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 …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Engineering,

#1951

Saurabh Sinha

#65831

Overall Influence

Saurabh Sinha is an influential South African engineer and a Deputy Vice Chancellor for Research and Internationalisation at the University of Johannesburg. He was previously the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment at the University of Johannesburg. He formerly served as Director of the Carl and Emily Fuchs Institute for Microelectronics at the University of Pretoria, from which he graduated with a Ph.D. in electronic engineering.

#1952

David A. Spencer

David A. Spencer

#43300

Overall Influence

David A. Spencer is the Mars Sample Return Campaign Mission Manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. As an aerospace engineer, Spencer designs and operates planetary spacecraft. Education Spencer received B.S. and M.S. degrees in aeronautics and astronautics from Purdue University in W. Lafayette, Indiana. He earned his Ph.D. from the Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, completing a dissertation on automated proximity operations using relative orbital elements.

#1953

José Luis Encarnação

José Luis Encarnação

#26980

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

José Luis Moreira da Encarnação is a Portuguese computer scientist, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Computer Science of the Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany and a senior technology and innovation advisor to governments, multinational companies, research institutions and organizations, and foundations. He is involved in the development of research agendas and innovation strategies for socio-economic development with a focus on emerging economies. He is also a member of the Topical Network Information and Communication Technology and ICT-related activities of the German Natio...

#1954

Hilary Sample

#74943

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Hilary Sample is an American architect, principal, and co-founder of the award-winning architecture firm MOS Architects in New York City. Education Sample received a Master of Architecture with distinction from Princeton University and a Bachelor of Architecture from Syracuse University .

#1955

Lucio Bianco

#64204

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Lucio Bianco was an Italian engineer and President of the National Research Council from 1997 to 2003. He is the brother of Gerardo Bianco, the former Italian Minister of Education. Biography Lucio Bianco was born on 16 December 1941 in Guardia Lombardi, Campania in Italy.

#1956

Takefumi Aida

#63723

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Takefumi Aida is a Japanese architect. He is known for his building block house series and layered memorials, which represented a break from then-current Japanese Metabolist philosophies.. Career In 1960 Aida graduated from Waseda University. In 1962, he completed the master's course at Waseda University. In 1966, he completed a doctoral course at Waseda University Graduate School. In 1967, he established the Takefumi Aida Architectural Institute. In 1977, he became a professor at Shibaura Institute of Technology and changed the name to Takefumi Aida Design Laboratory. In 2013, he reorganized into Aida Doi Design Co., Ltd.

#1957

Christos Davatzikos

#86293

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Christos Davatzikos is the Wallace T. Miller Sr. Professor of Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2014 for contributions to automatic analysis and interpretation of biomedical multi-dimensional data.

#1958

Krishan Sabnani

#43955

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Krishan Sabnani is an Indian-American networking researcher. He has made many seminal contributions to the Internet infrastructure design, protocol design, and wireless networks. Krishan made a breakthrough in Internet re-design. The main idea behind this work was to separate control functions and complex software from the forwarding portions on Internet routers. This work made it possible for forwarding technologies to evolve and be deployed independently from control protocols . This contribution is a precursor to the current Software Defined Networking revolution. A patent based on this...

#1959

Phil Ippe R. Spalart

#86316

Overall Influence

#1960

Arthur A. Oliner

#57414

Overall Influence

1921 - 2013 (92 years)

Arthur Aaron Oliner was an American physicist and electrical engineer, who was professor emeritus at department of electrical and computer engineering at New York University-Polytechnic. Best known for his contributions to engineering electromagnetics and antenna theory, he is regarded as a pioneer of leaky wave theory and leaky wave antennas.

#1961

Dan Keun Sung

#45928

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Dan Keun Sung is a South Korean professor of electronic engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejeon. Sung was born in South Gyeongsang Province. He received his B.Sc. in electronic engineering from Seoul National University in 1975 before going on to the University of Texas at Austin, where he received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering. He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for contributions to network resource management. He is also a member of the Korean Academy of Science and Te...

#1962

Anton Schwarzkopf

#19005

Overall Influence

1924 - 2001 (77 years)

Anton Schwarzkopf was a German engineer who founded Schwarzkopf Industries GmbH, a German manufacturer of roller coasters and other amusement rides that were sold to amusement parks and travelling funfairs around the world.

