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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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Person Name

School

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Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Engineering,

#1751

K. J. Ray Liu

#64700

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

K. J. Ray Liu is an American scientist, engineer, educator, and entrepreneur. He is the founder, former Chief Executive Officer, and now Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of Origin Wireless, Inc., which pioneers artificial intelligence analytics for wireless sensing and indoor tracking.

#1752

Victoria Chibuogu Nneji

#34301

Overall Influence

Victoria Chibuogu Nneji is a Nigerian-born American computer scientist, design and innovation strategist, and a lecturing fellow, known for her research on robotics, automation, human-centered design, and autonomous transportation.

#1753

Eric Stach

#30903

Overall Influence

Eric Andrew Stach is an American materials scientist who is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and an elected fellow of both the American Physical Society and the Microscopy Society of America. He was also awarded the Eli F. Burton Award in 2009. He was named a "Highly Cited Researcher" in the newly established Cross-Field category in 2018.

#1754

Jacob Fish

#79736

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Jacob Fish is a researcher and professor in computational mechanics. He was the Rosalind and John J. Redfern Jr. Chaired Professor of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and director of RPI's Multiscale Science and Engineering Center. He is currently the Robert A. W. and Christine S. Carleton Professor in Civil Engineering at Columbia University.

#1755

Nedjeljko Perić

#65458

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Nedjeljko Perić is a Croatian engineering professor. Early life and education Perić was born in Dubravica, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He graduated at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Zagreb in 1973, where he also received his PhD in 1989.

#1756

Kay Axhausen

#78923

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Kay W. Axhausen is Professor and chair of transportation planning at the ETH Zurich, where he leads its Institute for Transport Planning and Systems. Before working at ETH, he worked at the University of Innsbruck, the Imperial College London and the University of Oxford. He holds Master of Science degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison as well as Ph.D. in civil engineering from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

#1757

Ary L. Goldberger

#69021

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Ary Louis Goldberger is a physician-educator, whose collaborative research work is at the interface of biomedicine and complexity science . He holds a BA from Harvard College and an MD from Yale Medical School. He did his clinical training in internal medicine and cardiovascular disease at Yale–New Haven Hospital and at the University of California, San Diego, respectively. He currently serves as Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and was one of the Core Founding Faculty of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

#1758

John Frazer

#52796

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

John Frazer is a British architectural academic. Frazer's early work in computer technologies related to architecture, urbanism and design was developed at the Architectural Association in London, Cambridge University and the University of Ulster . He has been Swire Chair Professor, Head of the School of Design and Director of the Design Technology Research Centre at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Head of the School of Design at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. He is Professor of Digital Design at The European Graduate School.

#1759

Theodore Moustakas

#56284

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Theodore D. Moustakas holds the title of Distinguished Professor of Photonics and Optoelectronics at the Boston University Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2014 for his contributions to the epitaxial growth of nitride semiconductors. He has been granted 62 patents.

#1760

William E.M. Lands

#57121

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

William E.M. Lands is an American nutritional biochemist who is among the world's foremost authorities on essential fatty acids. Biography Lands graduated from University of Michigan in 1951 and served on the faculty there from 1955 to 1980. He then moved to University of Illinois Chicago and subsequently the National Institutes of Health , where he served as the senior scientific advisor to the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. He was named a Fellow by the American Society for Nutrition, Society for Redox Biology and Medicine, International Society for the Study of Fatty Acids and Lipids, and American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#1761

Dereje Agonafer

#66024

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Dereje Agonafer is an Ethiopian-American engineer and educator, who is currently a professor of mechanical engineering at University of Texas at Arlington, and member of National Academy of Engineering. He is also a fellow of National Academy of Inventors since 2018.

#1762

Elmer G. Gilbert

#26554

Overall Influence

1930 - 2019 (89 years)

Elmer Grant Gilbert was an American aerospace engineer and a Professor Emeritus of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. in Instrumentation Engineering from Michigan in 1957.

