Search People Result | Academic Influence

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

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

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

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

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

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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people

#151

Lawrence Rinder

#76597

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Lawrence R. Rinder is a contemporary art curator and museum director. He directed the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive from 2008 to 2020. Education Rinder received a B.A. in art from Reed College and an M.A. in art history from Hunter College. He has held teaching positions at UC Berkeley, Columbia University, and Deep Springs College.

#152

Clarence Allen

#78174

Overall Influence

1925 - 2021 (96 years)

Clarence Roderic Allen was an American geologist who studied seismology. Career He was a graduate of Reed College and the California Institute of Technology . Allen was President of the Seismological Society of America in 1975 and the Geological Society of America. He was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, and the Geological Society of America. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1975. Allen was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering since 1976.

#153

Vern Rutsala

#79077

Overall Influence

1934 - 2014 (80 years)

Vern Rutsala was an American poet. Born in McCall, Idaho, he was educated at Reed College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop . He taught English and creative writing at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon for more than forty years, before retiring in 2004. He also taught for short periods at the University of Minnesota, Bowling Green State University, University of Redlands, and the University of Idaho, and served in the U.S. Army, 1956–58. He died in Oregon on April 2, 2014.

#154

Hugo Bedau

#79552

Overall Influence

1926 - 2012 (86 years)

Hugo Adam Bedau was the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Tufts University, and is best known for his work on capital punishment. He has been called a "leading anti-death-penalty scholar" by Stuart Taylor Jr., who has quoted Bedau as saying "I'll let the criminal justice system execute all the McVeighs they can capture, provided they'd sentence to prison all the people who are not like McVeigh."

#155

Tyler Nordgren

#84141

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Tyler Eugene Nordgren is an astronomer and professor of physics at the University of Redlands. Education Nordgren earned a B.A. in physics from Reed College and an M.S. and Ph.D. in astronomy from Cornell University.

#156

Laleh Khadivi

#84799

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Laleh Khadivi is an Iranian American novelist, and filmmaker. Life Khadivi was born to a Kurdish family in Esfahan, Iran, in 1977. Shortly after the Iranian Revolution, she emigrated to the United States with her family in 1979, settling in the San Francisco Bay Area. She graduated from Reed College and from Mills College with an MFA. In 2002 she began to research the Kurds, particularly their fate in the southwestern region of Iran under the first Shah. Her first novel, The Age of Orphans, is the story of a Kurdish boy whose father is killed in a battle with the Iranian army in 1921. The boy...

#157

Edward J. Hall

#85890

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Edward J. Hall, also known as Ned Hall, is an American philosopher and Norman E. Vuilleumier Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. He is known for his expertise on philosophy of science and epistemology.

#158

Barbara Reskin

#87060

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Barbara Reskin is a professor of sociology. As the S. Frank Miyamoto Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington, Reskin studies labor market stratification, examining job queues, nonstandard work, sex segregation, and affirmative action policies in employment and university admissions, mechanisms of work-place discrimination, and the role of credit markets in income poverty and inequality.

#159

Kelly Falkner

#87274

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Kelly Kenison Falkner is an American chemical oceanographer and educator. She is the Director of the National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs . Her work in the position led her NSF colleagues to name the Falkner Glacier, in Victoria Land, Antarctica, after her.

#160

Neil Ramiller

#88441

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Neil Clifford Ramiller is an American academic, and Professor of Management at the Portland State University School of Business Administration, known for his work with Swanson, E. Burton on the management of information-technology innovations, particularly on organizing vision.

#161

Jonathan Boyarin

#91973

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Jonathan Aaron Boyarin is an American anthropologist whose work centers on Jewish communities and on the dynamics of Jewish culture, memory and identity. Born in Neptune, New Jersey, he is married and has two sons. In 2013, he was appointed Thomas and Diann Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies, Departments of Anthropology and Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University.

#162

Kimberly Clausing

#93122

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Kimberly Clausing is an liberal American economist. She is the Eric M. Zolt Chair in Tax Law and Policy at UCLA School of Law, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. From 2021 to 2022, she was the deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis at the United States Department of the Treasury. Clausing is known for her work on international trade and tax policy, particularly the taxation of multinational corporations.

#163

Anna C. Chave

#96521

Overall Influence

Anna C. Chave is an art historian and professor at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York . She is best known for her research and publications on modern sculpture and the New York School. She has published many essays concerned with issues of gender and identity, reception and interpretation, mainly with respect to 20th century art. Her artist subjects have ranged from early Pablo Picasso and Georgia O'Keeffe, to Jackson Pollock and Hannah Wilke.

