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

#26901

Eric J. Nestler

#26912

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Eric J. Nestler is the Nash Family Professor of Neuroscience, Director of the Friedman Brain Institute, and Dean for Academic Affairs at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Chief Scientific Officer of the Mount Sinai Health System. His research is focused on a molecular approach to drug addiction and depression.

#26902

Ricky J. Sethi

#26913

Overall Influence

Ricky J. Sethi is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Fitchburg State University and the Director of Research for The Madsci Network. He was appointed as a National Science Foundation Computing Innovation Fellow by the Computing Community Consortium and the Computing Research Association. He has contributed significantly in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, social computing, and science education/eLearning.

#26903

Joe R. Lansdale

Joe R. Lansdale

#26914

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Joe Richard Lansdale is an American writer and martial arts instructor. A prose writer in a variety of genres, including Western, horror, science fiction, mystery, and suspense, he has also written comic books and screenplays. Several of his novels have been adapted for film and television. He is the winner of the British Fantasy Award, the American Horror Award, the Edgar Award, and eleven Bram Stoker Awards.

#26904

Noel Perrin

#26915

Overall Influence

1927 - 2004 (77 years)

Edwin Noel Perrin was an American essayist and a professor at Dartmouth College, known for writing about rural life. Early years Perrin was born on September 18, 1927, in Manhattan and grew up in Pelham Manor, New York. His parents both worked as advertising copywriters at the J. Walter Thompson Agency. His mother Blanche was a career writer and the author of several novels, and she was his inspiration to become a writer.

#26905

Matthias Flach

#26916

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Matthias Flach is a German mathematician, professor and former executive officer for mathematics at California Institute of Technology. Professional overview Research interests includes:Arithmetic algebraic geometry .Special values of L-functions.Conjectures of:BlochBeilinsonDeligneBloch–Kato conjecture .Galois module theory.Motivic cohomology.

#26906

Clara Lida

#26917

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Clara Eugenia Lida is an Argentinian historian, well known for her work on social movements, anarchism and socialisms in the 19th century, and on Spanish emigration and Republican exile. First years Daughter of philologist Raimundo Lida , she studied with Silvio Zavala, in Mexico, and Vicente Llorens, at Princeton University. Her formal education as a historian started at Brandeis University , where she obtained her BA in 1963. She continued her higher education at El Colegio de México and Princeton University , where she obtained her PhD in history and literature. She taught at Wesleyan Uni...

#26907

Russ Mitchell

#26918

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Russell Edward Mitchell is an American journalist best known for his career at CBS where he was anchor of The Early Show on Saturday, news anchor for The Early Show during the week, and weekend anchor of the CBS Evening News.

#26908

Maurizio Bettini

#26919

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Maurizio Bettini is an Italian philologist, anthropologist and novelist. He is a professor of classical philology at the University of Siena and director of Siena's Centre for the Study of Anthropology and the Ancient World.

#26909

Rachel McAdams

#26920

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Rachel Anne McAdams is a Canadian actress. After graduating from a theatre degree program at York University in 2001, she worked in Canadian television and film productions, such as the drama film Perfect Pie , for which she received a Genie Award nomination, the comedy film My Name Is Tanino , and the comedy series Slings and Arrows , for which she won a Gemini Award.

#26910

Elliot S. Gershon

#26921

Overall Influence

Elliot S. Gershon is a professor of psychiatry and human genetics at the University of Chicago in the United States. He served as chair of its department of psychiatry from 1998 to 2004, and chief of the Clinical Neurogenetics branch of the NIMH. He held a NARSAD distinguished investigator grant from 1998 to 2006, and won the 1996 Falcone prize for Outstanding Achievement in Affective Disorders Research.

#26911

Michel Haïssaguerre

#26922

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Michel Haïssaguerre is a French cardiologist and electrophysiologist. His investigations have been the basis for development of new markers and therapies for atrial and ventricular fibrillation. Biography Haïssaguerre was born in Bayonne, France. He became a Professor of Cardiology in 1994. His present position is Chief of the Cardiac Pacing and Electrophysiology department at the Haut–Lévèque Cardiology Hospital, part of the Bordeaux University Hospital Community. He was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 2010.

