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

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Engineering,

#2151

Jan Peter Toennies

#50919

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Jan Peter Toennies is an American scientist. Early life and education He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to German immigrant parents. He is the grandson of sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies. He graduated from Lower Merion High School, outside of Philadelphia in 1948, from Amherst College, with a B.A. in 1952, and from Brown University, with a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1957. During graduate school he was a Fulbright student in Göttingen 1953–1954.

#2152

Peyman Givi

#75249

Overall Influence

Peyman Givi is a Persian-American rocket scientist and engineer. Givi currently serves as a Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and the James T. McLeod Professor at University of Pittsburgh, and previously a Distinguished Professor of Aerospace Engineering at State University of New York along with being an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, American Physical Society and ASME.

#2153

Richard Whitaker

#56489

Overall Influence

Richard Whitaker is an American Third Bay Tradition architect. Whitaker was one of four architects who designed The Sea Ranch. He was the teaching assistant to Lawrence Halprin at the University of California, Berkeley. Halprin invited Whitaker along to help with the project.

#2154

Alexander Smits

#63444

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Alexander John Smits is an Australian-American engineer and academic who is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Emeritus, at Princeton University. He is also the director of the Gas dynamics laboratory at Princeton. Smits received his Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from the University of Melbourne, Australia in 1970. Subsequently he received his Ph.D. from Melbourne in 1975.

#2155

Jonathan Hill

#46647

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Jonathan Hill was an English architect, architectural historian, and book author/editor. Jonathan Hill received a Diploma from the Architectural Association School of Architecture in 1983, a Master of Science degree from University College London in 1990, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of London in 2000.

#2156

Andres Alver

#72800

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Andres Alver is an Estonian architect. Born in Tartu, from 1961 to 1972, Alver studied in the 2nd Secondary School of Tartu . From 1972, Alver studied in the State Art Institute of the Estonian SSR in the department of architecture, graduating in 1977.

#2157

Steven Meisel

#1057

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Steven Meisel is an American fashion photographer, who obtained popularity and critical acclaim with his work in Vogue and Vogue Italia as well as his photographs of friend Madonna in her 1992 book, Sex. He is now considered one of the most successful fashion photographers in the industry. He used to work regularly for both US and Italian Vogue, and W and now exclusively for British Vogue.

#2158

Varazdat Harutyunyan

Varazdat Harutyunyan

#63210

Overall Influence

1909 - 2008 (99 years)

Varazdat Harutyunyan was an Armenian academic, architect and writer. Biography Harutyunyan was born in the Ottoman Empire, in the town of Van, but he and his family were forced to flee into Russian territory during the Armenian genocide. They settled first in Tbilisi and then in Yerevan. In 1946, he obtained his Ph.D., and then Doctor of Science in architecture. In 1964, he became a professor of history. In 1996 he was elected Academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia. In Armenia, he was also president of the Society for Protection of Historical Monuments.

#2159

Jimenez Lai

#74260

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Jimenez Lai is a faculty member at the USC School of Architecture in Los Angeles. He is also the founder and leader of Bureau Spectacular, a design studio founded in 2008 and led by Jimenez Lai. Academic career Jimenez Lai is a faculty member at the USC School of Architecture in Los Angeles and was previously a faculty member at UCLA. Lai previously held the LeFevre Fellowship at the Knowlton School of Architecture at the Ohio State University in 2007 and the Howarth-Wright Fellowship at Taliesin /Taliesin West. He was an assistant professor at University of Illinois at Chicago.

#2160

Mamoru Ishii

#91014

Overall Influence

#2161

H. Norman Abramson

#77664

Overall Influence

1926 - 2022 (96 years)

Hyman Norman Abramson was an American engineer and scientist. He was the Executive Vice President of the Southwest Research Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, and the manager and principal investigator in several NAE and NRC research projects.

#2162

Gabriel Georgiades

#82200

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Gabriel Georgiades is a professor of Aerospace Engineering in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is a widely published author known throughout the world as one of the leading authorities on light aircraft spin tendencies and recovery along with a major contributor to the creation of the finite element method of analyzing aircraft structures.

