Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most important people in 24 academic disciplines from 4000 BCE to today

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 proprietary AI program, we have ranked everyone in Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef based on the number of citations, publications, and academically relevant web presence.

Students and researchers now have the easiest and fastest way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you ever wanted to find famous medieval biologists, or influential engineers during the industrial revolution, now you can!

We’ve also put together our own custom rankings of people by discipline. And speaking of influential people, don’t forget to check out the interviews we do with the influential people of today!

Use the power of AI for your research! Simply select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) most relevant to your research, and the time periods of interest, and get enlightening results.

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List of the most influential people for the years 2010 – 2020

Gary Marcus

#1907

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (53 years)

Gary F. Marcus is a professor in the psychology department at New York University. In 2014 he founded Geometric Intelligence, a machine-learning company. Marcus challenges connectionist theories which posit that the mind is made up only of randomly arranged neurons, and argues that neurons can be put together into circuits that do things such as process rules or process structured representations. He describes how a small number of genes account for the functioning of the intricate human brain.

Jon Krakauer

#2469

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (69 years)

Jon Krakauer is an American writer and mountaineer. He is the author of bestselling non-fiction books—Into the Wild; Into Thin Air; Under the Banner of Heaven; and Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman—as well as numerous magazine articles. He was a member of an ill-fated expedition to summit Mount Everest in 1996, one of the deadliest disasters in the history of climbing Everest.

Alan Edelman

#3211

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (60 years)

Alan Stuart Edelman is an American mathematician and computer scientist. He is a professor of applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Principal Investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory where he leads a group in applied computing. In 2004 he founded a business, Interactive Supercomputing, which was later acquired by Microsoft. Edelman is a fellow of American Mathematical Society , Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics , Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers , and Association for Computing Machinery , f...

David Shulkin

#29461

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (64 years)

David Jonathon Shulkin is an American physician and former government official. In 2017, Shulkin became the ninth United States Secretary of Veterans Affairs and served under President Donald Trump. He was the Under Secretary of Veterans Affairs for Health from 2015 until 2017, appointed by President Barack Obama. On March 28, 2018, President Trump dismissed Shulkin from his position by tweet, and announced that Physician to the President Ronny Jackson would be nominated as Shulkin's successor, although Jackson's nomination was withdrawn on April 26, 2018, after allegations surfaced of misconduct and mismanagement while serving in the White House.

Naomi Wallace

#27932

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (63 years)

Naomi Wallace is an American playwright, screenwriter and poet from Kentucky. She is widely known for her plays, and has received several distinguished awards for her work. Biography Naomi Wallace was born in Prospect, Kentucky, to Henry F. Wallace, a photo journalist and correspondent for Time and Life magazines, and Sonja de Vries, a Dutch justice and human rights worker.

Carrie Mae Weems

#24215

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (70 years)

Carrie Mae Weems is an American artist working in text, fabric, audio, digital images and installation video, and is best known for her photography. She achieved prominence through her early 1990s photographic project The Kitchen Table Series. Her photographs, films and videos focus on serious issues facing African Americans today, including racism, sexism, politics and personal identity.

Benjamin Mako Hill

Benjamin Mako Hill

#29937

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (43 years)

Benjamin Mako Hill is a free software activist, hacker, author, and professor. He is a contributor and free software developer as part of the Debian and Ubuntu projects as well as the co-author of three technical manuals on the subject, Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible, The Official Ubuntu Server Book, and The Official Ubuntu Book.

George Bonanno

#24193

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (73 years)

George A. Bonanno is a professor of clinical psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University, U.S. He is responsible for introducing the controversial idea of resilience to the study of loss and trauma. He is known as a pioneering researcher in the field of bereavement and trauma. The New York Times on February 15, 2011, stated that the current science of bereavement has been "driven primarily" by Bonanno. Scientific American summarized a main finding of his work, "The ability to rebound remains the norm throughout adult life." In 2019, Bonanno was honored with the James McKeen Cattell aw...

