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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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#11701

Nikolai Amosov

#6422

Overall Influence

1913 - 2002 (89 years)

Nikolai Mikhailovich Amosov, Doctor of Science, Professor , also known as Mykola Mykhailovych Amosov was a Soviet and Ukrainian doctor, heart surgeon, inventor, best-selling author, and exercise enthusiast, known for his inventions of several surgical procedures for treating heart defects.

#11702

Dion Morton

#117911

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Dion Gregory Morton is a leading colorectal surgeon at the University of Birmingham, where he has been Professor of Surgery since 2006. He was appointed Barling Chair of Surgery at the University of Birmingham in 2015. In addition he has served as Director of Clinical Research at the Royal College of Surgeons of England since 2011. In the latter role he has worked to establish a national infrastructure to support the development and dissemination of clinical trials in surgery. He has championed the role of large-scale multi centre randomised controlled trials in informing best practice in sur...

#11703

Edward S. Ayensu

#120567

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Edward Solomon Ayensu was an African life scientist and Professor. He was an international development advisor on science, technology and economic development. He was a founding Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences.

#11704

Katrin Rittinger

Katrin Rittinger

#143962

Overall Influence

Katrin Rittinger is a professor in structural biology who has made significant contributions to the ubiquitination field. She is a senior scientist at the Francis Crick Institute and was awarded European Molecular Biology Organization membership in 2019. Rittinger is on the Editorial Board of Biochemical Journal and has written on transparency and openness in science.

#11705

George Tyndall

#57003

Overall Influence

George Tyndall was an American gynecologist. In 2019 he was under investigation in the Los Angeles Police Department's largest investigation of sexual abuse by a single perpetrator. Early life and education Tyndall was born and raised in Plattsburgh, New York, as one of five children. He had some French ancestry on his mother's side. He attended the State University of New York Plattsburgh but discontinued his studies to join the Navy in 1967. While in the Navy, he was sent to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey to study Vietnamese, a language that was in high demand for the American Intelligence efforts during the Viet Nam War.

#11706

Thomas W. Smith

#183999

Overall Influence

#11707

Jennifer Herdt

#177014

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Jennifer A. Herdt is an American philosopher and Gilbert L. Stark Professor of Christian Ethics and Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Yale Divinity School. She is known for her works on moral philosophy.

#11708

Ingo Brigandt

#128484

Overall Influence

Ingo Brigandt is a German Canadian philosopher and Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Biology at the University of Alberta. He is an executive editor of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy and an associate editor of Journal of Experimental Zoology Part B: Molecular and Developmental Evolution. Brigandt has held various grants and fellowships from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, and the University of Alberta.

#11709

Irene Cybulsky

#81111

Overall Influence

Irene Cybulsky is a Canadian lawyer and former cardiac surgeon. She was the first woman in Canada to be appointed head of a cardiac surgery division. After being dismissed from this position, she "represent[ed] herself in a human rights tribunal case against her former hospital", which was ultimately successful.

#11710

Benjy F. Brooks

#104121

Overall Influence

1918 - 1998 (80 years)

Benjy Frances Brooks was an American pediatric surgeon affiliated with several hospitals in Houston. She was the first woman in the surgery department at Harvard Medical School and the first woman to become a pediatric surgeon in the state of Texas. She founded the pediatric surgery division at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Brooks actively conducted research throughout her career in addition to working as a pediatric surgeon.

#11711

Sarah-Jane Dawson

#68819

Overall Influence

Sarah-Jane Dawson is an Australian clinician-scientist. She is a consultant medical oncologist and head of the Molecular Biomarkers and Translational Genomics Laboratory at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne. Her current research interests are focused on the development of noninvasive blood-based biomarkers for clinical application, including early detection, risk stratification and disease monitoring in cancer management.

#11712

Roger Horrocks

#154306

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Roger John Horrocks is a New Zealand writer, film-maker, educator and cultural activist. Biography Horrocks was born in the Auckland suburb of Mount Albert on 4 June 1941, the son of Jack Horrocks and Edith Barbara Horrocks . Majoring in English, he completed a BA , MA First Class Honours , and PhD from the University of Auckland. His doctoral thesis, supervised by C. K. Stead, was titled Mosaic: a study of juxtaposition in literature, as an approach to Pound's Cantos and similar modern poems. He also studied for two years with Allen Tate at the University of Minnesota and one year with Thom Gunn at the University of California, Berkeley .

#11713

Robert Biscup

#53986

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Robert S. Biscup is an American orthopaedic surgeon. Biscup's work includes developments in major reconstructive spine surgery, failed spine surgery, and minimally invasive spine surgery, including laser microsurgery and micro-decompression laminoplasty. Biscup lectures frequently in Florida and around the world.