#26912

Peter Cole

#26923

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Peter Cole is a MacArthur-winning poet and translator who lives in Jerusalem and New Haven. Cole was born in 1957 in Paterson, New Jersey. He attended Williams College and Hampshire College, and moved to Jerusalem in 1981. He has been called "one of the handful of authentic poets of his own American generation" by the critic Harold Bloom. In a 2015 interview in The Paris Review, he described his work as poet and translator as "at heart, the same activity carried out at different points along a spectrum."

#26913

Daniela Kühn

#26924

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Daniela Kühn is a German mathematician and the Mason Professor in Mathematics at the University of Birmingham in Birmingham, England. She is known for her research in combinatorics, and particularly in extremal combinatorics and graph theory.

#26914

Teresa Morgan

#26925

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Teresa Morgan is an English academic and cleric, best known as the author of Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds and Roman Faith and Christian Faith. Early life and education Teresa Morgan was born on May 30, 1968. She discovered Homer's Iliad and Plato's Republic when she was only nine or ten years of age. Jumping at the chance to learn Latin and Greek at school, she was soon reading the works of Horace, Cicero, Euripides and Plato in their original form. Morgan attended Oxford High School before studying the violin at the Hochschule für Musik, Cologne. She studied as an un...

#26915

Vela Velupillai

#26926

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Kumaraswamy Velupillai is an academic economist and a Senior Visiting Professor at the Madras School of Economics and was, formerly, Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research in New York City and Professore di Chiara Fama in the Department of Economics at the University of Trento, Italy.

#26916

F. Richard Stephenson

#26927

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

F. Richard Stephenson is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Durham, in the Physics department and the East Asian Studies department. His research concentrates on historical aspects of astronomy, in particular analyzing ancient astronomical records to reconstruct the history of Earth's rotation. He has an asteroid named after him: 10979 Fristephenson.

#26917

Scott Weiland

#26928

Overall Influence

1967 - 2015 (48 years)

Scott Richard Weiland was an American singer and songwriter. He was best known as the lead vocalist of the rock band Stone Temple Pilots from 1989 to 2003 and again from 2008 to 2013, recording six albums with them, and as the lead vocalist of the rock supergroup Velvet Revolver from 2003 to 2008. He also released one album with rock supergroup Art of Anarchy in 2015, as well as four solo studio albums and several collaborations with other musicians throughout his career.

#26918

Justus Rosenberg

#26929

Overall Influence

1921 - 2021 (100 years)

Justus Rosenberg was a literature professor who spent most of his life teaching in the United States, ending his career as a professor emeritus of languages and literature at Bard College. Before that, as a teenager he began playing a role in saving many lives when the Nazis overran France, working first as part of a French-American network organized to help anti-Nazi intellectuals and artists escape from Vichy France to the United States, and later as a member of the French Resistance during World War II, providing assistance as well to the US Army.

#26919

Jacques Taminiaux

Jacques Taminiaux

#26930

Overall Influence

1928 - 2019 (91 years)

Jacques Taminiaux was a Belgian philosopher and professor at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, United States. Biography Born in Seneffe, Taminiaux studied law and philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. His research interests are on phenomenology, aesthetics, political philosophy and contemporary continental philosophy.

#26920

Ian MacKaye

#26931

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Ian Thomas Garner MacKaye is an American musician. Active since 1979, he is best known as the co-founder and owner of Dischord Records, a Washington, D.C.-based independent record label, and the frontman of hardcore punk band Minor Threat and post-hardcore band Fugazi. MacKaye was also the bassist for the short-lived band the Teen Idles, and frontman for Embrace, and Pailhead, a collaboration with the band Ministry. MacKaye is a member of The Evens, a two-piece indie rock group he formed with his wife Amy Farina in 2001 and in 2018 formed the band Coriky with Farina and his Fugazi band mate J...