Ellis Henican

#49059

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (65 years)

Ellis Henican is an American columnist at Newsday and AM New York as well as a political analyst on the Fox News Channel. He hosts a nationally syndicated weekend show on Talk Radio Network and is the voice of "Stormy" on the Cartoon Network series Sealab 2021. He is the co-author of the New York Times Bestseller The Party's Over: How the Extreme Right Hijacked the GOP and I Became a Democrat.

Ken Burns

#26677

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (70 years)

Kenneth Lauren Burns is an American filmmaker known for his documentary films and television series, many of which chronicle American history and culture. His work is often produced in association with WETA-TV and/or the National Endowment for the Humanities and distributed by PBS.

Heather Boushey

Heather Boushey

#39811

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (53 years)

Heather Marie Boushey is an American economist. Boushey currently serves as a member of President Joe Biden's Council of Economic Advisers.She previously was the president and CEO of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. She has also worked as an economist at the Center for American Progress and the United States Congress Joint Economic Committee.

Walid Raad

#48085

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (56 years)

Walid Raad is a contemporary media artist. The Atlas Group is a fictional collective, the work of which is produced by Walid Raad. He lives and works in New York, where he is currently a professor at the School of Art at the Cooper Union School of Art.

Ed Droste

#74464

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (45 years)

Edward Droste is an American singer-songwriter and musician, formerly of the rock band Grizzly Bear. The group began as the solo effort of Droste with the release of 2004's Horn of Plenty, originally released on Kanine Records. All songs were written and performed by Droste. By 2005, the group expanded into a four-piece, with Droste still as a contributing songwriter. He left the group in 2020.

Hasok Chang

#58889

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (56 years)

Hasok Chang is a Korean-born American historian and philosopher of science currently serving as the Hans Rausing Professor at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and a board member of the Philosophy of Science Association. He previously served as president of the British Society for the History of Science from 2012 to 2014.

Peter Cole

#55359

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (66 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."

Norton Juster

#30630

Overall Influence

1929 - 2021 (92 years)

Norton Juster was an American academic, architect, and writer. He was best known as an author of children's books, notably for The Phantom Tollbooth and The Dot and the Line. Early life Juster was born in Brooklyn on June 2, 1929. Both his parents were Jewish and immigrated to the United States. His father, Samuel Juster, was born in Romania and became an architect through a correspondence course. His mother, Minnie Silberman, was of Polish Jewish descent. His brother, Howard, became an architect as well. Juster studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, obtaining a bachelor's degree in 1952.

Daniel Horowitz

Daniel Horowitz

#51595

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (69 years)

Daniel Aaron Horowitz is an American defense attorney who has represented several high-profile clients including talk show host Michael Savage and is a frequent commentator in the media on criminal cases in the news. In 2014 Horowitz was named a Top 100 Lawyer by the National Trial Lawyers. He is listed as a contributor to Criminal Law, Practice & Procedure. Daniel Horowitz is also a licensed real estate broker. Since 2017 Daniel Horowitz has been an SEC registered investment advisor associated with Meridian Investment Counsel, Inc..

Nicholas Merrill

Nicholas Merrill

#57800

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (51 years)

Nicholas Merrill is an Americann system administrator, computer programmer, and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Calyx Internet Access, an Internet and hosted service provider founded in 1995, and of the non-profit Calyx Institute. He was the first person to file a constitutional challenge against the National Security Letters statute in the USA PATRIOT Act and consequently the first person to have a National Security Letter gag order completely lifted.

Chuck Collins

#67519

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (64 years)

Chuck Collins is an author and a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, where he directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good. He is also co-founder of Wealth for Common Good. He is an expert on economic inequality in the US, and has pioneered efforts to bring together investors and business leaders to speak out publicly against corporate practices and economic policies that increase economic inequality.

