388

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Jean-Baptiste Waldner is a French engineer, management consultant and author, known for his contributions in the fields of computer-integrated manufacturing, enterprise architecture, nanoelectronics, nanocomputers and swarm intelligence.

#1665

Dan Meis

#37283

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Dan Meis, FAIA, RIBA is an American architect best known for designing sports and entertainment facilities including Staples Center, Safeco Field, Paycor Stadium, Stadio Della Roma, and Everton FC's new Everton Stadium. He began his career in Chicago under the mentorship of well-known architect Helmut Jahn, and later included time at sports architecture firms, including co-founding the sports and entertainment practice of NBBJ. Meis currently operates his own independent studio established in 2007, MEIS Architects, with offices in New York City and Los Angeles, California.

#1666

Anita Berrizbeitia

#44605

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Anita de la Rosa Berrizbeitia is a landscape theorist, teacher, and author. She continues to play an integral role in the renewed visibility of landscape architecture as a cultural practice. She is currently professor of landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and previous chair of the department of landscape architecture. Appointed in 2015, she served as the 14th chair of the oldest landscape architecture department in the world and only the second female to hold the position. Prior to coming to Harvard University she was the associate chair of landscape architectur...

#1667

Catherine Opie

#14302

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Catherine Sue Opie is an American fine-art photographer and educator. She lives and works in Los Angeles, as a professor of photography at University of California at Los Angeles. Opie studies the connections between mainstream and infrequent society. By specializing in portraiture, studio, and landscape photography, she is able to create pieces relating to sexual identity. Through photography, Opie, documents the relationship between the individual and the space inhabited, offering an exploration of the American identity, particularly probing the tensions between the constructed American dream and the diverse realities of its citizens.

#1668

Antonio Attolini Lack

#57066

Overall Influence

1931 - 2012 (81 years)

José Antonio Attolini Lack was a Mexican architect. Biography Attolini graduated at the Faculty of Architecture of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City in December 1955. He has designed several recognized commercial and religious buildings, as well as accommodation buildings. The first buildings he realized predominantly in Mexico City, in León and in Cuernavaca. Since 1955 he has been professor of architecture at the Faculty of Architecture of the UNAM. After 1970 he also lectured at the Universidad La Salle and later also at the Universidad Anáhuac del Sur. He is emeritus member of the Academia Mexicana de Arquitectura.

#1669

Peter Bohlin

#32756

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Peter Q. Bohlin is an American architect and the winner of the 2010 Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and a founding principal of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, established originally in 1965 as Bohlin Powell in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

#1670

Richard Grimsdale

#41494

Overall Influence

1929 - 2005 (76 years)

Richard Lawrence Grimsdale was a British electrical engineer and computer pioneer who helped to design the world's first transistorised computer. Early life and education Richard Lawrence Grimsdale was born on 18 September 1929 in Australia, where his father, an English engineer, was working on construction of the suburban railway system for the Metropolitan-Vickers company. The family returned to England, where he was educated at Manchester Grammar School, and then studied electrical engineering at the University of Manchester, where he earned his Bachelor of Science, his Master of Science i...

#1671

Ning Xiang

#48378

Overall Influence

Ning Xiang is a Chinese-American acoustical physicist, former Research Engineer of HEAD acoustics, and former Research Scientist of Fraunhofer Institut fuer Bauphysik, and of National Center for Physical Acoustics . He is now Director and full professor of the Graduate Program in Architectural Acoustics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

#1672

Kartik Chandran

#19557

Overall Influence

Kartik Chandran is an American environmental engineer at Columbia University, where he is a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering. He primarily works on the interface between environmental molecular and microbiology, environmental biotechnology and environmental engineering. The focus of his research is on elucidating the molecular microbial ecology and metabolic pathways of the microbial nitrogen cycle. Applications of his work have ranged from energy and resource efficient treatment of nitrogen containing wastewater streams, development and implementation of sustainable approaches to sanitation to novel models for resource recovery.

#1673

Arthur Leissa

#75283

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Arthur W. Leissa is an American scientist specializing in the vibrations and dynamics of continuous systems fields. Education Arthur Leissa went to the Ohio State University as an undergraduate, earning bachelor's and master's degrees in mechanical engineering in 1954. He worked for a year in industry before returning to Ohio State for doctoral studies. He completed his Ph.D. in 1958, and remained at Ohio State as a faculty member. At the time of his promotion to full professor in 1964, he was the youngest full professor at the university.

