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

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#12151

John Caughie

#123821

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

John Caughie is a British academic, specialising in film and television studies. Life Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, his books include Theories of Authorship, A Companion to British and Irish Cinema and Television Drama: Realism, Modernism, and British Culture. He is on the editorial board of the British film and television journal, Screen, and is a Council member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, U.K.

#12152

Ephraim Isaac

#16423

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Ephraim Isaac is an Ethiopian scholar of ancient Ethiopian Semitic languages and of Africann and Ethiopiann civilizations. He is the director of the Institute of Semitic Studies based in Princeton, NJ. and the chair of the board of the Ethiopian Peace and Development Center.

#12153

Hernán Neira

#176778

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Hernán Neira is a Chilean writer, philosopher and university professor. Education He attended in Chile to Colegio San Ignacio in Santiago de Chile. His family moved to Spain in 1971, where he attended to Colegio San Patricio and Instituto Cardenal Cisneros. In January 1984 he received his undergraduate degree in philosophy from the Catholic University in Santiago de Chile, where he also directed Perspectivas, a student magazine opposed to the dictatorship of general Pinochet. In 1985 he moved to Paris, where he studied philosophy at the Paris VIII University. He also studied sociology and linguistics at the l'École de hautes etudes en sciences sociales, Paris.

#12154

Piotr Czauderna

#40126

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Piotr Stefan Czauderna is a member of the National Development Council of Poland. He was appointed to the position by President Andrzej Duda in November 2015. Biography Czauderna was born on 11 August 1962. He is a graduate of the Gdańsk Medical University and the University of Provence. A professor of medical science since 2013, Czauderna is currently the Head of the Surgery and Urology Clinic for Children and Adolescents of the Gdańsk Medical University. He was elected to the Gdańsk City Council in 2014 from the Law and Justice party. Czauderna is the vice chairman of the Gdańsk City Council.

#12155

John Ezell

#156178

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

John Ezell is an American scenic designer and theatre educator. He currently serves as the Hall Family Foundation Professor of Design at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he leads the UMKC Theatre Scenic Design program.

#12156

Vladimir Dilman

#89909

Overall Influence

1925 - 1994 (69 years)

Vladimir Mikhailovich Dilman was a Soviet scientist and physician. He served on the staff of the N.N. Petrov Research Institute of Oncology for many years. He contributed to the development of oncology, endocrinology and gerontology.

#12157

Kay Thompson

#149411

Overall Influence

1909 - 1998 (89 years)

Kay Thompson was an American author, singer, vocal arranger, vocal coach, composer, musician, dancer, actress, and choreographer. She became famous for creating the Eloise children's books and for her role in the movie Funny Face.

#12158

Annie Luetkemeyer

Annie Luetkemeyer

#33978

Overall Influence

Annie F. Luetkemeyer is an American physician and researcher who is Professor of Medicine and Infectious Diseases at the University of California, San Francisco. She specializes in infectious diseases, in particular tuberculosis, human immunodeficiency virus and viral hepatitis. During the COVID-19 pandemic Luetkemeyer led a clinical trial of remdesivir. She has also researched treatment of COVID-19 as a co-infection with HIV.

#12159

Filippa Lentzos

#42547

Overall Influence

Filippa Lentzos is a Norwegian social scientist researching threats posed by biological agents. She is a senior research fellow at King's College London, holding a joint appointment in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine and the Department of War Studies. Lentzos also holds the position of associate senior researcher at the Armament and Disarmament Programme at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute . Moreover, she is the NGO Coordinator for the Biological Weapons Convention since 2017, the biosecurity columnist at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 2018, a...

#12160

Sander J. H. Van Deventer

#186988

Overall Influence

#12161

Stephen Willis

#128085

Overall Influence

1946 - 1994 (48 years)

Stephen Charles Willis was a Canadian musicologist and archivist. A graduate of the University of Western Ontario and Columbia University, he taught on the faculty of the University of Ottawa from 1979-1985. He also served as head of the manuscript collection of the Music Division at the National Library of Canada from 1977-1994. At the NLC he organized several notable exhibitions, including ones dedicated to composer Alexis Contant , famous Canadian organists , and bells through the ages .

