You can often find experts on any topic in universities. You can find these people by looking at the institutes “staff” pages. Alternatively, you can also search these people up by subject area, and whatever department their expertise is likely to fall under. Once you have found an expert in the subject you’re interested in you can often see a list of their degrees and any other credentials, their areas of interest and expertise, and also often you’ll be able to find a pdf of their CV or a list of their professional and academic memberships, awards they have won, papers they have published and conferences that they have presented at. Sometimes they also include links to their GitHub pages if they have one. Additionally, some of these experts are not super good with their personal privacy/security, often because there is so much information about them online, you can end up finding their personal email addresses, or phone numbers - if you want to contact them that directly, but you shouldn’t need to as most of them also have email addresses through their institute where you can reach out (which you should only do if you have a serious inquiry, don’t waste people’s time). You can often find that these people also hold positions in other organisations, and find their LinkedIn pages and other social media, if you’re feeling extra stalker-ish. You can sometimes see journals they have peer reviewed, or been editors of etc… From there, if you so wish to, you can decide if they’re truely influential and “expert” enough by looking at the peer reviewed journals they have been published in, and have a look at things such as the impact factor for the journal. Additionally, you can often find that these experts have google scholar profiles (or similar) that list how many times an expert has been cited.
These are some of the ways to decide if someone is credible.
That’s how you find an expert, IMO.