#11714

Vera Ignjatovic

#172183

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Vera Ignjatovic is a medical researcher specialising in paediatric thrombosis and haemostasis and in proteomics. Early life and education Ignjatovic was born in Niš, Nišava, Serbia on 15 March 1975. She has a BSc and a PhD, for her thesis titled "The effects of a phytochemical preparation on lipid metabolism in obesity: the study of 'Slimax', a Chinese herbal mixture", from Monash University.

#11715

Rafaël Govaerts

#79714

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Rafaël Herman Anna Govaerts is a Belgian botanist. He is particularly noted for his work on plant taxonomy. He has worked at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew since the 1990s. He is the principal contributor to the World Checklist of Selected Plant Families, which was completed in 2023, and will continue to be updated as Plants of the World Online.

#11716

Jean-Gérard Bursztein

#146997

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Jean-Gerard Bursztein is a French psychoanalyst who has a doctorate in philosophy. He teaches psychoanalysis and practices in Paris. He was a student of Jean-Toussaint Desanti and worked on both philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science. He continues to explore this field in studying the intrication of psychoanalysis and mathematics. On the basis of his practice he has written the following publications :

#11717

Stewart Hillis

#102073

Overall Influence

1943 - 2014 (71 years)

William Stewart Hillis was a Scottish physician who held a professorship in cardiology and exercise medicine. He was doctor for the Scotland national football team for 228 full international matches, part of his involvement with football that spanned more than 40 year during his medical career. He was vice-chairman of the UEFA medical committee and medical advisor to FIFA.

#11718

Arkady Melua

#79727

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Arkady Ivanovich Melua is the general director and editor-in-chief of the scientific publishing house, Humanistica. Life and work Starting in 1969, Melua served and worked as an engineer at the Ministry of Defense facilities. In 1973, while having served in the military, he received a degree in engineering at the Leningrad Engineering-Construction Institute. He participated in the construction of an educational nuclear reactor in one of the military schools. In 1974, he began conducting scientific research.

#11719

William H. Harris

William H. Harris

#67434

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (99 years)

William H. Harris, is an American orthopaedic surgeon, Founder and Director Emeritus of the Massachusetts General Hospital Harris Orthopaedics Laboratory, and creator of the Advances in Arthroplasty course held annually since 1970.

#11720

Oriol Mitjà

#70987

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Oriol Mitjà i Villar is a Catalan-born Spanish researcher and consultant physician in internal medicine and infectious diseases with expertise in poverty-related tropical diseases. He has conducted research at the Lihir Medical Centre in Papua New Guinea since 2010 on new diagnostic and therapeutic tools to eradicate yaws. He was awarded the Princess of Girona Award in the scientific research category. Currently at the Germans Trias i Pujol Research Institute, Mitjà is conducting research on SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus disease and strategies to control the infection at a community level.

#11721

Volkmar Braunbehrens

#63175

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Volkmar von Braunbehrens is a German musicologist, specialising in research about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Braunbehrens studied history of literature, musicology, and art history in Munich, Heidelberg and Berlin; he received his PhD from the Free University of Berlin in 1974. He is Privatdozent since 1981. In 1976, he co-founded, and until 1981 co-edited, the journal Berliner Hefte – Zeitschrift für Kultur und Politik; for many years, he was director of an art gallery in Berlin.

#11722

Tim Hayward

#145512

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Tim Hayward is Professor of Environmental Political Theory at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and director of the university's Just World Institute, a body set up to "foster interdisciplinary research into the global challenges facing the international order, with particular attention to issues of ethics and justice". Between 1995 and 2017, Hayward published four books on ecological values, human rights and political theory. Hayward has recently received coverage in the mainstream press for his alleged "propaganda" in defense of Putin's Russia and Bashar Assad's Syrian regime.

#11723

Berta Jereb

#121712

Overall Influence

1925 - Present (101 years)

Berta Jereb is a Slovenian oncologist and the first Slovenian radiotherapist. She studied medicine in Vienna, Ljubljana, and Belgrade, and she received her bachelor's degree from the University of Ljubljana in 1950. In 1955, she specialised in radiotherapy and defended her master's thesis at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. In 1973, she went to the United States, where she worked at the Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center from 1973 to 1975 and from 1977 to 1984. For many years, she also worked at the Ljubljana Oncology Institute. Since 1993, she has been a full professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Ljubljana.

