The Most Influential People Across History

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#11951

Fern Shaffer

Fern Shaffer
#127284
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Fern Shaffer is an American painter, performance artist, lecturer and environmental advocate. Her work arose in conjunction with an emerging Ecofeminism movement that brought together environmentalism, feminist values and spirituality to address shared concern for the Earth and all forms of life. She first gained widespread recognition for a four-part, shamanistic performance cycle, created in collaboration with photographer Othello Anderson in 1985. Writer and critic Suzi Gablik praised their work for its rejection of the technocratic, rationalizing mindset of modernity, in favor of communion with magic, the mysterious and primordial, and the soul.
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#11952

Lavinia Loughridge

#101204
Overall Influence
1930 - 2014 (84 years)
Lavinia Winifred Loughridge was a Northern Irish physician who specialised in nephrology. She was one of the pioneers of kidney transplantation, working with Sir Roy Yorke Calne on Britain's first transplantation programme to use cadaveric kidneys.
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#11953

David F. Hardwick

#82871
Overall Influence
1934 - 2021 (87 years)
David Francis Hardwick MD, FRCPC, FCAP was a Canadian medical academic and researcher in the field of paediatric pathology. Hardwick was involved with The University of British Columbia for more than sixty years as a student, professor, and Professor Emeritus. His research included the first description of histopathologic implications of differential survival of Wilms' Tumors to pathogenesis of L-methionine toxicity and administrative/management research.
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#11954

Innocent Gangaidzo

#84794
Overall Influence
Innocent Tichaona Gangaidzo, is a Zimbabwean gastroenterologist, who currently serves as the president of the East, Central, and Southern Africa College of Physicians . Gangaidzo is the current editor-in-chief of the Central African Journal of Medicine.
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#11955

Werner Wolf

#168721
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
Werner Wolf was a German musicologist and music critic. The acknowledged Wagner researcher was co-editor of Sämtlicher Briefe of the composer from 1967 to 1979. He also presented several opera performances. In 1981 he was appointed professor at the Leipzig University.
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#11956

Nabil Maleh

#134062
Overall Influence
1936 - 2016 (80 years)
Nabil Maleh was a Syrian film director, screenwriter, producer, painter and poet; he is thought to be a father of Syrian cinema. Nabil has published more than 1,000 articles short stories, essays and poems. He is the writer and director of 120 short, experimental and documentary works and 12 feature-length films including The Extras and The Leopard. He has more than 60 awards at international film festivals, including several lifetime achievement awards. Several of his films are in the curriculum of international film schools and he has taught film direction, acting, writing and aesthetics at...
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#11957

James Mosley

#18439
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
James Mosley is a retired librarian and historian whose work has specialised in the history of printing and letter design. The main part of Mosley's career has been 42 years as Librarian of the St Bride Printing Library in London, where he curated and worked to expand the museum's large collection of printing and lettering materials, books and examples. This collection greatly expanded with the close of the metal type era, which saw many companies and printing shops selling off their equipment and archives. Mosley also expanded the library's collection of lettering and signs. He has also been...
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#11958

Sarah Blagden

#144960
Overall Influence
Sarah Blagden is a Professor of Experimental Oncology at the University of Oxford. Her laboratory research is in investigating post-transcriptional mechanisms for ovarian cancer behavior. Her clinical research is in conducting early phase trials in novel cancer therapeutics for people with advanced malignancies.
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#11959

Roselyn P. Epps

#67773
Overall Influence
1930 - 2014 (84 years)
Roselyn Elizabeth Payne Epps was an American pediatrician and public health physician. She was the first African American president of the American Medical Women's Association and wrote more than 90 professional articles. She died on September 29, 2014.
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#11960

Evan Lyon

#104984
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Evan Lyon is the Illinois Director for Partners In Health's Public Health Accompaniment Unit. He served as the Chief Integrative Health Officer for the Heartland Alliance Health - a Chicago-based NGO serving people experiencing homelessness, mental illness, addiction, and chronic illness - from 2016 to 2020.
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#11961

Moncef Slaoui

Moncef Slaoui
#20761
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Moncef Mohamed Slaoui is a Moroccan-born Belgian-American researcher who served as the head of Operation Warp Speed under President Donald Trump from 2020 to 2021. Slaoui is the former head of the vaccines department at GlaxoSmithKline . He worked at the company for thirty years, retiring in 2017. On May 15, 2020, President Donald Trump announced that Slaoui would manage the U.S. government's development of a vaccine used to treat coronavirus disease in OPWASP; Slaoui resigned on January 12, 2021 after successfully having helped introduce a number of vaccines to the US and global markets. In...
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#11962

Lennart Persson

#185728
Overall Influence
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#11963

