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,

#13001

Bruce Bennett

#191087

Overall Influence

#13002

Bert L. Vallee

#61707

Overall Influence

1919 - 2010 (91 years)

Bert L. Vallee was an Edgar M. Bronfman Distinguished Senior Professor at the Harvard Medical School. He was the founder and president of the Endowment and the CBBSM . Early life and career Vallee received his M.D degree from New York University in 1943 and subsequently held positions at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School in Medicine and Biochemistry. Vallee was a member of the Medical and Science Faculty of Harvard University since 1948. He was the Founding Director of the Biophysics Research Laboratory at Harvard , which was established in 1954 by The Rockefeller Foundation.

#13003

Robert Cutietta

#103127

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Robert Alan Cutietta is best known as an educator, author, researcher, composer, and arts leader. He is the author or co-author of five books and over fifty referereed research articles in the area of music psychology and education. He is also a composer, having written for television shows and movies.

#13004

Arne Krumsvik

#189444

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Arne Håskjold Krumsvik is a Norwegian scholar, media entrepreneur, and aviator, and considered to be one of the founders of media innovations studies. He is currently the principal of Kristiania University College, previous to that he was the head of department at Department of Media and Communications, University of Oslo, Norway.

#13005

James Mourilyan Tanner

James Mourilyan Tanner

#52683

Overall Influence

1920 - 2010 (90 years)

James Mourilyan Tanner, was a British paediatric endocrinologist who was best known for his development of the Tanner scale, which measures the stages of sexual development during puberty. He was a professor emeritus of the Institute of Child Health at the University of London.

#13006

Todd Phillips

#154308

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Todd Phillips is an American double bassist. He has appeared on a number of acoustic instrumental and bluegrass recordings made since the mid-1970s. A two-time Grammy Award winner and founding member of the original David Grisman Quintet, Phillips has made a career of performing and recording with acoustic music artists.

#13007

Harry Freedman

#110525

Overall Influence

1922 - 2005 (83 years)

Harry Freedman , was a Canadian composer, English hornist, and music educator of Polish birth. He wrote a significant amount of symphonic works, including the scores to films such as The Bloody Brood , Isabel , The Act of the Heart , The Pyx and The Courage of Kavik the Wolf Dog , and composed a substantial amount of chamber music. He also composed music for six ballets, an opera, some incidental music for the theatre, and a few vocal art songs and choral works. He was awarded a Juno Award in 1996 for his symphonic work Touchings, which was recorded by the Esprit Orchestra on the Nexus label.

#13008

Carys Bannister

#77810

Overall Influence

1935 - 2010 (75 years)

Carys Margaret Bannister was the first female British neurosurgeon. Born in Brazil to Welsh parents, she moved to England as a teenager and trained in surgery after qualifying as a doctor. She spent most of her career as a consultant neurosurgeon at North Manchester General Hospital and as a researcher at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. She specialised in treating disorders of the cerebral circulation, spina bifida, and hydrocephalus.

#13009

Daniel E. Singer

#191097

Overall Influence

#13010

Joseph W. Eschbach

Joseph W. Eschbach

#106320

Overall Influence

1933 - 2007 (74 years)

Joseph Wetherill Eschbach was an American doctor and kidney specialist whose twenty years of research starting in the 1960s led to an improvement in the treatment of anemia. Dr. Eschbach graduated from Jefferson Medical College in 1959. Eschbach was married to MaryAnn Eschbach for 51 years, they had 3 children; 5 grandchildren.

#13011

Kelly J. Manahan

#116591

Overall Influence

Kelly J. Manahan is an American gynecologist who is the current Chair of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Toledo College of Medicine and Life Sciences in Toledo, Ohio. She is the fifth Chair of Obstetrics and Gynecology for The University of Toledo which is the former Medical College of Ohio. She is the first female to hold this position. She was appointed to this position after a nationwide search in 2011.

