The Most Influential People Across History
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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List of the most influential people in Engineering,
#351
Thomas Huang
#19749
Overall Influence
1936 - 2020 (84 years)
Thomas Shi-Tao Huang was a Chinese-born American computer scientist, electrical engineer, and writer. He was a researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . Huang was one of the leading figures in computer vision, pattern recognition and human computer interaction.
Go to Profile#352
Ilesanmi Adesida
#10282
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Ilesanmi Adesida is a Nigerian American physicist of Yoruba descent. He has been the provost at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan, from September 2016. Adesida is also the Donald Biggar Willett Professor Emeritus of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; he retired from Illinois in 2016. In May 2012, the board of trustees of the University of Illinois selected Adesida to be the next vice chancellor for academic affairs and provost of the Urbana campus, a position he held from August 15, 2012 to August 31, 2015. Other positions that Adesida held at Illinois in...
Go to Profile#353
Bob Colwell
#14624
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Robert P. "Bob" Colwell is an electrical engineer who worked at Intel and later served as Director of the Microsystems Technology Office at DARPA. He was the chief IA-32 architect on the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, and Pentium 4 microprocessors. Bob retired from Intel in 2000. He was an Intel Fellow from 1995 to 2000.
Go to Profile#354
Garrett Eckbo
#12593
Overall Influence
1910 - 2000 (90 years)
Garrett Eckbo was an American landscape architect notable for his seminal 1950 book Landscape for Living. Youth He was born in Cooperstown, New York, to Axel Eckbo, a businessman, and Theodora Munn Eckbo. In 1912, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois. After Eckbo's parents divorced, he and his mother relocated to Alameda, California, where they struggled financially while he grew up. After Eckbo graduated from high school in 1929, he felt a lack of ambition and direction and went to stay with a wealthy paternal uncle, Eivind Eckbo, in Norway. It was during his stay in Norway that he began to focus on his future.
Go to Profile#355
Nader Khalili
#13956
Overall Influence
1936 - 2008 (72 years)
Nader Khalili was an Iranian-born American architect, author, and educator. He is best known for his inventive structures that incorporated a range of atypical building materials to provide shelter in the developing world and emergency contexts. His work was heavily influenced by the traditional arid house designs of Iran.
Go to Profile#356
Stanley Tigerman
#8394
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Stanley Tigerman was an American architect, theorist and designer. Biography Early years Tigerman was born into a Jewish family, the only child of Emma , a typist for the federal government, and Samuel Tigerman, an engineer whose career struggled by the Depression. He grew up in his paternal grandparents' boardinghouse in Edgewater, Chicago. He won the 'beautiful baby' contest at the 1933 World's Fair. When he was a child, he wanted to be a musician and took six years of piano lessons. At Senn High School he studied jazz.
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Ali H. Nayfeh
#8967
Overall Influence
1933 - 2017 (84 years)
Ali Hasan Nayfeh was a Palestinian-Jordanianian mathematician, mechanical engineer and physicist. He is regarded as the most influential scholar and scientist in the area of applied nonlinear dynamics in mechanics and engineering. He was the inaugural winner of the Thomas K. Caughey Dynamics Award, and was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal in mechanical engineering. His pioneering work in nonlinear dynamics has been influential in the construction and maintenance of machines and structures that are common in daily life, such as ships, cranes, bridges, buildings, skyscrapers, jet engines, r...
Go to Profile#358
Günther Domenig
#14506
Overall Influence
1934 - 2012 (78 years)
Günther Domenig was an Austrian architect. Domenig was born in Klagenfurt, and studied architecture at the Graz University of Technology . After working as an architectural assistant, he set up in practice with Eilfried Huth , producing buildings in a brutalist vein. They designed buildings with exposed concrete that are among the outstanding examples of brutalism in Austria. Both the Pedagogical Academy Graz and the Oberwart Parish Church were commissioned by the Catholic Church.
Go to Profile#359
Piet Bergveld
#7292
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Piet Bergveld is a Dutch electrical engineer. He was professor of biosensors at the University of Twente between 1983 and 2003. He is the inventor of the ion-sensitive field-effect transistor sensor. Bergveld's work has focused on electrical engineering and biomedical technology.
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Pietro Perona
#12526
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Pietro Perona is an Italian-American educator and computer scientist. He is the Allan E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology and director of the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center in Neuromorphic Systems Engineering. He is known for his research in computer vision and is the director of the Caltech Computational Vision Group.
Go to Profile#361
Edward J. McCluskey
#6540
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Edward Joseph McCluskey was a professor at Stanford University. He was a pioneer in the field of Electrical Engineering. Biography McCluskey was born Oct 16, 1929, in New York City. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1953 and earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956. McCluskey worked on electronic switching systems at the Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1955 to 1959. In 1959, he moved to Princeton University, where he was Professor of Electrical Engineering and Director of the University Computer Center. In 1966, he joined Stanford Univ...
Go to Profile#362
Gregory L. Fenves
#15091
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Gregory Louis Fenves is a structural engineer, professor and college administrator who is the twenty-first president of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Fenves was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2014 for contributions to computational modeling, creation of open source software for earthquake engineering analysis, and academic leadership.
Go to Profile#363
John A. Rogers
#9630
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
#364
Abdullah Atalar
#11901
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Abdullah Atalar is a Turkish scientist and academic. Atalar was the Rector of İhsan Doğramacı Bilkent University, and a professor at Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering. He received B.S. degree from Middle East Technical University, in 1974, M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University in 1976 and 1978, respectively, all in Electrical Engineering. His thesis work was on reflection acoustic microscopy.
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Tamer Başar
#14010
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Mustafa Tamer Başar is a control and game theorist who is the Swanlund Endowed Chair and Center for Advanced Study Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He is also the Director of the Center for Advanced Study .
Go to Profile#366
Günter Behnisch
#12973
Overall Influence
1922 - 2010 (88 years)
Günter Behnisch was a German architect, born in Lockwitz, near Dresden. During the Second World War he became one of Germany's youngest submarine commanders. Subsequently, Behnisch became one of the most prominent architects representing deconstructivism. His prominent projects included the Olympic Park in Munich and the new West German parliament in Bonn.
Go to Profile#367
Wiesław Binienda
#23467
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Wiesław Kazimierz Binienda is a Polish-American scientist, researcher, PhD, and professor and chairman of the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Akron. Research His research includes impact simulation, fracture and damage of advanced composite materials, explicit and implicit finite element mechanics, smart materials, structural design and optimization, characterization and constitutive equation development for ceramic matrix, metal matrix and polymer matrix composites.
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Ascher H. Shapiro
#17657
Overall Influence
1916 - 2004 (88 years)
Ascher Herman Shapiro was a professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He grew up in New York City. Early life and education Shapiro was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish Lithuanian immigrant parents. He earned his S.B. in 1938 and an Sc.D. in 1946 in the field of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .
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Behrokh Khoshnevis
#21340
Overall Influence
Behrokh Khoshnevis is the President and CEO of Contour Crafting Corporation and the Louise L. Dunn Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the University of Southern California , where he has affiliations with the Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering, Astronautics Engineering, Civil & Environmental Engineering and Industrial & Systems Engineering departments. He is the Director of the Center for Rapid Automated Fabrication Technologies at USC. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow Member of the National Academy of Inventors and is a Fellow of the American Society for the Advancement of Science.
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James L. Flanagan
#8258
Overall Influence
1925 - 2015 (90 years)
James Loton Flanagan was an American electrical engineer. He was Rutgers University's vice president for research until 2004. He was also director of Rutgers' Center for Advanced Information Processing and the Board of Governors Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is known for co-developing adaptive differential pulse-code modulation with P. Cummiskey and Nikil Jayant at Bell Labs.
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Gottfried Böhm
#10534
Overall Influence
1920 - 2021 (101 years)
Gottfried Böhm was a German architect and sculptor. His reputation is based on creating highly sculptural buildings made of concrete, steel, and glass. Böhm's first independent building was the Cologne chapel "Madonna in the Rubble" . The chapel was completed in 1949 where a medieval church once stood before it was destroyed during World War II. Böhm's most influential and recognized building is the Maria, Königin des Friedens pilgrimage church in Neviges.
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Rachid Yazami
#8746
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Rachid Yazami is a Moroccan scientist, engineer, and inventor. He is best known for his critical role in the development of the graphite anode for lithium-ion batteries and his research on fluoride ion batteries.
Go to Profile#373
Winy Maas
#12435
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Wilhelmus "Winy" Maas is a Dutch architect, landscape architect, professor and urbanist. In 1993 together with Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries he set up MVRDV. Education He completed his studies at the RHSTL Boskoop, graduating as a "landscape architect", and in 1990 he got his degree from the Delft University of Technology. He currently is visiting professor of architectural design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is professor in architecture and urban design at the faculty of architecture, Delft University of Technology. Before this he was professor at among others Berl...
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Mario Salvadori
#13549
Overall Influence
1907 - 1997 (90 years)
Mario G. Salvadori was an American structural engineer and professor of both civil engineering and architecture at Columbia University. Early life Salvadori was born in Rome, Italy in 1907. His father, Riccardo, an engineer who worked for the telephone company, became the chief engineer of the city of Genoa when the phone company merged with their French counterpart. Salvadori's father later became the head of the gas and electric company in Spain. His mother, Ermelinda Alatri, belonged to a rich Jewish family. Following his father's activities, Salvadori spent many years of his youth in Madrid and only returned to Italy in 1923.
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Siva S. Banda
#8521
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Siva Subrahmanyam Banda is an Indian-American aerospace engineer. He is Director of the Control Science Center of Excellence and Chief Scientist for the Aerospace Systems Directorate at the United States Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. He has taught at Wright State University, the University of Dayton, and the Air Force Institute of Technology.
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Julius Adams Stratton
#9613
Overall Influence
1901 - 1994 (93 years)
Julius Adams Stratton was a U.S. electrical engineer, physicist, and university administrator. He attended the University of Washington for one year, where he was admitted to the Zeta Psi fraternity, then transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , from which he graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1923 and a master's degree in electrical engineering in 1926. He then followed graduate studies in Europe and the Technische Hochschule of Zürich , Switzerland, awarded him the degree of Doctor of Science in 1928.
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Robert C. Michelson
#16962
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Robert C. Michelson is an American engineer and academic widely known for inventing the entomopter, a biologically inspired flapping-winged aerial robot, and for having established the International Aerial Robotics Competition. He has received degrees in electrical engineering from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Michelson's professional career began at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory where he worked on radar-based ocean surveillance systems. He later became a member of the research faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology. At the Georgi...
Go to Profile#378
M. C. Frank Chang
#11555
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Mau-Chung Frank Chang is Distinguished Professor and the Chairman of Electrical Engineering department at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he conducts research and teaching on RF CMOS design, high speed integrated circuit design, data converter, and mixed-signal circuit designs. He is the Director of the UCLA High Speed Electronics Laboratory.
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Gert Wingårdh
#12210
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Gert Wingårdh is a Swedish architect whose company, Wingårdh arkitektkontor, maintains an international practice. Personal life Gert Wingårdh was born 1951 into a wealthy family in Skövde, Västergötland county, as the only child. His father owned the local cement factory and the family’s house was built on a limestone mountain. Both cement and limestone are materials Wingårdh later has used in his work.
Go to Profile#380
Way Kuo
#14880
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Way Kuo is the 4th President of the City University of Hong Kong and University Distinguished Professor of the City University of Hong Kong. Before joining CityU, he was University Distinguished Professor and Dean of Engineering at the University of Tennessee.
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Philip Cox
#9303
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Philip Sutton Cox is an Australian architect. Cox is the founding partner of Cox Architecture, one of the largest architectural practices in Australia. He commenced his first practice with Ian McKay in 1962, and in 1967 he founded his own practice, Philip Cox and Associates. The firm has grown to become Cox Architecture, with offices across Australia as well as in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Involved in much of concept design for each project over fifty years, Cox stepped back from the business in 2015 that is now responsible for projects throughout Australia and also in Southeast Asia, China, the Middle East, South Africa and Europe.
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Bin He
#11125
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Bin He is a Chinese American biomedical engineering scientist. He was the Trustee Professor and Head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Professor by courtesy in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Professor of the Neuroscience Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior, he was Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Medtronic-Bakken Endowed Chair for Engineering in Medicine at the University of Minnesota. He previously served as the director of the Institute for Engineering in Medicine and the Center for Neuroengineering at the University of Minnesota.
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David Boggs
#6467
Overall Influence
1950 - 2022 (72 years)
David Reeves Boggs was an American electrical and radio engineer who developed early prototypes of Internet protocolss, file servers, gatewayss, network interface cards and, along with Robert Metcalfe and others, co-invented Ethernet, the most popular family of technologies for local area computer networkss.
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Vijay P. Bhatkar
#6178
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Vijay Pandurang Bhatkar is an Indian computer scientist, IT leader and educationalist. He is best known as the architect of India's national initiative in supercomputing where he led the development of Param supercomputers. He is a Padma Shri, Padma Bhushan, and Maharashtra Bhushan awardee. Indian computer magazine Dataquest placed him among the pioneers of India's IT industry. He was the founder and executive director of Centre for Development of Advanced Computing and is currently working on developing exascale supercomputing for India.
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Homayoun Seraji
#25859
Overall Influence
1947 - 2007 (60 years)
Homâyun Serâji was an Iranian scientist, engineer, a JPL senior researcher and former professor of Sharif University of Technology who published extensively in the field of multivariable control systems, focusing on optimal control, pole placement, multivariable PID controllers, and output regulation. Also he has significant publications in the field of Robotics, and space exploration.
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Adrian Bejan
#6046
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Adrian Bejan is a Romanian-American professor who has made contributions to modern thermodynamics and developed his constructal law. He is J. A. Jones Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Duke University and author of the books Design in Nature, The Physics of Life , Freedom and Evolution and Time And Beauty: Why Time Flies And Beauty Never Dies
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Donald Bitzer
#7031
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Donald L. Bitzer is an American electrical engineer and computer scientist. He was the co-inventor of the plasma display, is largely regarded as the "father of PLATO", and has made a career of improving classroom productivity by using computer and telecommunications technologies.
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Ted Belytschko
#22666
Overall Influence
1943 - 2014 (71 years)
Ted Bohdan Belytschko was an American mechanical engineer. He was Walter P. Murphy Professor and McCormick Professor of Computational Mechanics at Northwestern University. He worked in the field of computational solid mechanics and was known for development of methods like element-free Galerkin method and the Extended finite element method.
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Fernando Távora
#24406
Overall Influence
1923 - 2005 (82 years)
Fernando Luís Cardoso de Meneses de Tavares e Távora, ComSE, simply known as Fernando Távora , was a renowned Portuguese architect and professor. Biography The sixth of seven children and third of three sons of José Pinto Tavares de Mendonça Ferrão or José Ferrão de Tavares e Távora and wife Maria José do Amaral Ferrão Lobo Machado or Maria José Lobo de Sousa Machado Cardoso de Meneses, of the Viscounts of Paço de Nespereira, he inherited from his mother the House of Covilhã. He graduated in architecture from the Porto School of Fine Arts in 1952. Having sat the examination in Fine Composition for Professor of Architecture, he was later invited to become a Professor at the school.
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Gottfried Ungerboeck
#7789
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Gottfried Ungerboeck is an Austrian communications engineer. Ungerboeck received an electrical engineering degree from Vienna University of Technology in 1964, and a Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, in 1970. He joined IBM Austria as a systems engineer in 1965, and the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory in 1967.
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Elizabeth Diller
#13152
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Elizabeth Diller, also known as Liz Diller, is an American architect and partner in Diller Scofidio + Renfro, which she co-founded in 1979. She is also an architecture professor at Princeton University.
Go to Profile#392
Bernard Budiansky
#23819
Overall Influence
1925 - 1999 (74 years)
Bernard Budiansky was an American scholar in the field of applied mechanics, and made seminal contributions to the mechanics of structures and mechanics of materials. He was a recipient of the Timoshenko Medal.
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Craig Ellwood
#23147
Overall Influence
1922 - 1992 (70 years)
Craig Ellwood was an influential Los Angeles-based modernist architect whose career spanned the early 1950s through the mid-1970s. Although untrained as an architect, Ellwood fashioned a persona and career through equal parts of a talent for good design, self-promotion and ambition. He was recognized professionally for fusing of the formalism of Mies van der Rohe with the informal style of California modernism.
Go to Profile#394
Ferdinand P. Beer
#15316
Overall Influence
1915 - 2003 (88 years)
Ferdinand Pierre Beer was a French mechanical engineer and university professor. He spent most of his career as a member of the faculty at Lehigh University, where he served as the chairman of the mechanics and mechanical engineering departments. His most significant contribution was the co-authorship of several textbooks in the field of mechanics, which have been widely cited and utilized in engineering education.
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Vijay K. Dhir
#17213
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Vijay K. Dhir is the former Dean of the University of California, Los Angeles Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, holding the position from March 2003 to January 2016. He is also a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, joining the UCLA faculty in 1974. He is the principal investigator of the Boiling eXperiment Facility - Nucleate Pool Boiling eXperiment , which was conducted in micro-g environment on the International Space Station to understand bubble growth, detachment and subsequent motion of single and large merged bubbles boiling in micro-g environment.
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Bill Dally
#11910
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
William James Dally is an American computer scientist and educator. Formerly a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University and MIT, he is the chief scientist and senior vice president at Nvidia where he leads the company's research efforts in high-performance computing and artificial intelligence. Since 2021, he has been a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology .
Go to Profile#397
N. John Habraken
#16534
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
N. John Habraken was a Dutch architect, educator, and theorist. His theoretical contributions are in the field of user participation in mass housing, the integration of users and residents into the design process. The visual result of his theory is the architecture of lively variety. Habraken was the initiator of the international "Participation movement" in architecture. His book Supports: An Alternative to Mass Housin, first published in 1961, is the manifesto and starting point of this movement. The theme resident or user participation has been linked to Structuralism and open building.
Go to Profile#398
Alessandro Mendini
#10395
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Alessandro Mendini was an Italian designer and architect. He played an important part in the development of Italian, Postmodern, and Radical design. He also worked, aside from his artistic career, for Casabella, Modo and Domus magazines.
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Neri Oxman
#8522
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Neri Oxman is an American–Israeli designer and professor known for art and architecture that combines design, biology, computing, and materials engineering. She coined the phrase "material ecology" to define her work.
Go to Profile#400
Umran Inan
#10781
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Umran Savaş İnan is a Turkish scientist at Koç University and Stanford University in the field of geophysics and very low frequency radio science. İnan was the president of Koç University between 2009 and 2021.
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