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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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List of the most influential people

#23751

Hubie Brown

#23762

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Hubert Jude Brown is an American retired basketball coach and player and active television analyst. Brown is a two-time NBA Coach of the Year, the honors separated by 26 years. Brown was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2005.

#23752

Cecilia Jarlskog

#23763

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Cecilia Jarlskog is a Swedish theoretical physicist, working mainly on elementary particle physics. Jarlskog obtained her doctorate in 1970 in theoretical particle physics at the Technical University of Lund. She is known for her work on CP violation in the electroweak sector of the Standard Model, introducing what is known as the Jarlskog invariant, and for her work on grand unified theories .

#23753

José Baselga

#23764

Overall Influence

1959 - 2021 (62 years)

Josep Baselga i Torres, known in Spanish as José Baselga , was a Spanish medical oncologist and researcher focused on the development of novel molecular targeted agents, with a special emphasis in breast cancer. Through his career he was associated with the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology, and the Massachusetts General Hospital in their hematology and oncology divisions. He led the development of the breast cancer treatment Herceptin, a monoclonal antibody, that targets the HER2 protein, which is impacted in aggressive breast cancers.

#23754

Ketan Mulmuley

#23765

Overall Influence

Ketan Mulmuley is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, and a sometime visiting professor at IIT Bombay. He specializes in theoretical computer science, especially computational complexity theory, and in recent years has been working on "geometric complexity theory", an approach to the P versus NP problem through the techniques of algebraic geometry, with Milind Sohoni of IIT Bombay. He is also known for his result with Umesh Vazirani and Vijay Vazirani that showed that "Matching is as easy as matrix inversion", in a paper that introduced the isolation...

#23755

Martin Nystrand

#23766

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Martin Nystrand is an American composition and education theorist. He is Louise Durham Mead Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Professor Emeritus of Education at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research.

#23756

Ganesan Venkatasubramanian

#23767

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Ganesan Venkatasubramanian is an Indian psychiatrist and clinician-scientist who works as a professor of psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore . His overarching research interest to learn the science that will facilitate a personalized approach to understand and treat severe mental disorders like schizophrenia. Venkatasubramanian is known for his studies in the fields of schizophrenia, transcranial Direct Current Stimulation , brain imaging, neuroimmunology, neurometabolism and several other areas of biological psychiatry. The Council of Scientifi...

#23757

John Romanides

#23768

Overall Influence

1927 - 2001 (74 years)

John Savvas Romanides was a theologian, Eastern Orthodox priest, and scholar who had a distinctive influence on post-war Greek Orthodox theology. Biography Born in Piraeus, Greece, on 2 March 1928, his parents emigrated to the United States when he was only two months old. He grew up in Manhattan, graduating from the Hellenic College, Brookline, Massachusetts. After attending Yale Divinity School, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Athens.

#23758

David Horrobin

#23769

Overall Influence

1939 - 2003 (64 years)

David Frederick Horrobin was a British-Canadian entrepreneur, medical researcher, author and editor. He is best known as the founder of the biotechnology company Scotia Holdings and as a promoter of evening primrose oil as a medical treatment, Horrobin was founder and editor of the journals Medical Hypotheses and Prostaglandins, Leukotrienes and Essential Fatty Acids, the latter journal co-founded with his then graduate student Morris Karmazyn.

#23759

Olaf Blanke

#23770

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Olaf Blanke is a Swiss and German physician, neurologist and neuroscientist. He holds the Bertarelli Foundation Chair in Cognitive Neuroprosthetics at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne . He directs the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Brain Mind Institute of EPFL and is professor of Neurology at Geneva University Hospitals. Blanke is known for his research on the neurological bases of self-consciousness and out-of-body experiences.

#23760

Bruce Sagan

#23771

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Bruce E. Sagan is an American Professor of Mathematics at Michigan State University. He specializes in enumerative, algebraic, and topological combinatorics. He is also known as a musician, playing music from Scandinavia and the Balkans.

#23761

Dina Porat

#23772

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Dina Porat is an Israeli historian. She is professor emeritus of modern Jewish history at the Department of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University and the chief historian of Yad Vashem. Academic career Dina Porat served as head of the Jewish History Department at Tel Aviv University's Stephen Roth Institute. She is head of the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry and holds the Alfred P. Slaner Chair for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University.