#13012

Senait Fisseha

#59247

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Professor Senait Fisseha is an Ethio-American physician, lawyer and obstetrician-gynecologist, with a specialization in endocrinology from the University of Michigan. She is currently Vice-President of International Programs at the Susan Thompson Buffet Foundation. Fisseha also received her Juris Doctor from Southern Illinois University and is recognized for her advocacy in global reproductive health, rights and gender equality. During the Covid-19 pandemic, she became an advocate for global equity, collaborating closely with African leaders and institutions in her capacity as an advisor and thought leader.

#13013

Olaitan Soyannwo

#191109

Overall Influence

Olaitan Soyannwo is a Nigerian Professor of Anaesthesia and consultant at the University of Ibadan and foreign secretary of the Nigerian Academy of Science. She was formerly the President of International Association for the Study of Pain.

#13014

Ilan Mitchell-Smith

Ilan Mitchell-Smith

#122709

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Ilan Mitchell-Smith is an American academic and former actor, best known as a co-star of the film Weird Science and Andy McCalister in Superboy. Acting career Mitchell-Smith's very first passion was ballet. He studied as a child and even won a scholarship to dance with the School of American Ballet. While there on his scholarship, he was discovered by a casting director and his film career began in 1982 at age 12 when he played a younger version of the title character in Sidney Lumet's Daniel. After a starring role in the 1984 film The Wild Life, he was cast as Wyatt Donnelly in the 1985 teen film Weird Science by writer/director John Hughes.

#13015

Ginni Rometty

#108353

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Virginia Marie "Ginni" Rometty is an American business executive who was executive chairman of IBM after stepping down as CEO on April 1, 2020. She was previously chairman, president and CEO of IBM, becoming the first woman to head the company. She retired from IBM on December 31, 2020, after a near-40 year career there. Before becoming president and CEO in January 2012, she first joined IBM as a systems engineer in 1981 and subsequently headed global sales, marketing, and strategy. While general manager of IBM's global services division, in 2002 she helped negotiate IBM's purchase of PricewaterhouseCoopers' IT consulting business, becoming known for her work integrating the two companies.

#13016

Robert DuPont

#28377

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Robert L. DuPont is an American psychiatrist, known for his advocacy in the field of substance abuse. He is president of the Institute for Behavior and Health, whose mission is "to reduce the use of illegal drugs". He has written books including Chemical Slavery: Understanding Addiction and Stopping the Drug Epidemic, The Selfish Brain: Learning from Addiction, as well as Drug Testing in Treatment Settings, Drug Testing in Schools, and Drug Testing in Correctional Settings, published by the Hazelden Foundation. DuPont is a fellow of the American Society of Addiction Medicine and a life fellow...

#13017

Katie Allen

#164642

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Katrina Jane Allen is an Australian politician and former medical researcher who was a member of the House of Representatives from 2019 until 2022. She is a member of the Liberal Party and represented the Division of Higgins in Victoria.

#13018

Oni Blackstock

#173960

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Oni Blackstock is a primary care and HIV physician, researcher, and founder of Health Justice, a racial and health equity consulting practice. She previously served as assistant commissioner for the Bureau of HIV for the New York City Department of Health, where she led the city's response to the HIV epidemic. Her research considers the experiences of women and people of color in healthcare. During the COVID-19 pandemic Blackstock shared advice on how people in New York City could maintain sexual health and slow the spread of COVID-19 as well as guidance for people with HIV and HIV care provid...

#13019

Charles LeMaistre

#61783

Overall Influence

1924 - 2017 (93 years)

Charles Aubrey "Mickey" LeMaistre was an American physician, medical educator, and academic administrator who served as chancellor of the University of Texas System from 1971 to 1978 and as president of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center from 1978 to 1996. He also has the dubious distinction of serving on the board of directors of the Enron Corporation.

