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,

#1701

Alberto Diaspro

#68918

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Alberto Diaspro is an Italian scientist. He received his doctoral degree in electronic engineering from the university of Genoa, Italy, in 1983. He is full professor in applied physics at university of Genoa. He is research director of Nanoscopy Italian Institute of Technology. Alberto Diaspro is President of the Italian biophysical society SIBPA. In 2022 he got the Gregorio Weber Award for excellence in fluorescence.

#1702

Monica Grady

#20740

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Monica Mary Grady, CBE , is a leading British space scientist, primarily known for her work on meteorites. She is currently Professor of Planetary and Space Science at the Open University and is also the Chancellor of Liverpool Hope University.

#1703

Maarten Steinbuch

Maarten Steinbuch

#67818

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Maarten Steinbuch is a high-tech systems scientist, entrepreneur and communicator. He holds the chair of Systems & Control at Eindhoven University of Technology , where he is Distinguished University Professor. His research spans from automotive engineering to mechatronics, motion control, and fusion plasma control. He is most known for his work in the field of advanced motion control, as well as in robotics for high precision surgery. Steinbuch is a prolific blogger and a key opinion leader on the influence of new technologies on society. He is well known as an advocate of electric vehicles...

#1704

Richard Baraniuk

Richard Baraniuk

#29945

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Richard G. Baraniuk is the C. Sidney Burrus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University and the Founder and Director of the open education initiative OpenStax . Academic biography Dr. Baraniuk received a B.Sc. from the University of Manitoba in 1987 and a M.Sc. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1988. He earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1992 under the supervision of Douglas L. Jones. After spending 1992-1993 at École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France working with Patrick Flandrin, he joined Rice Un...

#1705

J.a.k. Suykens J. Vandewalle

#79823

Overall Influence

#1706

Kurt Kosanke

#54984

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Kurt Kosanke is a German engineer, retired IBM manager, director of the AMICE Consortium and consultant, known for his work in the field of enterprise engineering, Enterprise integration and CIMOSA.

#1707

Franco Purini

#67608

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Franco Purini, born as Francesco Purini , is an Italian architect, essayist, and university professor. He has designed many buildings, including the Torre Eurosky in Rome. He studied architecture in Rome with , earning his degree in 1971, spending his free time in the company of Franco Libertucci, Achille Perilli, and Lorenzo Taiuti.

#1708

Moeness Amin

#54493

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Moeness G. Amin is an Egyptian-American professor and engineer. Amin is the director of the Center for Advanced Communications and a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Villanova University.

#1709

Morris W. Lev

#80024

Overall Influence

#1710

Emmanouil Korres

Emmanouil Korres

#54085

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Emmanouil Korres is a major Greek restoration architect, civil engineer and professor of architectural history at postgraduate studies at the National Technical University of Athens. Currently he is head of the Acropolis Restoration Service and a casual member of the Academy of Athens since 2017.

#1711

A. W. Kuchler

#5772

Overall Influence

1907 - 1999 (92 years)

August William Kuchler was a German-born American geographer and naturalist who is noted for developing a plant association system that has become widely used in the United States. Some of this database has been digitized for integration into GIS mapping systems. Kuchler received his Ph.D. in geography from the University of Munich in 1935. In 1978, he received the Association of American Geographers' Honors award. He is the author of the book Vegetation Mapping.

#1712

He Tian

#80261

Overall Influence

#1713

Fan Lichu

#47453

Overall Influence

1933 - 2016 (83 years)

Fan Lichu was a Chinese structural engineer, bridge specialist, and academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering . Biography Fan was born in Shanghai on 8 June 1933. He obtained a bachelor's degree of bridge and tunnel engineering from Tongji University in 1955. He became a teaching assistant in Tongji University after his graduation. Working under Li Guohao, Fan's research was mainly in the field of bridge structural engineer. He provided aseismic design and analysis for bridges such as Nanpu Bridge, Yangpu Bridge, Donghai Bridge, Sutong Yangtze River Bridge, Jiangyin Yangtze River Brid...

