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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Ranking

List of the most influential people

#40051

James Westphal

#40064

Overall Influence

1930 - 2004 (74 years)

James Adolph Westphal was an American academic, scientist, engineer, inventor and astronomer and Director of Caltech's Palomar Observatory from 1994 through 1997. His participation played an important role in designing the main camera for the Hubble Space Telescope.

#40052

David Garrow

#40065

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

David Jeffries Garrow is an American author and historian. He wrote the book Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference , which won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. He also wrote Liberty and Sexuality , a history of the legal struggles over abortion and reproductive rights in the U.S. prior to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama , and other works.

#40053

David Pesetsky

#40066

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

David Michael Pesetsky is an American linguist. He is the Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics and former Head of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#40054

Hans Wortmann

#40067

Overall Influence

1950 - 2022 (72 years)

Johannes Casper Wortmann was a Dutch computer scientist and professor of Information Management at the University of Groningen, known for his contributions in the field of risk management and Industry requirements.

#40055

Dale Peterson

#40068

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Dale Peterson is an American author who writes about scientific and natural history subjects. Early life and education Dale Alfred Peterson was born and raised in Corning, New York, a small town known for glass manufacturing in western New York State. He obtained his BA from the University of Rochester in 1967, then began his graduate studies at Stanford University, first in the writing program under Wallace Stegner, later in the English Department. Stanford awarded him a Ph.D. in English and American Literature in 1977.

#40056

Michel Deza

#40069

Overall Influence

1939 - 2016 (77 years)

Michel Marie Deza was a Soviet and French mathematician, specializing in combinatorics, discrete geometry and graph theory. He was the retired director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research , the vice president of the European Academy of Sciences, a research professor at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and one of the three founding editors-in-chief of the European Journal of Combinatorics.

#40057

Barry E. Friedman

#40070

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Barry E. Friedman is an American academic and one of the country's leading authorities on constitutional law, policing, criminal procedure, and federal courts, working at the intersections of law, politics and history. Friedman teaches a variety of courses including Judicial Decisionmaking, Federal Courts and the Federal System, and Criminal Procedure: Fourth and Fifth Amendments, as well as a seminar on Democratic Policing. He writes about judicial review, constitutional law and theory, federal jurisdiction, judicial behavior, and policing. His scholarship appears regularly in the nation's t...

#40058

Horst Kasner

#40071

Overall Influence

1926 - 2011 (85 years)

Horst Kasner was a German Protestant theologian and father of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Biography Kasner was born as Horst Kaźmierczak in 1926, the son of a policeman in the Pankow suburb of Berlin, where he was brought up. His father Ludwig Kaźmierczak was born out of wedlock to Anna Kazmierczak and Ludwik Wojciechowski, ethnic Poles and citizens of the German Empire from the Poznań area. Ludwig was mobilised into the German army in 1915 and sent to France, where he was taken prisoner of war and joined the Polish Haller's Army fighting on the side of Entente. Together with the army he returned to Poland to fight in the Polish-Ukrainian war and the Polish-Soviet war.

#40059

Elfatih Eltahir

#40072

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Elfatih Ali Babiker Eltahir is a Sudanese -American Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, H.M. King Bhumibol Professor of Hydrology and Climate, and Director of the MIT-UM6P Research Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#40060

Lou Gramm

#40073

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Louis Andrew Grammatico , known professionally as Lou Gramm, is an American singer and songwriter. He is best known as the lead vocalist of the rock band Foreigner from 1977 to 1990 and again from 1992 to 2003, during which time the band had numerous successful albums and singles.

#40061

Elliot Page

#40074

Overall Influence

1987 - Present (39 years)

Elliot Page is a Canadian actor. He has received various accolades, including nominations for an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards and a Primetime Emmy Award. Page was assigned female at birth, and later publicly came out as a trans man in December 2020. In March 2021, he became the first openly trans man to appear on the cover of Time.

#40062

John Barrell

#40075

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

John Charles Barrell FBA FEA is a British scholar of eighteenth and early nineteenth century studies. Early life John Barrell was born in February 1943. He took his first degree at Trinity College, Cambridge, and his PhD at the University of Essex.

#40063

Lorenzo Albacete

#40076

Overall Influence

1941 - 2014 (73 years)

Lorenzo Albacete Cintrón was a Puerto Rican theologian, Roman Catholic priest, scientist and author. A New York Times Magazine contributor, Albacete was one of the leaders in the United States for the international Catholic movement Communion and Liberation. He was the Chairman of the Board of Advisors of Crossroads Cultural Center.

