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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Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#11901

Francis Gillingham

#84957

Overall Influence

1916 - 2010 (94 years)

Francis John Gillingham was a British neurosurgeon. Early life Gillingham was born in Dorchester, Dorset, England, on 15 March 1916, the only son of Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Gillingham. He was educated at Hardye's School, Dorset, and then studied medicine at St. Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College of London University.

#11902

Robert E. Anderson

#185322

Overall Influence

#11903

Andrew Sluyter

#80198

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Andrew Sluyter is an American social scientist who currently teaches as a professor in the Geography and Anthropology Department of the Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. His interests are the environmental history and historical, cultural, and political ecology of the colonization of the Americas. He has made various contributions to the theorization of colonialism and landscape, the critique of neo-environmental determinism, to understanding pre-colonial and colonial agriculture and environmental change in Mexico, to revealing African contributions to establishing cattle ranching in the Americas, and to the historical geographies of Hispanics and Latinos in New Orleans.

#11904

Jonathan Crowe

#181438

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Jonathan George Crowe is an Australian legal philosopher. He is Head of School and Dean of the School of Law and Justice at the University of Southern Queensland. Crowe is recognised internationally for his work on legal philosophy, ethics and public law. He is a proponent of natural law theory in jurisprudence and ethics. He is known in Australia for his advocacy on behalf of survivors of sexual violence.

#11905

Brian McDonough

#49082

Overall Influence

Brian McDonough has been described as a Family Physician with a focus on patient education. In addition to providing clinical care he employs audio, video and digital technology to provide helpful information for the general public.

#11906

Edward T. Cone

#88661

Overall Influence

1917 - 2004 (87 years)

Edward Toner Cone was an American composer, music theorist, pianist, and philanthropist. Life and career Cone was born in Greensboro, North Carolina. He studied composition under Roger Sessions at Princeton University, receiving his bachelor's in 1939 . Cone and Milton Babbitt were the first to earn graduate degrees in musical composition from Princeton . He studied piano with Karl Ulrich Schnabel and Edward Steuermann. During the Second World War, Cone served first in the army and later in the Office of Strategic Services. Beginning in 1946, he taught at Princeton. He was the co-editor o...

#11907

Q. David Bowers

Q. David Bowers

#31633

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Quentin David Bowers is an American numismatist, author, and columnist. Beginning in 1952, Bowers’s contributions to numismatics have continued uninterrupted and unabated to the present day. He has been involved in the selling of rare coins since 1953 when he was a teenager.

#11908

Ami Zota

#148919

Overall Influence

Ami R. Zota is an associate professor at George Washington University Milken School of Public Health, specializing in public and occupational health. Education Zota graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1999 with a bachelor's degree in environmental science and engineering. She later graduated from the Harvard School of Public Health with a master's and doctorate in environmental health in 2003 and 2007, respectively.

#11909

Amos Vogel

#88908

Overall Influence

1921 - 2012 (91 years)

Amos Vogel was a New York City cineaste and curator. Biography Vogel was born in Vienna, Austria. He fled Austria with his parents after the Nazi Anschluß in 1938 and at first studied animal husbandry at the University of Georgia. In the American South, he noted, the racism was as bad as the anti-semitism he witnessed in Europe. Later he received a bachelor's degree from The New School for Social Research in New York.

#11910

Athanase Bénétos

#185380

Overall Influence

#11911

Barbara J. Collins

#82016

Overall Influence

1929 - 2013 (84 years)

Barbara Jane Collins was an American writer, ecologist, geologist, botanist, and professor. She was the founder of the Barbara Collins Arboretum at the campus of California Lutheran University where she was a professor for 50 years. She was instrumental in the preservation of Wildwood Mesa and received a commendation from the Mayor of Thousand Oaks, California for her preservation efforts. At Cal Lutheran, she created a website which cataloged over 3,000 plant species and was the sole member of the Interdisciplinary Major Committee for thirty years. She was among the first faculty at both California Lutheran University and California State University, Northridge .

#11912

Tzvetan Todorov

#185401

Overall Influence

#11913

Paul Booth

#94113

Overall Influence

Paul Booth is an American media scholar and a professor of Digital Communication and Media Arts at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. He serves on the editorial board of a number of journals, including Transformative Works and Cultures and the Journal of Fandom Studies. He also oversees the annual DePaul Pop Culture Conference.