#11724

Bunsom Martin

#57726

Overall Influence

1922 - 2008 (86 years)

Bunsom Martin was a Thai medical doctor and university professor who pioneered the establishment of physical education in Thailand. He served as Minister of Education, Minister of Public Health, and President of Chiang Mai University.

#11725

Stefano Bianchi

#184106

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

#11726

Jürgen Habermas

#184110

Overall Influence

#11727

T. Brian Callister

T. Brian Callister

#50291

Overall Influence

T. Brian Callister is an American physician who works on care transitions. He is a critic of assisted suicide and euthanasia. Callister was the National Medical Director, Chief Medical Officer and Senior Physician Executive at The LifeCare Family of Hospitals , a system of specialty care hospitals, from 2004 – 2016. He was an academic hospitalist and associate professor of internal medicine in Reno, Nevada. and is the governor-elect of Nevada for the American College of Physicians. Much of his work is focused on healthcare policy, quality improvement, and end-of-life issues.

#11728

Christoph Stein

#184144

Overall Influence

#11729

Kenneth Lyons Jones

#184161

Overall Influence

#11730

Ilit Ferber

#178840

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Ilit Ferber is an associate professor of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. Academic biography During the years 1998–2002, Ferber was a student at the Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students at Tel Aviv University. Her Master Thesis, "Truth and the idea in Walter Benjamin's early writings", was written at the department of philosophy. Ferber continued to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy, which she wrote between the years 2003-2008 under the supervision of . Her dissertation was titled "Melancholy and philosophy: Walter Benjamin's early writings". During her Ph.D. studies, ...

#11731

Guro Valen

#174355

Overall Influence

1960 - 2014 (54 years)

Guro Valen was a Norwegian professor of medicine. She was a daughter of political scientist Henry Valen. She worked at the University of Tromsø, Karolinska Institutet and the University of Oslo, and was a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. She died from cancer in September 2014.

#11732

Michael Cohen

#25644

Overall Influence

2000 - 2018 (18 years)

M. Michael Cohen Jr. was an American pathologist and geneticist who was Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics, Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University . He was the first doctor to diagnose Proteus syndrome, in 1979.

#11733

Spencer Shaw

#72314

Overall Influence

1916 - 2010 (94 years)

Spencer Gilbert Shaw was an American librarian and educator specializing in library services to children. He taught at the Information School of the University of Washington and served as president of the Association for Library Services to Children .

#11734

Enrique Pérez Santiago

#78124

Overall Influence

1916 - 1999 (83 years)

Dr. Enrique Pérez Santiago, MD was a Puerto Rican medical doctor. Born in Comerio, he was the first Puerto Rican hematologist and he began the formal program at the University of Puerto Rico Hospital.

#11735

Aleksandra Pawliszyn

Aleksandra Pawliszyn

#154697

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Aleksandra Pawliszyn is a Polish philosopher, specializing in the areas of phenomenology and philosophical hermeneutics. Biography She obtained her doctorate in 1991 at Warsaw University on the basis of a work titled: Czynności rozumienia w hermeneutyce Gadamerai psychoanalizie Freuda, and qualified as an assistant professor in 2002, also at Warsaw University, on the basis of a work titled: Krajobrazyczasu. Obecne dociekania egzystencjalnej wartości czasu. For a period of eight years she was head of The Department of Learning Theory at the Institute of Philosophy, Sociology and Journalism at Gdańsk University.

#11736

Anne-Maria Laukkanen

#181188

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Anne-Maria Laukkanen is a Finnish researcher and a permanent full professor of speech technique and vocology at the University of Tampere. She has supervised 12 doctoral dissertations and 23 master theses and is now supervising 7 doctoral dissertations. She is a peer reviewer in 23 international scientific journals.

#11737

Nils Retterstøl

Nils Retterstøl

#182276

Overall Influence

1924 - 2008 (84 years)

Nils Retterstøl was a Norwegian psychiatrist. He was a professor at the University of Bergen from 1968 to 1973, and at the University of Oslo from 1973 to 1994. He published several books on mental subjects. He is also famous for saying "A man who is determined that he is right, despite everyone else telling him that he is wrong, certainly do have a serious mental illness" which was his statement in the Juklerød case, where a healthy person was forcibly restrained in a mental institution and medicated, because of him being "difficult for the authorities". Perhaps the biggest psychiatric scand...

#11738

Barbara Sattler

#184071

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Barbara Michaela Sattler is a Senior Lecturer in philosophy at St Andrews University. Her area of research is metaphysics and natural philosophy in the ancient Greek world. Career From January to March 2017, she was an Institute of Advanced Study Fellow at St John's College, Durham.