Lupita Nyong'o

#114574

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (40 years)

Lupita Amondi Nyong'o is a Kenyan-Mexican actress. She is the recipient of several accolades, including an Academy Award, and nominations for two Primetime Emmy Awards and a Tony Award. The daughter of Kenyan politician Peter Anyang' Nyong'o, she was born in Mexico City, where her father was teaching, and was raised in Kenya from the age of three. She attended college in the United States, earning a bachelor's degree in film and theatre studies from Hampshire College. She later began her career in Hollywood as a production assistant. In 2008, she made her acting debut with the short film East River and subsequently returned to Kenya to star in the television series Shuga .

Jeff Sharlet

#78658

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (51 years)

Jeff Sharlet is an American academic, journalist, and author. Throughout his career, Sharlet's work has focused on religion. Career He is a contributing editor for Harper's, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Rolling Stone. His work has also appeared in Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Esquire, Lapham's Quarterly, Oxford American, Bookforum, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, New York, Advocate, Guernica, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia Journalism Review, New Statesman, The Nation, The New Republic, Forward, and The Baffler. He has taught at New York University and is the Frederick Sessions Beebe '35 Professor in the Art of Writing at Dartmouth College.

Madeleine Baran

Madeleine Baran

#102664

Overall Influence

Madeleine Baran is an American investigative journalist. She is best known as the lead reporter for the APM podcast In the Dark. She has received accolades including three Peabody Awards, a Gracie Award and two Sigma Delta Chi Awards for her reporting.

Eula Biss

#75193

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (46 years)

Eula Biss is an American non-fiction writer who is the author of four books. Biss has won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a founding editor of Essay Press and a Guggenheim Fellow.

Aaron Lansky

#45667

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (68 years)

Aaron Lansky is the founder of the Yiddish Book Center, an organization he created to help salvage Yiddish language publications. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1989 for his work. Lansky is the author of Outwitting History , an autobiographical account of how he saved the Yiddish books of the world, from the 1970s to the present day. It won the 2005 Massachusetts Book Award. A children’s book called “The Book Rescuer: How a Mensch from Massachusetts Saved Yiddish Literature for Generations to Come” also tells his story.

Gail Hershatter

#60935

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (71 years)

Gail Hershatter is an American historian of Modern China who holds the Distinguished Professor of History chair at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She previously taught in the history department at Williams College.

Liev Schreiber

#109076

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (56 years)

Isaac Liev Schreiber is an American actor, director, screenwriter, producer, and narrator. He became known during the late 1990s and early 2000s after appearing in several independent films, and later mainstream Hollywood films, including the first three Scream horror films , Ransom , Phantoms , The Hurricane , The Sum of All Fears , The Manchurian Candidate , The Omen , Defiance , X-Men Origins: Wolverine , Taking Woodstock , Salt , Goon , Pawn Sacrifice , and Spotlight , The 5th Wave , and The French Dispatch . He has also lent his voice to animated films such as My Little Pony: The Movie ,...

Edward Humes

#67820

Overall Influence

Edward Humes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and non-fiction writer. Biography Humes was born in Philadelphia and attended Hampshire College. In 1989 he received the Pulitzer Prize for specialized reporting for investigative stories he wrote about the United States military for the Orange County Register.

John Roosevelt Boettiger

John Roosevelt Boettiger

#86682

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (84 years)

John Roosevelt Boettiger is a retired professor of developmental and clinical psychology, and the son of Anna Roosevelt Boettiger and her second husband, Clarence John Boettiger. He is a grandson of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt. He lives in northern California.

Michael Klare

#118274

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (81 years)

Michael T. Klare is a Five Colleges professor of Peace and World Security Studies, whose department is located at Hampshire College , defense correspondent of The Nation magazine and author of Resource Wars and Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency . His 2019 book is, All Hell Breaking Loose: the Pentagon's Perspective on Climate Change . Klare also teaches at Amherst College, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

S. Bear Bergman

S. Bear Bergman

#200114

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (49 years)

S. Bear Bergman is an American author, poet, playwright, and theater artist. He is a trans man, and his gender identity is a main focus of his artwork. Biography Bergman was educated at Concord Academy, was one of the founders of the first Gay–straight alliance and a member of the Governor of Massachusetts' Safe Schools Commission for LGBT youth. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Hampshire College in 1996.