#40064

Zoltán Dörnyei

#40077

Overall Influence

1960 - 2022 (62 years)

Zoltán Dörnyei was a Hungarian-born British linguist. He was a professor of psycholinguistics at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. He was known for his work on second language acquisition and the psychology of the language learner, in particular on motivation in second language learning, having published numerous books and papers on these topics.

#40065

Akiyoshi Kitaoka

Akiyoshi Kitaoka

#40078

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Akiyoshi Kitaoka is a Professor of Psychology at the College of Letters, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan. In 1984, he received a BSc from the Department of Biology, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan, where he studied animal psychology and neuronal activity of the inferotemporal cortex in macaque monkeys.

#40066

Norbert Perrimon

#40079

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Norbert Perrimon is a French geneticist and developmental biologist. He is the James Stillman Professor of Developmental Biology in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and an Associate of the Broad Institute. He is known for developing a number of techniques for used in genetic research with Drosophila melanogaster, as well as specific substantive contributions to signal transduction, developmental biology and physiology.

#40067

Zhang Xinbao

#40080

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Zhang Xinbao is a Chinese civil law scholar, a professor at Renmin University of China Law School. Biography Zhang Xinbao was born in Gongan, Hubei. He received his LL.B degree from Southwest College of Political Science and Law in 1984, and LL.M degree from Renmin University of China Department of Law in 1986. Zhang studied the US tort law at Syracuse University from 1991 to 1993. He received his Ph.D degree from Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1997.

#40068

David Vann

#40081

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

David Vann was born October 19, 1966, on Adak Island in the Aleutian Islands, Alaska. He is a novelist and short story writer, and is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of Warwick in England. Vann received a Guggenheim Fellowship and has been a National Endowment of the Arts fellow, a Wallace Stegner fellow, and a John L’Heureux fellow. His work has appeared in many magazines and newspapers. His books have been published in 23 languages and have won 14 prizes and been on 83 'best books of the year' lists. They have been selected for the New Yorker Book Club, the Time...

#40069

Brad Park

#40082

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Douglas Bradford "Brad" Park is a Canadian former professional ice hockey player. A defenceman, Park played in the National Hockey League for the New York Rangers, Boston Bruins and Detroit Red Wings. Considered to be one of the best defencemen of his era, he was named to an All-Star team seven times. The most productive years of his career were overshadowed by superstar Bobby Orr, with whom he played with for a brief time. Unlike Orr's, however, his teams never hoisted the Stanley Cup. Park was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1988. In 2017, he was named one of the '100 Greatest NHL P...

#40070

Fred Poché

#40083

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Fred Poché is a French philosopher. Bachelor of philosophy , higher degree in language sciences from the University of Paris III : Sorbonne nouvelle, PhD in philosophy , and accreditation awarded by the University of Strasbourg as supervisor of doctoral students. He is professor of contemporary philosophy at the Catholic University of the West in Angers. His research concerns social philosophy and covers the following fields: recognition, dignity, vulnerability, memories, wounds, racism, contextuality and politics .

#40071

Haifan Lin

#40084

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Haifan Lin is a Chinese-born American stem cell biologist. He is the Eugene Higgins Chair Professor of Cell Biology at Yale University and the founding Director of the Yale Stem Cell Center. He previously founded and directed the Stem Cell Research Program at Duke University. Recognized for his significant contributions to stem cell research, he was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018.

#40072

Paul Von Raguée Schleyer

#40085

Overall Influence

#40073

Bogo Grafenauer

Bogo Grafenauer

#40086

Overall Influence

1916 - 1995 (79 years)

Bogo Grafenauer was a Slovenian historian, who mostly wrote about medieval history in the Slovene Lands. Together with Milko Kos, Fran Zwitter, and Vasilij Melik, he was one of the founders of the so-called Ljubljana school of historiography.

#40074

Kwesi Yankah

#40087

Overall Influence

Kwesi Yankah is a Ghanaian academic, author, and university administrator. He is a professor of linguistics and oral literature specializing in the ethnography of communications. He has served as the Pro-vice-chancellor of the University of Ghana and the president of the Central University. The author of several books, he was inducted as a fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999. He is currently the Ghanaian Minister of State in charge of tertiary education.

#40075

Adam Gamoran

#40088

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Adam Gamoran is an American sociologist. Early life and education He obtained his Ph.D. in Sociology of Education from the University of Chicago in 1984. Career Until 2013 he had held the John D. MacArthur Chair in Sociology and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and chaired the Department of Sociology. He was also the director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. A particular focus of his research has been school structure, educational inequality, and school reform.

#40076

Nan Goldin

#40089

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Nancy Goldin is an American photographer and activist. Her work often explores LGBT subcultures, moments of intimacy, the HIV/AIDS crisis, and the opioid epidemic. Her most notable work is The Ballad of Sexual Dependency . The monograph documents the post-Stonewall, gay subculture and includes Goldin's family and friends. She is a founding member of the advocacy group P.A.I.N. . She lives and works in New York City.