#12162

Kumud Dhital

#73022

Overall Influence

Kumud Dhital is a Nepalese cardiothoracic specialist and Heart & Lung Transplant Surgeon at Yashoda Hospitals, Hyderabad, India. Dhital's prior work experience was at St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney and, Australia.

#12163

Eliezer Shalev

#104480

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Eliezer Shalev is an Israeli gynecologist and current President of Tel Hai Academic College. He also serves as Chairman of the Israeli Ministry of Health National Council for Gynecology, Neonatology and Genetics.

#12164

Milton Terris

#41577

Overall Influence

1915 - 2002 (87 years)

Milton Terris was an American public health physician and epidemiologist. He graduated from Columbia University in 1935 and completed his MD at the New York University School of Medicine in 1939 and his MPH from Johns Hopkins University in 1944. He was associate professor of preventive medicine at the State University of New York at Buffalo from 1951 through 1957, and was professor of epidemiology at Tulane University from 1958 through 1960. He was head of the Chronic Disease Unit of the New York City Public Health Research Institute from 1960 through 1963. In 1964 he became professor and cha...

#12165

Robert Altman

#44494

Overall Influence

1944 - 2021 (77 years)

Robert Mark Altman was an American photographer. Altman attended Hunter College at the City University of New York and studied psychology and anthropology. Initially he had no intention of becoming a photographer, and said that the camera he wore around his neck was essentially just a prop to "meet girls". However, after graduation, he opened a shop called the Electric Lotus and displayed some of his photographs on a notice board here. The reaction here was so positive that Ansel Adams ended up taking him on as a photography apprentice.

#12166

Thomas D. Schiano

#138796

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Thomas D. Schiano is an American specialist in liver transplantation, intestinal transplantation and in the diagnosis and treatment of acute and chronic liver disease. He serves as associate editor for the journals Hepatology and Liver Transplantation and has published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles and abstracts and more than 20 book chapters.

#12167

Amanda Oakley

#98193

Overall Influence

Amanda Margaret Meredith Oakley is a New Zealand-based dermatologist, specialising in melanoma research and teledermatology. She is a founder and former editor-in-chief of DermNet. Medical career Oakley graduated from the University of Bristol in 1979, and completed postgraduate studies in Auckland, London and Durham before emigrating to New Zealand. She has been a practicing dermatologist at Waikato Hospital since 1987.

#12168

Youssef Fares

#135976

Overall Influence

Youssef Fares is a Lebanese neurosurgeon, academic and healthcare leader. He is a Professor and the Dean of the Lebanese University Faculty of Medicine, where he also serves as the founding director of the Neuroscience Research Center. Fares is also the CEO and Chairman of Al-Zahraa Hospital University Medical Center, the founding president of the Lebanese Association of Spine Surgery and the Senior Executive Vice President of the World Academy of Medical Sciences. In addition, he serves as an editor for the neurosurgical journal Surgical Neurology International.

#12169

Lez Edmond

#122284

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Lez Edmond was an American philosopher, social activist, civil rights journalist, public intellectual author and academic primarily concerning the Civil rights movement . Early life Edmonds was born in Jacksonville, Florida. He was raised a Seventh-day Adventist who initially attended Adelphi University for his BA and MA degree. He later earned his PHD from Union Institute. Edmonds stated in an interview that he was forced into Civil Rights while working for an electronic store. It was here that a German co-worker called him a "god-damn black nigger." When Edmonds reported this to HR, ...

#12170

Jan Boxill

#124750

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Jeanette Marie Boxill is an American academic who was Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was also Chair of the Faculty and Director of Parr Center for Ethics. Her writing and teaching relate broadly with ethical issues in social conduct, social and political philosophy, feminist theory, and ethics in sports. She is editor of Sports Ethics: An Anthology and Issues in Race and Gender. She is past president of the International Association for Philosophy in Sport, serves on the board of the NCAA Scholarly Colloquium Committee, and chairs both the 2011 NCAA Scholarly Colloquium and the Education Outreach Program for the U.S.