#1714

Peter Clarricoats

#68436

Overall Influence

1932 - 2020 (88 years)

Peter John Bell Clarricoats CBE, FREng, FRS was a British engineer, and was professor of electronic engineering at Queen Mary, University of London from 1968 to 1997. Clarricoats had begun his academic career in 1959 as a lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast, followed by a move in 1961 to the University of Sheffield. He was appointed as a professor at the University of Leeds in 1963, which made him the youngest professor in his field at the time. He received his PhD from the University of London in 1958, with a thesis entitled "Properties of waveguides containing ferrites with special refer...

#1715

Kaustav Banerjee

#55064

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Kaustav Banerjee is a professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the Nanoelectronics Research Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He obtained Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering and computer sciences from the University of California. He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2012 "for contributions to modeling and design of nanoscale integrated circuit interconnects." One of Banerjee's notable doctoral student is Deblina Sarkar, who later joined the faculty of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The jour...

#1716

Walter Haeussermann

Walter Haeussermann

#34265

Overall Influence

1914 - 2010 (96 years)

Walter Haeussermann was a German-American aerospace engineer and member of the "von Braun rocket group", both at Peenemünde and later at Marshall Space Flight Center, where he was the director of the guidance and control laboratory. He was awarded the Department of the Army Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service in 1959 for his contributions to the US rocket program.

#1717

Vijay Kumar

#80417

Overall Influence

#1718

Nasir Ahmed

#20336

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Nasir Ahmed is an Indian-American electrical engineer and computer scientist. He is Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of New Mexico . He is best known for inventing the discrete cosine transform in the early 1970s. The DCT is the most widely used data compression transformation, the basis for most digital media standards and commonly used in digital signal processing. He also described the discrete sine transform , which is related to the DCT.

#1719

Susan Landau

#10708

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

#1720

Geert Bekaert

#44285

Overall Influence

1928 - 2016 (88 years)

Geert Bekaert was a Belgian architectural critic and writer on art and design. He was one of the most prolific non-fiction writers in the Dutch language of the late 20th-century. As a young man he was for some years a member of the Society of Jesus.

#1721

Stephen Hodder

#42945

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Stephen Hodder is an English architect who won the RIBA's Stirling Prize in 1996. He is also a partner at his own practice Hodder Associates which was founded in 1992 in Manchester. In 2012 Hodder was elected for a two-year term as the president of the RIBA .

#1722

Pierre Carreau

#68355

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Pierre J. Carreau is a rheologist, the author of the model of Carreau fluid. He is a professor emeritus at École Polytechnique in Montreal and the founding director of CREPEC . Pierre Carreau is internationally known for his research work on the rheology of polymers, an area in which he co-authored two books and published more than 160 scientific articles, most in leading scientific journals. His best known works on rheological equations and conformation models for polymer systems are considered benchmarks in polymer engineering. The so-called Carreau Viscosity Model is now part of most softwa...

#1723

Charles Bernard Higgins

#80594

Overall Influence

#1724

Ralph Wesley Phillips

#80610

Overall Influence

#1725

Makoto Shinkai

#2803

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Makoto Niitsu, known as Makoto Shinkai, is a Japanese animator, filmmaker, author, and manga artist. Shinkai began his career as a video game animator with Nihon Falcom in 1996, and gained recognition as a filmmaker with the release of the original video animation She and Her Cat . Beginning his longstanding association with CoMix Wave Films, Shinkai then released the science-fiction OVA Voices of a Distant Star in 2002, and followed this with his debut feature film The Place Promised in Our Early Days .

#1726

Alec D. Gallimore

#62042

Overall Influence

Alec Damian Gallimore is an American aerospace engineer, currently serving as Provost of Duke University as of July 2023. Prior to assuming the role of provost at Duke, Gallimore served as the Robert J. Vlasic Dean of Engineering and the Richard F. and Eleanor A. Towner Professor of Engineering of the University of Michigan College of Engineering. He founded the Plasmadynamics and Electric Propulsion Laboratory in 1992.

#1727

Gérard Maugin

#69882

Overall Influence

1944 - 2016 (72 years)

Gérard A. Maugin was a French engineering scientist. Maugin acquired his engineering degree in mechanical engineering in 1966 at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Arts et Métiers and he continued his studies at the school of aeronautics Sup Aéro in Paris until 1968. In 1966 he worked for the French Ministry of Defence on ballistic missiles. In 1968 he received his degree in hydrodynamics in Paris. In 1969, he earned his master's degree from Princeton University, where he graduated in 1971 . He was a NASA International Fellow between 1968 and 1970. In 1971/72 he was an officer in the French Air Force.

