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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Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Engineering,

#2901

Carl W. Helstrom

#28488

Overall Influence

1925 - 2013 (88 years)

Carl W. Helstrom was one of the earliest pioneers in the field of quantum information theory. He is well known in this field for discovering what is now known as the Helstrom measurement, the quantum measurement with minimum error probability for distinguishing one quantum state from another. He has written a textbook which has been widely read by experts in quantum information theory. He authored several other textbooks on signal detection and estimation theory.

#2902

Huang Wanli

#47415

Overall Influence

1911 - 2001 (90 years)

Huang Wanli was a Chinese hydrologist. Huang was a professor at Tsinghua University from 1953 to 2001. Biography Huang was born in Chuansha County, Jiangsu on 20 August 1911, the fourth of nine children of Huang Yanpei and Wang Jiusi . In 1924, he enrolled in Wuxi Industrial School. He entered Tangshan Jiaotong University in 1927 and graduated in 1932. After college, he worked as an apprentice engineer at Hangzhou-Zhejiang Railway. In 1934, Huang went to the United States. He received a master's degree from Cornell University in hydrology in 1935 and a doctor of engineering degree from Univ...

#2903

Huseyin Arslan

#105785

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Huseyin Arslan from the University of South Florida Tampa, Florida, USA was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2016 for contributions to spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks. Arslan was among the 169 academic inventors identified by the US National Academy of Inventors in 2022.

#2904

David Simchi-Levi

#59187

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

David Simchi-Levi is an American academic working as a Professor of Engineering Systems at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also the founder or co-founder of several companies. Simchi-Levi's research focuses on supply chain management, revenue management, and business analytics.

#2905

József Karger‐kocsis

#105824

Overall Influence

#2906

Patrick M. Kochanek

#105835

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

#2907

Muhammad Ali Imran

#105837

Overall Influence

#2908

Alfred Browning Parker

#83070

Overall Influence

1916 - 2011 (95 years)

Alfred Browning Parker, FAIA was a Modernist architect who is one of the best-known post World War II residential architects. He gained fame for his highly published modern houses in the region around Miami, Florida. He was born in Boston, MA and moved to Miami when he was eight years old. Parker graduated from the University of Florida in 1939 with a degree in Architecture. Influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright but with regional touches, Parker's designs have been published in many magazines such as House Beautiful, as well as in companion books.

#2909

Ben Young

#105931

Overall Influence

#2910

Irfan Rahman

#105937

Overall Influence

#2911

Hatice Altug

#88049

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Hatice Altug is a Turkish physicist and professor in the Bioengineering Department and head of the Bio-nanophotonic Systems laboratory at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne , in Switzerland. Her research focuses on nanophotonics for biosensing and surface enhanced spectroscopy, integration with microfluidics and nanofabrication, to obtain high sensitivity, label-free characterization of biological material. She has developed low-cost biosensor allowing the identification of viruses such as Ebola that can work in difficult settings and therefore particularly useful in case of pandemics.

#2912

Suresh Kumar Goyal

#105940

Overall Influence

#2913

Suresh Gopaldas Advani

#105957

Overall Influence

#2914

Henry N Ginsberg

#105981

Overall Influence

#2915

James F. Pankow

#94878

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

James F. Pankow is an American environmental engineer. Pankow studied chemistry at the State University of New York at Binghamton and earned a doctorate in engineering from the California Institute of Technology . He is a professor of chemistry and engineering at Portland State University. Pankow has been an ISI highly cited researcher since 2003. In 2009, Pankow was elected a member of the United States National Academy of Engineering "for contributions to understanding the chemical thermodynamics of organic particulate matter in urban air and the global atmosphere."

#2916

Gordon Kipping

#92878

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Gordon Kipping is the founder and principal of G TECTS, a New York-based architectural firm. Kipping has taught at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University and has assisted Frank Gehry in teaching design studios at the School of Architecture at Yale University. Kipping has been a studio professor at the School of Architecture at Columbia University, since 2000.

#2917

Ch. Venkata Suryanarayana

#106011

Overall Influence

#2918

Xuejun Wen

#94280

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Xuejun Wen is a bioengineer and the William H. Goodwin Professor, Department of Chemical and Life Science Engineering, Institute for Engineering and Medicine, Virginia Commonwealth University. Early life and education Wen was born in May 1971 at Linzhou City, Henan Province, P.R. China. He earned an M.D. at Henan Medical University in 1994. He earned an M.S. in materials science and engineering from Zhejiang University in 1997. Subsequently he moved to the United States and in 2000 earned a second M.S. in materials science and engineering at the University of Cincinnati. He earned a PhD in...

#2919

Pascal Frossard

#106023

Overall Influence

#2920

Murugappan Muthukumar

#106035

Overall Influence

#2921

Zaida Muxí

#105478

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Zaida Muxí Martínez is an Argentine architect and city planner who graduated in the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urbanism at the University of Buenos Aires, Muxí earned her doctorate from the Upper Technical School of Architecture of Seville and later served as professor in the Upper Technical School of Architecture of Barcelona.