#1763

Yuehe Lin

#81434

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

#1764

Ronald G. Tompkins

#62021

Overall Influence

1951 - 2022 (71 years)

Ronald G. Tompkins was an American physician and academic. He served as Sumner M. Redstone Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and chief of Surgery, Science and Bioengineering at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Division of Surgery. He was also the founding director of The Institute for Bioengineering and Biotechnology and of the Center for Engineering in Medicine & Surgery at MGH.

#1765

Behzad Razavi

#81459

Overall Influence

#1766

S. Ziqing Li

#81489

Overall Influence

#1767

Jerry Woodall

#64186

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Jerry M. Woodall is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Davis who is widely known for his revolutionary work on LEDs and semiconductors. Over the course of his career, he has published close to 400 scientific articles and his work has directly contributed to the development of major technologies that are used around the world, such as TVs, optical fibers, and mobile phones. Woodall currently holds over 80 U.S. patents for a variety of inventions and has received prestigious awards from IBM, NASA, and the U.S. President for his contributions to sc...

#1768

J. K. Aggarwal

#78875

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Jagdishkumar Keshoram Aggarwal is an American computer scientist, who is currently retired and is Cullen Trust Endowed Emeritus Professor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Cockrell School of Engineering, University of Texas at Austin. He is known for his contributions in the fields of computer vision, pattern recognition and image processing focusing on human motion and activities. He served in various positions in the Department of Electrical and Computer of the University of Texas at Austin and other institutions.

#1769

Davood Domairry Ganji

#81564

Overall Influence

#1770

Stephen Salter

#39987

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Stephen Hugh Salter, is Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design at the University of Edinburgh and inventor of the eponymous Salter duck wave energy device. Salter is also a proponent of geoengineering and is responsible for creating the concept of the mechanical enhancement of clouds to achieve cloud reflectivity enhancement.

#1771

Gisele Bennett

#60531

Overall Influence

Gisele Bennett was a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Director of the GTRI Electro-Optical Systems Laboratory at the Georgia Tech Research Institute . She also founded the Logistics and Maintenance Applied Research Center at GTRI.

#1772

Richard S. Stein

#72531

Overall Influence

1925 - 2021 (96 years)

Richard S. Stein was an American scientist. Stein completed undergraduate at Brooklyn Polytechnic, where he performed some of the first studies of the dimensions of polymer molecules in solution using light scattering. Stein joined the faculty of University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1950 as an assistant professor and initiated its polymer program. He started the university's Polymer Research Institute, which evolved into the Polymer Science and Engineering Department. Stein later served as Emeritus Goessmann Professor of Chemistry. He was elected to membership in the National Academies of Sciences and of Engineering.

#1773

Krishnendu Chakrabarty

#74591

Overall Influence

Krishnendu Chakrabarty is an Indian-American electrical and computer engineer. He is the Fulton Professor of Microelectronics at Arizona State University Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. Before joining Arizona State, he was the John Cocke Distinguished Professor and was the Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University Pratt School of Engineering.

#1774

Ruby B. Lee

#49261

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Ruby Bei-Loh Lee is an American electrical engineer who is currently the Forrest G. Hamrick Professor in Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Princeton University. Her contributions to computer architecture include work in reduced instruction set computing, embedded systems, and hardware support for computer security and digital media. At Princeton, she is the director of the Princeton Architecture Laboratory for Multimedia and Security. Tech executive Joel S. Birnbaum has called her "one of the top instruction-set architects in the world".

#1775

Naomi Ginsberg

#43574

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Naomi Shauna Ginsberg , is an electrical engineer, physicist, and scientist. She is currently an associate professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. Life and education Ginsberg earned her B.ASc. in engineering at the University of Toronto in 2000, and completed her PhD in physics at Harvard.

#1776

Mitchell Joachim

Mitchell Joachim

#40017

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Mitchell Joachim is an architect and urban designer. He is the Co-Founder of Terreform ONE, and an Associate Professor of Practice at NYU. Previously he was the Frank Gehry Chair at University of Toronto and a faculty member at Pratt, Columbia, Syracuse, Washington, The New School, and the European Graduate School.