#40077

Jim Hunt

#40090

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

James Baxter Hunt Jr. is an American politician and retired attorney who was the 69th and 71st Governor of North Carolina . He is the longest-serving governor in the state's history. Hunt is tied with former Ohio governor Jim Rhodes for the sixth-longest gubernatorial tenure in post-Constitutional U.S. history at days.

#40078

Ebenezer Laing

#40091

Overall Influence

1931 - 2015 (84 years)

Ebenezer Laing, was a Ghanaian botanist and geneticist who served as the Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana, Legon. He was a professor at the University of Ghana, Legon, and later an emeritus professor. Laing, together with his university and faculty colleague, George C. Clerk , was one of the first Ghanaian academics to specialise in botany as a scientific discipline and contributed significantly to the growth of the field in Ghana. He was also a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, inducted in 1965. In 1985, he was elected an inaugural Fellow of the African Academy...

#40079

Lucy Danziger

#40092

Overall Influence

Lucy Danziger is a veteran magazine editor, writer, well-being expert and strategic content creator who is CEO of 10 Point Ventures, a digital content studio that works with brands, startups and media companies to help them reach their business goals. Danziger is the former American editor-in-chief of Self magazine and recently left her post as the Editorial Director of The Beet, a guide to plant-based healthy living. Danziger served as an editor-in-chief of Condé Nast Publications' Self from 2001 until 2014. After leaving Condé Nast she built and launched Hinted, a social shopping platform th...

#40080

Taekjip Ha

#40093

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Taekjip Ha is a South Korean-born American biophysicist who is currently a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Biophysics and Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He was previously the Gutgsell Professor of Physics, at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he was the principal investigator of Single Molecule Nanometry group. He is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

#40081

Zhijian Chen

#40094

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Zhijian "James" Chen is a Chinese-American biochemist and professor in the department of molecular biology at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. He is best known for his discovery of mechanisms by which nucleic acids trigger innate and autoimmune responses from the interior of a cell, work for which he received the 2019 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.

#40082

Tim Lewens

#40095

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Tim Lewens is a professor in the history and philosophy of biology, medicine, and bioethics at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Lewens is a Fellow of Clare College, where he serves as Director of Studies in Philosophy and he is a member of the academic staff and lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science .

#40083

Guy Sigsworth

#40096

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Allan Arthur Guy Sigsworth is an English record producer and songwriter. During his career, he has worked with many artists, including Seal, Björk, Goldie, Madonna, Britney Spears, Kate Havnevik, Imogen Heap, Bebel Gilberto, Mozez, David Sylvian, Alanis Morissette, Eric Whitacre, Alison Moyet, and AURORA . He has also collaborated with many celebrated instrumental musicians, including Talvin Singh, Jon Hassell, and Lester Bowie. He is a member of the duo Frou Frou, with Imogen Heap.

#40084

Mandeep R. Mehra

#40097

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Mandeep R. Mehra is The William Harvey Distinguished Chair in Advanced Cardiovascular Medicine and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is the medical director of the Brigham Heart and Vascular Center in Boston, Massachusetts, and specializes in advanced heart failure, mechanical circulatory support and cardiac transplantation.

#40085

Jill Green

#40098

Overall Influence

Jill Green is an American dance educator and scholar who originated the Social Somatic Theory. Green served on the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and was co-editor of Dance Research.

#40086

Dennis Fairclough

#40099

Overall Influence

Dennis Fairclough is Deputy Chair/Professor at the Computing & Networking Sciences Department at Utah Valley University. He specializes in teaching Borland C++ Builder and Java. Raised in Northern California, Fairclough earned a Ph.D. at Brigham Young University. He taught at BYU's department of electric engineering from 1976 to 1984. He was an architect of Wicat Systems and began the computer-related section at Eyring Research Institute. He subsequently founded Praxis Computer Systems and Icon Systems.

#40087

Karthik Ramanna

#40100

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Karthik Ramanna is Professor of Business & Public Policy and Director of the Master of Public Policy Program at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, where he established the leadership curriculum on building trust across divided communities.

#40088

Jeff Faux

#40101

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Jeff Faux is the principal founder of the Economic Policy Institute and was its first president, from 1986 to 2002. He is now the Institute's Distinguished Fellow and also serves on its board of directors.

#40089

Douglas Gordon

#40102

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Douglas Gordon is a Scottish artist. He won the Turner Prize in 1996, the Premio 2000 at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997 and the Hugo Boss Prize in 1998. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Work Much of Gordon's work is seen as being about memory and uses repetition in various forms. He uses material from the public realm and also creates performance-based videos. His work often overturns traditional uses of video by playing with time elements and employing multiple monitors.