#2163

William Yeager

#15386

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

William "Bill" Yeager is an American engineer. He is best known for being the inventor of a packet-switched, "Ships in the Night", multiple-protocol router in 1981, during his 20-year tenure at Stanford's Knowledge Systems Laboratory as well as the Stanford University Computer Science department.

#2164

Martha E. Sloan

#54836

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Martha Ann Evans Sloan is an American electrical engineer. She taught engineering for many years at Michigan Technological University, and became the first female president of the IEEE. Her service to the profession has been honored by several society fellowships and awards.

#2165

Clive Dym

#65188

Overall Influence

1942 - 2016 (74 years)

Clive Dym was a professor emeritus of Engineering Design and also Director of the Center for Design Education at Harvey Mudd College. He served as the chair of the engineering department at Harvey Mudd College from 1999 through 2002. He taught at several universities including at Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, Northwestern University and University of Southern California. He was a member of the Institute for Defense Analyses and National Academy of Engineering. He was awarded the Gordon Prize in 2012. He earned a BS from Cooper Union in 1962, an MS from Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1964 and a PhD from Stanford University in 1967.

#2166

Randal E. Bryant

#91118

Overall Influence

#2167

Soumyen Bandyopadhyay

#58281

Overall Influence

Soumyen Bandyopadhyay is an architect and architectural historian at Liverpool University where he was head of department and holds the Sir James Stirling Chair in Architecture. He has previously held professorial positions at the Manchester School of Architecture and Nottingham Trent University.

#2168

Dorin Comaniciu

#79073

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Dorin Comaniciu is a Romanian-American computer scientist. He is the Senior Vice President of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation at Siemens Healthcare. Research Comaniciu is known for his work in computer vision, medical imaging and machine learning. His academic publications have 54,000 citations with an H-index of 85. As of 2022, he holds 308 US patents and 550 international patent applications. He joined Siemens in 1999 as a senior research scientist with a focus on computer vision applications for automotive systems. Since 2004, he has served in various research and leadership...

#2169

Gilda Barabino

#62990

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Gilda A. Barabino is the president of the Olin College of Engineering, where she is also a professor of biomedical and chemical engineering. Previously, she served as the dean of The Grove School of Engineering at the City College of New York, and as a professor in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Chemical Engineering and the CUNY School of Medicine. On March 4, 2021, she became the President-Elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#2170

Karen M. Kensek

Karen M. Kensek

#72443

Overall Influence

Karen M. Kensek is on the faculty of the USC School of Architecture at the University of Southern California. She is a leading figure in architectural computing, focusing on analytical building information modeling and building science.

#2171

Lorna Simpson

#16261

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Lorna Simpson is an American photographer and multimedia artist whose works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally. In 1990, she became the first African-American woman to exhibit at the Venice Biennale. She came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with photo-text installations such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal that questioned the nature of identity, gender, race, history and representation. Simpson continues to explore these themes in relation to memory and history using photography, film, video, painting, drawing, audio, and sculpture.

#2172

Albert Macovski

#25625

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

Albert Macovski is an American Professor at Stanford University, known for his many innovations in the area of imaging, particularly in the medical field. Education Macovski graduated from NYU Poly and got his PhD from Stanford University for research supervised by Joseph W. Goodman.

#2173

Ghulam Ishaq Khan

#19609

Overall Influence

1915 - 2006 (91 years)

Ghulam Ishaq Khan , commonly known by his initials GIK, was a Pakistani bureaucrat, politician and statesman who served as the seventh president of Pakistan from 1988 to 1993. He previously served as Chairman of the Senate from 1985 to 1988 under president Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, and was sworn in shortly after Zia's death.

#2174

Burcin Becerik-Gerber

#53554

Overall Influence

Burcin Becerik-Gerber is a Turkish American engineering educator and Professor in the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Southern California. She is known for her work in human-building interaction, a new field she pioneered, which researches the design and use of technology that focuses on the interfaces between buildings and their users. She is the founding director of the Innovation in Integrated Informatics LAB and the director of USC’s Center for Intelligent Environments . She puts a specific focus on human-building communication to change both user behavior and building behavior through trust in automation.

