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

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#11151

Robert Orledge

#43606

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Robert Orledge is a British musicologist who specialises in French music from the late 19th to early 20th centuries. A Professor Emeritus at the University of Liverpool, Orledge has published book-length studies on the composers Claude Debussy, Gabriel Fauré, Charles Koechlin and Erik Satie.

#11152

Peter Harper

#121147

Overall Influence

1939 - 2021 (82 years)

Sir Peter Stanley Harper was a British physician and academic who was University Research Professor in Human Genetics at Cardiff University. His work focused on researching neurogenetics and has resulted in discoveries concerning muscular dystrophies and Huntington's disease. He was knighted in 2004 for services to medicine.

#11153

August Coppola

#25899

Overall Influence

1934 - 2009 (75 years)

August Floyd Coppola was an American academic, author, film executive, and advocate for the arts. He was the brother of director Francis Ford Coppola and actress Talia Shire, and the father of actor Nicolas Cage, radio DJ Marc Coppola and director Christopher Coppola.

#11154

Stanton Glantz

#11705

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Stanton Arnold Glantz is an American professor, author, and tobacco control activist. Glantz is a faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, where he is a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Cardiology, the American Legacy Foundation Distinguished Professor of Tobacco Control, and former director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. Glantz's research focused on the health effects of tobacco smoking.

#11155

Jan Rath

#144468

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Jan Rath is a Dutch social scientist who is holding a chair in Urban Sociology in the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His academic studies have focused on the nexus of urban structures and processes on the one hand and their social, ethnic and religious dimensions on the other. His work is highly cited in the sub-fields related to the problematization of immigrant ethnic minorities, and on urban economies, entrepreneurship, and cultural consumption.

#11156

Herbert E. Douglass

#57499

Overall Influence

1927 - 2014 (87 years)

Herbert Edgar Douglass Jr. was a Seventh-day Adventist theologian. He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, US, the oldest of five children to Herbert Edgar Douglass Sr and Mildred Jennie Munson . He earned his Doctorate in Theology at Pacific School of Religion in 1964.

#11157

John Rotherham

#74880

Overall Influence

John Rotherham or Rotheram was an 18th-century British physician and scientist. Life He was born around 1750 in Hexham in northern England, the son of Catherine Roberts and her husband Dr John Rotheram. He was the eldest brother of seven siblings, one of which was Edward Rotheram. He was educated at Newcastle Grammar School in part learning mathematics and physics from his father and Charles Hutton. He was then sent to Sweden to study medicine and sciences at the University of Uppsala under Carl Linnaeus and Prof Bergmann.

#11158

David McKee

#18640

Overall Influence

1935 - 2022 (87 years)

David John McKee was a British writer and illustrator, chiefly of children's books and animations. For his contribution as a children's illustrator, he was UK nominee for the biennial international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2006.

#11159

Seiji Ogawa

#179353

Overall Influence

#11160

Eva J. Pell

#73013

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Eva J. Pell is a biologist, plant pathologist, and science administrator. Pell's research focused on the physiological and biochemical impacts of air pollutants on vegetation. As a science administrator at Pennsylvania State University and the Smithsonian Institution, Dr. Pell initiated several pan-institutional science institutes. Since leaving the Smithsonian, she is developing a series of adventure stories for elementary school children with the theme rescuing endangered species.

#11161

Tachi Yamada

#159325

Overall Influence

1945 - 2021 (76 years)

Tadataka "Tachi" Yamada KBE was a Japanese-born American physician and gastroenterologist. He was a venture partner of Frazier Healthcare Partners. Early life and education Born in Tokyo, Yamada had a Japanese American mother and was the a grandson of one of the first people of Japanese descent to be fully trained as an American physician. In 1960, he moved to the United States where he completed his education. After attending Phillips Academy for his high school education, he graduated from Stanford University with a BA in history and obtained his M.D. from New York University School of Medicine.

#11162

Simone Buitendijk

#37828

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Simone Elisabeth Buitendijk is a Dutch academic and the vice-chancellor of the University of Leeds. In October 2023 it was announced that she would be stepping down from the post on 31st December 2023. Her research considers women's health and innovations in education.

#11163

Anthony Abela

#127409

Overall Influence

1954 - 2006 (52 years)

Anthony Abela was a major Maltese sociologist. He mostly specialised in values. Life Abela was born at Floriana, Malta, in 1954. He began his studies at the University of Malta, from which he acquired a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy , and pursued further studies at the Gregorian University in Rome, Italy, from which he acquired a bachelor's degree in Theology . He also studied at the Centre Sèvres in Paris, France, from which he acquired a master's degree in Theology ; at the Loyola University of Chicago, U.S. ; and at the University of Oxford, England, from which he acquired a doctorate in ...