#1963

Matias del Campo

#52649

Overall Influence

Matias del Campo is a Chilean born Austrian architect, designer and educator, co-founder of the architectural practice SPAN. Education and early career Matias del Campo graduated from the University of Applied Arts Vienna in 2003, receiving a Master of Architecture with distinction.

#1964

Adam Heller

#26551

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Adam Heller is an Israeli American scientist and engineer. He is Chief Science Officer of SynAgile Corp. of Wilson, Wyoming, consults to Abbott Diabetes Care of Alameda, California, and is Ernest Cockrell Sr. Chair Emeritus of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. His 1973 paper with James J. Auborn established the feasibility of high energy density, high-voltage, non-rechargeable lithium batteries. Their 3.6-volt lithium thionyl chloride and 3.7-volt lithium sulfuryl chloride batteries remain in use in applications requiring very high energy density and a shelf life of 20 years o...

#1965

Mani Ratnam

#9781

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Gopalaratnam Subramaniam , known professionally as Mani Ratnam, is an Indian film director, film producer and screenwriter who predominantly works in Tamil cinema and few Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada films. He is one of India's most acclaimed and commercially successful filmmakers. Ratnam has won six National Film Awards, four Filmfare Awards, six Filmfare Awards South, and numerous awards at various film festivals across the world. In 2002, the Government of India honoured him with the Padma Shri, acknowledging his contributions to film.

#1966

Guus Berkhout

#44969

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Augustinus Johannes "Guus" Berkhout is a Dutch engineer who has worked for the oil and gas industry, and as a professor. Berkhout started his career working for Shell. Between 1976 and 2007, he served as professor of acoustics, geophysics and innovation management, at Delft University of Technology. From 2000 to 2002 he was chair of a commission dealing with projected sound norms at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, from which he resigned after feeling the commission's independence was undermined by the Ministry for Transport and Water Management. In 2019, Berkhout co-founded the climate sceptic or...

#1967

Goodarz Ahmadi

#86618

Overall Influence

#1968

Masanobu S. Shinozuka

#86620

Overall Influence

#1969

Maja Pantić

#67587

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Maja Pantić is a Professor of Affective and Behavioural Computing at Imperial College London and an AI Scientific Research Lead in Facebook London. She was previously Professor of Affective and Behavioural Computing University of Twente and Research Director of the Samsung AI lab in Cambridge, UK. She is an expert in machine understanding of human behaviour including vision-based detection and tracking of human behavioural cues like facial expressions and body gestures, and multimodal analysis of human behaviours like laughter, social signals and affective states.

#1970

Farid F. Abraham

#36466

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Farid F. Abraham is an American scientist. He has pioneered new methods of using computer modeling in the fields of fracture mechanics, membrane dynamics and phase transformation behavior of matter. He has written two textbooks and over 200 papers published in international journals. He won the Aneesur Rahman Prize in Computational Physics, which is the highest prize given by the American Physical Society.

#1971

Peter Zandstra

#66794

Overall Influence

Peter W. Zandstra, is a Canadian scientist who is the Director of the Michael Smith Laboratories at the University of British Columbia. Education Zandstra graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering degree from McGill University in the Department of Chemical Engineering and later obtained his Ph.D. degree from the University of British Columbia in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, under the supervision of Jamie Piret and Connie Eaves. He continued his research training as a Post Doctoral Fellow in the field of Bioengineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology b...

#1972

Albert Speer

#47079

Overall Influence

1934 - 2017 (83 years)

Albert Speer was a German architect and urban planner. He was the son of Albert Speer , Adolf Hitler's chief architect before assuming the office of Minister of Armaments and War Production for Germany during World War II. His grandfather, Albert Friedrich Speer, was also an architect.

#1973

Brit Andresen

#66960

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Brit Andresen is a Norwegian-born Australian architect and was the first female recipient of the RAIA Gold Medal, awarded in 2002, for her sustained contribution to architecture through teaching, scholarship and practice.

#1974

Hao Jiming

#83743

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Hao Jiming is a Chinese environmental engineer and President of the International Ecological Economic Promotion Association. A native of Shandong Province, Hao earned a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from Tsinghua University before pursuing a master's degree in environmental engineering from the same institution. Hao received a Ph.D. in environmental engineering at the University of Cincinnati.