#23762

D'Angelo

#23773

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Michael Eugene Archer , better known by his stage name D'Angelo , is an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer. He first garnered attention after co-producing the single "U Will Know" for R&B supergroup Black Men United. His debut studio album, Brown Sugar , was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America ; and received widespread acclaim from music critics, who have credited the album for ushering in the neo soul movement. Its third single "Lady", reached the top ten on the Billboard Hot 100.

#23763

Angela Stent

#23774

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Angela E. Stent is a British born American foreign policy expert specializing in US and European relations with Russia and Russian foreign policy. She is professor emerita of Government and Foreign Service at Georgetown University and senior advisor and director emerita of its Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies. She is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She has served in the Office of Policy Planning in the US State Department and as National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia.

#23764

John W. Hutchinson

#23775

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

John W. Hutchinson is the Abbott and James Lawrence Research Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. He works in the field of solid mechanics concerned with a broad range of problems in structures and engineering materials.

#23765

Jean-François Bergier

Jean-François Bergier

#23776

Overall Influence

1931 - 2009 (78 years)

Jean-François Bergier was a Swiss historian. He was a professor at the University of Geneva from 1963 to 1969 and at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich until his retirement in 1999.

#23766

Karel Dobbelaere

#23777

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Karel Dobbelaere is a Belgian educator and noted sociologist of religion. Dobbelaere is an Emeritus Professor of both the University of Antwerp and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. He is past-President and General Secretary of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion.

#23767

Róbert Szelepcsényi

#23778

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Róbert Szelepcsényi is a Slovak computer scientist of Hungarian descent and a member of the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics of Comenius University in Bratislava. His results on the closure of non-deterministic space under complement, independently obtained in 1987 also by Neil Immerman , brought the Gödel Prize of ACM and EATCS to both of them in 1995.

#23768

Peter Forsberg

#23779

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Peter Mattias Forsberg is a Swedish former professional ice hockey player and former assistant general manager of Modo Hockey. Nicknamed "Peter the Great" and "Foppa", Forsberg was known for his on-ice vision and physical play, and is considered one of the greatest players of all time. Although his career was shortened by persistent injuries, , he stands ninth all-time in career points-per-game and fifth all-time in career assists-per-game in the NHL, only behind Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Bobby Orr, and Connor McDavid. In 2017 Forsberg was named one of the '100 Greatest NHL Players' in hi...

#23769

Nancy E. Gary

#23780

Overall Influence

1937 - 2006 (69 years)

Nancy E. Gary was president and chief executive officer of the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates, executive vice president of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and dean of its F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine. She was also clinical professor of medicine at George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences. She was considered a change agent in medical education and "a 'powerhouse' in academic medicine."

#23770

Thomas Snyder

#23781

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Thomas Snyder is an American puzzle creator and world-champion sudoku and logic puzzle solver. He is the first person to win both the World Sudoku Championship and the World Puzzle Championship. Snyder writes a puzzle blog as Dr. Sudoku.

#23771

Adam Winkler

#23782

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Adam Winkler is the Connell Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law. He is the author of We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights and Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America. His work has frequently been cited in judicial opinions, including in Supreme Court cases pertaining to the First and Second Amendments.

#23772

Sylvia Ann Hewlett

#23783

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Sylvia Ann Hewlett is a Cambridge educated economist. Education Hewlett graduated from Girton College, Cambridge, was a Kennedy Scholar and then earned her PhD degree in economics at the University of London.

#23773

Mary Evelyn Tucker

#23784

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Mary Evelyn Tucker is the co-founder and co-director of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology with her husband, John Allen Grim. Tucker teaches in the joint Master's program in religion and ecology at Yale University between the School of the Environment, and the Divinity School. She also has an appointment at Yale's Department of Religious Studies. A pioneer in the field of religion and ecology, she has authored and edited around 20 volumes and has published hundreds of articles.

#23774

Peter Guber

#23785

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Howard Peter Guber is an American film producer, business executive, entrepreneur, educator, and author. He is chairman and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment. Guber's most recent films from Mandalay Entertainment include The Kids Are All Right, Soul Surfer and Bernie. He has also produced Rain Man, Batman, The Color Purple, Midnight Express, Gorillas in the Mist, The Witches of Eastwick, Missing, and Flashdance. Guber's films have grossed over $3 billion worldwide and received 50 Academy Award nominations.

#23775

Miranda Aldhouse-Green

#23786

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Miranda Jane Aldhouse-Green, is a British archaeologist and academic, known for her research on the Iron Age and the Celts. She was Professor of Archaeology at Cardiff University from 2006 to 2013. Until about 2000 she published as Miranda Green or Miranda J. Green.