#1777

Jonathan How

#73413

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jonathan P. How is a Canadian-American astrophysicist and aeronautical engineer currently the Richard Cockburn Maclaurin Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and editor-in-chief of the IEEE Control Systems Magazine, also previously a Davis Faculty Scholar at Stanford University. His current concerns are technology systems engineering and space engineering.

#1778

Mehran Mesbahi

#69221

Overall Influence

Mehran Mesbahi is an Iranian-American control theorist and aerospace engineer. He is a Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering and Mathematics at the University of Washington in Seattle. His research is on systems and control theory over networks, optimization, and aerospace controls.

#1779

Werner Fischer

#75462

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Werner Fischer is a German academic, professor and engineer. Between 1980 and 1990 he served as vice-president and between 1990 and 2005 as the president of Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences . In 2005, Fischer has been a recipient of the Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. He is the father of the politicians Axel Fischer and Lutz Fischer.

#1780

Theodore Pian

#78146

Overall Influence

1919 - 2009 (90 years)

Theodore Hsueh-Huang Pian was a Chinese-born American engineer. A Shanghai native, born on 18 January 1919, Pian grew up in Tianjin, where he attended Nankai Middle School, and graduated from Tsinghua University in 1940. He began working in aerospace engineering in Kunming, Yunnan, terminals of the Burma Road. Pian left China for the United States in 1943, earning a master's degree in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology the next year, after which he worked for Curtiss Airplane Division and served in the United States Marine Corps. In 1945, he married Rulan Chao.

#1781

Rex Harris

#63117

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Rex Harris FREng FIMMM FInstP was a British academic. Rex Harris was educated at Larkfield Grammar School in Chepstow. He graduated from the University of Birmingham with the degrees of BSc, PhD, and DSc. Harris was an ICI research fellow, then lecturer, and then senior lecturer at Birmingham University between 1964 and 1987. Harris was a Professor of Materials Science at Birmingham University from 1988. He was head of the school of metallurgy and materials at Birmingham University from 1996 to 2001, in addition to being acting head from 1989 to 1990. Harris was President of the Magnetics Pa...

#1782

Chiara Daraio

#73289

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Chiara Daraio is an Italian-American materials scientist and acoustical engineer. She is the G. Bradford Jones Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics at the California Institute of Technology.

#1783

John F. C. Turner

#23023

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (97 years)

John Francis Charlewood Turner was a British architect and theorist known for his work on informal self-help housing and neighbourhood building in Peru, the United States, and the United Kingdom. His work on housing in the 1960s and 1970s has seen him described as the most influential post-war writer on housing in the developing world and as a "principal architect" in United Nations and World Bank policies on self-help urban assistance to developing countries. He was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 1988 for "championing the rights of people to build, manage and sustain their own shelter...

#1784

Tso-Ping Ma

#72540

Overall Influence

1945 - 2021 (76 years)

Tso-Ping Ma was a Chinese-American electronic engineer and professor of electrical engineering and applied physics at Yale University, USA. Early life Tso-Ping Ma was born in Lanzhou, China in 1945, but relocated to Taiwan to escape the Chinese Civil War. After graduating from National Taiwan University in 1968, he moved to live and study in the United States. He completed his Ph.D. degree from Yale University in 1974.

#1785

Harold L. Grubin

#81763

Overall Influence

#1786

Aldo da Rosa

#71853

Overall Influence

1917 - 2015 (98 years)

Aldo Weber Vieira da Rosa was a professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford University. His research interests were in ionospheric processes, energy processes and renewable energy. He is the author of "Fundamentals of Renewable Energy Processes" and "Fundamentals of Electronics". He is also the holder of a US patent on the process for the production of ammonia.

#1787

Leidy Klotz

#35694

Overall Influence

Leidy Klotz is an American scientist and author who studies and writes about design and problem-solving. He is a professor of engineering and architecture at the University of Virginia. Klotz has published in scientific journals including Nature and Science and in other publications such as The Washington Post, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and The Globe and Mail. He is also the author of two popular books: Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less , which discusses design and problem-solving, and Sustainability through Soccer , a work about systems thinking.

#1788

Jean-Marc Bonfils

#43628

Overall Influence

1963 - 2020 (57 years)

Jean-Marc Bonfils was a Lebanese architect of French ethnicity, based in Beirut, known for his work in the city during the rebuilding after the Lebanese Civil War. He was killed by an explosion that occurred near his home.