#11164

Martin Heidegger

#179384

Overall Influence

#11165

Robert J. Glushko

#38523

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Robert J. Glushko is an adjunct professor at the University of California Berkeley School of Information. He has written a number of books including Document Engineering and The Discipline of Organizing .

#11166

Helen O'Connell

#40159

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Helen E. O'Connell is an Australian professor of urology and a pioneer in the anatomical study of the clitoris. She is a leading researcher in the area of female pelvic anatomy and was the first woman to complete training as a urologist in Australia.

#11167

Drorah Setel

#98088

Overall Influence

Drorah Setel is an American biblical scholar and feminist theologian from Buffalo, New York, who was formerly a rabbi at Temple Beth El in Niagara Falls, NY. She presently serves as rabbi to the Temple Emanu-El congregation at the Jewish Community Center in Brighton, a suburb of Rochester, New York.

#11168

Clay Marsh

#97149

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Clay Braden Marsh is an American physician, scientist, educator and university administrator. He has been vice president and executive dean for health sciences at West Virginia University since 2015. He is a member of the board of WVU Medicine, West Virginia's largest health care enterprise and largest employer.

#11169

Joanna Hańderek

#174105

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Joanna Hańderek is a Polish philosopher of culture, associate professor at the Jagiellonian University, opinion journalist, activist and politician. Biography Academic work In 2002 she obtained a PhD in humanities at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Jagiellonian University, on the basis of the work Suffering and Time. An attempt to analyze the suffering-time relationship based on the views of Emmanuel Lévinas, supervised by Beata Szymańska. In 2012, she obtained habilitation in humanities. She is an associate professor at the Jagiellonian University. She was the deputy director for student a...

#11170

Nicholas J. J. Smith

#168139

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Nicholas Jeremy Josef Smith is an Australian philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a former President of the Australasian Association for Logic. Smith is known for his research on logics. He is a lecturer for the popular PHIL1012: Introductory Logic course at the University of Sydney, which broke records in 2021 as the largest course by enrolments in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

#11171

Patrice Mangin

#36339

Overall Influence

Professor Patrice Mangin is a widely published forensic pathologist and toxicologist, director of the University Center of Legal Medicine in Lausanne and Geneva, Switzerland. Education Mangin graduated from the Faculty of medicine Broussais-Hôtel-Dieu, University René Descartes in 1973. In 1978 he obtained his M.D. thesis at Faculty of medicine, Louis Pasteur University - Strasbourg I and later got his board certification in legal medicine in France and Switzerland in 1980 and 1996 respectively. He defended his Ph.D thesis in toxicology under Professor of Pharmacy G. Dirrheimer at Louis Pasteur University - Strasbourg I in 1985.

#11172

John P. Welle

#131232

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

John P. Welle is an American professor of Italian Studies and translator of poems from Italian to English. Life He graduated from St. John's University and Indiana University with an MFA and PhD. His poetry and translations have appeared in Dacotah Territory, The Cresset, The Juggler, Modern Poetry in Translation, and World Literature Today.

#11173

Megan Rosenbloom

Megan Rosenbloom

#101264

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Megan Curran Rosenbloom is an American medical librarian and expert on anthropodermic bibliopegy, the practice of binding books in human skin. She is a team member of the Anthropodermic Book Project, a group which scientifically tests skin-bound books to determine whether their origins are human. Rosenbloom is the author of Dark Archives, a 2020 non-fiction book on the history, provenance, and myths about books bound in human skin.

#11174

Alma Flor Ada

#50152

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Alma Flor Ada is a Cuban-American author of children's books, poetry, and novels. A Professor Emerita at the University of San Francisco, she is recognized for her work promoting bilingual and multicultural education in the United States.

#11175

Rezvi Sheriff

#34000

Overall Influence

Vidya Jyothi Mohamed Hussain Rezvi Sheriff, FRCP , FRCPE , FRACP, FCCP, FSLCGP, FNASSL is a Sri Lankan academic, nephrologist and physician. He served as the director of the Postgraduate Institute of Medicine; senior professor of medicine; head of the Department of Clinical Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Colombo. He is currently serving as the Senior Professor of Medicine at General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University. He is also a consultant physician and nephrologist at National Hospital Sri Lanka. He is widely regarded as the Father of Nephrology or either hailed as Father of Modern Nephrology and Dialysis.