#23776

Kareena Kapoor

#23787

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

#23777

Larry McReynolds

Larry McReynolds

#23788

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Lawrence Joseph McReynolds III is a former NASCAR crew chief and current racing analyst on Fox Sports as well as a columnist on Foxsports.com. In the past, he has served as an advisor to Petty Enterprises, and as a minority owner in Bang! Racing.

#23778

Huey-Kang Sytwu

#23789

Overall Influence

Huey-Kang Sytwu is a medical researcher and administrator. Career He is the President of the National Health Research Institutes and a Distinguished Investigator at the NHRI's National Institute of Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology.

#23779

Victoria Kolakowski

#23790

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Victoria Kolakowski is an American lawyer who serves as a judge of the Alameda County Superior Court since January 2011. Kolakowski is the first openly transgender person to serve as a trial court judge of general jurisdiction in the United States, the first elected to a judgeship, and the first to serve as any type of judge in California. .

#23780

George Robert Carruthers

George Robert Carruthers

#23791

Overall Influence

1939 - 2020 (81 years)

George Robert Carruthers was an African American inventor, physicist, engineer and space scientist. Carruthers perfected a compact and very powerful ultraviolet camera/spectrograph for NASA to use when it launched Apollo 16 in 1972. He designed it so astronauts could use it on the lunar surface, making all adjustments inside their bulky space suits. Upon instructions from Carruthers, they used the camera to record the Earth's outermost atmosphere, noting its variations, and also mapped portions of the far-ultraviolet sky recording stars and galaxies, and the gaseous media between them. In 197...

#23781

Thereza Imanishi-Kari

#23792

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Thereza Imanishi-Kari is an associate professor of pathology at Tufts University. Her research focuses on the origins of autoimmune diseases, particularly systemic lupus erythematosus, studied using mice as model organisms. Previously she had been a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is notable for her role in what became known as the "Baltimore affair", in which a 1986 paper she co-authored with David Baltimore was the subject of research misconduct allegations. Following a series of investigations, she was fully exonerated of the charges in 1996.

#23782

Thomas C. Cochran

#23793

Overall Influence

1902 - 1999 (97 years)

Thomas Childs Cochran was an American economic historian. He was the author of several books. He is considered a pioneer in that field. Early life Thomas C. Cochran was born on April 29, 1902, in Manhattan. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from New York University before obtaining his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.

#23783

Bill Amend

#23794

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

William J. C. Amend III is an American cartoonist. He is known for his comic strip FoxTrot. Early life Amend was born in Massachusetts and raised in Northern California. He attended high school in Burlingame, California where he was a cartoonist on his school newspaper. Amend is an Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America. He graduated with a degree in physics from Amherst College in 1984.

#23784

Bob Weston

#23795

Overall Influence

1947 - 2012 (65 years)

Robert Joseph Weston was a British rock guitarist, who was a member of Fleetwood Mac in the early 1970s. He also recorded and performed with a number of other musicians, including Graham Bond, Long John Baldry, Murray Head, Sandy Denny, and Danny Kirwan.

#23785

Mike E. Smith

#23796

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Michael Earl Smith is an American jockey who has been one of the leading riders in U.S. Thoroughbred racing since the early 1990s, was inducted into the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in 2003, and has won the most Breeders' Cup races of any jockey with 27 Breeders' Cup wins. Smith is also the third leading jockey of all time in earnings with over $336 million. In 2018, Smith rode Justify to the Triple Crown, becoming the oldest jockey to win the title at age 52.

#23786

Eric Nadel

#23797

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Eric Nadel is an American sports announcer on radio broadcasts for the Texas Rangers baseball organization. In 2014, he was honored with the Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasting excellence by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

#23787

Gottfried Fischer

#23798

Overall Influence

1944 - 2013 (69 years)

Gottfried Fischer was a German psychologist, psychotherapist and psychoanalyst. He is considered to be the founder of psychotraumatology in Germany and has been director of the Institute for Clinical Psychology and Psychological Diagnostics at the University of Cologne from 1995 to 2009.