#1789

Michael I. Miller

#50851

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Michael Ira Miller is an American-born biomedical engineer and data scientist, and the Bessie Darling Massey Professor and Director of the Johns Hopkins University Department of Biomedical Engineering. He worked with Ulf Grenander in the field of Computational Anatomy as it pertains to neuroscience, specializing in mapping the brain under various states of health and disease by applying data derived from medical imaging. Miller is the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Imaging Science, Whiting School of Engineering and codirector of Johns Hopkins Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute....

#1790

Darryll Pines

#54873

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Darryll John Pines is an American aerospace engineer and academic administrator currently serving as president of University of Maryland, College Park. He was previously dean of the A. James Clark School of Engineering and held the Glenn L. Martin professorship of aerospace engineering.

#1791

Lawrence Appel

#62226

Overall Influence

Lawrence J. Appel is the C. David Molina Professor of Medicine and Director of the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology and Clinical Research at Johns Hopkins University, a joint program of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Appel is a primary care internist who holds a primary appointment in the Department of Medicine with joint appointments in the Department of Epidemiology, International Health, and Nursing. In addition, he directs the ProHealth Clinical Research Unit. The focus of his career is the conduct of clinical, epidem...

#1792

Tadashi Nagaokakyo Kokubo

#82130

Overall Influence

#1793

Rena Bizios

#66713

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Irene Rena Bizios is an American bioengineer. She is the Peter Flawn Professor at University of Texas at San Antonio and the Lutcher Brown Chair Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Bizios is an Elected Fellow of the National Academy of Medicine, National Academy of Inventors, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and American Institute of Chemical Engineers. Her current interests are cellular and tissue engineering, biocompability and tissue-biomaterial relationships.

#1794

Robert Spinrad

#49858

Overall Influence

1932 - 2009 (77 years)

Robert J. Spinrad was an American computer designer, who was on the staff of Brookhaven National Laboratory and who created many of the key technologies used in modern personal computers while director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

#1795

Thomas D. O'Rourke

#75029

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Thomas Denis O’Rourke is an American educator, engineer and serves as the Thomas R. Biggs Professor of civil & environmental engineering at the Cornell University College of Engineering. O’Rourke took his Bachelor of Science in civil engineering at Cornell's engineering college in 1970 and his doctorate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1975.

#1796

Emory Kemp

#54914

Overall Influence

1931 - 2020 (89 years)

Emory Leland Kemp was the founder and director of the Institute for the History of Technology and Industrial Archaeology at West Virginia University. There, he was Chair and Professor of Civil Engineering at the Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering & Mineral Resources, and a professor of history in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences. Until his death, he served as Professor Emeritus for the Department of History at West Virginia University.

#1797

Herman P. Schwan

#82359

Overall Influence

#1798

Heinz Unbehauen

#72273

Overall Influence

1935 - 2019 (84 years)

Heinz Unbehauen was a German control engineer. He studied mechanical engineering, graduating in 1961, and afterwards receiving a Doctorate in electrical engineering in 1964 at the University of Stuttgart, with thesis Zur Optimierung verfahrenstechnischer Regelkreise . After finishing habilitation in 1969 in Stuttgart, in 1971 he started working as an assistant professor, and in 1974 as an associate professor. Since 1975 he worked as a professor at the University of Bochum in the Department of Automation and Process Automation. He retired in 2001.

#1799

Vincent Canby

#617

Overall Influence

1924 - 2000 (76 years)

Vincent Canby was an American film and theatre critic who served as the chief film critic for The New York Times from 1969 until the early 1990s, then its chief theatre critic from 1994 until his death in 2000. He reviewed more than one thousand films during his tenure there.

#1800

Abolhassan Naeini

#53332

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Dr. Abolhassan Naeini is an Iranian academic and the former chancellor of Imam Khomeini International University from 2004 to 2006 and also from 2014 to 2021. He graduated from New Jersey Institute of Technology and later received his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Iran University of Science and Technology.

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