#11176

Maurice Ewing

#139072

Overall Influence

1912 - 1999 (87 years)

Maurice Rossie Ewing, CBE, FRCSEd, FRCS, FRACS was a Scottish surgeon who was the first professor of surgery at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His department established an early programme of renal transplantation in Australia.

#11177

Clare Hocking

#179446

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Clare Hocking is a New Zealand occupational therapy academic, and New Zealand's first occupation therapy professor. She is currently a full professor at the Auckland University of Technology and an honorary professor at Plymouth University.

#11178

Boghuma Kabisen Titanji

#135721

Overall Influence

Boghuma Kabisen Titanji is a Cameroonian medical doctor and clinical researcher. She is an expert on HIV drug resistant viruses. Education and work Boghuma Kabisen Titanji, clinically trained in Cameroon, received her MSc and DTM&H in Tropical Medicine and International Health from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in 2010 and a PhD in Infectious Diseases studying HIV-1 cell-to-cell spread and Antiretroviral therapy drug resistance from University College London in 2014. Titanji's work focuses on the mechanisms of HIV transmission and antiretroviral drug resistance. In May 2012,...

#11179

Tomis Kapitan

#122199

Overall Influence

1949 - 2016 (67 years)

Tomis Kapitan was an American philosopher and Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at Northern Illinois University. He worked primarily in metaphysics and philosophy of language. Kapitan was especially interested in the free will debate, where he was a "compatibilist," defending the view that free will is possible even in a completely deterministic universe. He also published in philosophy of religion and wrote extensively on the Palestine-Israeli conflict.

#11180

Jürgen Schläder

#102732

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Jürgen Schläder is a German theatre director and musicologist, who was from May 1987 to March 2014 Professor of Theatre Studies with a focus on stage music at the LMU München. He studied German literature and musicology at the Ruhr-University Bochum and achieved his doctorate in musicology in 1978 with the dissertation Undine in stage music. In 1986 he habilitated on the subject of Das Opernduett. A 19th century scene type and its prehistory. His current research focuses are: Aesthetic foundations and analysis of contemporary directorial theatre, experimental forms of modern music for theatre...

#11181

Victor Chang

#7415

Overall Influence

1936 - 1991 (55 years)

Victor Peter Chang was a Chinese-born Australian cardiac surgeon and a pioneer of modern heart transplantation in Australia. His murder in 1991 stunned Australia and is considered one of the most notorious in the country's history. Chang was given a state funeral, and in 1999, he was voted Australian of the Century at the People's Choice Awards.

#11182

Nilofer S. Azad

#128546

Overall Influence

Nilofer Saba Azad is an American oncologist and physician-scientist specialized in gastrointestinal, colorectal, cholangiocarcinoma, and pancreaticobiliary cancers. She is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and oversees clinical trials at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center.

#11183

Marie-Jo Thiel

#170165

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Marie-Jo Thiel is a French theologian, medical doctor, and professor of ethics. She is a professor of moral theology, specialising in ethics and bioethics, at the University of Strasbourg. Her research focuses on topics such as ageing, death, medical ethics, and sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. She is also the founder and former director of the European Centre for Studies and Research in Ethics and former president of the European Society for Catholic Theology.

#11184

William D. Haseman

#53770

Overall Influence

1948 - 2019 (71 years)

William David Haseman was an American computer scientist who was an expert in Management Information Systems and Wisconsin Distinguished Professor of MIS of University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee . His expertise is Internet-based technologies.

#11185

Steve Sawyer

#178338

Overall Influence

Steven Burton Sawyer is a professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. He is known for his research on social and organizational informatics, how people work together and how they use technology, and the relationships among changing forms of work & organization. Sawyer has worked on improving the social components of teamwork, as well as the distinctions between packaged and custom software development. His research is done through field-based studies of software developers, scientific collaborators, scientific data repositories, real estate agents, police officers, ...

#11186

Frank Daniel

#22150

Overall Influence

1926 - 1996 (70 years)

František "Frank" Daniel was a Czech-American screenwriter, film director and teacher. He is known for developing the sequence paradigm of screenwriting, in which a classically constructed movie can be broken down into three acts, and a total of eight specific sequences. He served as co-chair of the Columbia University film program, and as a dean of FAMU, the American Film Institute and the USC School of Cinema-Television. He was also an Artistic Director of the Sundance Institute.

#11187

A. Ranganadha Rao

#63390

Overall Influence

1930 - 2014 (84 years)

Professor A. Ranganadha Rao M.B.B.S., M.S., M.Ch., D.Sc. was an Indian urologist. He is the first Urologist from Andhra Pradesh and the first person to perform a kidney transplantation in Andhra Pradesh.