#164

Peter Norton

#98313

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Peter Norton is an American programmer, software publisher, author, and philanthropist. He is best known for the computer programs and books that bear his name and portrait. Norton sold his software business to Symantec Corporation in 1990.

#165

Lisa Kemmerer

#98484

Overall Influence

Lisa Kemmerer is an American academic who has written on animal ethics and environmental ethics. She is an associate professor of philosophy and religion at Montana State University Billings, and is the author or editor of nine books.

#166

Athena Aktipis

#98834

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Christina Athena Aktipis is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University. She is the director of the Interdisciplinary Cooperation Initiative and the co-director of the Human Generosity Project. She is also the director of the Cooperation and Conflict lab at Arizona State University, vice president of the International Society for Evolution, Ecology and Cancer , and was the director of human and social evolution and co-founder of the Center for Evolution and Cancer at UCSF. She is a cooperation theorist, an evolutionary biologist, an evolutionary psychologist, and a cancer biologist who works at the intersection of those fields.

#167

Elizabeth Haswell

#98976

Overall Influence

Elizabeth Haswell is an American biologist who is a professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute-Simons Faculty Scholar at the Washington University in St. Louis. She was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2021.

#168

Harvey S. Leff

#99738

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Harvey S. Leff is a United States physicist and physics teacher who is known primarily for his research and expository articles in physics, focusing on energy, entropy, Maxwell's demon, and the foundations of thermodynamics. He introduced the 'energy spreading' metaphor for entropy change.

#169

William Dickey

#101368

Overall Influence

1928 - 1994 (66 years)

William Hobart Dickey was an American poet and professor of English and creative writing at San Francisco State University. He wrote 15 books of poetry over a career that lasted over 30 years. Early life and education Dickey was born in 1928 in Bellingham, Washington and was raised in Washington and Oregon. He attended Reed College, graduating in 1951. At Reed, he wrote a novel for his bachelor's thesis and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa Society.

#170

David Grusky

#101499

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

David Bryan Grusky is an American sociologist and the Barbara Kimball Browning Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. He is also a senior fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and the director of the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality. He formerly taught at Cornell University, where he was the founder and founding director of the Center for the Study of Inequality.

#171

Katya Komisaruk

#101518

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Katya Komisaruk is an American civil rights lawyer and social justice activist. She attended Harvard Law School, helped form the Midnight Special Law Collective and Just Cause Law Collective. Early years Komisaruk grew up in Michigan and California. Her father is a psychiatrist and her mother a housewife. As a child in Detroit, Michigan, Komisaruk was inspired by reading about the White Rose group who resisted Nazism in Germany. "It was important to me to know that not everybody was wrong, that there were some people who did the right thing even when everybody else was failing to stop the t...

#172

Steven Allan Boggs

#103673

Overall Influence

1946 - 2018 (72 years)

Steven Allan Boggs was an American physicist in the field of dielectrics and electrical insulation. He was a researcher in industry before becoming a tenured research professor at University of Connecticut from 1993 to 2013.

#173

Duncan Ryūken Williams

#106848

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Duncan Ryūken Williams is a scholar, writer, and Soto Zen Buddhist priest who is currently professor of religion and East Asian languages and cultures at the University of Southern California. He also serves as the director of the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture. His research focuses on Zen Buddhism, Buddhism in America, and the mixed-race Japanese experience.

#174

Patrick Kline

#109159

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Patrick McGraw Kline is an U.S. American economist and Professor of Economics of the University of California at Berkeley. In 2018, his research was awarded the Sherwin Rosen Prize by the Society of Labor Economists for "outstanding contributions in the field of labor economics". In 2020, he was awarded the prestigious IZA Young Labor Economist Award.

#175

R. Kip Guy

#111512

Overall Influence

R. Kip Guy is an American pharmaceutical chemist. , he is the dean of the University of Kentucky College of Pharmacy. Early life and education Guy was born in Alabama but was raised in various places including Jacks Creek, Tennessee, England, and Ohio. He completed his Bachelor of Arts degree in chemistry from Reed College before working as a process development chemist in the process translation unit at IBM Research. Following this, he received his PhD in organic chemistry in 1996 based on the total synthesis of taxol from the Scripps Research Institute. His thesis was conducted under the guidance of K.