Joan Braderman

#107282

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (75 years)

Joan Braderman is an American video artist, director, performer, and writer. Braderman's video works are considered to have created her signature style known as "stand up theory." Via this "performative embodiment," she deconstructs and analyzes popular media by inserting chroma-keyed cut-outs of her own body into appropriated mass media images, where she interrogates the representation of ideology and the transparency of photographic space in U.S. popular culture.

Leah Hager Cohen

#127828

Overall Influence

Leah Hager Cohen is an American author who writes both fiction and nonfiction. Cohen's father was superintendent of the Lexington School for the Deaf in Queens, New York, and she became fluent in sign language there. She entered NYU at age 16, intending to study drama, but later transferred to Hampshire College to study literature, graduating in 1988. After working as a sign language interpreter for two years, she entered Columbia Journalism School, graduating in 1991. Her first book grew out of her masters thesis, in which she reported on deaf culture.

Lesley Arfin

#150091

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (44 years)

Lesley Arfin is an American comedy writer and author. Life Arfin was born to a Jewish family in 1979 in Long Island, New York. She attended Syosset High School and Hampshire College. Career Lesley Arfin was a contributor to Vice from 2001, but left in 2007, after publication of her book Dear Diary, based on a column she wrote for Vice magazine, which was published by Vice Books. In 2008, she became the editor-in-chief of Missbehave.

Robert Sanborn

#173841

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (64 years)

Robert Sanborn is a nationally known activist for education and children and is the President/CEO of Children At Risk in Houston, Texas. He has been president since 2005. Sanborn was born in Caribou, Maine and raised in Puerto Rico.

Ronnie Dugger

#103197

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (92 years)

Ronnie Dugger is an American progressive journalist. Dugger attended UT and was editor of The Daily Texan 1950–1951. He was the founding editor of The Texas Observer from 1954 to 1961. Later he served as the Observer's publisher, spending more than 40 years with the political newsmagazine.

Helaine Selin

#59398

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (77 years)

Helaine Selin is an American librarian, historian of science, author and the editor of several bestselling books. Career Selin attended Binghamton University, where she earned her bachelor's degree. She received her MLS from SUNY Albany. She was a Peace Corps volunteer from the fall of 1967 through the summer of 1969 as a teacher of English and African History in Karonga, Malawi. She retired in 2012 from being the science librarian at Hampshire College.

Tom Hull

#31469

Overall Influence

Thomas C. Hull is an associate professor of mathematics at Western New England University and is known for his expertise in the mathematics of paper folding. Career Hull was an undergraduate at Hampshire College. He earned a master's degree and Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Rhode Island. His 1997 dissertation, Some Problems in List Coloring Bipartite Graphs, involved graph coloring, and was supervised by Nancy Eaton.

Lisa Shannon

#240292

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (48 years)

Lisa J. Shannon is an American author, human rights activist, and speaker known for her work in the international women's movement, including founding Run for Congo Women, co-founding Sister Somalia with Fartuun Adan Abdisalan, co-founding and serving as CEO of Every Woman Treaty. She is author of A Thousand Sisters: My Journey Into the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman . Her second book, Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen: An Ordinary Family's Extraordinary Tale of Love, Loss, and Survival in Congo , follows one family's struggle for survival in the shadow of Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Ar...

Robin Coste Lewis

#218610

Overall Influence

Robin Coste Lewis is an American poet, artist, and scholar. She is known primarily for her debut poetry collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2015––the first time a poetry debut by an African-American had ever won the prize in the National Book Foundation's history, and the first time any debut had won the award since 1974. Critics called the collection “A masterpiece…” “Surpassing imagination, maturity, and aesthetic dazzle…” “remarkable hopefulness…in the face of what would make most rage and/or collapse...” “formally polished,...

Dawn M. Liberi

#218302

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (69 years)

Dawn M. Liberi is a diplomat, international development expert and former United States Ambassador to Burundi. She was nominated by President Barack Obama on July 10, 2012 and confirmed by the Senate October 19, 2012.

