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

Henry S. Taylor

#57520

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (81 years)

Henry Splawn Taylor is an American poet, author of more than 15 books of poems, translation, and nonfiction, and winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Taylor was born in Lincoln, Virginia, in rural Loudoun County, where he was raised as a Quaker. He went to high school at George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania. He graduated from the University of Virginia in 1965 and received his M.A. from Hollins University in 1966.

Ann Compton

#42397

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (76 years)

Ann Compton is an American former news reporter and White House correspondent for ABC News Radio. Career highlights Ann Compton graduated from New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, in 1965. She began her broadcasting career in Virginia, where an internship during her junior year at Hollins College led to a full-time job as the first woman reporting for WDBJ TV, a CBS affiliate in Roanoke. She established a State Capitol Bureau in Richmond for the station. In 1973, ABC News hired her and she reported from New York City until December 1974, when she was assigned to the White House.

Annie Dillard

#32776

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (78 years)

Annie Dillard is an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and non-fiction. She has published works of poetry, essays, prose, and literary criticism, as well as two novels and one memoir. Her 1974 work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. From 1980, Dillard taught for 21 years in the English department of Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut.

Balli Kaur Jaswal

#162602

Overall Influence

Balli Kaur Jaswal is a Singaporean novelist, having family roots in Punjab. Her first novel Inheritance won the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelist Award in 2014, and was adapted for a film presented at the 2017 Singapore International Festival of the Arts. Her second novel Sugarbread was a finalist for the 2015 inaugural Epigram Books Fiction Prize. Her third novel, Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows was released in 2017, and garnered her a wider international following, driven in part by being picked as a selection for Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine online book club. Movie rights for Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows have been sold to Scott Free Productions and Film4.

Lee Smith

#88020

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (79 years)

Lee Smith is an American fiction author who typically incorporates much of her background from the Southeastern United States in her works. She has received writing awards, such as the O. Henry Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and, in April 2013, was the first recipient of Mercer University's Sidney Lanier Prize for Southern Literature. Her novel The Last Girls was listed on the New York Times bestseller's list and won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. Mrs Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger, a collection of new an...

Anna Cristina Niceta Lloyd

#266155

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (53 years)

Anna Cristina "Rickie" Niceta Lloyd is an Italian-American event planner who served as the White House Social Secretary for U.S. President Donald Trump. She was appointed by First Lady Melania Trump on February 8, 2017. Prior to her role at the White House, Lloyd worked for Design Cuisine, a catering company.

Lyda Hill

#169639

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (81 years)

Lyda Hill is an American investor and philanthropist. Early life Lyda Hill was born on September 17, 1942 in Dallas, Texas. Her father was Albert Galatyn Hill Sr. and her mother, Margaret Hunt Hill . Her maternal grandfather was H.L. Hunt .

Gay Hendricks

#115934

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (78 years)

Gay Hendricks is a psychologist, writer, and teacher in the field of personal growth, relationships, and body intelligence. He is best known for his work in relationship enhancement and in the development of conscious breathing exercises. After receiving his Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University in 1974, Hendricks began teaching at the University of Colorado. He spent 21 years at the University of Colorado and became a full professor in the Counseling Psychology Department while founding The Hendricks Institute. He conducts workshops with his wife of nearly 40 years, Dr. Kathlyn Hendricks.

James Dodson

#209553

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (70 years)

James Dodson is an American sports writer. He is currently a Writer-in-Residence for The Pilot newspaper, an editor of PineStraw magazine in Southern Pines, North Carolina, and an editor of the arts and culture magazine of the Carolina Sandhills. He also serves as Founding Editor of O. Henry Magazine, the arts and culture sister publication in Greensboro, North Carolina, Dodson's hometown, and Salt Magazine in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Donna Richardson

Donna Richardson

#224307

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (66 years)

Donna Richardson Joyner is an American fitness and aerobics instructor, author and ESPN television sports commentator. Widely known for her series of fitness videos, she was appointed in 2006 by President George W. Bush to serve on the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. She also produces and hosts Donna Richardson: Mind, Body, & Spirit, which airs on TV One, and Sweating In The Spirit, which airs on The Word Network.