#13020

William R. Maples

#34248

Overall Influence

1937 - 1997 (60 years)

William Ross Maples, Ph.D. was an American forensic anthropologist working at the C.A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory at the Florida Museum of Natural History. His specialty was the study of bones. He worked on several high-profile criminal investigations, including those concerning historical figures such as Francisco Pizarro, the Romanov family, Joseph Merrick , President Zachary Taylor and Medgar Evers. His insights often proved beneficial in closing cases that otherwise may have remained unsolved.

#13021

Miriam Zach

#141277

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Miriam Susan Zach is an Iowa State University professor and musicologist residing in Gainesville, Florida known for her work in the study of women composers. Zach's published works in the area of female composers include a CD titled Hidden Treasures: 300 Years of Organ Music by Women Composers which was released in 1998 and the textbook For the Birds: Women Composers Music History Speller, and her collections of music and documentation about women composers formed the base of the International Women Composers' Library, a music history library of which Dr. Zach is the current director.

#13022

Ida E. Jones

#146763

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Ida E. Jones is an American historian and author who is the University Archivist at Morgan State University, the first archivist in the university's history. Previously she worked as Assistant Curator of Manuscripts at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University where as part of her work she created a Guide to Resources on Africa. Jones was the National Director of the Association of Black Women Historians from 2011 through 2013.

#13023

Steve White

#176848

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Steve White is an American actor and comedian, best known for his roles in Spike Lee films. Career White has worked with Spike Lee five times . From 1992 to 1997, White performed stand-up comedy on Russell Simmons's Def Comedy Jam on HBO and he also had a recurring role on the ABC comedy series Hangin' With Mr. Cooper. Steve was most recently one of the guest announcers on The Price Is Right. He also had guest appearances on 1990s black sitcom Living Single & Martin, which both aired on the Fox Network respectively.

#13024

Han Young-sil

#185516

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Han Young-sil , is a professor and nutritionist in South Korea. She was president of Sookmyung Women's University. Biography Han Young-sil was born on November 14, 1957, in Incheon, South Korea. In 1980, she was a graduate of Sookmyung Women's University. In 1992, University of Bonn Department of Food Science training courses were completed. From 2005, she became a cast member in KBS 2TV reality show Vitamin .

#13025

Kathie-Ann Joseph

#113667

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Kathie-Ann Joseph is a surgeon and researcher at New York University Langone Health where she specializes in breast surgery and oncology surgery. Joseph is also the chief of breast surgery at Bellevue Medical Center, where she was recognized in 2015 as Bellevue's Physician of the Year. Joseph works to reduce disparities in cancer care in order to improve health care for individuals in need. Specifically, Joseph focuses on developing programs that will help African-American women to address their needs in breast cancer prevention and care. She is also studying the effects of a cell surface r...

#13026

Josephine Halvorson

#175277

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Josephine Halvorson is an American contemporary painter, sculptor, and print maker based in Massachusetts. She is best known for her on-site paintings, drawing from scenes of the natural world and everyday life. Her work bends material fact and immaterial illusion. Halvorson is a Professor of Art and Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting at Boston University.

#13027

Wojciech Maksymowicz

#180469

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Wojciech Stefan Maksymowicz is a Polish neurosurgeon, from 1997 to 1999 minister of health, since 2019 member of the IX Sejm. Associated with the Agreement political party. In 2021, Maksymowicz left the PiS Parliamentary Club being the second to do so. He left the Agreement on 19 May 2021. He joined Poland 2050 the next day.He left the party on 30 November 2022.

#13028

Peter M. Boenisch

#189367

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Peter Michael Boenisch is a German theatre researcher. Since 2019, he had been Professor for Dramaturgy at Aarhus University . In 2019, he was elected into the Academia Europaea. Biography He read Theatre Studies, English Literature and Theoretical Linguistics at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, where he worked, following his PhD, as an Assistant Professor for Dance and Performance from 2000. Between 2004 and 2018, he worked in the United Kingdom, initially at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and since then as Professor of European Theatre at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London .