#11914

Leigh Hale

#185406

Overall Influence

Leigh Anne Hale is a New Zealand physiotherapy academic, and as of 2019, is a full professor at the University of Otago. Academic career After a 2002 PhD titled 'The problems experienced by people with stroke living in Soweto, South Africa.' at the University of the Witwatersrand, Hale moved to the University of Otago, rising to full professor.

#11915

Monkey Punch

#59067

Overall Influence

1937 - 2019 (82 years)

Kazuhiko Katō, known by the pen name , was a Japanese manga artist, best known for his series Lupin III. Life and career Katō was born in Hamanaka, Hokkaido; he began drawing at a very young age, but did not draw manga until junior high school, when his manga strips were used in the school newspaper. After graduating, he moved to Tokyo to look for work and began going to a technical school for electronics, continuing to draw for fun. While working in a dōjinshi group with other artists, he was recruited by Futabasha and drew yonkoma. He was an assistant to Naoki Tsuji on Zero-sen Hayato and Ti...

#11916

Bo Ruberg

#170339

Overall Influence

Bo Ruberg is an American game studies scholar and associate professor at the University of California, Irvine in the Klein College of Media and Communication. They are known for their work on queer theory and video games. They are the author of Video Games Have Always Been Queer, The Queer Games Avant-Garde, and Sex Dolls at Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies, as well as the editor of Queer Game Studies. From 2023 to 2027, they are the co-editor-in-chief, with Liz Elcessor, of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. They are also one of the co-founders of the Queerness in Games C...

#11917

Stella Bruzzi

#153771

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Stella Bruzzi, FBA is an Italian-born British scholar of film and media studies and currently Dean of Arts and Humanities at University College London. Career From 2006 to 2017, Bruzzi was Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. In 2017, she moved to University College London, where she is Executive Dean of its Faculty of Arts and Humanities. She has previously taught at the University of Manchester and at Royal Holloway, University of London.

#11918

Ngaire Naffine

#146621

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Ngaire May Naffine is an Australian feminist legal academic and Professor Emerita at the University of Adelaide. Life Born in 1954 Ngaire May Naffin, she changed her surname to Naffine in 1987. She graduated from the University of Adelaide with an LLB, followed by a PhD in 1983 on "Criminality, deviance and conformity in women".

#11919

Gretchen Berland

#43591

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Gretchen Kimberly Berland is an American physician and filmmaker who is Associate Professor of Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine. Life She graduated from Pomona College with a BA in 1986 and Oregon Health & Science University with an MD in 1996. She was a Fellow in the UCLA Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program.

#11920

R. Edward Freeman

#185432

Overall Influence

#11921

Lisa Cooper

#57247

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Lisa A. Cooper is an American internal medicine and public health physician who is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Equity in Health and Healthcare at Johns Hopkins University, jointly appointed in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins School of Nursing and in the departments of Health, Behavior and Society, Health Policy and Management; Epidemiology; and International Health in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is the James F. Fries Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine, Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity, and Director of the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute.

#11922

Sudi Devanesen

#42730

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Sudarshan Devanesen, CM, is a family medicine physician and educator, public health activist, and member of the Order of Canada. An order of which he was initiated into for his role in preventing Heart disease affecting South Asians in Canada.

#11923

Steve Jones

#185463

Overall Influence

#11924

Robert Rodriguez

#156014

Overall Influence

Robert M. Rodriguez is an American emergency physician working at the San Francisco General Hospital. He is a professor of emergency medicine at the UCSF School of Medicine and was a member of the COVID-19 Advisory Board of U.S. president Joe Biden.

#11925

Sam Mbulaiteye

#182021

Overall Influence

Sam M. Mbulaiteye is a Ugandan physician-scientist and epidemiologist who researches Burkitt lymphoma. He is a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute. Life Mbulaiteye received physician training at Makerere University with advanced training in epidemiology and biostatistics from the University of Cambridge , and specialist training in internal medicine from Makerere University . His early research focused on measuring the impact of HIV on cancer in patients at the Uganda Cancer Institute from 1994 and 1997 and investigating population trends of HIV in a general population in rural southwest Uganda while at the Uganda Virus Research Institute and U.K.

#11926

Feng Lin

#185483

Overall Influence

#11927

Alfred Freddy Krupa

#143571

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Alfred Freddy Krupa is a Croatian painter and book illustrator. He graduated from the University of Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts in 1995. He published New Ink Art Manifesto in 1996 and departed to Tokyo Gakugei University in 1998. He became known to the general public in 1990 via the then popular Yugoslav weekly "Vikend/Weekend". Author Milica Jović wrote in her article for New York-based Highlark Magazine that Krupa is considered the pivotal figure in the Western New Ink Art movement.He got the award of the Order of Danica Hrvatska on April 26, 2023 and The City of Karlovac Award on the 13th...