James Estrin

#210957

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (66 years)

James Estrin is a photographer, writer, filmmaker, and academic. He is a New York Times senior staff photographer and founder of Lens, The New York Times photography blog. Estrin was part of a team that won a 2001 Pulitzer Prize for a national series of articles entitled “How Race Is Lived In America." He is also the co-executive producer of the documentary film "Underfire: The Untold Story of Pfc. Tony Vaccaro" which appeared on HBO in November 2016.

Susan Mikula

#162573

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (65 years)

Susan Mikula is an American artist and photographer. After years working in the art industry and serving on an art jury, Mikula had her first solo photography exhibition in 1998. She uses older technology to produce her photographs, including pinhole cameras and Polaroid cameras. Mikula is the longtime partner of political commentator Rachel Maddow.

Lucy-Ann McFadden

#225199

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (71 years)

Lucy-Ann Adams McFadden is an American astronomer and planetary scientist. An employee of NASA, she also founded the Science, Discovery & the Universe Program within the University of Maryland, and the Explore-It-All Science Center, a children's science program.

Lee Jussim

#104460

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (68 years)

Lee J. Jussim is an American social psychologist. He leads the Social Perception Laboratory at Rutgers University. Early life and education When Jussim was 5 years old, his family moved into a Brooklyn-area public housing where they lived until he was 12. When he was 13, his family moved to Levittown, Long Island, and his mother died of cancer shortly after.

Anson Rabinbach

Anson Rabinbach

#171591

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (78 years)

Anson Gilbert Rabinbach is a historian of modern Europe and the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History, Emeritus at Princeton University. He is best known for his writings on labor, Nazi Germany, Austria, and European thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1973 he co-founded the journal New German Critique, which he continues to co-edit.

Joseph Amon

#122822

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (54 years)

Joseph Amon is an American epidemiologist and human rights activist and currently director of the Health and Human Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. Prior to working at Human Rights Watch, he worked for more than 15 years conducting research, designing programs, and evaluating interventions related to HIV, hepatitis, malaria and guinea worm eradication, for a wide variety of organizations including: the Peace Corps, the Carter Center, Family Health International, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Joseph Amon is 6’3”.

Kirin Narayan

#118725

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (64 years)

Kirin Narayan is an Indian-born American anthropologist, folklorist and writer. Early life, education, and career Narayan is the daughter of Narayan Ramji Contractor, a civil engineer from Nashik, and Didi Kinzinger, a German-American "artist, decorator, and builder of sustainable housing". Narayan was born in Bombay, attended school in India and came to the United States in 1976.

Stephen Petronio

#181659

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (67 years)

Stephen Petronio is an American choreographer, dancer, and the artistic director of New York City-based Stephen Petronio Company. Stephen Petronio was born in Newark, New Jersey. He grew up in nearby Nutley and graduated in 1974 from Nutley High School. He received a B.A. degree from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he began dancing in 1974. Prior to pursuing a career in dance, Petronio studied pre-medicine before being inspired by the dancing of Rudolf Nureyev and Steve Paxton, with whom he studied contact improvisation. From 1982 to 1987 he was a member of Channel Z, an improvisation performance ensemble based in New York City.

Jonathan Westphal

#97217

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (72 years)

Jonathan Westphal is an academic philosopher working on the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of science, logic and philosophy of language and aesthetics. More recently he has become interested in issues in the philosophy of time, and in the understanding of human freedom. In the history of philosophy, he has worked mostly on Wittgenstein and Leibniz. He lives in Hamden, Connecticut, and works as a private tutor in philosophy

Barry Sonnenfeld

Barry Sonnenfeld

#204256

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (70 years)

Barry Sonnenfeld is an American filmmaker and television director. He originally worked as a cinematographer for the Coen brothers before directing films such as The Addams Family and its sequel Addams Family Values , Get Shorty , the Men in Black trilogy , and Wild Wild West .

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