#13029

Arti Agrawal

#115383

Overall Influence

Arti Agrawal is a scientist and engineer known for her work on computational photonics as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM; she has been recognized in both of these areas by a number of awards. Her research is focused on numerical modeling and simulation of photonic devices and optical components. Agrawal is currently serving as Associate Professor and the Director of Women in Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Technology Sydney and Associate Vice President of Diversity for the IEEE Photonics Society.

#13030

James Herbert

#168887

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

James Herbert is an American painter and filmmaker known for directing a series of music videos for the band R.E.M. He has also made over forty short films, including John Five and Jumbo Aqua , and directed four independent features: Scars , Speedy Boys , Rabbit Pix and Abandoned House . Some of his short films have been collected on the video compilation Figures .

#13031

Matthew Uttley

#97442

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Matthew R. H. Uttley , born in 1965, is a British academic best known for his published work on the historical and contemporary dimensions of defence economics, weapons acquisition, and United Kingdom defence policy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal Historical Society.

#13032

Meredith Broussard

#54564

Overall Influence

Meredith Broussard is a data journalism professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. Her research focuses on the role of artificial intelligence in journalism. Career Broussard was previously a features editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a software developer at the AT&T Bell Labs and MIT Media Lab. Broussard has published features and essays in many outlets including The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and Slate Magazine. She is the author of the nonfiction book Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World.

#13033

John Grant

#72667

Overall Influence

1922 - 2013 (91 years)

John MacDonald Falconar Grant, AO, OBE was an Australian neurosurgeon and disability sport administrator. He was president of the 2000 Sydney Paralympic Games Organising Committee. He played a leading role in the development of disability sport in Australia.

#13034

Kenneth C. Edelin

#49748

Overall Influence

1939 - 2013 (74 years)

Kenneth Carlton Edelin was an American physician known for his support for abortion rights and his advocacy for indigent patients' rights to healthcare. He was born in Washington, D.C., and died in Sarasota, Florida.

#13035

Patrick Meenan

#163780

Overall Influence

1917 - 2008 (91 years)

Patrick Meenan was the president of the Medical Council of Ireland and dean of the faculty of medicine in University College Dublin . In his research work, he was involved with Albert Sabin and Jonas Salk in the development of the polio vaccine. He was educated in the Catholic University School, Clongowes Wood, and UCD, where he became auditor of the Literary and Historical Society. He died in June 2008

#13036

Harry Smith

#78600

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (98 years)

Henry Sidney "Harry" Smith, is a British Egyptologist and academic, specialising in epigraphy and Egyptian archaeology. He held the Edwards Chair of Egyptology at University College London from 1970 to 1986. He had previously been a lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Cambridge, where he was also Budge Fellow in Egyptology at Christ's College, Cambridge.

#13037

Barbara Natterson-Horowitz

#94066

Overall Influence

Barbara N. Horowitz, M.D., is a cardiologist, academic and author. She is a professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiology at University of California, Los Angeles and a visiting professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and has been on the faculty of Harvard Medical School since 2020. Horowitz is a New York Times bestselling author of the book Zoobiquity on the subject of a cross-species approach to medicine which includes veterinary and evolutionary perspectives. In 2019, Horowitz and Bowers co-authored their second book, Wildhood.

#13038

Matthea Harvey

#60911

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Matthea Harvey is a contemporary American poet, writer and professor. She has published four collections of poetry. The most recent of these, If the Tabloids Are True What Are You?, a collection of poetry and images, was published in 2014. Prior to this, the collection Modern Life earned her the 2009 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award, and a New York Times Notable Book.

#13039

Frank De Vol

#170193

Overall Influence

1911 - 1999 (88 years)

Frank Denny De Vol was an American actor, and using the name De Vol was an arranger and composer. As a composer he was nominated for four Academy Awards. Early life and career De Vol was born in Moundsville in Marshall County in northern West Virginia, and was reared in Canton, Ohio. His father, Herman Frank De Vol, was band-leader of the Grand Opera House in Canton, Ohio, and his mother, Minnie Emma Humphreys De Vol, had worked in a sewing shop. He attended Miami University.