#11928

Deanna B. Marcum

#122250

Overall Influence

1946 - 2022 (76 years)

Deanna Bowling Marcum was an American librarian and nonprofit leader who served as president of the Council on Library and Information Resources from 1995 to 2003, Associate Librarian for Library Services at the Library of Congress from 2003 to 2011, and managing director of Ithaka S+R from 2012 to 2016.

#11929

Mohammed Jaber Al-Ansari

#141597

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Mohammed Jaber Al-Ansari, is a prominent Bahraini philosopher and political thinker, and an influential proponent of rational thinking in the 20th-century Arab World. He played a pivotal role in establishing the previously peripheral Persian Gulf region as an integral contributor to modern Arabic thought, on equal footing with other parts of the Arab World. His early work as a literary historian, and critic, instigated wide literary activity in his native Bahrain and in its surrounding Persian Gulf region. Al-Ansari was one of the early Arab intellectuals to delve into studying the East Asian ...

#11930

Peabo Bryson

#34941

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Robert Peapo "Peabo" Bryson is an American singer and songwriter. He is known for singing soul ballads including the hit singles "Tonight, I Celebrate My Love" with Roberta Flack, "A Whole New World with Regina BelleBeauty and the Beast with Celine Dion. Bryson has contributed to two Disney animated feature soundtracks. Bryson is a winner of two Grammy Awards.

#11931

Emmanuel Quaye Archampong

#56628

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Professor Emmanuel Quaye Archampong, was a Ghanaian surgeon and academic. He was an emeritus professor of the College of Health Sciences University of Ghana Medical School, University of Ghana, Legon.

#11932

Jan De Maeseneer

#76764

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Jan De Maeseneer is a Belgian family physician and has been Head of the Department of Family Medicine and Primary Health Care of Ghent University . In 1977, De Maeseneer graduated as a medical doctor at Ghent University and since 1978 works as a family physician at the Wijkgezondheidscentrum Botermarkt in Ledeberg . In 1981, he started working as a part-time assistant at the Department of Family Medicine and Primary Health Care at Ghent University. In 1989 he obtained a PhD. with the thesis The functioning of 94 GP trainers at the State University of Ghent: an explorative research. His resear...

#11933

Donna Andrews

#63657

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Donna Andrews is an American mystery fiction writer of two award-winning amateur sleuth series. Her first book, Murder with Peacocks , introduced Meg Langslow, a blacksmith from Yorktown, Virginia. It won the St. Martin's Minotaur Best First Traditional Mystery contest, the Agatha, Anthony, Barry, and Romantic Times Reviewers' Choice awards for best first novel, and the Lefty award for funniest mystery of 1999. The first novel in the Turing Hopper series debuted a highly unusual sleuth—an Artificial Intelligence personality who becomes sentient—and won the Agatha Award for best mystery th...

#11934

Peter M. Rhee

#26652

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Peter Meong Rhee is an American surgeon, medical professor, and military veteran. During his 24 years in the United States Navy, Rhee served as a battlefield casualty physician in Afghanistan and Iraq.

#11935

Benedict Groeschel

Benedict Groeschel

#24396

Overall Influence

1933 - 2014 (81 years)

Benedict Joseph Groeschel, C.F.R. was an American Franciscan friar, Catholic priest, retreat master, author, psychologist, activist, and television host. He hosted the television talk program Sunday Night Prime on the Eternal Word Television Network, as well as several serial religious specials.

#11936

Roy Pounder

#65762

Overall Influence

Roy Pounder is a British physician and entrepreneur. He was Professor of Medicine at the Royal Free and University College Medical School in London and clinical vice president of the Royal College of Physicians of London. He is now a London University Emeritus Professor of Medicine.

#11937

Jean-Marc Gabaude

#130013

Overall Influence

1928 - 2020 (92 years)

Jean-Marc Gabaude was a French philosopher and professor. Biography Gabaude was born in 1928 in Graulhet. He studied at the University of Toulouse, and earned his doctorate of letters in 1972. Gabaude became Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès and President of the Société toulousaine de philosophie in 1991. He paid tribute to his good friend, Michel Clouscard, in October 2011.