#1728

Ramesh Jain

#78389

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Ramesh Chandra Jain is a scientist and entrepreneur in the field of information and computer science. He is a Bren Professor in Information & Computer Sciences, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine.

#1729

Fritz Auer

#70382

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Fritz Auer , is a German architect, the founder and senior partner of Auer+Weber+Assoziierte. Career 1953–1962 studied at TH Stuttgart 1958–1959 Scholarship to Cranbrook Academy of Arts, Bloomfield Hill, Michigan, USA, Master of Architecture1962 graduated from TH Stuttgart1960–1965 Behnisch and Lambart, Stuttgart1965 Yamasaki+Associates, Birmingham, Michigan, USA1966–1979 Partner in Behnisch & Partner, and designed Olympiapark in Munichsince 1980 Office Auer+Weber with Carlo Weber1985–1992 Professor of Munich University of Applied Sciences1993–2001 Profes...

#1730

Scott W. Sloan

#68723

Overall Influence

1946 - 2019 (73 years)

Scott William Sloan FRS FREng FAA FTSE was laureate Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Newcastle. Education Sloan was educated at Monash University where he was awarded Bachelor of Engineering and Master of Engineering degrees. He went on to study at the University of Cambridge where he was awarded a PhD in 1981 for numerical analysis of incompressible and plastic solids using finite elements.

#1731

Karl Henrik Johansson

#78049

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Karl Henrik Johansson is a Swedish researcher and best known for his pioneering contributions to networked control systems, cyber-physical systems, and hybrid systems. His research has had particular application impact in transportation, automation, and energy networks. He holds a Chaired Professorship in Networked Control at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. He is Director of KTH Digital Futures.

#1732

Ken Smith

#44546

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Ken Smith is an internationally acclaimed American landscape architect. Biography Kenneth W. Smith was born in Waukee, Iowa, and attended Iowa State University, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture in 1976. After graduation, he apprenticed with sculptor Paul Shao, and worked for the Iowa Conservation Commission in Parks and Recreation Planning. He attended the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and received his Master in Landscape Architecture in 1986.

#1733

Dennis S. Bernstein

#80832

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

#1734

Eduardo Kausel

#68398

Overall Influence

Eduardo Kausel is a Chilean-born, American engineering scientist who has made significant contributions in the fields of soil dynamics, structural dynamics, wave propagation, and engineering mechanics.

#1735

Tapan Kumar Sarkar

#80891

Overall Influence

#1736

Eric J. Hill

#43371

Overall Influence

Eric J. Hill, Ph.D., FAIA, is a Professor of Practice in Architecture at the University of Michigan. He earned his bachelor's degree in Architecture in 1970 from the University of Pennsylvania, a Masters in Architecture from Harvard in 1972, and a Ph.D in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania in 1976. He was a Marshall Research Fellow at Denmark's Royal Academy of Fine Arts from 1972 to 1973. He is the co-author, along with John Gallagher, of AIA Detroit: The American Institute of Architects Guide to Detroit Architecture. He has served as a Director of Urban Planning and Design at the Detroit firm of Albert Kahn Associates.

#1737

Dietmar Feichtinger

#31653

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Dietmar Feichtinger is an Austrian architect established since 1989 in Paris. Biography After graduating in 1988 from the Technical University of Graz with honors, he moved to Paris in 1989 where he founded the studio Dietmar Feichtinger Architectes in 1994. Today, the firm has 35 employees. A wide range of buildings have been built by the company in Europe including schools, pools, office buildings and housing.

#1738

Guyford Stever

#37775

Overall Influence

1916 - 2010 (94 years)

Horton Guyford Stever was an American administrator, physicist, educator, and engineer. He was a director of the National Science Foundation . Biography Stever was raised in Corning, New York, principally by his maternal grandmother. He played football in high school. He graduated from Colgate University with an undergraduate degree in physics and then from California Institute of Technology in 1941 with a PhD in physics. He joined the staff of the radiation lab at MIT. In 1942 he began serving the military as a civilian scientific liaison officer based in London, England until the end of World War II.