#2922

M. Yousuff Hussaini

#59012

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Mohammed Yousuff Hussaini is an Indian born American applied mathematician. He is the Sir James Lighthill Professor of Mathematics and Computational Science & Engineering at the Florida State University, United States. Hussaini is also the holder of the TMC Eminent Scholar Chair in High Performance Computing at FSU. He is widely known for his research in scientific computation, particularly in the field of computational fluid dynamics and Control and optimization. Hussaini co-authored the popular book Spectral Methods in Fluid Dynamics with Claudio Canuto, Alfio Quarteroni, and Thomas Zang. H...

#2923

George Tchobanoglous

#106108

Overall Influence

#2924

Albert Szabo

#87598

Overall Influence

1925 - 2003 (78 years)

Albert Szabo was an American architect, educator and artist. He was born in Brooklyn, New York on November 7, 1925, to Benjamin Szabo of Felso Viso, Hungary and Jeanette Szabo of New York, New York . Szabo was a tenured professor of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and at the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies , Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. He co-founded the latter, together with Eduard Sekler in 1968. He was author, with his wife, architect Brenda Dyer Szabo , of “Preliminary Notes on the Indigenous Architecture of Afghanistan” and, with anthropologist, Thomas Barfield, of, “Afghanistan: An Atlas of Indigenous Domestic Architecture” .

#2925

Jim Hall

#88306

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

James Hall, is Professor of Climate and Environmental Risks and former director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. He is director of research at the School of Geography and the Environment, Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Engineering Science and Fellow of Linacre College. Hall is a member of the UK Prime Minister's Council for Science and Technology, Commissioner of the National Infrastructure Commission, and is chair of the Science and Advisory Committee of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. He was appointed as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2010.

#2926

Walter Bitterlich

#39591

Overall Influence

1908 - 2008 (100 years)

Walter Bitterlich was an Austrian forestry scientist. He was the inventor of the relascope, a method for efficient forest inventory. Early career Bitterlich descended from several generations of foresters and did much of his early work in the Tyrolean Alps of Austria.

#2927

Daidō Moriyama

#22637

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Daidō Moriyama is a Japanese photographer best known for his black-and-white street photography and association with the avant-garde photography magazine Provoke. Moriyama began his career as an assistant to photographer Eikoh Hosoe, a co-founder of the avant-garde photo cooperative Vivo, and made his mark with his first photobook Japan: A Photo Theater, published in 1968. His formative work in the 1960s boldly captured the darker qualities of urban life in postwar Japan in rough, unfettered fashion, filtering the rawness of human experience through sharply tilted angles, grained textures, harsh contrast, and blurred movements through the photographer's wandering gaze.

#2928

Anna Stefanopoulou

#73310

Overall Influence

Anna G. Stefanopoulou is a Greek-American mechanical engineer known for her research on the control theory of fuel cells and on improving the fuel efficiency of automotive engines. She is William Clay Ford Professor of Technology in the department of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, director of the University of Michigan Energy Institute, and a member of the University of Michigan President's Commission on Carbon Neutrality.

#2929

Lambertus Hesselink

#99072

Overall Influence

Lambertus Hesselink is a Professor in the Stanford Department of Electrical Engineering. He was the Director of the Ginzton Lab from 2008 until 2014. His research includes nano-photonics, ultra high density optical data storage, nonlinear optics, optical super-resolution, materials science, three-dimensional image processing and graphics, and Internet technologies.

#2930

William Alexander Gambling

#91482

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (98 years)

William Alexander Gambling FRS, FREng was a British electrical engineer. Life From 1950 to 1955, he was lecturer in electric power engineering at the University of Liverpool. He taught at the University of Southampton and was dean of Engineering and Applied Sciences from 1972 to 1975.

#2931

Dante C. Youla

#74614

Overall Influence

1925 - 2021 (96 years)

Dante C. Youla was Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Polytechnic Institute of New York University. He has made fundamental contributions to the areas of Circuit theory, analysis and synthesis; Communication theory; microwave systems and control theory.

#2932

David B. Marshall

#106256

Overall Influence

#2933

James W Varni

#106305

Overall Influence

#2934

Carol Willis

#44887

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Carol Willis is the founder, director, and curator of the Skyscraper Museum. She is also adjunct associate professor of Urban Studies at Columbia University. Herbert Muschamp described Willis in The New York Times as the “woman who created the Skyscraper Museum in 1996 from nothing but her imagination, her passion for New York architecture, and her belief in the importance of history and the value of the public realm.”

#2935

Jillian Buriak

#76099

Overall Influence

Jillian M. Buriak FRSC is a Canadian chemist, currently a Canada Research Chair in Nanomaterials at University of Alberta and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, American Association for the Advancement of Science and Royal Society of Chemistry. She is known for her work developing flexible, lightweight solar cells made from nanoparticles. By spraying a plastic surface with nanomaterials, she's able to fabricate a transparent layer of electrode that acts as solar cells. Due to the flexibility, they could be incorporated onto different surfaces.

#2936

Joji Nagashima

#71852

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Joji Nagashima is a Japanese automobile designer for BMW. He is best known for the exterior designs of the E90 versions of the BMW 3 Series, the E39 version of the BMW 5 Series, and the Z3 Roadster. As of November 2007, he held 22 patents in car design.