#11739

Enitan Carrol

#169319

Overall Influence

Enitan Carrol is a British physician and Professor of Clinical Infection, Microbiology and Immunology. Carrol studies the mechanisms that underpin bacterial infection. In 2020 she was featured in Nicola Rollock's exhibition Phenomenal Women: Portraits of UK Black Female Professors.

#11740

Gavin C. E. Stuart

#101713

Overall Influence

Gavin C. E. Stuart FRCPC is Professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, UBC Faculty of Medicine, where he formerly was Dean of Medicine and Vice-Provost Health . Stuart was born in Manitoba and attended medical school at the University of Western Ontario. He pursued postgraduate training in obstetrics and gynecology and then a fellowship in Gynecologic Oncology at Wayne State University School of Medicine. He has held faculty appointments at Wayne State University and the Tom Baker Cancer Centre, where later served as the centre's director and Head of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

#11741

Osamu Ito

#184242

Overall Influence

#11742

Jerzy Tabeau

#20335

Overall Influence

1918 - 2002 (84 years)

Jerzy Tabeau , an imprisoned Polish medical student, was one of the first escapees from Auschwitz to give a detailed report to the outside world on the genocide occurring there. First reports in early 1942 had been made by the Polish officer Witold Pilecki. Zabłotów-born Tabeau's report was known as that of the "Polish major" in the Auschwitz Protocols. After the war, he became a noted cardiologist in Kraków.

#11743

Oswald Taylor Brown

#101398

Overall Influence

1916 - 2006 (90 years)

Oswald Taylor Brown OBE, FRCP, FRCP was a Scottish consultant physician in geriatric medicine based in Dundee from 1951 until 1979. He is recognised as an early architect of geriatric care services in Scotland.

#11744

Lloyd Evans

#52345

Overall Influence

1927 - 2015 (88 years)

Lloyd Thomas Evans AO FRS FAA was a New Zealand plant physiologist who made his career in Australia. Early life and education Evans was born in Wanganui in 1927. He received his secondary education at Wanganui Technical College and at Wanganui Collegiate School. He studied at the Canterbury Agricultural College in Lincoln from 1945 to 1950 and in 1947, he won the Hunter Brown Cup for that year's best essay on sheep husbandry. His 1950 master's thesis was on the ecology of the Lake Ellesmere flats. In 1948, he represented Lincoln at the Joynt Scroll, a debating competition between New Zealand universities; he also won that year's Hunter Brown Cup.

#11745

Michael F. Berger

#184266

Overall Influence

#11746

Elizabeth Yakel

#83504

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Elizabeth Yakel is an archivist, researcher, and educator in information science. Yakel is known for work advancing archival practice, the use of primary sources in archives education, studies of data reuse practices, and digital curation. Yakel is the senior associate dean for academic affairs and a professor at the University of Michigan School of Information, where she has been on the faculty since 2000. She is the former coordinator of the Preservation of Information specialization in the Master of Science in Information program and teaches in the Archives and Record Management area. She s...

#11747

Charles Wesley Shilling

Charles Wesley Shilling

#51895

Overall Influence

1901 - 1994 (93 years)

Captain Charles Wesley Shilling was an American physician who was known as a leader in the field of undersea and hyperbaric medicine, research, and education. Shilling was widely recognized as an expert on deep sea diving, naval medicine, radiation biology, and submarine capabilities. In 1939, he was Senior Medical Officer in the rescue of the submarine U.S.S. Squalus.

#11748

Donald S. Gann

#106561

Overall Influence

1932 - 2020 (88 years)

Donald Stuart Gann was an American trauma surgeon. He chaired surgical departments at Case Western Reserve University, Brown University, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He was a past president of the Biomedical Engineering Society and the .

#11749

George Stillman

#117981

Overall Influence

1921 - 1997 (76 years)

George Stillman was an American abstract expressionist artist and member of the San Francisco Bay Area group known as the "Sausalito Six". Biography George Stillman was born in Laramie, Wyoming, but was raised in Ontario, California. He began working with photography while still a teenager and at the age of 17 or 18 won first prize for creative photography in the Golden Gate International Exposition. He got an associate degree at Chaffey College and then enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, but in 1942 he was drafted to serve in the military in World War II.

#11750

A. Monem Mahjoub

A. Monem Mahjoub

#118302

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

A. Monem Mahjoub is a Libyan linguist, philosopher, poet, historian, and political critic. Sometimes described as "the last Sumerian", his major works are in the fields of linguistics, philology, historiography, religion and humanistic thought, civilization development and politics. As a prolific author he has written more than twenty-five books.

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