David Berson

#94129
Overall Influence
David M. Berson is Professor of Medical Science at Brown University. He helped lead the way in the discovery of a third class of mammalian photoreceptors by providing the first electrophysiological recordings from intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells.
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#11964

Sigrid Quack

#81109
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Sigrid Quack is a German social scientist working in the field of comparative sociology. She is a professor of sociology at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, where she is the Director of the Centre for Global Cooperation Research, and was a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University.
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#11965

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò

#183457
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is a philosopher and professor of African political thought at the Africana Studies Research Center at Cornell University. He was born in Nigeria, where he lived most of his life except for five years in Canada.
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#11966

Valerii Kryshen

#78520
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Valerii Kryshen is a Ukrainian scientist, Doctor of Medicine, and professor of general surgery. Biography Kryshen was born on 11 September 1955 in Dnipropetrovsk in what was then the Soviet Union to a medical family. He completed his medical degree in 1978 and began working in the surgical unit in Dnipropetrovsk city hospital. He chairs the general surgery department at Dnipropetrovsk State Medical Academy.
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#11967

David N. Sundwall

David N. Sundwall
#91642
Overall Influence
Dr. David N. Sundwall is a primary care physician and served as the executive director of the Utah Department of Health from January 2005 to January 2011. Background He was born and raised in Murray, Utah, and followed several family members into the medical profession, including his father, Dr. Val Sundwall, great uncles Dr. Olaf Sundwall and Dr. John Sundwall, and brother, Dr. Peter Sundwall.
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#11968

Tobias Delbruck

#91070
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Tobias "Tobi" Delbrück is an American neuromorphic engineer at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2014 "for contributions to neuromorphic visual sensors and processing".
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#11969

Harold M. Weintraub

#62029
Overall Influence
1945 - 1995 (50 years)
Harold M. "Hal" Weintraub was an American scientist who lived from 1945 until his death in 1995 from an aggressive brain tumor. Only 49 years old, Weintraub left behind a legacy of research. Early life and education Born on June 2, 1945, in Newark, New Jersey, Weintraub's childhood revolved around sports, including basketball, an activity he would continue to particularly relish throughout his adult life. Weintraub was also the pitcher for an all-city high school baseball team, and a football fullback.
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#11970

Harold Raley

Harold Raley
#168922
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Harold C. Raley, born , is an American Hispanist, philosopher and writer. A retired university professor, he is best known as a scholar and translator of the work of Julián Marías. Biography Harold Cecil Raley was born November 23, 1934, near Hartselle, Alabama. He grew up working in a rural community in Winston County, Alabama. He is descended from Walter Raleigh, through the patrilineal line.
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#11971

Petra Klinge

#179664
Overall Influence
Petra Klinge is a neurosurgeon and academic. She is professor of neurosurgery at Brown University. Education and training Klinge earned her medical degree from the University of Kiel in 1993. She conducted her neurosurgical residency at Hannover Medical School in Germany, completing it in 2002. The same year, she earned her habilitation and postdoctoral qualification "venia legendi".
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#11972

Mu'min al-Taq

#102352
Overall Influence
Abū Ja'far Muḥammad ibn 'Alī ibn Nu'mān ibn Abī Ṭurayfa al-Bajalī al-Kūfī , known as Mu'min al-Ṭāq was a companion of Ja'far al-Sadiq and a Shia theologian in the 2nd/8th century. He was renowned for providing incisive and thought-provoking responses to questions from his opponents. He allegedly got into a heated argument with renowned scholar Abu Hanifa. He advocated for the rights of the imam and held that the imams are the only ones with the greatest knowledge required to lead humanity to felicity at its highest level. He wrote a number of works including Kitab al-imama and Kitab al-radd '...
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#11973

Joan Venes

#122508
Overall Influence
1935 - 2010 (75 years)
Joan Venes was a neurosurgeon. She helped to develop the practice of neurosurgery in children. Early life Venes was born on June 27, 1935. She was raised in a blue-collar neighborhood in Queens, New York. She was a first-generation American and the first person in her neighborhood to go to college.
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#11974

David Blumenthal

#26031
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
David Blumenthal is an academic physician and health care policy expert, known as the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology from 2009 to 2011 during the early implementation of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act provisions on "meaningful use".
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#11975

Anne-Françoise Schmid

#183296
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Anne-Françoise Schmid is a Swiss-born French philosopher, formerly an associate researcher of Mines Paris-Tech. Schmid is a specialist in the philosophical works of Henri Poincaré, as well as being an associate researcher at the Henri Poincaré archives. Schmid has also edited the letters of correspondence between Bertrand Russell and Louis Couturat. She is also a founding member of a philosophical research initiative known as non-philosophy, alongside her spouse François Laruelle. Through this work, she has been publishing on generic epistemologies, which entails a non-exclusive epistemologic...
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#11976