#1739

Milivoje Kostic

Milivoje Kostic

#63767

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Milivoje Kostic , is a Serbian-American thermodynamicist and professor emeritus of mechanical engineering at Northern Illinois University, Licensed Professional Engineer in Illinois, and Editor-in-Chief of the Thermodynamics section of the journal Entropy. He is an expert in energy fundamentals and applications, including nanotechnology, with emphasis on efficiency, efficient energy use and energy conservation, and environment and sustainability.

#1740

Iannis Xenakis

#13196

Overall Influence

1922 - 2001 (79 years)

Giannis Klearchou Xenakis was a Romanian-born Greek-French communist avant-garde composer, music theorist, architect, performance director and engineer. After 1947, he fled Greece, becoming a naturalised citizen of France eighteen years later. Xenakis pioneered the use of mathematical models in music such as applications of set theory, stochastic processes and game theory and was also an important influence on the development of electronic and computer music. He integrated music with architecture, designing music for pre-existing spaces, and designing spaces to be integrated with specific mus...

#1741

John Friedmann

#21337

Overall Influence

1926 - 2017 (91 years)

John Friedmann was an Honorary Professor in the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and Professor Emeritus at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. He was the founding professor of the Program for Urban Planning in the Graduate School of Architecture and Planning at UCLA and served as its head for a total of 14 years between 1969 and 1996.

#1742

Dorit S. Hochbaum

#31129

Overall Influence

Dorit S. Hochbaum is a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her work on approximation algorithms, particularly for facility location, covering and packing problems, and scheduling, and on flow and cut algorithms, Markov random fields, image segmentation and clustering.

#1743

David K. Cheng

#66205

Overall Influence

1917 - 2012 (95 years)

David Keun Cheng was a Chinese-born Professor of Electrical Engineering. He was known for his work in the field of electromagnetics. His 1983 undergraduate textbook Field and Wave Electromagnetics has been cited in more than 4000 publications and in 2016 is in the collections of about 500 libraries around the world.

#1744

Timo Penttilä

#34458

Overall Influence

1931 - 2011 (80 years)

Timo Jussi Penttilä was one of Finland's most important modernist architects and was for over 15 years a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in Austria. He is most renowned for the design of the Helsinki City Theatre .

#1745

Stephen Quake

#75731

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Stephen Ronald Quake is an American physicist, inventor, and entrepreneur. Education and Career Quake earned his B.S. in physics and M.S. in mathematics from Stanford in 1991 and his D.Phil. in theoretical physics from Oxford University in 1994 as a Marshall Scholar. His thesis research was in statistical mechanics and the effects of knots on polymers. He did his postdoctoral work at Stanford in single-molecule biophysics with Steven Chu. Quake joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology at the age of 26, where he rose through the ranks and was ultimately appointed the Thomas and Doris Everhart Professor of Applied Physics and Physics.

#1746

Gábor Stépán

#52242

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Gábor Stépán , Hungarian professor of applied mechanics, member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, fellow of the International Academy for Production Engineering , fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics , former dean of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Won the Széchenyi Prize in 2011, the Thomas K. Caughey Dynamics Award in 2015, and the Delay Systems Lifetime Achievements Award in 2021. His research fields include nonlinear vibrations, delay-differential equations, and stability theory. He was elected as a...

#1747

Roger Ebert

#1067

Overall Influence

1942 - 2013 (71 years)

Roger Joseph Ebert was an American film critic, film historian, journalist, essayist, screenwriter, and author. He was a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, Ebert became the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times said Ebert "was without question the nation's most prominent and influential film critic," and Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times called him "the best-known film critic in America."

#1748

Barry Onouye

#75725

Overall Influence

Barry Onouye is a structural engineer, emeritus faculty member in the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington, and author of multiple textbooks on structural engineering and design.

#1749

Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu

#37333

Overall Influence

Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu, is a Ghanaian robotics engineer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the chief engineer and technical group leader for the mobility and manipulation group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory He has been associated with various NASA Mars missions, notably the Mars Rover and InSight projects.

#1750

Raphael Haftka

#77135

Overall Influence

1944 - 2020 (76 years)

Raphael T. Haftka was an American engineer, a Distinguished Professor at University of Florida and an Elected Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

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