#40090

Soterios Johnson

#40103

Overall Influence

Soterios Johnson is an American radio journalist and the former local host of National Public Radio's Morning Edition on New York City public-radio station WNYC. A Highland Park, New Jersey native, Johnson graduated from Highland Park High School, where he participated in the school's radio station. He worked at a small FM station in his hometown while earning his undergraduate degree in American history from Columbia University in New York City, granted in 1990. While there he was active at the institution's radio station WKCR-FM . Subsequently, he received a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

#40091

Jim Murphy

#40104

Overall Influence

1947 - 2022 (75 years)

James John Patrick Murphy was an American author. He wrote more than 35 nonfiction and fiction books for children, young adults, and general audiences, including more than 30 about American history. He won the Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association in 2010 for his contribution in writing for teens.

#40092

Christopher M. Reddy

#40105

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Christopher Michael Reddy is a Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the Department of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry. Reddy's research spans from the source, fate and transport of combustion-derived materials, PCBs, and DDT to the environmental chemistry of oil spills, biofuels, plastics, nanoparticles, as well as developing environmentally friendly products.

#40093

Jeong Ji-yong

#40106

Overall Influence

1902 - Present (124 years)

Jeong Ji-yong, often romanized in literature as Cheong Chi-yong , was a Korean poet and translator of English poetry who "opened a new horizon of poetic possibilities through chiselled expression, tempered sentiments, and precise visual imagery" according to the scholar of Korean poetry, Brother Anthony.

#40094

Sean Kinney

#40107

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Sean Howard Kinney is an American musician, best known as the drummer and co-founder of the rock band Alice in Chains. Kinney also founded the short-lived supergroup Spys4Darwin, and has collaborated with other artists such as Johnny Cash and Metallica. He played drums for his Alice in Chains bandmate, Jerry Cantrell's first solo album, Boggy Depot . Since 2009, Kinney has been co-owner of the Crocodile club in Seattle. He was a guest drummer on NBC's Late Night with Seth Meyers in September 2018. Kinney has earned nine Grammy Award nominations as a member of Alice in Chains.

#40095

Khiara Bridges

#40108

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Khiara M. Bridges is an American law professor and anthropologist specializing in the intersectionality of race, reproductive justice, and law. She is best known for her book, Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization, in which she argues that race and class largely affect the prenatal, childbirth, and postnatal experiences of women.

#40096

Roy McFarland

#40109

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Roy Leslie McFarland is an English former football manager and former player. With Derby County, he played 442 league games, helping him to earn 28 caps for England. Playing career Born in Liverpool, McFarland was a player for Tranmere Rovers, Derby County and Bradford City. He represented England at full international level. Brian Clough and Peter Taylor signed him for Derby on 25 August 1967, three months after taking charge at Derby County, when they were rebuilding a side to gain promotion to the first division.

#40097

Albert Stunkard

#40110

Overall Influence

1922 - 2014 (92 years)

Albert J. Stunkard was an American psychiatrist. He is known for his first descriptions of binge eating disorder and night eating syndrome in the 1950s. Life Albert Stunkard was born in Manhattan, New York City, as the son of biologist Horace Stunkard. He studied medicine at Yale University and received his bachelor's degree in 1943. He received his MD from Columbia University in 1945. During World War II, he served as a physician in the United States Army in Japan. He was a lifelong student of D. T. Suzuki.

#40098

James Kari

#40111

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

James Kari is a linguist and Professor Emeritus with the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks specializing in the Dene of Alaska. For over fifty years he has done extensive linguistic work in many Dene languages including Ahtna, Dena'ina, Koyukon, Deg Hit'an, Holikachuk, Lower Tanana, Middle Tanana, Tanacross, Upper Tanana, and Babine-Witsuwit'en. He was on the faculty of UAF from 1973 until his retirement in 1997. He continues to work on numerous Alaska Native language projects. He is the author or editor of over 200 publications, including more than 4000 pages of bilingual texts in seven Dene languages.

#40099

Mikhail Volkenstein

#40112

Overall Influence

1912 - 1992 (80 years)

Mikhail Vladimirovich Volkenshtein was a notable Soviet and Russian biophysicist, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor and Doctor of Sciences. In his publications in English his name is written as M. V. Volkenstein.

#40100

Callum Roberts

#40113

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Callum Michael Roberts is a British marine conservation biologist, oceanographer, science communicator, author and research scholar at the University of Exeter. He was formerly at the University of York. He is best known for his research and advocacy related to marine reserves and the environmental impact of fishing.

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