#26921

David Brown

#26932

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

David William Brown is an Anglican priest and British scholar of philosophy, theology, religion, and the arts. He taught at the universities of Oxford, Durham, and St. Andrews before retiring in 2015. He is well-known for his "non-punitive theory of purgatory, his defense of specific versions of social Trinitarianism and kenotic Christology, his distinctive theory of divine revelation as mediated fallibly through both tradition and imagination, and his proposals regarding a pervasive sacramentality discerned in nature and human culture alike."

#26922

Frank Bergon

#26933

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Frank Bergon is an American writer whose novels, essays, anthologies, and literary criticism focus primarily on the American West. Biography Frank Bergon was born in Ely, Nevada, and grew up on a ranch in Madera County in California's San Joaquin Valley. After attending elementary school at St. Joachim in Madera, California and high school at Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, he received a B.A. in English at Boston College, attended Stanford University as a Wallace Stegner Fellow, and completed a Ph.D. in English and American Literature at Harvard University.

#26923

Deep Saini

#26934

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Hargurdeep Saini , also known as Deep Saini, is a scientist, and is the Principal and Vice-Chancellor of McGill University. Career Hargurdeep Saini was previously the President and Vice-Chancellor of Dalhousie University, a Vice-Chancellor and President of University of Canberra, a vice-president of University of Toronto, and principal of the university's Mississauga campus, and dean of the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario. Saini became a noted plant physiologist and served as director general of the Plant Biology Research Institute in Montreal before m...

#26924

Alison Moyet

#26935

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Geneviève Alison Jane Ballard is an English singer noted for her powerful bluesy contralto voice. She came to prominence as half of the duo Yazoo , but has since mainly worked as a solo artist. Her worldwide album sales have reached a certified 23 million, with over two million singles sold. All nine of her studio albums and three compilation albums have charted in the top 30 of the UK Albums Chart, with two of them reaching number one. She has also achieved nine top 30 singles and six top 10 hits on the UK Singles Chart. Her most recent album, her ninth, Other, was released 16 June 2017.

#26925

Ivan Svitlichny

#26936

Overall Influence

1929 - 1992 (63 years)

Ivan Oleksiyovych Svitlichny was a Ukrainian poet, literary critic, and Soviet dissident. Biography Ivan Svitlichny was born on 20 September 1929 in Polovykino, Luhansk Oblast to a family of farmers.

#26926

Oliver Bierhoff

#26937

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Oliver Bierhoff is a German football official and former player who played as a forward. He has previously served as the national team director of the German Football Association. A tall, strong and prolific goalscorer, Bierhoff was mostly renowned for his excellent abilities in the air, and as a target man, being able to deliver pin-point headers towards goal.

#26927

Michael Grunstein

Michael Grunstein

#26938

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Michael Grunstein is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biological Chemistry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. The only surviving child of Holocaust survivors, he obtained his Bachelor of Science degree from McGill University in Montreal, and his PhD from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He did his post-doctoral training at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where he invented the colony hybridization screening technique for recombinant DNAs in David Hogness' laboratory.

#26928

V. Parmeswaran Nair

#26939

Overall Influence

V. Parmeswaran Nair is a physicist, currently a Distinguished Professor at City University of New York, holding it since September 2011, and is also a published author.

#26929

Jessica Walsh

#26940

Overall Influence

1986 - Present (40 years)

Jessica Walsh is an American designer, art director, illustrator and educator. She was a partner of the design studio Sagmeister & Walsh , and the founder of the creative agency &Walsh . &Walsh is one of the .1% of creative agencies owned by women. She has taught at the School of Visual Arts .

#26930

Janaka de Silva

#26941

Overall Influence

Janaka de Silva FRCP FNASSL is a Sri Lankan physician and academic. He is Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the University of Kelaniya. Janaka de Silva was educated at Royal College, Colombo and holds degrees from the universities of Colombo and Oxford. He had his higher specialist clinical training at the John Radcliffe Hospital.

#26931

Richard M. Bohart

#26942

Overall Influence

1913 - 2007 (94 years)

Richard Mitchell Bohart was an American entomologist, university professor, and a member of the University of California, Davis Department of Entomology for more than 50 years. He taught courses in general entomology, insect systematics, and summer field courses in insect identification. From 1963 to 1967 he served as chair of the Department of Entomology for the University of California at Davis.