#1975

Mark Drela

#57087

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Mark Drela is an American aeronautical engineer, currently the Professor of Fluid Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an Elected Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He is primarily concerned with computational engineering, design, and optimization. Drela is famed for his work on aerodynamics softwares:XFOIL for airfoil analysis using a panel methodAthena Vortex Lattice for flight dynamic analysis using a vortex lattice methodMISES for design and analysis of turbo machinery bladingIn 2009, Drela was elected as a member into the National Acad...

#1976

Robert J. Marks II

Robert J. Marks II

#34367

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Robert Jackson Marks II is an American electrical engineer, computer scientist and Distinguished Professor at Baylor University. His contributions include the Zhao-Atlas-Marks time-frequency distribution in the field of signal processing, the Cheung–Marks theorem in Shannon sampling theory and the Papoulis-Marks-Cheung approach in multidimensional sampling. He was instrumental in the defining of the field of computational intelligence and co-edited the first book using computational intelligence in the title. A Christian and an old earth creationist, he is a subject of the 2008 pro-intellig...

#1977

Juergen Teller

#5930

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Juergen Teller is a German fine-art and fashion photographer. He was awarded the Citibank Prize for Photography in 2003 and received the Special Presentation International Center of Photography Infinity Award in 2018.

#1978

Hwung Hwung-hweng

#43386

Overall Influence

1946 - 2019 (73 years)

Hwung Hwung-hweng was a Taiwanese hydraulic engineer, university president, and political administrator. Academic career Hwung was born in 1946. He received a bachelor's degree from National Cheng Kung University in 1970, and completed his graduate education at the same institution, earning a doctorate in 1981. Upon graduation, Hwung joined the NCKU faculty, and was eventually named senior executive vice president. He was named NCKU president in October 2010, and formally assumed office in February 2011, succeeding Michael M. C. Lai. Hwung also took Lai's position on the Southeast and South Asia and Taiwan Universities Presidents’ Forum.

#1979

Shashi Nambisan

#57851

Overall Influence

Shashi Nambisan is currently a professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. He has held various positions previously such as the director of the Center for Transportation Research and Education at Iowa State University, United States, where he was also a professor in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering and director of the Las Vegas Transportation Research Center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas where he worked for 18 years. He worked on traffic safety and made contributions to road safety in Nevada. His services were recognized by the Governor of Nevada, who proclaimed January 31, 2007, as Professor Shashi Nambisan Day.

#1980

Sheri D. Sheppard

#79220

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Sheri D. Sheppard is the Burton J. and Deedee McMurtry University Fellow in Undergraduate Education; Associate Vice Provost of Graduate Education; and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Curriculum, Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University. She focuses her teaching on engineering design for undergraduate and graduate students. In November 2014, the Carnegie Foundation bestowed on her the U.S. Professor of the Year award.

#1981

Wolfgang Rodi

#86895

Overall Influence

#1982

Carson Morrison

Carson Morrison

#46591

Overall Influence

1902 - 1993 (91 years)

Carson F. Morrison, P.Eng. was a university professor, innovative engineer, magazine editor, co-founder of the North American firm Morrison Hershfield, and president of a standards association. He was considered to be a touchstone for professional ethics and morality in engineering. He is remembered for his ideas and advice, knowledge and imagination.

#1983

Karen Holford

#49380

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Karen Margaret Holford is a Welsh engineer, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Vice-Chancellor and Chief Executive of Cranfield University. She was formerly Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Cardiff University. She is also a former Pro Vice-Chancellor of the College of Physical Sciences and Engineering and Head of the School of Engineering. She is an active researcher of acoustic emission and her work has been applied to damage assessment inspections on industrial components.

#1984

Juan Miró

#62680

Overall Influence

Juan Miró is a Spanish-American architect. He is Director of the Studio Mexico Program and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Miró has directed Studio Mexico since 1998, a program that affords students the opportunity to travel to and explore Mexican culture through the study of architecture, drawing, and design. He teaches at the School of Architecture and his areas of interests are design and construction, Mexican architecture and architectural history, and the role of architects in the shaping of cities in the U.S. and abroad. He is particularly interested in lookin...