#176

Katharine Reeves

#112091

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (123 years)

Katharine Reeves is an astronomer and solar physicist who works at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian .. She is known for her work on high temperature plasmas in the solar corona, and measurement/analysis techniques to probe the physics of magnetic reconnection and thermal energy transport during solar flares; these are aspects of the coronal heating problem that organizes a large part of the field. She has a strong scientific role in multiple NASA and international space missions to observe the Sun: Hinode ; IRIS ; SDO; Parker Solar Probe; and suborbital sounding rockets inc...

#177

Susan Silas

#112531

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Susan Silas is a visual artist working primarily in video, sculpture and photography. Her work, through self-portraiture, examines the meaning of embodiment, the index in representation, and the evolution of our understanding of the self. She is interested in the aging body, gender roles, the fragility of sentient being and the potential outcome of the creation of idealized selves through bio-technology and artificial intelligence.

#178

Gail M. Kelly

#113948

Overall Influence

1933 - 2005 (72 years)

Gail M. Kelly was an American anthropologist known for training generations of anthropologists at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. She was born February 9, 1933, in Deer Park, Washington and after her mother's death was raised by relatives in Portland. She attended Reed as an undergraduate, studying under Morris Opler and David H. French, graduating in 1955. Her B.A. thesis, Themes in Wasco Culture, was based on fieldwork on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation under French's supervision. She pursued a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago, where she was strongly influenced by Edward Shils and Fred Eggan.

#179

Wallace T. MacCaffrey

#115651

Overall Influence

1920 - 2013 (93 years)

Wallace T. MacCaffrey was Professor Emeritus of History at Harvard University. He was a graduate of Reed College and Harvard University. He also taught at the University of California, Los Angeles and Haverford College. Among his awards is a Guggenheim fellowship. He was a leading scholar of Elizabethan England, best known for his trilogy of books, The Shaping of the Elizabethan Regime , Queen Elizabeth and the Making of Policy, 1572-1588 and Elizabeth I: War and Politics, 1588-1603 .

#180

James N. Baron

#117159

Overall Influence

James N. Baron is an American sociologist. Baron earned a bachelor's degree in sociology from Reed College, then completed further study in the subject at University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Baron began teaching at Stanford University in 1982, where he was named Walter Kenneth Kilpatrick Professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resources in 1992. He joined the Yale University faculty in 2006, and is currently the William S. Beinecke Professor at Yale School of Management.

#181

Don Berry

#118379

Overall Influence

1932 - 2001 (69 years)

Don George Berry was an American author and artist best known for his trilogy of historical novels about early settlers in the Oregon Country. Described as one of "Oregon's best fiction writers of the post-World War II generation", and a "Forgotten Beat", Berry's second novel, Moontrap , was nominated for the National Book Award in 1963.

#182

Mark Galassi

#119434

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Mark Galassi is a physicist, computer scientist, and contributor to the free and open-source software movement. He was born in Manhattan, grew up in France and Italy, and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

#183

Dennis B. McGilvray

#120349

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Dennis B. McGilvray is a professor in the Department of Anthropology in University of Colorado at Boulder. Dennis's research interest are focused on the Tamils and Muslims of south India and Sri Lanka. His research examines matrilineal Hindu and Muslim kinship, caste structure, religious ritual, and ethnic identities in the Tamil-speaking region of eastern Sri Lanka. It is also important to note that this region is deeply affected by the island’s civil war. He is also interested in visual anthropology and alternative modes of cultural representation. At University of Colorado, he teaches on T...

#184

Brendan McConville

#121776

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Brendan McConville is an American author and professor of history at Boston University. His books on American history include The King's Three Faces and The American Revolution, 1763-1789 . Career McConville was educated at Brown University and Reed College, Portland. His research focuses on the intersection of politics and social developments in Early America, and his interests include colonial history and the English Reformation.

#185

Carol Heimer

#122421

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Carol Anne Heimer is Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. She is known for her research on the sociology of risk and responsibility, and on regulation and ethics. Career and personal life She received her B.A. from Reed College and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Her dissertation advisors were Charles Bidwell, Edward Laumann, Paul Hirsch, Donald Levine, and Michael Schudson.