Christine Schutt

#271913

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (75 years)

Christine Schutt, an American novelist and short story writer, has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She received her BA and MA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and her MFA from Columbia University. She is also a senior editor at NOON, the literary annual published by Diane Williams.

Susan Campbell Bartoletti

#160286

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (65 years)

Susan Campbell Bartoletti is an American writer of children's literature whose work includes Kids on Strike! and Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow. She was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, but eventually the family ended up in a small town in northeastern Pennsylvania. She graduated from the University of Scranton in 1982.

R. H. W. Dillard

#87010

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (86 years)

Richard Henry Wilde Dillard is an American poet, author, critic, and translator. Born in Roanoke, Virginia, Dillard is best known as a poet. He is also highly regarded as a writer of fiction and critical essays, as well as one of the screenwriters for the cult classic Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Roanoke College and went on to receive of a Master of Arts and the Ph. D. from the University of Virginia. While at the University of Virginia he was both a Woodrow Wilson and a DuPont Fellow. He is considered something of an institution at Ho...

Mary K. Gaillard

#49762

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (84 years)

Mary Katharine Gaillard is an American theoretical physicist. Her focus is on particle physics. She is a professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, a member of the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics, and visiting scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She was Berkeley's first tenured female physicist.

Amanda Cockrell

#179963

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (75 years)

Amanda Cockrell is a professor of English at Hollins University, specializing in children's literature and creative writing. She is the author of a number of historical novels for adults, some written under her own name and some under the pseudonym Damion Hunter. She has written novels about the Romans and about the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Her first young adult novel, What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay, was published in 2011 and was named one of the best children's books of the year by The Boston Globe.

Kenneth Massey

#297634

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (48 years)

Kenneth Massey is an American sports statistician known for his development of a methodology for ranking and rating sports teams in a variety of sports. His ratings have been a part of the Bowl Championship Series since the 1999 season. He is an assistant professor of mathematics at Carson–Newman University in Tennessee.

Cathryn Hankla

#326538

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (65 years)

Cathryn Hankla is an American poet, novelist, essayist and author of short stories. She is professor emerita of English and Creative Writing at Hollins University in Hollins, Virginia, and served as inaugural director of Hollins' Jackson Center for Creative Writing from 2008 to 2012.

Pamela J. H. Slutz

Pamela J. H. Slutz

#363205

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (74 years)

Pamela Jo Howell Slutz was a career member of the United States Foreign Service who served as U.S. Ambassador to Burundi, and as U.S. Ambassador to Mongolia. Over the course of her career, she has also served in various diplomatic posts in Kenya, Taiwan, Indonesia, and China. She was the recipient of two U.S. Department of State Superior Honor Awards and the Presidential Rank Award of Meritorious Executive. After retiring in 2012, Slutz continued to work part-time for the Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of State. Since 2019, she has served as president of The Mongolia Society...

Donna Polseno

#363546

Overall Influence

Donna Polseno is a contemporary American visual artist known for pottery, ceramics, and sculpture. Background Donna Polseno earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Kansas City Art Institute and her Master of Arts in Teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design. She lives and works in Floyd, Virginia and teaches ceramics at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. Polseno is a founding member of the 16 Hands Studio Tour and director of the Women Working with Clay Symposium.

Adam Ross

#633925

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (56 years)

Adam Ross is an American writer and editor best known for his 2010 novel Mr. Peanut. Biography Ross was born and raised in New York City. As a child actor, he appeared in the 1979 film The Seduction of Joe Tynan, as well as numerous television shows, commercials, and radio dramas. Ross attended the Trinity School, where he was a state champion wrestler. His early literary fixations included Frank Herbert's Dune and the comic books of John Byrne, Frank Miller, and Walt Simonson, which he loved "with such a passion that I read them into a state of frayed worthlessness."

Adrian Blevins

#440203

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (59 years)

Adrian Blevins is an American poet. Author of three collections of poetry, her most recent is Appalachians Run Amok, winner of the 2016 Wilder Prize . Her other full-length poetry collections are Live from the Homesick Jamboree and The Brass Girl Brouhaha . With Karen McElmurray, Blevins recently co-edited Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia , a collection of essays of new and emerging Appalachian poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers. Her chapbooks are Bloodline and The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes, which won the first of Bright Hill Press's chapbook contests.