#23788

Siba Shakib

#23799

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Siba Shakib is an Iranian/German filmmaker, writer and political activist. She was born and raised in Tehran, Iran. Her international bestseller Afghanistan, Where God Only Comes to Weep has been translated into 27 languages and won a P.E.N. prize

#23789

John Rigby Hale

#23800

Overall Influence

1923 - 1999 (76 years)

Sir John Rigby Hale was a British historian and translator, best known for his Renaissance studies. Biography Hale was born in Ashford, Kent. He was educated at Jesus College, Oxford . He also attended Johns Hopkins University and Harvard University .

#23790

Peter Cushing

#23801

Overall Influence

1913 - 1994 (81 years)

Peter Wilton Cushing was an English actor. His acting career spanned over six decades and included appearances in more than 100 films, as well as many television, stage and radio roles. He achieved recognition for his leading performances in the Hammer Productions horror films from the 1950s to 1970s, and as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars .

#23791

Max Velmans

#23802

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Max Velmans is a British psychologist and Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, principally known for the theory of consciousness called "reflexive monism". Reflexive monism bridges the materialist/dualist divide by noting that, in terms of their phenomenology, experiences of the external world are none other than the physical world-as-experienced, thereby placing aspects of human consciousness in the external phenomenal world, rather than exclusively within the head or brain. A similar point of departure is adopted in much of European phenomenology. The theory...

#23792

Jaw-Shen Tsai

#23803

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Jaw-Shen Tsai is a Taiwanese physicist. He is a professor at the Tokyo University of Science and a team leader of the Superconducting Quantum Simulation Research Team at the Center for Emergent Matter Science within RIKEN. He has contributed to the area of condensed matter physics in both its fundamental physical aspects and its technological applications. He has recently been working on experiments connected to quantum coherence in Josephson systems. In February 2014, he retired from NEC Corporation, after 31 years of employment. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society as well as ...

#23793

Franco Stella

#23804

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Francesco Stella , known professionally as Franco Stella, is an Italian architect. Life Stella studied at the Università Iuav di Venezia in Venice. In the early 1970s he undertook teaching and research at Gruppo Architettura. In 1973 he was professor of architecture design at the IUAV. He has been Professor of Architectural Design at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Genoa. In architectural terms, Stella views himself as a representative of classic modern rationalism.

#23794

Hikaru Nakamura

Hikaru Nakamura

#23805

Overall Influence

1987 - Present (39 years)

Christopher Hikaru Nakamura is an American chess grandmaster, streamer, YouTube content creator, five-time U.S. Chess Champion, and the reigning World Fischer Random Chess Champion. A chess prodigy, he earned his grandmaster title at the age of 15, the youngest American at the time to do so. With a peak rating of 2816, Nakamura is the tenth-highest-rated player in history.

#23795

Steven T. DeKosky

#23806

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Steven T. DeKosky is the Aerts-Cosper Professor of Alzheimer's Research at the University of Florida College of Medicine, deputy director of UF’s Evelyn F. and William L. McKnight Brain Institute and associate director of the 1Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.

#23796

Barbara Johnstone

#23807

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Barbara Johnstone is an American professor of rhetoric and linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University. She specializes in discourse structure and function, sociolinguistics, rhetorical theory, and methods of text analysis. She was the editor in chief of Language in Society from 2005 to 2013, and is the editor of Pittsburgh Speech & Society, a website about Pittsburgh English for non-linguists. She has published several books, including Speaking Pittsburghese and Discourse Analysis, 2nd Ed. . She has also written for The New York Times.

#23797

Jim Broadbent

#23808

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

James Broadbent is an English actor. A graduate of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in 1972, he came to prominence as a character actor for his many roles in film and television. He's received various accolades including an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards, and two Golden Globe Awards as well as nominations for two Primetime Emmy Awards and a Grammy Award.

#23798

Zineb El Rhazoui

Zineb El Rhazoui

#23809

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (44 years)

Zineb El Rhazoui is a Moroccan-born French journalist. She was a columnist for Paris-based satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo from 2011 to 2017. She was in Morocco during the Charlie Hebdo shooting on 7 January 2015.

#23799

Ian K. Smith

#23810

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Ian K. Smith is an American physician, author and television host best known for hosting The Doctors. In 2007, he launched the 50 Million Pound Challenge, a national weight loss initiative sponsored by CVS Pharmacy and State Farm.

#23800

Hagop S. Akiskal

#23811

Overall Influence

1944 - 2021 (77 years)

Hagop Souren Akiskal was a Lebanese-born American psychiatrist and professor, of Armenian descent. He is best known for his research on temperament and bipolar disorder , revolutionizing the field of clinical psychiatry.

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