#2937

Anna Klingmann

#76900

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Anna Klingmann is a German born, American architect, author and academic who specializes in branding. She is the founder and principal architect of Klingmann Architects and Brand Consultants, and author of Brandscapes: Architecture in the Experience Economy. Klingmann coined the term "brandism" which describes how architecture can communicate a company's brand to the public. Her description of brandism can also be used not just to describe single structures; entire cities can have a unique brand or "expression of identity." She also has described the concept of a "brandscape" which describes corporate value systems embodied into the physical landscape.

#2938

Donald H. Liles

#99236

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Donald H. Liles was an American engineer, Professor of Industrial Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington, known for his seminal work on enterprise engineering. Biography Liles studied engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he received his BS in 1970, his MS in 1974 and his PhD in 1978 all in industrial engineering.

#2939

John E. Bowers

#76654

Overall Influence

John E. Bowers is an American physicist, engineer, researcher and educator. He is the Fred Kavli Chair in Nanotechnology, the director of the Institute for Energy Efficiency and a distinguished professor in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Materials at University of California, Santa Barbara. He was the deputy director of American Institute of Manufacturing of Integrated Photonics from 2015 to 2022.

#2940

Otto C. Koppen

#59818

Overall Influence

1901 - 1991 (90 years)

Otto C. Koppen was an American aircraft engineer. Early life Otto Koppen graduated with a Bachelor of Science from MIT in 1924. MIT Koppen was the professor emeritus of aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1929 Koppen returned to teach stability and control at MIT, where he remained until his retirement in 1965. As part of the course, Koppen took students up in a Fairchild 24 to demonstrate stability principles.

#2941

Warren J Manning

#106478

Overall Influence

#2942

P. C. Sreeram

#13354

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

P. C. Sreeram ISC is an Indian cinematographer and film director who works in Indian films. He is also the president of Qube Cinemas, a digital cinema technology company. He is an alumnus of the Madras Film Institute. Apart from his work as a cinematographer, Sreeram was much appreciated for his directorial venture Kuruthipunal. The film was internationally acclaimed and was submitted by India as its official entry to the Oscars in 1996. Sreeram is known for his association with Bharathan, Mani Ratnam, R Balki, Vikram Kumar, and received critical acclaim for his work in films such as Thevar M...

#2943

Dai Qionghai

#101530

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Dai Qionghai is a Chinese engineer who is a professor at Tsinghua University, and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering . Biography Dai was born in Shanghai, on 26 December 1964. In 1983, he was admitted to Shaanxi Normal University, majoring in mathematics. After graduating in 1987, he became an engineer at Yuejin Steel Works in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. He received his Master of Engineering degree and Doctor of Engineering degree from Northeastern University in 1994 and 1996, respectively.

#2944

Gabriele Tagliaventi

#76495

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Gabriele Tagliaventi is an Italian architect and a figure of the movement for the European Urban Renaissance and the New Urbanism in Europe. Biography Tagliaventi was coordinator of the EU Program on medium-sized cities from 1993 to 1996 and visiting professor at the University of Miami-School of Architecture from 1995 to 1997. Authors of various projects of architecture and town-planning, has received the 1st Prize at the International Competition for the Reconstruction of the Laeken Street in Bruxelles , one of the five 1st Prizes at the International Competition for the Reconstruction of t...

#2945

Brian Vad Mathiesen

#61918

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Brian Vad Mathiesen is a Danish engineer and professor at Aalborg University. He was listed among ISI Highly Cited researchers in 2015 and 2016, making him one of the leading engineers in the world.

#2946

Jeng‐shyang Pan

#106584

Overall Influence

#2947

Neelesh B. Mehta

#55108

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Neelesh B. Mehta is an Indian communications engineer, inventor and a professor at the Department of Electrical and Communications Engineering of the Indian Institute of Science who studies wireless networks.

#2948

Gulchohra Mammadova

#98472

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Gulchohra Huseyn gizi Mammadova is an Azerbaijani architect, academician, Doctor of Architecture, and the current president of Azerbaijan University of Architecture and Construction. She was also a deputy in the Azerbaijani National Assembly from 2000 to 2005.

#2949

Peter Williams

#59064

Overall Influence

1945 - 2020 (75 years)

Peter Williams was a British former professional motorcycle racer. He competed in Grand Prix motorcycle road racing from 1966 to 1973. He also competed at many levels on home short-circuit races. He raced many times on the Isle of Man TT course from 1966 to 1973. His father was Jack Williams who ran the Associated Motor Cycles race department. Williams trained in mechanical engineering and introduced via racing alloy wheels, an innovation which is commonplace on today's road bikes, and was also an early pioneer of solo-motorcycle disc brakes.

#2950

Norman Day

#64773

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Dr Norman Kingwell Day is an architect, educator, and writer. Architecture After graduating, in the late 60s Norman Day worked in the office of Romberg & Boyd, with noted architect and critic Robin Boyd and Professor Frederick Romberg. He then started his own practice in 1971.

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