Neelam Giri

#90551
Overall Influence
Neelam K. Giri is an Indian pediatric hematologist/oncologist and physician-scientist who researches bone marrow failure syndromes. She is a staff clinician in the clinical genetics branch at the National Cancer Institute.
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#11977

Bob Anderson

#53033
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Bob Anderson is an American animation director on The Simpsons. He also contributed additional sequence direction on The Simpsons Movie. After high school, Bob Anderson enrolled at the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art to pursue an education in animation. Before Bob graduated from The Joe Kubert School, he began his professional career. Hired by Broadcast Arts in New York City, he started work on a variety of commercials.
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#11978

Helmi Järviluoma

#152925
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Helmi Järviluoma-Mäkelä is a Finnish sound, music, and cultural scholar and writer. She is a Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Eastern Finland. As sensory and soundscape ethnographer, Järviluoma has developed the mobile method of sensobiographic walking. Her research and art spans the fields of sensory remembering, qualitative methodology , environmental cultural studies, sound art and fiction writing. Helmi Järviluoma was married to Finnish writer Matti Mäkelä .[in Finnish]
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#11979

John Peel

John Peel
#42806
Overall Influence
1904 - 2005 (101 years)
Sir John Harold Peel was a leading British obstetrician and gynecologist, who was Surgeon-Gynaecologist to Elizabeth II from 1961 to 1973, present at a number of royal births. Early life The son of a Methodist clergyman, John Harold Peel was educated at Manchester Grammar School and Queen's College, Oxford.
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#11980

Lizhi Zhang

#185878
Overall Influence
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#11981

Lisa Jackson Pulver

#99769
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Lisa Rae Jackson Pulver is an Aboriginal Australian epidemiologist and researcher in the area of Aboriginal health who has been Deputy Vice Chancellor at the University of Sydney since October 2018.
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#11982

Nadia Badawi

#79128
Overall Influence
Nadia Badawi AM is a medical researcher and an expert on newborn encephalopathy and cerebral palsy. She is the Chair of Cerebral Palsy at the University of Sydney. Life Badawi grew up in Egypt and trained in paediatrics and neonatology there. She later moved to Dublin, Ireland, and arrived in Australia in 1992 to work with Fiona Stanley at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research in Perth. Enrolling at the University of Western Australia, and with Stanley as her supervisor, Badawi worked on a research project for her Ph.D, completing it in 1998. The research, into newborn encephalopathy, remains unique in the world.
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#11983

Herman Høst

#183814
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
Herman Høst was a Norwegian physician. Høst was born in Bærum as a son of physician Herman Fleischer Høst. He graduated with the cand.med. degree in 1951 and took the dr.med. degree in 1966. He was a chief physician at the Norwegian Radium Hospital from 1974 and a professor of radiological cancer therapy at the University of Oslo from 1975. From 1980 to 1985 he was the dean of the Faculty of Medicine. He was also a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He retired in 1996. Høst died on 14 September 2023, at the age of 97.
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#11984

Steve Green

Steve Green
#98973
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Steve Green is an American Christian music singer. Early life Green was born in Portland, Oregon, to Charles and Jo Green, who were Baptist missionaries. He spent much of his early life in Argentina and then proceeded to attend Phoenix Christian High School along with two of his six siblings. He graduated from Phoenix Christian High School in 1974 and, at age 18, enrolled at Grand Canyon University. His intended major was pre-law, but a professor recognized his musical talent and encouraged him to develop it.
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#11985

Ian Edward Smith

#185915
Overall Influence
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#11986

Larisa Trembovler

#92263
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
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#11987

Alejandro L. Madrid

#96739
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Alejandro Luis Madrid-González is an American music scholar, cultural theorist, and professor, whose research focuses on Latino and Latin American musics and sound practices. He is the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music at Harvard University.
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#11988

Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Sandberg
#89256
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Sheryl Kara Sandberg is an American technology executive, philanthropist, and writer. Sandberg served as chief operating officer of Meta Platforms, a position from which she stepped down in August 2022. She is also the founder of LeanIn.Org. In 2008, she was made COO at Facebook, becoming the company's second-highest ranking official. In June 2012, she was elected to Facebook's board of directors, becoming the first woman to serve on its board. As head of the company's advertising business, Sandberg was credited for making the company profitable. Prior to joining Facebook as its COO, Sandber...
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#11989

Lynne Brindley

Lynne Brindley
#48037
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Dame Lynne Janie Brindley, is the former Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, a post she held until June 2020. Prior to this appointment she was a professional librarian, and served as the first female chief executive of the British Library, the United Kingdom's national library, from July 2000 to July 2012 and was founding chair of the Digital Preservation Coalition. She is also a member of the Ofcom board.
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#11990