#12171

Edward L. Schneider

#31311

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Edward L. Schneider is a Professor of Gerontology at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, Professor of Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, with a joint appointment in biological sciences and molecular biology at the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

#12172

Lisa Sanders

#23069

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Lisa Sanders is an American physician, medical author and journalist, and associate professor of internal medicine and education at Yale School of Medicine. In 2002, she began writing a column for The New York Times called Diagnosis, that covered medical mystery cases. She is an attending physician at Yale-New Haven Hospital, which serves as the model on which Princeton-Plainsboro Hospital was fashioned for the series House M.D. Her column was the inspiration for the television series House M.D., and she worked as a consultant on the show. In 2019, Netflix aired the program Diagnosis, featuri...

#12173

Howard Gimbel

#50633

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Howard V. Gimbel FRCSC, AOE, FACS, CABES, is a Canadian ophthalmologist, university professor, senior editor, and amateur musician. He is better known for his invention, along with Thomas Neuhann, of the continuous curvilinear capsulorhexis , a technique employed in modern cataract surgery.

#12174

Todd Joseph Miles Holden

#111703

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Todd Joseph Miles Holden is an American-born social scientist, essayist, philosopher, and novelist. He was the first tenured foreign professor at Tohoku University, one of Asia’s elite universities, where he taught for 26 years. His scholarship has been multi- and trans-disciplinary, embracing globalization, media studies, cultural studies, semiotics, advertising, television, Japanese popular culture, sociology, cultural anthropology, political communication, gender, identity, and digital youth. Between 2000 and 2009 he was a contributor to the international webzine PopMatters, writing a regu...

#12175

Peter Alward

#186920

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Peter Wallace Brannen Alward is a Canadian philosopher. He is a Professor in Philosophy and the Department Head in Philosophy at the University of Saskatchewan. He is known for his works on philosophy of fiction, philosophy of art and environmental philosophy. In 2016 Alward was awarded Tenured Professor Essay Prize by The Canadian Philosophical Association.

#12176

David Morley

#50570

Overall Influence

1923 - 2009 (86 years)

David Cornelius Morley was a British paediatrician and Emeritus Professor of Child Health, UCL Institute of Child Health who saved the lives of many thousands of children in developing countries. Early life David Cornelius Morley was born on 15 June 1923 in Rothwell, Northamptonshire in the UK. He was the youngest of seven children born to a vicar and his wife. He attended school at Haywards Heath and then Marlborough College.

#12177

Eric Salzman

#110330

Overall Influence

1933 - 2017 (84 years)

Eric Salzman was an American composer, scholar, author, impresario, music critic, and record producer. He is known for advancing the concept of "New Music Theater" as an independent art form differing in scope, both economically and aesthetically, from grand opera and contemporary popular musicals. He co-founded the American Music Theater Festival and was, at the time of his death in 2017, Composer-in-Residence at the Center for Contemporary Opera.

#12178

Margaret E. Chisholm

#111072

Overall Influence

1921 - 1999 (78 years)

Margaret Elizabeth Chisholm was an American librarian and educator and served as president of the American Library Association from 1987 to 1988. She promoted librarians as skilled in information technology.

#12179

Danielle Ofri

#37445

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Danielle Ofri is an American essayist, editor, and practicing internist. She is an attending physician at Bellevue Hospital, and a clinical professor of medicine at the New York University School of Medicine. Her writing appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Lancet.

#12180

Frank Scheck

#88322

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Frank Scheck is an American film critic. He is best known for his reviews in the New York Post and The Hollywood Reporter. He formerly edited STAGES Magazine and worked as a theater critic for the Christian Science Monitor in the 1990s.

#12181

J. David Embury

#177921

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

J. David Embury is a Canadian material scientist and engineer, having been a Distinguished University Professor at McMaster University. In 2002, Embury was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for outstanding contributions to fundamental structure/mechanical property relations of materials and their applications.