#1674

Erich Barke

#41149

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Erich Barke is a German emeritus professor of microelectronics. From 2005 to 2014, he was president of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität Hannover. Until December 2014, he was also president of the Niedersächsische Technische Hochschule .

#1675

Lyesse Laloui

#76533

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Lyesse Laloui, is a Swiss engineer and Professor at EPFL, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. He is Chair full Professor of Soil Mechanics, Geo-Engineering and Storage at EPFL's School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering and is the Director of the Soil Mechanics Laboratory

#1676

Pallavi Tiwari

#54157

Overall Influence

Pallavi Tiwari is an Indian American biomedical engineer who is a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research considers the development of computer algorithms to accelerate the diagnosis and treatment of disease. She was elected Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.

#1677

Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan

Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan

#16539

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan is an Indian-American scientist. He is currently the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Physics at Harvard University. His work centers around understanding the organization of matter in space and time . Mahadevan is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow.

#1678

Roma Agrawal

#29539

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

Roma Agrawal is an Indian-British-American chartered structural engineer based in London. She has worked on several major engineering projects, including the Shard. Agrawal is also an author and a diversity campaigner, championing women in engineering.

#1679

Giancarlo Genta

#40421

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Giancarlo Genta is Professor of Machine Design and Construction at the Polytechnic University of Turin. His areas of professional interest include vibration, vehicle design, magnetic bearings, and rotordynamics. He has written or co-authored more than 50 articles in professional publications. He has published extensively in the field of SETI research.

#1680

Peter Kyberd

#42642

Overall Influence

Peter Kyberd is a biomedical engineer specialising in rehabilitation. He is currently head of the School of the Built and Natural Environment at University of Derby. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Prosthetics and Orthotics, and the executive board of the national members society of the International Society of Prosthetics and Orthotics . His main research activity has been the practical application of technology to rehabilitation and engineering in Orthopaedics. He has chaired both international upper limb research conferences; MEC and TIPS.

#1681

Shen Zuyan

#47560

Overall Influence

1935 - 2017 (82 years)

Shen Zuyan was a Chinese structural engineer known for his studies on structural steel. He served as Vice President of Tongji University and was an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

#1682

John Kim

#48197

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Jeongbin John Kim is the Rockwell International Distinguished Professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, since 1993. He currently resides in Calabasas, California.

#1683

Yoshino Ōishi

#41265

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Yoshino Ōishi is a Japanese photojournalist. Ōishi was born in Suginami-ku, Tokyo on 28 May 1944. Seeing Melanesian art while at Nihon University had a big effect on her, as did a visit to Vietnam and Cambodia in 1966. After graduating in photography, she became a freelance photojournalist, working in west Africa, southeast Asia, and Europe. In 1971 she held an exhibition in the Nikon Salon of photographs of a Ghanaian child growing up in Nagano; she then spent three years photographing New Guinea. She worked on portraiture, and documented the effects of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the effect...

#1684

Thomas Sieverts

#39923

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Thomas Sieverts is a German architect and urban planner. He is the author of Zwischenstadt , a book which addresses the decentralization of the compact historical European city and examines the new form of urbanity which has spread across the world describable as the urbanised landscape or the landscaped city. Sieverts calls this the Zwischenstadt, or "in-between city", as it exists between old historical city centres and open countrysides, between place as a living space and the non-places of movement, between small local economic cycles and the dependency on the world market. In 2008 a gr...

#1685

Barouh Berkovits

#24725

Overall Influence

1926 - 2012 (86 years)

Barouh Vojtec Berkovits was one of the pioneers of bio-engineering, particularly the cardiac defibrillator and artificial cardiac pacemaker. In particular, Berkovits invented the "demand pacemaker" and the DC defibrillator.

#1686

James E. Mark

#53755

Overall Influence

1934 - 2017 (83 years)

James E. Mark was a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Cincinnati. Mark made important contributions to understanding the physical chemistry of polymers. His contributions included models of the elasticity of polymer networks, hybrid organic-inorganic composites, liquid-crystalline polymers, and a variety of computer simulations.

#1687

Seth A. Hutchinson

#58341

Overall Influence

Seth A. Hutchinson is an American electrical and computer engineer. He is the Executive Director of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is also Professor and KUKA Chair for Robotics in the School of Interactive Computing. His research in robotics spans the areas of planning, sensing, and control. He has published widely on these topics, and is coauthor of the books "Robot Modeling and Control," published by Wiley, Principles of Robot Motion - Theory, Algorithms, and Implementations, with Howie Choset, Kevin M. Lynch, George Kantor, Wolfram Burgard, Lydia E.