#13040

Alastair Bellingham

#59440

Overall Influence

1938 - 2017 (79 years)

Alastair John Bellingham was a British haematologist. Early life and education Bellingham was born to Stanley Herbert Bellingham and Sybil Mary Milne. He was a graduate of Tiffin Boys' School and University College London Hospital Medical School.

#13041

Peter Tregear

#141285

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Peter John Tregear OAM is an Australian musicologist, author and performer. Career Tregear's first academic appointment was as a lecturer in music at the University of Queensland in 1999. In 2000 he took up a Lectureship in music at Fitzwilliam and Churchill Colleges, Cambridge, as well as serving as a fellow and Director of Music at Fitzwilliam College, an appointment that "brought new energy" to the musical life of the college. He returned to Australia in 2006 to serve as Dean of Trinity College, University of Melbourne, where he successfully mounted a case for the construction of the Colleg...

#13042

Salvador Jara Guerrero

#76833

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Salvador Jara Guerrero is a Mexican philosopher, physicist and professor. He served as Substitute Governor of Michoacán Jara Guerrero was rector of the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo from 2011 until 2014.

#13043

John Perry

#191237

Overall Influence

#13044

Norman Morris

#79342

Overall Influence

1920 - 2008 (88 years)

Norman Frederick Morris was a British pioneer of women's health. He was a professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Charing Cross Hospital Medical School and was also a university administrator. From 1971 to 1980, he was dean of medicine, and then deputy vice-chancellor at the University of London. However his greatest contribution was to question current standards of prenatal care. He was critical of the way that midwives and obstetricians treated women, and his work was summarized in a paper in the Lancet in 1960. This paper was based on interviews with 500 women, included no references and at the time was extremely controversial.

#13045

Jorge Erdely Graham

#187769

Overall Influence

Jorge Erdely Graham is a Mexican theologian, religious studies scholar, and author. He is associate editor of Revista Académica para el Estudio de las Religiones, a member of the American Academy of Religion and former director of Centro de Investigaciones del Instituto Cristiano de Mexico.

#13046

Jeff Balser

#48060

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Jeffrey R. Balser is the president and CEO of Vanderbilt University Medical Center and dean of the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine . Balser is a 1990 graduate of the Vanderbilt M.D./Ph.D. program in pharmacology and subsequently completed residency training in anesthesiology and fellowship training in critical care medicine at Johns Hopkins. He continued to work at Johns Hopkins as a cardiac anesthesiologist and ICU physician before returning to Vanderbilt University and joining VUMC in 1998. Balser was appointed dean of the VUSM in 2008 and, the following year, was appointed the vice chancellor for health affairs at Vanderbilt, in charge of the medical center.

#13047

Catarina Resende de Oliveira

#122296

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Catarina Resende de Oliveira is a Portuguese neurologist, researcher, university professor, and doctor. A full professor of biochemistry at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Coimbra, she studies the processes that cause neurological degeneration responsible for illnesses such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.

#13048

Andrew K. Pace

#91831

Overall Influence

Andrew K. Pace is an American librarian and author. He has served as executive director of the University System of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions Library Consortium since March 2022, after fifteen years working in various leadership positions at OCLC.

#13049

Rosemary Haughton

#65740

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (99 years)

Rosemary Elena Konradin Haughton is a British-born Catholic lay theologian, who also resided in the United States over a period of 30 years. The daughter of Peter Luling and Sylvia Thompson Luling, she had two sisters, Dr. Virginia Luling , and Elizabeth Dooley . She attended the Farnham Girls' Grammar School, Queen's College, London, and the Slade School of Art. She married Algernon Haughton in 1948; the couple had 12 children including 2 foster children.[2] Algy Haughton died in Edinburgh in 2008.

#13050

Karen Redrobe

#169747

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Karen Redrobe is Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Endowed Professor in Film Studies and chair of the department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research has dealt with film theory, animation, and feminism, among other topics.

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