#12182

Anthony Page

#84557

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Anthony Page is a British stage and film director. Biography When Page was 19, he went to Canada on a free passage with the Royal Canadian Air Force and hitchhiked to New York where he studied with Sanford Meisner. In 1964, he took over directing at the Royal Court when George Devine fell ill. He directed Inadmissible Evidence with Nicol Williamson.

#12183

Robert M. Blizzard

#80166

Overall Influence

1957 - 2003 (46 years)

Robert M. Blizzard was an American pediatric endocrinologist and a founding member of the Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society. Life and career Blizzard was born in East St. Louis, Illinois, and raised in Greenville, Illinois. He attended Northwestern University, interrupting his undergraduate studies to serve in the United States Army for three years during the Second World War. He later returned and graduated from the Feinberg School of Medicine in 1952.

#12184

Robert de Hoog

#142914

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Robert de Hoog is a Dutch social scientist and Emeritus Professor Information and knowledge management at the University of Twente, known for his contributions in the field of scientific modelling. Biography De Hoog received his PhD in 1978 at the University of Amsterdam with a thesis entitled "Politieke voorkeur: oordelen en beslissen" under supervision of Robert J. Mokken.

#12185

Harry Burns

#55280

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Sir Henry Burns , known generally as Harry Burns, is the professor of global public health, University of Strathclyde, having been the Chief Medical Officer for Scotland from September 2005 to April 2014. He has become known for his work to address health inequalities. He is a member of the Council of Economic Advisers in Scotland.

#12186

José Narro Robles

#34352

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

José Narro Robles is a Mexican physician, researcher, academic, and politician. He is a former director of the Faculty of Medicine of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and was elected its 23rd Rector on November 20, 2007. After two 4-year periods leading UNAM, in February 2016, he was appointed by Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto to replace Mercedes Juan as head of the Mexican Secretariat of Health.

#12187

Eric Chivian

#32481

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Eric S. Chivian is the founder and director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, where he is also an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry. Life and career A 1964 graduate of Harvard University , he went on to graduate from Harvard Medical School in 1968.

#12188

Pamela Y. Collins

#135040

Overall Influence

Pamela Y. Collins is an American psychiatrist. She is the Director of the International Training and Education Center for Health and the Global Mental Health Program at the University of Washington School of Medicine and School of Public Health. Collins is professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of global health. She previously worked as the director of the Office for Research on Disparities and Global Mental Health at the National Institute of Mental Health .

#12189

Robert C. May

#110388

Overall Influence

Robert C. May is an American philosopher and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California, Davis. He is known for his works on philosophy of language. Books Logical Form: Its Structure and Derivation. MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma., 1985.The Grammar of Quantification, Garland Publishing, New York, 1991.Indices and Identity, with Robert Fiengo. MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma., 1994.De Lingua Belief, with Robert Fiengo. MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma, 2006.

#12190

Matthias Herrmann

#122566

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Matthias Herrmann is a German musicologist and university professor. Life Born in Mildenau, Herrmann became a member of the Dresdner Kreuzchor conducted by Kreuzkantor Rudolf Mauersberger, later Martin Flämig. He then studied musicology at the University of Leipzig and later became a staff member of the music department of the Saxon State Library in Dresden as well as of the cultural editorial staff of the .

#12191

Sue Stott

#185636

Overall Influence

Ngaire 'Sue' Susan Stott is a New Zealand paediatric orthopaedic surgeon, and as of 2019 is a full professor at the University of Auckland and holds a position at Starship Hospital. Academic career After an undergrad at the University of Auckland and a 1997 PhD at University of Southern California titled 'Regulation of chondrogenesis in vitro : the role of hedgehog and Wnt genes' , Stott joined the staff at Auckland University, rising to full professor in 2013. Stott has multiple research fundings and holds multiple roles, including ministerial appointments.