#2175

Philipos C. Loizou

Philipos C. Loizou

#80104

Overall Influence

1965 - 2012 (47 years)

Philipos C. Loizou was Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering , Erik Jonsson School of Engineering & Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas . Career Loizou was an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock prior to joining the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, where he helped co-found the Center of Robust Speech Systems . He established the Speech Processing and Cochlear Implant Laboratories at the University of Texas at Dallas and held the Cecil and Ida Green Chair in the Department of Electrical Engineering since 2009.

#2176

Constance J. Chang-Hasnain

Constance J. Chang-Hasnain

#69225

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Constance J. Chang-Hasnain is chairperson and founder of Berxel Photonics Co. Ltd. and Whinnery Professor Emerita of the University of California, Berkeley. She was President of Optica in 2021. She obtained a B.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering from University of California, Davis in 1982, an M.S. and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984 and 1987, respectively. She was a member of technical staff at Bellcore from 1987 to 1992 and assistant professor at Stanford University between 1992 and 1995. She joined the ...

#2177

Sanjit Kumar Mitra

#91345

Overall Influence

#2178

Karen Willcox

#51026

Overall Influence

Karen Elizabeth Willcox is an aerospace engineer and computational scientist best known for her work on reduced-order modeling and the study of multi-fidelity methods. She is currently the director of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas.

#2179

Mónica Ponce de León

#67132

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Mónica Ponce de León is a Latina architect, educator, and dean of the Princeton University School of Architecture. A National Design Award winner, Ponce de León has focused on the application of robotic technology to building fabrication and architecture education. Her interdisciplinary practice, MPdL Studio, has offices in New York City, Boston, Princeton, New Jersey, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ponce de León previously served as Dean of the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan and as Professor at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University .

#2180

Ali Kheyroddin

#54507

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Ali Kheyroddin is an Iranian researcher and Distinguished Professor of Structural Engineering at Semnan University. He is a former Deputy of Science and Technology at Iranian Ministry of Science, Research and Technology. He is known for his works on reinforced concrete structures, nonlinear finite element analysis, tall buildings , composite structures, fiber-reinforced concrete, seismic retrofit, progressive collapse, and neural networks.

#2181

George William Housner

#91406

Overall Influence

#2182

Ju Li

#91445

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

#2183

John Junkins

#54219

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

John L. Junkins is an American academic and a distinguished professor of aerospace engineering in the College of Engineering at Texas A&M University specializing in spacecraft navigation, guidance, dynamics, and control. He holds the Royce E. Wisenbaker Endowed Chair at Texas A&M University and also serves as the Founding Director of the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study at Texas A&M University, since its founding in December 2010. On November 24, 2020, Junkins was announced as the interim President of Texas A&M University starting January 2021. He was the interim president until May 31, 2...

#2184

Hiroshi Naito

#55599

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

is an architect from Japan, known for his modern-style buildings. His work includes projects in other countries. He is the principal architect at Hiroshi Naito Architect & Associates in Tokyo. He is Professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo and President of Tama Art University

#2185

Georg Karl Pfahler

#47725

Overall Influence

1926 - 2002 (76 years)

Georg Karl Pfahler was a German painter, printmaker and sculptor, and one of the leading proponents of post-war art in Germany. Biography After enrolling at the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg between 1948 and 1949, Pfahler pursued his artistic training at State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, which he attended until 1954. Although Pfahler had mainly worked in ceramics during his student days, as a freelance artist, he focused increasingly on painting. After his early "Metropolitan" pictures, Pfahler developed pictorial configurations around 1956, in which he experimented with the spatial effects of color in a manner reminiscent of the pointillist technique used by French Divisionists.

#2186

John Knott

#76948

Overall Influence

1938 - 2017 (79 years)

John Frederick Knott OBE FRS FREng was an English metallurgist and materials scientist. From 1962 to 1966, Knott was a Research Officer at the Central Electricity Research Laboratories in Leatherhead in Surrey, after which he became a lecturer in the Department of Materials, Science and Metallurgy at Cambridge University between 1967 and 1981. In 1990, he moved to the University of Birmingham, where he was Professor and Head of the School of Metallurgy and Materials until 1996, Dean of Engineering from 1995 to 1998 and the fifth Feeney Professor of Physical Metallurgy between 1994 and 2007.