Caren Diefenderfer

#496883

Overall Influence

1952 - 2017 (65 years)

Caren Lea Diefenderfer was an American mathematician known for her efforts to promote numeracy. Education and career Diefenderfer was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She started her undergraduate education at Smith College, but transferred to Dartmouth College among the first women to be admitted as undergraduates to Dartmouth. She graduated with summa cum laude honors in mathematics from Dartmouth in 1973. She went on to graduate study at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her 1980 dissertation, Approximation of Functions of Several Variables concerned function approximation for m...

Richard McCann

#475590

Overall Influence

1949 - 2021 (72 years)

Richard John McCann was an American writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He lived in Washington, D.C., where he was a longtime professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at American University.

Karen Bender

#424738

Overall Influence

Karen E. Bender is an American novelist. Biography Karen E. Bender is the author of the short story collection Refund, which was a Finalist for the National Book Award in fiction for 2015, and on the shortlist for the 2015 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and the novels A Town of Empty Rooms and Like Normal People; Like Normal People was a Los Angeles Times Bestseller, and a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. Both her collections Refund and The New Order were Longlisted for the Story prize.

Helen Pickett

#448899

Overall Influence

Helen Pickett is an American choreographer for stage and film, and has been described as “one of the few prominent women in ballet today”. Early life and education Pickett was raised in San Francisco, California. Her mother is a retired periodontist and agricultural biologist, and her father is an author. She started ballet at eight years old, receiving dance training at California Ballet, the Ballet Society of San Diego, and San Francisco Ballet School. Pickett attended Lowell High School in San Francisco and earned her Masters of Fine Arts in Dance from Hollins University in 2011.

Mildred Persinger

#355425

Overall Influence

1918 - 2018 (100 years)

Mildred Tilghman Emory Persinger was an American feminist and international activist for non-governmental organizations . Persinger was born in Roanoke, Virginia in April 1918. In the early 1960s Persinger served as a public member on the U.S. Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, and on the Committee Against Discrimination of the American Civil Liberties Union. From 1969 to 1972, Persinger was chairwoman of the Conference of the US Conference of NGOs. Persinger was the United States' World YWCA observer at the United Nations from 1968 to the present.

Jennifer Boysko

#940608

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (57 years)

Jennifer Barton Boysko is an American politician from the Commonwealth of Virginia. She represents the 33rd district in the Virginia Senate. Previously, she represented the 86th district in the Virginia House of Delegates, which is located in Fairfax and Loudoun counties. She is a member of the Democratic Party.

Ellen Goldsmith-Vein

#523993

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (59 years)

Ellen Goldsmith-Vein is an American television and film producer. She is the founder and CEO of the Gotham Group, a management company. As the only woman to own her own management company, with over 40 employees, Goldsmith-Vein was the first talent manager ever featured on the cover of the “Power 100” special issue of The Hollywood Reporter in 2006.

Hillary Homzie

#956864

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (57 years)

Hillary Homzie is a lecturer, playwright and author from Charlottesville, Virginia. Early life Homzie was born Denver and raised in Virginia, United States of America. She is the daughter of the late M.J. Homzie.

Carl F. Weems

#955747

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (23 years)

Heather Fitzenhagen

#1258814

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (63 years)

Heather Dawes Fitzenhagen is a Republican politician from Florida. She represented the 78th District, encompassing Fort Myers, in the Florida House of Representatives from 2012 to 2020. History Fitzenhagen was born in Dallas, Texas, and attended Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, before moving to the state of Florida in 1987. She then attended the Shepard Broad Law Center, the law school at Nova Southeastern University. Afterwards, she started Resolution Strategies, a mediation and arbitration company, and worked as the Marketing Director at the Condo & HOA Law Group, PLLC.

Brendan Galvin

#557800

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (85 years)

Brendan James Galvin is an American poet. His book, Habitat: New and Selected Poems 1965–2005, was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award. Life During forty years of college teaching, he served as Wyndham Robertson Visiting Writer in Residence in the MA program at Hollins University, Coal Royalty Distinguished Writer in Residence in the MFA program at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and Whichard chair in the Humanities at East Carolina University.