#12192

Mary Ellen Avery

Mary Ellen Avery

#32959

Overall Influence

1927 - 2011 (84 years)

Mary Ellen Avery , also known as Mel, was an American pediatrician. In the 1950s, Avery's pioneering research efforts helped lead to the discovery of the main cause of respiratory distress syndrome in premature babies: her identification of surfactant led to the development of replacement therapy for premature infants and has been credited with saving over 830,000 lives. Her childhood, mentors, drive, and education inspired Avery to be the visionary that she was. In 1991 President George H.W. Bush conferred the National Medal of Science on Avery for her work on RDS.

#12193

Anne M. Leggett

#102347

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Anne Marie Leggett is an American mathematical logician. She is an associate professor emerita of mathematics at Loyola University Chicago. Leggett is the editor-in-chief of the bi-monthly newsletter of the Association for Women in Mathematics , a position she has held continuously since 1977. She has served on the Executive Committee of the AWM since 1977 and the AWM Policy and Advocacy Committee . With Bettye Anne Case, she is the editor of the book Complexities: Women in Mathematics . Leggett received an Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award for Complexities in 2006.

#12194

Richard E. Besser

Richard E. Besser

#7636

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Richard E. Besser is an American doctor and executive who has served as president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation since April 2017. Besser served as the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry from January to June 2009. He was ABC News' former chief health and medical editor. Besser is a brother-in-law to Scottish singer Annie Lennox.

#12195

Tahir Shamsi

#84044

Overall Influence

1962 - 2021 (59 years)

Tahir Sultan Shamsi was a Pakistani professor of medicine, researcher and pioneer of Bone marrow transplant in Pakistan worked as a clinical hematologist and bone marrow transplant physician. He established the National Institute for Blood Diseases . He was the director of the Stem Cell Programme at NIBD as well.

#12196

Worta McCaskill-Stevens

#183411

Overall Influence

Worta J. McCaskill-Stevens was an American physician-scientist and medical oncologist specialized in cancer disparities research, management of comorbidities within clinical trials, and molecular research for cancer prevention interventions. She was chief of the community oncology and prevention trials research group at the National Cancer Institute.

#12197

Trinh T. Minh-ha

Trinh T. Minh-ha

#171359

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Trinh T. Minh-ha is a Vietnamese filmmaker, writer, literary theorist, composer, and professor. She has been making films for over thirty years and may be best known for her films Reassemblage'', made in 1982, and Surname Viet Given Name Nam, made in 1985. She has received several awards and grants, including the American Film Institute's National Independent Filmmaker Maya Deren Award, and Fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. Her films have been the subject of twenty retrospectives.

#12198

George Baker

#80521

Overall Influence

1931 - 2011 (80 years)

George Morris Baker, MBE was an English actor and writer. He was best known for portraying Tiberius in I, Claudius, and Inspector Wexford in The Ruth Rendell Mysteries. Early life Baker was born in Varna, Bulgaria. His father was an English businessman and honorary vice consul and his mother an Irish Red Cross nurse who moved to Bulgaria to help fight cholera.

#12199

Torben Schousboe

#95340

Overall Influence

1937 - 2017 (80 years)

Torben Schousboe was a Danish music researcher and writer. After completing organ studies in 1960, he graduated from Copenhagen University, where he taught from 1972 to 1996. He is known above all for his work on Carl Nielsen. In 1983 he published, in collaboration with Nielsen's daughter Irmelin Eggert Møller, the composer's diaries and correspondence with his wife Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen.

#12200

Barbara Takenaga

#56368

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Barbara Takenaga is an American artist known for swirling, abstract paintings that have been described as psychedelic and cosmic, as well as scientific, due to their highly detailed, obsessive patterning. She gained wide recognition in the 2000s, as critics such as David Cohen and Kenneth Baker placed her among a leading edge of artists renewing abstraction with paintings that emphasized visual beauty and excess, meticulous technique, and optical effects. Her work suggests possibilities that range from imagined landscapes and aerial maps to astronomical and meteorological phenomena to microscopic views of cells, aquatic creatures or mineral cross-sections.

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