#2187

Claus Bonderup

#79466

Overall Influence

1943 - 2022 (79 years)

Claus Bonderup is a Danish architect and professor emeritus in architecture at Aalborg University. He has created a large number of edifices and designs as well as city plans. Among the most renowned are the Arctic Museum in Rovaniemi, Finland, the palace of the Kuwaiti Sheik Salkem Al-Ali Al-Sabah and Professor Bonderup’s own house in the dunes near the town of Blokhus in the northern part of Jutland. Designs by Claus Bonderup have also been used by companies such as Royal Copenhagen and Georg Jensen A/S. His works are represented in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in N...

#2188

Jasvinder Singh

#91553

Overall Influence

#2189

Xing-yuan Wang

#91591

Overall Influence

#2190

Declan Kennedy

#69455

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Declan Kennedy is an Irish architect. He was a leader of the Global Ecovillage Network Europe , Director of the Permaculture Institute for Europe , and Vice President of the Berlin Institute of Technology . He has been Professor of Architecture at the TU Berlin since 1972.

#2191

Alain Le Mehaute

Alain Le Mehaute

#27566

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Alain Le Mehaute is a French engineer-chemist and inventor. He has written numerous scientific researches and academic literature on Geometry, Physics and Chemistry. Alain Le Mehaute, Olivier de Witte and Jean Claude André were the first to file their patent for the stereolithography process, but officially the title of inventor of stereolithography and 3D printing technology on the whole belongs to Chuck Hull

#2192

Amin Abbosh

#34910

Overall Influence

Amin M. Abbosh is an Iraqi electrical engineer. Abbosh earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Mosul, then remained at the institution to complete graduate study in the subject, obtaining his master's degree in 1991 and his doctorate in 1996. He is a professor at the University of Queensland. In 2022, Abbosh was elected a fellow of the IEEE, "for contributions to electromagnetic medical imaging."

#2193

Kameshwar Poolla

#73765

Overall Influence

Kameshwar Poolla is the Cadence Design Systems Distinguished Professor, in Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences, and Department of Mechanical Engineering at University of California, Berkeley. He received his B.Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in 1980 and his Ph.D. from the Center for Mathematical System Theory, University of Florida, Gainesville in 1984.

#2194

Nils J. Diaz

#70317

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Nils J. Diaz is a former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, having worked for the commission between 1996 and 2006. He was the chairman of the commission between 2003 and 2006. He was a nuclear engineering professor and chairman at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida, from the 1970s to the 1990s. Diaz holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in nuclear engineering from the University of Florida, and a B. S. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Villanova, Havana.

#2195

Rajat Mittal

#55962

Overall Influence

Rajat Mittal is a computational fluid dynamicist and a professor of mechanical engineering in the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He holds a secondary appointment in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is known for his work on immersed boundary methods and applications of these methods to the study of fluid flow problems.

#2196

Jason Speyer

#84785

Overall Influence

Jason Lee Speyer is an American engineer working with mechanical and aerospace engineering currently the Ronald and Valerie Sugar Endowed Professor of Engineering, at University of California, Los Angeles and is also a published author, being held in 860 libraries.

#2197

Manfred Robert Schroeder

#91748

Overall Influence

#2198

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi

#4206

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Saif al-Islam Muammar al-Gaddafi is a Libyan political figure. He is the second son of the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and his second wife Safia Farkash. He was a part of his father's inner circle, performing public relations and diplomatic roles on his behalf. He publicly turned down his father's offer of the country's second highest post and held no official government position. According to United States Department of State officials in Tripoli, during his father's reign, he was the second most widely recognized person in Libya, being at times the de facto prime minister, and was mentioned as a possible successor, though he rejected this.

#2199

Jonathan Cooper

#74436

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Jonathan Cooper is Professor of Engineering in the College of Science & Engineering at the University of Glasgow. Professor Cooper has held the Wolfson Chair in Bioengineering at the school since 2009.

#2200

Adèle Naudé Santos

Adèle Naudé Santos

#67521

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Adèle Naudé Santos is a South African born American architect and urban designer focused on low-income housing, campus architecture, and socially conscious design. She is principal architect of Santos Prescott and Associates, based in San Francisco and Somerville, Massachusetts. She served as the Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2003 to 2014. She became a Fellow of American Institute of Architects in 1996.

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