Candice F. Ransom

#486751

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (71 years)

Candice F. Ransom is a popular children's and young-adult author. She has written over 150 books as of June 2020, including 18 books for The Boxcar Children series, The Time Spies series and the Sunfire series. She wrote the Dungeons & Dragons novel, Key to the Griffon's Lair . Her work includes picture books, easy readers, middle grade fiction, biographies, and nonfiction. More than 45 of her titles have been translated into 12 languages.

Sandra Doller

#974128

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (49 years)

Sandra Doller is an American poet and writer. Life She attended Amherst College, University of Washington, and University of Chicago. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was awarded the two year Iowa Arts Fellowship.

Ethel Morgan Smith

#1009497

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (71 years)

Ethel Morgan Smith born April 11, 1952 Louisville, Alabama is an American author and associate professor. She first received recognition when her essay Come and Be Black for Me was published in 1997. Ethel Morgan Smith is not a radical; she tries to mediate between black and white as in her contribution to the article in The New York Times shows: Robert Byrd, Living History. Her essay in The New York Times entitled Mother documents her hard life being a young black girl, and the circumstances she was born into. Her book Reflections of the Other: Being Black in Germany was a finalist in the Nex...

Louis D. Rubin Jr.

#473057

Overall Influence

1923 - 2013 (90 years)

Louis Decimus Rubin Jr. was a noted American literary scholar and critic, writing teacher, publisher, and writer. He is credited with helping to establish Southern literature as a recognized area of study within the field of American literature, as well as serving as a teacher and mentor for writers at Hollins College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and for founding Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, a publishing company nationally recognized for fiction by Southern writers. He died in Pittsboro, North Carolina and is buried at the Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim Cemetery in Charl...

Carol Semple

#1157126

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (75 years)

Carol Semple , also known by her married name Carol Semple Thompson, is an American golfer who participated only on the amateur circuit, and never turned pro. Semple was born in Sewickley, Pennsylvania. She is from a prominent golfing family; her father served as president of the United States Golf Association in 1974 and 1975. Her mother played competitive golf and served on various USGA committees for many years. At age 16, Carol Semple won her first tournament by defeating her mother in the finals of the Western Pennsylvania Women's Championship.

Betsy B. Carr

#1442422

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (77 years)

Betsy Brooks Carr is a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, representing the 69th district, which includes part of Richmond and Chesterfield County. She served on the School Board in Richmond, Virginia from 2006 to 2009 before being elected to the Virginia House of Delegates in the 2009 General Election.

Jennifer Berman

#1265797

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (59 years)

Jennifer Ruth Berman is an American sexual health expert, urologist and female sexual medicine specialist. She is also a former co-host on the television show The Doctors. She has been likened to Dr. Ruth Westheimer .

Dorothy R. Burnley

#1445984

Overall Influence

1927 - 2016 (89 years)

Dorothy Rockwell "Dot" Burnley was an American businesswoman and politician. Born in High Point, North Carolina, Burnley graduated from Jefferson High School in Roanoke, Virginia. She went to Hollins College from 1944 to 1946. Burnley was in the furniture business. From 1981 to 1985, Burnley served in the North Carolina House of Representatives and was a Republican. Burnley died in Kingston, New York where she had been living with her family for fifteen years.

Laurence Cornell Becker

#1204638

Overall Influence

Michelle Ann Abate

#2712772

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (48 years)

Zachary Thomas Ingle

#4702919

Overall Influence

A. Katherine Grieb

#1043519

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (74 years)

Anne Katherine "Kathy" Grieb is an American biblical scholar and Episcopal priest. She has taught New Testament at Virginia Theological Seminary since 1994, and is currently Meade Professor in Biblical Interpretation. She previously taught at Bangor Theological Seminary in Maine.

Mary Jane Carmichael

#5966893

Overall Influence

Jian-chao Han

#4255547

Overall Influence

Scott L. Matthews

#5731468

Overall Influence

Richard L. Michalski

#4527869

Overall Influence

Erin S Lavender-Stott

#6173001

Overall Influence

Christopher Michael Florio

#9570609

Overall Influence

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