#11188

Michele Barry

#49225

Overall Influence

Michele Barry is a professor of medicine. She became Stanford's inaugural Senior Associate Dean of global health in 2009 and started the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health in 2010. Prior to this, she was a professor at Yale, where she started the first refugee health clinic and homeless health mobile van project, for which she was awarded the Elm Ivy Mayor’s Award. She specializes in tropical medicine, emerging infectious diseases, women’s leadership in global health, and human and planetary health.

#11189

Ingetraut Dahlberg

Ingetraut Dahlberg

#85313

Overall Influence

1927 - 2017 (90 years)

Ingetraut Dahlberg was a German information scientist and philosopher who developed the universal Information Coding Classification covering some 6,500 subject fields. Her career spanned various roles in research, teaching, editing, and publishing. Dahlberg founded the journal International Classification as well as both the scientific Society for Classification and International Society for Knowledge Organization.

#11190

Joakim Norbeck

#51145

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Joakim Norbeck, born 1965, is a scientist in molecular biotechnology at Chalmers University, Gothenburg, Sweden. He received his Ph.D. from Gothenburg University in 1996 on a thesis entitled "Protein expression of yeast during growth under osmotic stress",. He identified the genes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae encoding glycerol-3-phosphatase , as well as the genes encoding dihydroxyacetone kinase in the same organism.

#11191

Kevin Thomas

#69603

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Kevin B. Thomas is an American film critic who has written reviews for the Los Angeles Times since 1962. His long tenure makes him the longest-running film critic among major United States newspapers.

#11192

Andrew Wilkinson

#173868

Overall Influence

Andrew Wilkinson is a Professor Emeritus of Paediatrics and Perinatal Medicine at All Souls College, Oxford. Wilkinson is most notable for being an international authority in neonatology and a lead author of the Standards of Care for NICU and NICE guidelines on retinopathy of prematurity.

#11193

Nancy E. Dunlap

#39980

Overall Influence

Nancy E. Dunlap is a physician, researcher and business administrator focused in the area of pulmonary and critical care medicine. She is now an emeritus professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine.

#11194

Peter Ormerod

#129448

Overall Influence

1950 - 2019 (69 years)

Professor Lawrence Peter Ormerod FRCP, FRCP, FRCP was an English chest physician. Ormerod was educated at Bacup and Rawtenstall Grammar School. He qualified as a doctor in 1974 and gained a DSc in 2000 for his work researching tuberculosis.

#11195

Rahul Potluri

#32226

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (43 years)

Rahul Potluri is a British physician, researcher and founder of ACALM Study Unit, United Kingdom . His clinical epidemiology research unit is one of the first to use big data in healthcare and medical research. His work has shown for the first time a link between high cholesterol and breast cancer. Further research has suggested the role of cholesterol and possibly statins improving the mortality in patients with breast cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer and bowel cancer. Other prominent studies include health services research evaluating differences in death rates from weekend admission ...

#11196

David Bivar

#171561

Overall Influence

1926 - 2015 (89 years)

Adrian David Hugh Bivar, FRAS was a British numismatist and archaeologist, who was Emeritus Professor of Iranian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He specialized in Sasanian seals and rock reliefs, Kushanoo-Sasanian coins and chronology, Mithraic iconography, Arsacid history and pre-Islamic folklore. His written works include book chapters written for the Fischer Weltgeschichte and The Cambridge History of Iran .

#11197

Merfyn Jones

#25905

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

R. Merfyn Jones CBE is a Welsh historian and broadcaster, was vice-chancellor of Bangor University and a governor of the BBC . He grew up and still lives in Gwynedd, Wales. Academic career Jones has specialized as an historian in modern and contemporary Welsh history, and has made several TV documentaries in this area. He has a particular interest is the history of the process of devolution in Wales.

#11198

Ilse Korotin

#111697

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Ilse Erika Korotin is an Austrian philosopher and sociologist. She researched and published on the history of ideas of Nazism. At the Institute for Science and Art in Vienna, she heads the Documentation Centre for Women's Studies. Her work focuses on feminist biographical research and history of science.

#11199

Robin Cook

#37874

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Robert Brian "Robin" Cook is an American physician and novelist who writes about medicine and topics affecting public health. He is best known for combining medical writing with the thriller genre. Many of his books have been bestsellers on The New York Times Best Seller List. Several of his books have also been featured in Reader's Digest. His books have sold nearly 400 million copies worldwide.

#11200

John H. Newman

#179700

Overall Influence

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