#1688

Jürgen Rödel

#30679

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Jürgen Rödel is a German materials scientist and professor of non-metallic inorganic materials at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. He is particularly well known for his fundamental and pioneering work on the mechanical and functional properties of ceramics. This includes his research work on the sintering behaviour of ceramics and the development of lead-free piezoceramics. Until then, lead-free piezo materials were considered impossible. Through meticulous research, he found the first lead-free systems with "Giant" elongation. In 2008, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, th...

#1689

Elizabeth G. Loboa

#57577

Overall Influence

Elizabeth G. Loboa is an American biomedical engineer, inventor, researcher and academic administrator currently serving at Southern Methodist University as provost and vice president for academic affairs.

#1690

Bruno Vallespir

#42665

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Bruno Vallespir is a French engineer, and Professor of Enterprise Modelling at the University of Bordeaux, working in the fields of production management, performance evaluation and enterprise modeling.

#1691

Bill English

#10904

Overall Influence

1929 - 2020 (91 years)

William Kirk English was an American computer engineer who contributed to the development of the computer mouse while working for Douglas Engelbart at SRI International's Augmentation Research Center. He would later work for Xerox PARC and Sun Microsystems.

#1692

Pınar Keskinocak

#40455

Overall Influence

Pınar Keskinocak is a Turkish-American systems engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she is William W. George Chair, Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems, and College of Engineering ADVANCE Professor. Her research involves the application of operations research and management science to health care and supply-chain management. She is the former president of INFORMS.

#1693

Hiroshi Inose

#26196

Overall Influence

1927 - 2000 (73 years)

was a Japanese electrical engineer, known as the inventor of the Time-Slot Interchange system , which is basic to modern digital telephone switches. Inose was highly involved within his career. He held positions such as director general, chairman, associate professor, and president specific committees pertaining to engineering and technology. He was awarded with many honorific titles. In 1976 he received the Marconi Prize, in 1993 the Harold Pender Award, and in 1994 the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal.

#1694

Anthony E. Siegman

#68399

Overall Influence

1931 - 2011 (80 years)

Anthony E. Siegman was an electrical engineer and educator at Stanford University who investigated and taught about masers and lasers. Known to almost all as Tony Siegman, he was president of the Optical Society of America [now Optica ] in 1999 and was awarded the Esther Hoffman Beller Medal in 2009.

#1695

Akhilesh K. Gaharwar

Akhilesh K. Gaharwar

#53893

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (42 years)

Akhilesh K. Gaharwar is an Indian academic and a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University. The goal of his lab is to understand the cell-nanomaterials interactions and to develop nanoengineered strategies for modulating stem cell behavior for repair and regeneration of damaged tissue.

#1696

Wing-kam Liu

#79573

Overall Influence

#1697

Nancy J. Currie-Gregg

#58857

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Nancy Jane Currie-Gregg is an American engineer, United States Army officer and a NASA astronaut. Currie-Gregg has served in the United States Army for over 22 years and holds the rank of colonel. With NASA, she has participated in four space shuttle missions: STS-57, STS-70, STS-88, and STS-109, accruing 1,000 hours in space. She currently holds an appointment as a professor of practice in the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering at Texas A&M University.

#1698

John Price Hirth

#79659

Overall Influence

#1699

Hideo Itokawa

#28272

Overall Influence

1912 - 1999 (87 years)

was a pioneer of Japanese rocketry, popularly known as "Dr. Rocket," and described in the media as the father of Japan's space development. The near-Earth asteroid 25143 Itokawa was named in honor of Itokawa, and is notable as the target of the Hayabusa mission.

#1700

Tom Husband

#47126

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Thomas Mutrie Husband FREng was a Scottish engineer, and was the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Salford from 1990 to 1997. Life and career Thomas Mutrie Husband was born in Glasgow on 7 July 1936. He was educated at Shawlands Academy, then went straight from school to a 5-year trade apprenticeship as a marine engine fitter at the Weir Group in Cathcart, Glasgow. On completion and with a Higher National Certificate he was sponsored by Weir to take a sandwich-structured BSc degree in Mechanical Engineering at Strathclyde University. He worked as a manager and project engineer at Weir having graduated in 1961.

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