#26932

Max Essex

#26943

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Myron Elmer "Max" Essex is the Mary Woodard Lasker Professor of Health Sciences, emeritus in the department of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard University, chair of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health AIDS Initiative in the department of immunology and infectious diseases, and chair of the Botswana–Harvard AIDS Institute in Gaborone, Botswana. Essex was one of the first to link animal and human retroviruses to immunosuppressive disease, to suspect that a retrovirus was the cause of AIDS, and to determine that HIV could be transmitted through blood and blood products to hemophiliacs and recipients of blood transfusions.

#26933

Sajid Javid

#26944

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Sajid Javid is a British politician who served as Secretary of State for Health and Social Care from June 2021 to July 2022, having previously served as Home Secretary from 2018 to 2019 and Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2019 to 2020. A member of the Conservative Party, he has been Member of Parliament for Bromsgrove since 2010.

#26934

Karen Head

#26945

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Karen Head is an American poet, educator and editor. She is a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology where she is the executive director of the Communication Center. Head is known for her contributions to Massive Open Online Courses

#26935

Gillian Reid

#26946

Overall Influence

Gillian Reid is a British chemist who is Professor of Inorganic Chemistry and former Head of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Southampton. Her research considers coordination chemistry, inorganic semiconductors and metal fluoride scaffolds. In 2020, she was appointed the President-elect of the Royal Society of Chemistry, becoming President in 2022.

#26936

Sam Nujoma

#26947

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (97 years)

Samuel Shafiishuna Daniel Nujoma, is a Namibian revolutionary, anti-apartheid activist and politician who served three terms as the first President of Namibia, from 1990 to 2005. Nujoma was a founding member and the first president of the South West Africa People's Organization in 1960. Prior to 1960, SWAPO was known as the Ovambo People's Organisation . He played an important role as leader of the national liberation movement in campaigning for Namibia's political independence from South African rule. He established the People's Liberation Army of Namibia in 1962 and launched a guerrilla w...

#26937

Sasson Somekh

#26948

Overall Influence

1933 - 2019 (86 years)

Sasson Somekh was an Israeli academic, writer and translator. He was professor emeritus of Modern Arab Literature at Tel Aviv University. Biography Sasson Somekh was born in Baghdad to a secular Jewish family. In 1951, Somekh and his family immigrated to Israel. He did not know Hebrew at the time, but started learning it in earnest in order to achieve his goal of becoming a translator of Arabic poetry into Hebrew. His first translation was published in 1954 in Ner, a journal published by Ihud , an association dedicated to the advancement of Arab–Jewish reconciliation established by Judah Mag...

#26938

Joel Makower

#26949

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Joel Makower is an American entrepreneur, writer and strategist on sustainable business, clean technology, and green marketing. His work has focused on three principal topics: how companies of all sizes and sectors are integrating environmental thinking into their operations in a way that produces business value; the creation of new companies and markets for clean energy, clean water, and advanced materials; and the strategies and tactics that companies use in order to communicate and market their environmental efforts and leadership, especially to consumers.

#26939

Francis M. Wilhoit

#26950

Overall Influence

1920 - 2010 (90 years)

Francis "Frank" Marion Wilhoit was an American political scientist and author, who was the Thomas F. Sheehan Professor of Political Science at Drake University. Early life and education Wilhoit was born in 1920 in North Carolina. He attended Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor's degree, a master in public affairs, and a PhD in Political Science. He was friends with Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski in college.

#26940

Neil Innes

#26951

Overall Influence

1944 - 2019 (75 years)

Neil James Innes was an English writer, comedian and musician. He first came to prominence in the pioneering comedy rock group Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and later became a frequent collaborator with the Monty Python troupe on their BBC television series and films, and is often called the "seventh Python" along with performer Carol Cleveland. He co-created the Rutles, a Beatles parody/pastiche project, with Python Eric Idle, and wrote the band's songs. He also wrote and voiced the 1980s ITV children's cartoon adventures of The Raggy Dolls.