#11938

Gerald M. Pohost

#185576

Overall Influence

#11939

Margo Cohen

#78804

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Margo Panush Cohen is an American physician and entrepreneur. She has been a Professor of Internal Medicine and Chief of Endocrinology and Metabolism at the Wayne State University School of Medicine and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. She is President and Chief Scientific Officer of Glycadia, and a founder of its subsidiary Exocell.

#11940

Thibault Isabel

Thibault Isabel

#175826

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Thibault Isabel is a French writer and publisher. Biography Thibault Isabel was born in Roubaix on 29 April 1978. He obtained a doctorate in film studies from the Charles de Gaulle University – Lille III in 2004 with a dissertation on American cinema from 1981 to 2000. He has been editor-in-chief of , a journal founded by Alain de Benoist and a part of the French New Right, although Isabel does not consider himself right-wing. He is the editor of the website Linactuelle.fr which he founded in 2018 and participates in Michel Onfray's magazine Front Populaire, launched in 2020.

#11941

Roger Savory

#71099

Overall Influence

1925 - 2022 (97 years)

Roger Mervyn Savory was a British-born Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto who was an Iranologist and specialist on the Safavids. His numerous writings on Safavid political, military history, administration, bureaucracy, and diplomacy-translated into several languages have had a great impact in understanding this period.

#11942

Paula Krebs

#36290

Overall Influence

Paula Krebs is the Executive Director of the Modern Language Association of America , the largest organization of scholars of languages and literature in the United States. She was previously a professor of English at Wheaton College. From 2012 to 2017, she served as the dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Bridgewater State University.

#11943

Milena Penkowa

#142823

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Milena Penkowa is a Danish neuroscientist who was a professor at the Panum Institute at the University of Copenhagen from 2009–2010. In 2010 she was convicted of fraud and embezzlement of funds from The Danish Society of Neuroscience. In the same year, she was suspended by the University of Copenhagen and consequently resigned her professorship. In 2012, the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty concluded that she had been guilty of scientific misconduct. As of 2020 Penkowa has had nine of her research publications retracted, and four others have received expressions of concern.

#11944

Judith Kaur

#112932

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Judith Salmon Kaur is an American oncologist who is Director of the Native American Programs in the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center. According to Indian Country Today, Kaur is one of only two Native American oncologists working in the United States.

#11945

Bettina Judd

#101057

Overall Influence

Bettina Judd is an African-American interdisciplinary writer, scholar, artist, and performer. Early life and education Judd was born in Baltimore and raised in Southern California. She received her bachelor's degree in Comparative Women’s Studies and English from Spelman College in 2005, her master's degree in Women's Studies from University of Maryland in 2007, and her PhD in Women's Studies in 2014, also from the University of Maryland. Her dissertation, Feelin Feminism: Black Women's Art as Feminist Thought , is an analysis of how various oppressions that affect black women are felt, and ma...

#11946

Benjamin Alman

#100133

Overall Influence

Benjamin Aaron Alman is an American orthopaedic clinician-scientist and currently Chair of Orthopaedic Surgery at Duke University School of Medicine . Alman is the Distinguished James R. Urbaniak, MD, Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery and also holds appointments with the Department of Cell Biology, Pediatrics, and Pathology at Duke University. Among Alman's other appointments, he is co-director of the Regeneration Next Initiative at Duke University.

#11947

Christopher Nolan

#40871

Overall Influence

1965 - 2009 (44 years)

Christopher Nolan was an Irish poet and author. He was born in Mullingar, Ireland, but later moved to Dublin. He was educated at the Central Remedial Clinic School, Mount Temple Comprehensive School and at Trinity College, Dublin. His first book was published when he was fifteen. He won the Whitbread Book Award for his autobiography in 1987. He was also awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters in the UK, the medal of excellence from the United Nations Society of Writers, and a Person of the Year award in Ireland.

#11948

Ralph Norgren

#185635

Overall Influence

#11949

Fyodor Uglov

#45041

Overall Influence

1904 - 2008 (104 years)

Fyodor Grigorievich Uglov was a Soviet and Russian surgeon. In 1994 he was listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest practicing surgeon in the world. He retired from practice at the age of 102.

#11950

Georgia Mills Jessup

Georgia Mills Jessup

#146224

Overall Influence

1926 - 2016 (90 years)

Georgia Mills Jessup was an American painter, sculptor, ceramicist, muralist, and collage artist. Early life and education Jessup, a native of Washington, D.C., was of African-American, Native American, and European descent. Her father, Joseph Mills, identified as a Pamunkey descendant; her mother was Margaret Hall Mills, a hairdresser who had dreamed of a career in the theater.

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