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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List of the most influential people

#1

Lewis C. Cantley

#10908

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Lewis C. Cantley is an American cell biologist and biochemist who has made significant advances to the understanding of cancer metabolism. Among his most notable contributions are the discovery and study of the enzyme PI-3-kinase, now known to be important to understanding cancer and diabetes mellitus. He is currently Meyer Director and Professor of Cancer Biology at the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City. He was formerly a professor in the Departments of Systems Biology and Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and the Director of Cancer Research at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, Massachusetts.

#2

Pamela Balch

#37046

Overall Influence

Pamela Balch is the 18th president of West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon, West Virginia. Balch is a 1971 graduate of West Virginia Wesleyan College, and was the unanimous choice as the eighteenth president of the college by the board of trustees.

#3

Antwaan Randle El

Antwaan Randle El

#50075

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Antwaan Randle El is an American football coach and former player who was a wide receiver in the National Football League for nine seasons. He is currently the wide receivers coach for the Detroit Lions of the National Football League . He attended Indiana University where he played college football for the Indiana Hoosiers, and also played basketball and baseball. For a time, he was also a sideline reporter for the Big Ten Network for interconference games that the Indiana football team plays.

#4

Denise Giardina

#52005

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Denise Giardina is an American novelist. Her book Storming Heaven was a Discovery Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and received the 1987 W. D. Weatherford Award for the best published work about the Appalachian South. The Unquiet Earth received an American Book Award and the Lillian Smith Book Award for fiction. Her 1998 novel Saints and Villains was awarded the Boston Book Review fiction prize and was semifinalist for the International Dublin Literary Award. Giardina is an ordained Episcopal Church deacon, a community activist, and a former candidate for governor of West Virginia.

#5

Robin Davis

#55332

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Robin Jean Davis is an American jurist who served on the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia. First elected to fill an unexpired term in 1996, Davis later won full twelve-year terms in 2000 and 2012. However, Davis retired before the end of her second full term in August 2018 after the West Virginia House Judiciary Committee named Davis in articles of impeachment during the Impeachment of the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia.

#6

Maggie Anderson

#67407

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Maggie Anderson is an American poet and editor with roots in Appalachia. Education and beginning of career Anderson attended West Virginia Wesleyan College from 1966–68 and earned a bachelor's degree in English, with high honors, from West Virginia University in 1970. Her M.A. in English in 1973 and an M.S.W. in 1977 were also from WVU. She worked as a rehabilitation counselor for blind and visually impaired clients at the West Virginia Rehabilitation Center from 1973-77. Beginning in 1979, she worked as poet-in-residence for ten years, in schools, senior centers, correctional facilities and libraries in West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

#7

Heather Conley

#69299

Overall Influence

Heather A. Conley is president of the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Washington, D.C. Early life and education Conley received her Bachelor of Arts degree from West Virginia Wesleyan College. She received her Master of Arts in International Relations from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University.

#8

David E. Stuart

#71259

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

David E. Stuart is an American anthropologist, and novelist, and Associate Provost Emeritus at University of New Mexico. He graduated from West Virginia Wesleyan College, with a BA in Anthropology and Sociology in 1967, and from University of New Mexico with an MA in 1970 and PhD in 1972 in Anthropology.

#9

Irene McKinney

#71616

Overall Influence

1939 - 2012 (73 years)

Irene McKinney was an American poet and editor, and served as the Poet Laureate of the state of West Virginia from her appointment by Governor Gaston Caperton in January 1994 until her death. Biography Third oldest of her parents' six children, Irene McKinney was born and grew up in Belington, Barbour County, WV on a 300-acre farm that had been in her family for generations. She had 5 siblings . Her family grew most of their food on their farm due to the struggle of living on one income and having to feed 8 mouths in the house.

#10

Jason Koon

#73296

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (39 years)

Jason Koon is an American professional poker player from Weston, West Virginia known for his accomplishments in live and online poker tournaments. Early life Koon graduated from Lewis County High School in 2003 and then attended West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon. There he received his Masters in Business Administration and Finance. He declared he started to play poker following an injury. To avoid boredom, his roommate taught him Texas Hold'Em, and Jason Koon realized he could make a lot of money.

#11

Emanuel Todorov

#76561

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Emanuel Vassilev Todorov , a neuroscientist, is an associate professor and director of the Movement Control Laboratory at the University of Washington. He introduced the use of optimal control as a formal explanatory framework for biological movement . He is the principal developer of the MuJoCo physics engine.

#12

John Swan

#122302

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Sir John William David Swan is a former Bermudian political figure. A real estate developer, a political luminary and a philanthropist, Swan served as Premier of Bermuda from 1982 to 1995. Swan built his reputation through property development.

#13

Katherine A. Hoadley

#144986

Overall Influence

Katherine A. Hoadley is an American breast cancer researcher. , she has served as the Associate Director of Cancer Genomics for the High-Throughput Sequencing Facility at UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. Her research is focused on understanding the biology of cancer through gene expression analyses and integrative genomic approaches.

#14

Anthony Peters

#172249

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

Anthony Peters is an American soccer player. Career Youth and college Peters attended Baton Rouge Magnet High School and played two years of college soccer at the University of Kentucky, before trying his hand at playing professionally in both Norway and Iceland. Finding opportunities in Europe limited, he returned to college in 2007, playing for West Virginia Wesleyan College, where he was named as the WVIAC Player of the Year and to the NSCAA/Adidas Atlantic Region All-American First Team in 2008.

#15

Ted Cassidy

1932 - 1979 (47 years)

Theodore Crawford Cassidy was an American actor. He tended to play unusual characters in offbeat or science-fiction works such as Star Trek and I Dream of Jeannie, and he played Lurch on The Addams Family in the mid-1960s. He also narrated The Incredible Hulk TV series and voiced The Hulk in the show's first 2 seasons.

#16

Greasy Neale

1891 - 1973 (82 years)

Alfred Earle "Greasy" Neale was an American football and baseball player and coach. Early life and playing career Neale was born in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Although writers eventually assumed that Neale got his nickname, "Greasy", from his elusiveness on the football field, it actually arose during his youth, from a name-calling joust with a friend.

#17

Gale Bullman

1901 - 1977 (76 years)

Delmar Gale Bullman was an American football player and coach. He played college football at West Virginia Wesleyan College and professionally in the National Football League with the Columbus Tigers. Bullman served as the head football coach at the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy—now known as Missouri University of Science and Technology—from 1937 to 1963, compiling a record of 96–112–9. He was also athletic director there from 1937 to 1967.

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