#1985

David J. McComas

#68091

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

David John McComas is an American space physicist, Vice President for Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and Professor of Astrophysical Sciences and leads the Space Physics at Princeton Group at Princeton University. He had been Assistant Vice President for Space Science and Engineering at the Southwest Research Institute, Adjoint Professor of Physics at the University of Texas at San Antonio , and was the founding director of the Center for Space Science and Exploration at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is noted for his extensive accomplishments in experimental space plasma physics, i...

#1986

Frederick Naftolin

#87006

Overall Influence

#1987

Jacob K. White

#56124

Overall Influence

Jacob K. White is the Cecil H. Green Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He researches fast numerical algorithms for simulation, particularly the simulation of circuits. His work on the FASTCAP program for three-dimensional capacitance calculation and FASTHENRY, a program for three-dimensional inductance calculations, is highly cited. He has also done extensive work on steady-state simulation of analog and microwave circuits. White was a significant early contributor to the development of Spectre and SpectreRF.

#1988

Gordon S. Kino

#79523

Overall Influence

1928 - 2017 (89 years)

Gordon Stanley Kino was an Australian-British-American inventor and professor of electrical engineering and applied physics. He is known for "inventing new microscopes that improved semiconductor manufacturing and transformed medical diagnostics." His dual-axis confocal microscope has several advantages over the single-axis confocal microscope.

#1989

Warren J. Baker

Warren J. Baker

#57902

Overall Influence

1938 - 2022 (84 years)

Warren J. Baker was an American academic administrator who was president of California Polytechnic State University . Baker was the eighth president of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, holding the office from 1979 until 2010.

#1990

Guang‐hong Yang

#87133

Overall Influence

#1991

Hu Peiquan

#43437

Overall Influence

1920 - 2019 (99 years)

Hu Peiquan was a Chinese engineering mechanician, aerospace engineer, and educator. He was a distinguished professor and founder of the Department of Engineering Mechanics at Northwestern Polytechnical University. He founded the Journal of Northwestern Polytechnical University and served as its chief editor for more than 60 years.

#1992

Julie Beckman

#60264

Overall Influence

Julie Beckman is an American architect who designed the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial with her husband Keith Kaseman. The $22 million memorial, which includes 184 benches with names of victims of the September 11 attacks in 2001 inscribed and illuminated by reflecting pools, opened on September 11, 2008.

#1993

Markus J Buehler

#87262

Overall Influence

#1994

Anthony Catanese

Anthony Catanese

#39470

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Anthony James Catanese is an American university administrator, author, and a former President and CEO of the Florida Institute of Technology. Prior to his position at the Florida Institute of Technology, Catanese was President of Florida Atlantic University. Catanese previously served as President and Chairman of the President's council of the Sunshine State Conference.

#1995

James M. Tien

#49730

Overall Influence

James M. Tien, Ph.D., DEng , is distinguished professor and former dean of the University of Miami College of Engineering. He has worked previously at Bell Laboratories, Rand Corporation and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

#1996

Marek W. Urban

#53706

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Marek W. Urban is an American professor, polymer and materials scientist who works in the field of polymers, polymer spectroscopy, polymeric coatings and films, stimuli-responsive materials, and self-healing polymers.

#1997

Frederick Steiner

#32649

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Frederick R. "Fritz" Steiner is an American ecologist who currently serves as the Dean and Paley Professor for the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, having succeeded Marilyn Jordan Taylor in 2016. He is a fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and the American Academy in Rome. He teaches courses in the areas of landscape analysis, landscape architecture theory, and environmental impact assessment. His specialization is in ecological planning, historic preservation, environmental design, green building, and regional planning.

#1998

Ali Emadi

#87435

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Ali Emadi is a Canada Excellence Research Chair in Hybrid Powertrain at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2013 for his contributions to electric power conversion and control for electric and hybrid vehicles. In 2017, he was named a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.

#1999

Shlomo P. Neuman

#87475

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

#2000

Mark Power

#37933

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Mark Power is a British photographer. He is a member of Magnum Photos and Professor of Photography in The Faculty of Arts and Architecture at the University of Brighton. Power has been awarded the Terence Donovan Award and an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions