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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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#10301

Alfred Wilhelmi

#117863

Overall Influence

1910 - 1994 (84 years)

Alfred Ellis Wilhelmi was an American endocrinologist recognized for contributing to the understanding of anterior pituitary hormones. Education Born in Lakewood, Ohio, Wilhelmi attended Cleveland public schools. Wilhelmi earned a B.S. degree in premedical sciences from Western Reserve University in 1933. He then attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, where he obtained a B.A. in 1933 and Ph.D. in animal physiology in 1937. He then joined Yale University's Biochemistry Department, rising to the position of Professor in 1950.

#10302

Liselotte Mettler

#18453

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Liselotte Mettler is an Austrian-German surgeon who specializes in endocrinology, reproductive medicine, gynecological endoscopy and gynecological oncology. Mettler is a professor emeritus for the Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics at Kiel University, Germany where she worked closely with Kurt Semm. The author of more than 600 publications and several books.

#10303

Gail Bradbrook

#114860

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Gail Marie Bradbrook is a British environmental activist and convicted criminal, who co-founded the environmental social movement Extinction Rebellion. Early life and career Bradbrook was born in 1972 and grew up in South Elmsall in West Yorkshire. Her father worked at a mine in South Kirkby. She studied molecular biophysics at the University of Manchester, gaining a PhD. She carried out post-doctoral work in India and France.

#10304

Claude V. Palisca

#50625

Overall Influence

1921 - 2001 (80 years)

Claude Victor Palisca was an American musicologist. An internationally recognized authority on early music, especially opera of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, he was the Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor Emeritus of Music at Yale University. Palisca is best known for co-writing the standard textbook A History of Western Music , as well as for his substantial body of work on the history of music theory in the Renaissance, reflected in his editorship of the Yale Music Theory in Translation series and in the book Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought . In particular, he was the leading expert on the Florentine Camerata.

#10305

Sandra Dingli

#147437

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Sandra Dingli is a Maltese philosopher mostly specialised in Creative Thinking. Life Dingli was born at Paceville, Malta, in 1952. She started attending philosophy and language courses at the University of Malta, and later proceeding to graduate courses at the same university. She acquired a Bachelor of Arts and a Masters in Philosophy, and proceeded to obtain a Doctorate in Philosophy from Durham University in England.

#10306

Victoria Sork

#114512

Overall Influence

Victoria Louise Sork is an American scientist who is Professor and Dean of Life Sciences at University of California, Los Angeles. She studies tree populations in California and the Eastern United States using genomics, evolutionary biology and conservation biology. Sork is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#10307

Nkiru Nzegwu

#39154

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Nkiru Nzegwu is a Nigerian philosopher, painter, author, curator and art historian. She is Distinguished Professor for Research at State University of New York at Binghamton. Among Dr. Nzegwu’s areas of expertise are African aesthetics, philosophy, African feminist issues, multicultural studies in art, and digital publishing.

#10308

Lesley McCowan

#158941

Overall Influence

Lesley Margaret Elizabeth McCowan is a New Zealand medical researcher and academic specialising in maternal health. She is currently a full professor and head of obstetrics and gynaecology at the University of Auckland.

#10309

Tori Haring-Smith

Tori Haring-Smith

#89461

Overall Influence

Tori Haring-Smith is the former president of Washington & Jefferson College. Education Haring-Smith received a bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College and doctoral and master's degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As an undergraduate, she received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to study abroad.

#10310

Rebecca Landa

#170264

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Rebecca Jean Moellman-Landa is an American speech-language pathologist specializing in neuropsychology and autism research. She is the founder and director of the center for autism and related disorders at the Kennedy Krieger Institute. Landa is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

#10311

Andrew Biankin

#88673

Overall Influence

Andrew Victor Biankin is a Scotland-based Australian clinician-scientist, best known for his work on enabling precision oncology in learning healthcare systems by integrating discovery, preclinical and clinical development to accelerate novel therapeutic strategies, and developing standardised pan-cancer assays for use by healthcare systems and researchers worldwide.

#10312

John Gager

#59723

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

John Goodrich Gager Jr. is an American scholar of Christianity. He retired from his position as William H. Danforth Professor of Religion at Princeton University in the spring of 2006. Biography The Gager family's roots in New England reach back to the arrival of John Winthrop and the "Winthrop Fleet" at what became the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630.

#10313

Mauro Ceruti

#124513

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Mauro Ceruti is an Italian philosopher. He is one of the pioneers and developers of Complex Systems Theories, Methods and Epistemologies, and of the trans-disciplinary research line usually called "Complex Thinking", which aims at the innovation of the paradigms of rationality.

#10314

Diane Winston

#149736

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Diane Winston is an American professor of Media and Religion at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, and an author. USC lists her current research interests as media coverage of Islam, religion and new media, and the place of religion in American identity.

#10315

Selwyn M. Vickers

#64114

Overall Influence

Selwyn Maurice Vickers is an American gastrointestinal surgical oncologist. He is the President and CEO of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, starting in September 2022. Previously, he was the senior vice president for Medicine and Dean of the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine and the CEO of both the UAB Health System and the UAB/Ascension St. Vincent's Alliance.

#10316

Ashfaq Ahmed

#8670

Overall Influence

1925 - 2004 (79 years)

Ashfaq Ahmed was a Pakistani writer, playwright and broadcaster. His works in Urdu included novels, short stories and plays for television and radio of Pakistan. He received the President's Pride of Performance and Sitara-i-Imtiaz awards for his everlasting services in the field of broadcasting and literary heritage of Pakistan.

#10317

Richard J. Blackwell

#81107

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (97 years)

Richard Joseph Blackwell was an American philosopher and professor emeritus of philosophy at Saint Louis University, where he held the Danforth Chair in the Humanities. His research has been on the interactions between modern science and philosophy.

#10318

Marsha Kinder

#56175

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Marsha Kinder is an American film scholar and Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Southern California. Background Kinder began her career as a scholar of eighteenth-century English Literature before moving to the study of transmedia relations among various narrative art forms. From 1965 through 1980 she taught at Occidental College in the Dept. of English and Comparative Literature. With her colleague, William Moritz, Kinder introduced film studies into their curriculum. In 1980 she joined USC as a Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts where she taught ...

#10319

Giles Hooper

#119573

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Giles Hooper is an author and lecturer at the University of Liverpool. He is known for contributions to contemporary musicology and applications of postmodernist theory in musicology. Hooper completed his PhD, The study of music and the status of musical knowledge, at the University of Keele in 2003. After teaching at Keele, Exeter, and Bristol, he was appointed as a lecturer in the School of Music in 2005. Hooper's work is currently in wide-ranging research interests including twentieth-century music, critical theory and analysis. In 2010, Hooper was appointed Head of the School of Music. His...

#10320

Andrew E. Sloan

#150198

Overall Influence

Andrew Edward Sloan is an American neurosurgeon and physician-scientist. He is the Peter D. Cristal Chair of Neurosurgical Oncology at Case Western Reserve University. In June 2000, Sloan married biostatistician and data scientist Jill S. Barnholtz-Sloan at the Missouri Botanical Garden.

#10321

Torstein Hovig

#131998

Overall Influence

1928 - 2015 (87 years)

Torstein Hovig was a Norwegian pathologist. He took the cand.med. degree at the University of Oslo in 1954 and the dr.med. degree in 1965. He worked at Rikshospitalet from 1967, was promoted to docent in 1973 and professor in 1985.

#10322

Christopher Hookway

#169579

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Christopher Hookway is a British philosopher and Emeritus Professor in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. He is known for his studies of Charles S. Peirce and is a former president of the Aristotelian Society.

#10323

David Selbourne

#54410

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

David Selbourne is a British political philosopher, social commentator and historian of ideas. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School, and Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied Jurisprudence, held the Winter Williams Law Scholarship, and was awarded a Paton Studentship and the Jenkins Law Prize. He was thereafter a British Commonwealth Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, and in 1960 was called to the bar of the Inner Temple where he was student scholar, but did not practise law. He is the father of Raphael Selbourne, winner of the 2009 Costa First Book Award.

#10324

Owen Wade

#87787

Overall Influence

1921 - 2008 (87 years)

Owen Lyndon Wade was a British medical researcher and academic, described by the Royal College of Physicians as "one of the founding fathers of clinical pharmacology and therapeutics in the UK". Wade was born in Penarth, South Wales, on 17 May 1921, to Katie Jones and James Owen David Wade, the latter a surgeon.

#10325

Radomir Đorđević

Radomir Đorđević

#122090

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Radomir Č. Đorđević – Pule is a retired professor of philosophy at the University of Belgrade. Biography Đorđević – Pule completed his secondary school in Belgrade, where he also obtained his undergraduate degree in philosophy. After graduation, he was elected assistant at the Institute of Social Sciences before joining academia on 1 October 1965 at the Faculty of Physics in Belgrade, where he spent his entire working life. Additionally, he taught philosophy at the Tenth Grammar School in Belgrade , the Faculty of Technology and Metallurgy , the Faculty of Philology , the Land Forces Military Academy , the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Kragujevac .

#10326

Vincent Luizzi

#168713

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Vincent Luizzi is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University. He is known for his expertise on legal ethics and philosophy of law. Luizzi was the Chair of Philosophy at Texas State University . He is also a member of the State Bar of Texas and a municipal judge in San Marcos, TX.

#10327

Frank Viola

#64150

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Frank Viola is an American author, speaker, and blogger on Christian topics. His work focuses on Jesus studies and biblical narrative, with a strong emphasis on helping the poor and the oppressed. He is most noted for his emphasis on the gospel of the kingdom, the centrality and supremacy of Jesus Christ, and the idea that Jesus indwells all Christians and they can learn to live by his life.

#10328

Lula Lubchenco

#94384

Overall Influence

1915 - 2001 (86 years)

Lula Olga Lubchenco was an American pediatrician. Her family moved from Russian Turkestan to South Carolina when she was a small child, and Lubchenco's higher education and career were spent almost entirely in Colorado. After completing a pediatric residency in Denver, Lubchenco joined the faculty of the University of Colorado School of Medicine and was the first director of the Premature Infant Center at Colorado General Hospital.

#10329

George Khutsishvili

George Khutsishvili

#59377

Overall Influence

1948 - 2013 (65 years)

George Khutsishvili Doctor of Philosophy, Professor , was a prominent Georgiann public figure, one of the founders of conflictology in Georgia and the Caucasian region and a scientist in the field of peace and conflict studies. In 1994 he founded the independent non-for-profit and non-partisan International Center on Conflict and Negotiation . Between 1995 and 2013 he was the publisher of Peace Times, Conflicts and Negotiations and Alternatives to Conflict’ amongst others. For many years he was invited to work as a professor at different leading universities in Georgia and abroad. George Kh...

#10330

Herbert L. Abrams

#47191

Overall Influence

1920 - 2016 (96 years)

Herbert Leroy Abrams was an American medical doctor. After establishing a career as a radiologist at Harvard Medical School and the Stanford University School of Medicine, Abrams became involved in the anti-nuclear movement. He served on the national board of directors of Physicians for Social Responsibility and he was the founding vice president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War .

#10331

Sheila Lukehart

#171036

Overall Influence

Sheila Lukehart is an American physician who is Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the University of Washington. Her research covered immune responses and the pathogenesis of syphilis. In 2023, she was elected a Fellow of the American Society for Microbiology.

#10332

Lawrence Whalley

#105088

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Lawrence J. Whalley MB, BS, MD, DPM, FRCP, FRC Psych was formerly the Crombie Ross Professor of Mental Health in the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK from 1992 to 2008. He remains professor emeritus at the University of Aberdeen and from 2010-2020 part-time professor of research at the University of the Highlands and Islands.

#10333

Robert E. Gross

#171796

Overall Influence

#10334

Märt Põder

#84699

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Märt Põder is an Estonian philosopher, freedom of information activist, presenter, publicist and translator. Biography Põder was born in Tartu. He received his primary education at Tallinn Nõmme Primary School , secondary education at Tallinn School No. 21 . He has studied philosophy at the University of Tartu and Keio University in Japan .

#10335

Cissy Kityo

#77592

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Cissy Kityo Mutuluuza , is a Ugandan physician, epidemiologist and medical researcher. She is the Executive Director of the Joint Clinical Research Centre, a government-owned medical research institution in Uganda, specializing in HIV/AIDS treatment and management.

#10336

Melissa Terras

#111616

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Melissa Mhairi Terras is a British scholar of Digital Humanities. Since 2017, she has been Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Edinburgh, and director of its Centre for Digital Scholarship. She previously taught at University College London, where she was Professor of Digital Humanities and served as director of its Centre for Digital Humanities from 2012 to 2017: she remains an honorary professor. She has a wide ranging academic background: she has an undergraduate degree in art history and English literature, then took a Master of Science degree in computer science,...

#10337

Jules Engel

#81254

Overall Influence

1909 - 2003 (94 years)

Jules Engel was an American filmmaker, painter, sculptor, graphic artist, set designer, animator, film director, and teacher of Hungarian origin. He was the founding director of the experimental animation program at the California Institute of the Arts, where he taught until his death, serving as mentor to several generations of animators.

#10338

Thomas Langan

#171849

Overall Influence

1929 - 2012 (83 years)

Thomas Langan was an American philosopher and a former president of the Metaphysical Society of America .

#10339

Chiara Bucciarelli-Ducci

#168760

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Chiara Bucciarelli-Ducci is an Italian cardiologist working in England. Career Bucciarelli-Ducci was born on June 15, 1976. She completed her general medical training and her specialist cardiology training at the Sapienza University in Rome, before taking on a doctorate at Imperial College London. Formerly a senior lecturer at the University of Bristol and Co-Director of the Clinical Research and Imaging Centre Bristol, she was named the Chief Executive Officer of the Society for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance. Since September 2021, she works at the Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Foundat...

#10340

Tirone E. David

#30545

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Tirone Esperidiao David, is a Brazilian-born Canadian cardiac surgeon and professor of surgery at the University of Toronto. He is an attending cardiac surgeon at the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre, Toronto General Hospital. He is known for his 2007 development of a valve sparing aortic root replacement procedure to preserve the aortic valve in patients with aortic root aneurysms such as in Marfan syndrome; it is now known as the "David Operation".

#10341

Bernard Langer

#112658

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Bernard Langer was a Canadian surgeon and educator. In 2015, he was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. Biography Born in Toronto, he received an MD from the University of Toronto, interned at the Toronto General Hospital and completed training as a surgeon at the University of Toronto. Langer subsequently pursued training in oncology at MD Anderson Hospital in Houston and in liver transplantation at Brigham Hospital in Boston.

#10342

Scott A. Small

#130687

Overall Influence

Scott A. Small is an American neurologist and neuroscientist known for his work in Alzheimer's disease and normal cognitive aging. His research focuses on the hippocampus, a circuit in the brain targeted by Alzheimer's disease, aging, and schizophrenia. Small is the Director of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Columbia University, where he is the Boris and Rose Katz Professor of Neurology. He is also appointed in Radiology and in Psychiatry, where he directs the Schizophrenia Research program.

#10343

Mose Durst

#34403

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Mose Durst is an author, educator, and the former president of the Unification Church of the United States. Durst was born in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York City, to immigrant parents from Russia. He received a Master's degree and Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Oregon. He taught at Laney College in Oakland, California. In 1972 he converted from Judaism and joined the Unification Church in Oakland, then became a lecturer and a church leader in California. In 1974, he married Korean missionary Yon Soo Lim, and they led the Northern California church to...

#10344

Haden Guest

#122183

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

, Haden Guest in Geneva, New York, is a film historian, archivist and curator. He is Director of the Harvard Film Archive and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies, Harvard University.

#10345

Sophia Zoungas

#155951

Overall Influence

Sophia Zoungas is a clinical endocrinologist from Victoria, Australia. She is recognised for her work in the management of diabetes and its vascular complications and leads Australia's largest translational research program in diabetes care and benchmarking of diabetes services. Zoungas's research explores the link between diabetes, glucose levels and cardiovascular risks and has enabled people with diabetes to be prescribed medication that reduce their cardiovascular risk factors. She is head of the School of Public Health and Preventative Medicine at Monash University and is the Professor o...

#10346

Louis Ptáček

#102451

Overall Influence

Louis Ptáček is an American neurologist and professor who contributed greatly to the field of genetics and neuroscience. He was also an HHMI investigator from 1997 to 2018. His chief areas of research include the understanding of inherited Mendelian disorders and circadian rhythm genes. Currently, Ptáček is a neurology professor and a director of the Division of Neurogenetics in University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine. His current investigations primarily focus on extensive clinical studies in families with hereditary disorders, which include identifying and characterizing...

#10347

Philip Brett

#49572

Overall Influence

1937 - 2002 (65 years)

Philip Brett was a British-born American musicologist, musician and conductor. He was particularly known for his scholarly studies on Benjamin Britten and William Byrd and for his contributions to the development of lesbian and gay musicology. At the time of his death, he was Distinguished Professor of Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

#10348

David Rothenberg

#109485

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

David Rothenberg is a professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, with a special interest in animal sounds as music. He is also a composer and jazz musician whose books and recordings reflect a longtime interest in understanding other species such as singing insects by making music with them.

#10349

Soodabeh Davaran

#89673

Overall Influence

Soodabeh Davaran is an Iranian researcher, and professor of polymer chemistry in the Faculty of Pharmacy in Tabriz University of Medical Sciences. She has written many articles about chemistry. Awards Awards include:Davaran has gained First Rank of 9th Razi festival in Pharmacy , 2003; December, Tehran-Iran.She has been selected among the Women Elites of Iran and All Elites around the Islamic World, 2007: July, Tehran- Iran.She has been selected to be included in the first edition of "Who's Who in Plastics and Polymers", James P Harrington, Editor in chief, Society of Plastic Engineers, Techn...

#10350

Mark Schnitzer

#59560

Overall Influence

Mark Schnitzer is a Professor jointly in the Biology and Applied Physics departments at Stanford University and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and is a recipient of a Paul Allen grant. His current research focuses on techniques for imaging individual neurons in vivo, including using fluorescent imaging and highly parallel processing techniques. In 2003, he was named to the MIT Technology Review's "TR100" list of young innovators.

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