#26941

Richard H. Weisberg

#26952

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Richard H. Weisberg is a professor of constitutional law at the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York City, and a leading scholar on law and literature. Biography Weisberg received his B.A. degree from Brandeis University in 1965, Ph.D. degree from Cornell University in 1970, and J.D. degree from Columbia University in 1974.

#26942

Waciny Laredj

#26953

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Waciny Laredj is an Algerian novelist, short story writer and academic. Biography Laredj was born in Sidi Bou Jnan in Tlemcen province. He obtained a BA in Arabic literature from the University of Algiers and then went off to Syria to pursue postgraduate studies, aided by a government scholarship. He obtained an MA and a PhD from the University of Damascus.

#26943

Enrico Fazzini

#26954

Overall Influence

Enrico Fazzini is an American neurologist. He is considered an expert on Parkinson's disease and has published numerous research publications on the subject. He has been involved in a number of clinical trials for new pharmaceutical treatments for Parkinson's disease. He attended the University of Osteopathic Medicine and Health Sciences in Des Moines, Iowa. He is board certified in neurology by both the M.D. and D.O. medical boards. He began his practice in 1989. Dr. Enrico Fazzini completed his neurology training at Boston University in 1987 and his fellowship in Movement Disorders at Columbia Presbyterian in 1989.

#26944

Pancho Gonzales

Pancho Gonzales

#26955

Overall Influence

1928 - 1995 (67 years)

Ricardo Alonso "Pancho" González , known sometimes as Richard Gonzales, was an American tennis player. He won 15 major singles titles, including two U.S. National Singles Championships in 1948 and 1949, and 13 Professional Grand Slam titles. He also won three Tournament of Champions professional events in 1957, 1958, and 1959. He was ranked world amateur No. 1 in 1948 by Ned Potter and in 1949 by Potter and John Olliff.

#26945

Mel Bradford

#26956

Overall Influence

1934 - 1993 (59 years)

Melvin E. Bradford was an American conservative author, political commentator and professor of literature at the University of Dallas. Bradford is seen as a leading figure of the paleoconservative wing of the conservative movement. He died just as the term paleoconservative was being coined and preferred the term traditional conservative. In his preface to Reactionary Imperative, he wrote "Reaction is a necessary term in the intellectual context we inhabit in the twentieth century because merely to conserve is sometimes to perpetuate what is outrageous."

#26946

Peter Robinson

#26957

Overall Influence

1950 - 2022 (72 years)

Peter Robinson was a British-born Canadian crime writer who was best known for his crime novels set in Yorkshire featuring Inspector Alan Banks. He also published a number of other novels and short stories, as well as some poems and two articles on writing.

#26947

Omar Suleiman

#26958

Overall Influence

1986 - Present (40 years)

Omar Suleiman is an American Muslim scholar, civil rights leader, writer, and public speaker. He is the Founder and President of Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, and an adjunct professor of Islamic Studies and member of the Ethics Center Advisory Board at Southern Methodist University.

#26948

Clint Dempsey

#26959

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (43 years)

Clinton Drew Dempsey is an American former professional soccer player who played as a forward and midfielder. During his career, he played in the Premier League for Fulham and Tottenham Hotspur and in Major League Soccer for New England Revolution and Seattle Sounders FC. Considered as the greatest American player of all time, he is frequently debated with Landon Donovan for the title. Dempsey was the first American to score a hat-trick in the Premier League and is tied with Donovan for the record of most international goals scored by an American player .

#26949

Gregory Pardlo

#26960

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Gregory Pardlo is an American poet, writer, and professor. His book Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His poems, reviews, and translations have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Poet Lore, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and on National Public Radio. His work has been praised for its “language simultaneously urban and highbrow… snapshots of a life that is so specific it becomes universal.”

#26950

John M. Lounge

#26961

Overall Influence

1946 - 2011 (65 years)

John Michael "Mike" Lounge was an American engineer, a United States Navy officer, a Vietnam War veteran, and a NASA astronaut. A veteran of three Space Shuttle flights, Lounge logged over 482 hours in space. He was a mission specialist on STS-51-I and STS-26 and was the flight engineer on STS-35 .

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