Judith Palfrey

#68073
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Judith Palfrey is the T. Berry Brazelton Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and the author of Community Child Health: An Action Plan for Today and Child Health In America: Making A Difference Through Advocacy , and co-editor of Global Child Health Advocacy and the Disney Encyclopedia of Baby and Childcare . She is also the former Faculty Dean of Adams House at Harvard University along with her husband Sean Palfrey who is also a pediatrician in Boston.
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#11991

James Scott

#70758
Overall Influence
1924 - 2006 (82 years)
James Steel Scott was a Scottish obstetrician and gynaecologist who was a pioneer in the field of reproductive immunology. He was Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Leeds from 1961 to 1989.
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#11992

Peter Anderson

#83513
Overall Influence
Peter Anderson is a cinematographer, visual effects supervisor, and expert on specialized imaging technologies, many of which he helped to develop, including modern 3-D, motion control, large format, high frame rate, and high dynamic range.
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#11993

Owen Goldin

#185959
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Owen Goldin is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at Marquette University. He is the President of the Metaphysical Society of America. Goldin is known for his research on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics.
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#11994

Erik W. Tawaststjerna

Erik W. Tawaststjerna
#104996
Overall Influence
1916 - 1993 (77 years)
Erik Werner Tawaststjerna was a Finnish musicologist who also worked as a pianist, pedagogue, and critic. He is remembered as a significant biographer of Jean Sibelius. Biography Erik Werner Tawaststjerna was born in Mikkeli, Grand Duchy of Finland in 1916. His piano studies were with Ilmari Hannikainen, K. Bernhard, Heinrich Leygraf, Heinrich Neuhaus, Alfred Cortot and Jules Gentil. His concert career began in 1943, and was confined to Scandinavia, Vienna and the Soviet Union, after which he became a private teacher. He held posts in the Press and Cultural Affairs Department of the Foreign Ministry of Finland from 1948 to 1960.
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#11995

Juan José López-Ibor

Juan José López-Ibor
#69387
Overall Influence
1906 - 1991 (85 years)
Juan José Lopez-Ibor was a Spanish psychiatrist. He studied medicine at the University of Valencia and of Madrid, where he obtained his doctorate in 1930. In 1932, he was awarded the chair of Legal Medicine in Santiago de Compostela; later, the chair of Psychiatry in Salamanca, In 1960, he succeeded Antonio Vallejo Nájera at the Chair of Psychiatry in Madrid. In 1940, he founded Actas Españolas de Psiquiatría. From a very young age he was considered opposed to the Freudian method of psychoanalysis. In 1967 he created the López Ibor Clinic in Madrid.
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#11996

Jalaluddin Umri

#31045
Overall Influence
1935 - 2022 (87 years)
Syed Jalaluddin Umri was an Islamic scholar and writer. He was the Amir of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind from 2007 to 2019. Early life and education Jalaluddin Umri was born in 1935 in a village called Puttagram, District of North Arcot, Tamil Nadu, British India. He was a graduate of Jamia Darussalam, Oomerabad, Tamil Nadu. He received a master's degree in Islamic Studies from Jamia Darussalam. He also received a bachelor's degree in English literature from Aligarh Muslim University.
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#11997

Andrea Hayes-Jordan

#176706
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Andrea A. Hayes Dixon is an American surgeon. She was the first pediatric surgeon to perform a high-risk, life-saving procedure in children with a rare form of cancer and developed the first orthotropic xenograft model of metastatic Ewing's sarcoma. In 2002, she became the first African American female pediatric surgeon board-certified in the United States.
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#11998

Donato LaRossa

#94060
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Donato D. LaRossa was a medical doctor and Professor Emeritus of Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Career LaRossa was born in New Jersey in 1941. He received his A.B. from Seton Hall University in 1963 and his M.D. from Georgetown University School of Medicine in 1967. LaRossa served in the United States Army for two years as the Assistant Chief of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Denver, Colorado where he was promoted to the rank of Major. He was also an instructor at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
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#11999

Jason Mittell

#55485
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Jason Mittell is a professor of American studies and film and media culture at Middlebury College whose research interests include the history of television, media, culture, and new media. He is author of three books, Genre and Television , Television and American Culture , and Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling , and co-editor of How To Watch Television .
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#12000

Thomas D. Kirsch

#39342
Overall Influence
Thomas Dean Kirsch is an American physician, scientist, and writer whose career has focused on disaster preparedness and response.  He has been described as “…an expert in disaster research, planning and response, and disaster and wilderness medicine… both nationally and internationally”.
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