#186

Bruce Baker

#123950

Overall Influence

1945 - 2018 (73 years)

Bruce Stewart Baker was an American geneticist. Baker was born to William K. Baker and Margaret I. Stewart in Swannanoa, North Carolina, on December 20, 1945, while his father served in the United States military. The first Drosophila Research Conference was hosted by his parents in 1958. Baker attended high school in Chicago. He enrolled at Reed College prior to graduating, and earned his bachelor's degree in 1966. Baker then pursued graduate study at the University of Washington under Larry Sandler, receiving his doctorate in 1971. Baker remained at UW alongside Sandler before working with James F.

#187

Sarah Dougher

#124013

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Sarah Dougher is an American singer-songwriter, author, and teacher. Dougher began her musical career playing the Farfisa organ in the Portland, Oregon based band The Crabs, and later joined Cadallaca with Sleater-Kinney frontwoman Corin Tucker. She has also released multiple solo albums.

#188

Craig Edward DeForest

Craig Edward DeForest

#126062

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Craig Edward DeForest is an American solar physicist and the Vice-Chair of the American Astronomical Society's Solar Physics Division. He leads the heliophysics research group at the Boulder, Colorado offices of the Southwest Research Institute and holds an adjunct faculty position at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His wide-ranging contributions to the field of experimental astrophysics of the Sun include: early work on the MSSTA, a sounding rocket that prototyped modern normal-incidence EUV optics such as are used on the Solar Dynamics Observatory; his discovery of sound waves in the...

#189

Robert K. Thomas

#128678

Overall Influence

1918 - 1998 (80 years)

Robert K. Thomas was a professor of English at Brigham Young University as well as the founder of BYU's honors program and later the academic vice president of BYU. Thomas studied at Reed College in Oregon. It was here he saw the benefits of a small college with close interaction between students and faculty. Thomas went on to receive an M.A. from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University. He joined the BYU faculty in 1951.

#190

Jon Appleton

#129746

Overall Influence

1939 - 2022 (83 years)

Jon Howard Appleton was an American composer, an educator and a pioneer in electro-acoustic music. His earliest compositions in the medium, e.g. "Chef d'Oeuvre" and "Newark Airport Rock" attracted attention because they established a new tradition some have called programmatic electronic music. In 1970, he won Guggenheim, Fulbright and American-Scandinavian Foundation fellowships. When he was twenty-eight years old, he joined the faculty of Dartmouth College where he established one of the first electronic music studios in the United States. He remained there intermittently for forty-two years.

#191

Shadab Zeest Hashmi

#131619

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Shadab Zeest Hashmi is an American poet of Pakistani origins. Her poetry, written in English, has been translated into Spanish and Urdu. She has been the editor of the Magee Park Poets Anthology and MahMag and is a columnist for 3 Quarks Daily. Many of Hashmi's poems explore feminism, history and perspectives on Islam.

#192

Christopher Phelps

#131909

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Christopher Phelps is an American political and intellectual historian of the twentieth century. The subjects of his research and writing include philosophical pragmatism, class and labor in social thought, the American Left, and race and sexuality in American history. He teaches in the department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham in England.

#193

Robert. Ornduff

#133888

Overall Influence

#194

Nigel Nicholson

#135175

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Nigel Nicholson is a British business psychologist and Emeritus Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School. He is known for his work advocating the application of evolutionary psychology to business management.

#195

Donald Treiman

#137297

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Donald Treiman is an American sociologist, currently the Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of California, Los Angeles and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#196

Daniel R. Gamelin

#138217

Overall Influence

#197

Hilary Parker

#141001

Overall Influence

Hilary S. Parker is an American biostatistician and data scientist. She was formerly a senior data analyst at the fashion merchandising company Stitch Fix. Parker co-hosts the data analytics podcast Not So Standard Deviations with Roger Peng. She received her PhD in biostatistics from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and has formerly been employed by Etsy.

#198

Leslie D. Zettergren

#141049

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Leslie D. Zettergren is an American biomedical researcher. He was born in 1943. Career He received a BS degree from Southern Illinois University and a PhD from Tulane University. He was a faculty member at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

#199

Samiya Bashir

#143783

Overall Influence

Samiya A. Bashir is an American lesbian poet and author. Much of Bashir's poetry explores the intersections of culture, change, and identity through the lens of race, gender, the body and sexuality. She is currently associate professor of creative writing at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

#200

Ann Cvetkovich

#143985

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Ann Luja Cvetkovich is a Professor and former Director of the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation at Carleton University in Ottawa. Until 2019, she was the Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she had been the founding director of the LGBTQ Studies Program, launched in 2017. She has published three books: Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism ; An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures ; and Depression: A Public Feeling ....

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