The Most Influential People Across History

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 female people in Anthropology,

#551

Laurie Godfrey

#110312
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Laurie R. Godfrey is an American paleontologist and physical anthropologist. She is emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research has focused on the evolutionary history of the present-day lemur populations of Madagascar. An outspoken critic of creationism and advocate for the teaching of evolution in schools, she has edited three books on the subject: Scientists Confront Creationism , What Darwin Began: Modern Darwinian and Non-Darwinian Perspectives on Evolution , and Scientists Confront Intelligent Design and Creationism .
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#552

Hallie Buckley

#126151
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Hallie Ruth Buckley is a New Zealand bioarchaeologist and professor at the University of Otago. Career Buckley completed her PhD at the University of Otago in 2001, with a thesis titled Health and disease in the prehistoric Pacific Islands. She then joined the faculty at Otago, and was appointed a full professor in 2017.
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#553

Janis Nuckolls

#128937
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Janis Nuckolls is an American anthropological linguist and professor of linguistics and English language at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. She has spent many years doing field research, with a primary focus on the Amazonian Quichua people in Ecuador and their endangered language.
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#554

Linda S. Cordell

#157759
Overall Influence
1943 - 2013 (70 years)
Linda Sue Cordell was an American archaeologist and anthropologist. She was a leading researcher of the archaeology of the Southwest United States and Ancestral Pueblo communities. She authored a number of notable books familiar to both the general public and scholars, including the Prehistory of the Southwest. Cordell was well recognized for her mentorship and leadership in the field; she received many awards and honors throughout her career, including being elected to the National Academies of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an endowed Peabody Award was named in ...
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#555

Peggy Brunache

#111715
Overall Influence
Peggy Brunache is a Haitian American food historian and archaeologist. She currently lives in Perth and lectures at the University of Glasgow on the History of Atlantic slavery. Brunache has contributed to various BBC programs and is involved with an annual food festival in Perth called the Southern Fried Food Festival.
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#556

María del Pilar León-Castro Alonso

#117699
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
María del Pilar León-Castro Alonso is a Spanish archaeologist and historian, as well as an academician of the Real Academia de la Historia. In 1969, León-Castro Alonso graduated in arts from the University of Seville with honors and received her doctorate there in 1974. She studied under Antonio Blanco Freijeiro, and extended her studies in Bonn by a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She also spent two years conducting research at the Institute of Archaeology Rodrigo Caro Spanish National Research Council. Her research has included Roman Córdoba. Previously a professor at the ...
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#557

Juliet Morrow

#168117
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Juliet Morrow is an American archaeologist and a professor of Anthropology at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Education and career Morrow was born Juliet Elizabeth Remley in St. Louis, Missouri on April 5, 1962. She graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with BA degrees in geology and anthropology in 1987. She went on to receive an MA and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis as well. In 1998 she founded the Central Mississippi Valley Archaeological Society.
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#558

Elizabeth French

#50723
Overall Influence
1931 - 2021 (90 years)
Elizabeth Bayard French, FSA , also known as Lisa French, was a British archaeologist and academic, specialising in Mycenaean Greece, especially pottery and terracotta figurines and the site of Mycenae. She was the first woman to serve as director of the British School at Athens .
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#559

Alex Bayliss

#91261
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Alexandra Bayliss is a British archaeologist and academic. She is Head of Scientific Dating at Historic England, and a part-time Professor of Archaeological Science at the University of Stirling in Scotland. Her research focuses on the construction of exact chronologies of European Neolithic archaeological sites, through the application of Bayesian statistical modelling of radiocarbon dates.
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#560

Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich

#129896
Overall Influence
Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich is a Professor of Anthropology at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and Head of School of Social and Cultural Studies. Education Born in Northeim , studied Cultural Anthropology, Art History, Archaeology and History of Science at the University of Göttingen 1982–1987, graduated with a M.A. 1987 and got her PhD in 1994 from the University of Marburg with a scholarship by the Immanuel-Kant-Foundation. She was awarded her Dr. phil. habil. in 2000 for a project on German migration to New Zealand. She has worked on independent research projects and lectured at universities in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and New Zealand.
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#561

Nora Ahlberg

#110998
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Nora Louise Ahlberg is a Norwegian psychologist. She was Professor of Psychology at the University of Oslo and Director of the Psychosocial Centre for Refugees and later Director of the Norwegian Centre for Migration and Minority Health, a government agency that is now part of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.
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#562

Zhang Dongju

#29185
Overall Influence
Zhang Dongju is a Chinese archeologist and an associate professor at the College of Earth and Environmental Sciences of Lanzhou University. Zhang's research determined that the Xiahe mandible found in the Baishiya Karst Cave on the Tibetan Plateau shared DNA with fossilized remains found in the Denisova Cave in Siberia. This moved to 120,000 years earlier the dates of earliest proven hominin activities in the Tibetan Plateau, and revealed for the first time that the Denisovan hominins had spread throughout Asia rather than being located only near the Denisova Cave. Zhang's work is considered likely to prompt reconsideration of other fossil remains using ancient protein analysis.
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#563

Pegi Vail

#68942
Overall Influence
Pegi Vail is an American anthropologist, documentary filmmaker, and curator at New York University. Career A former Fulbright Scholar, Vail began as a visual artist and museum educator. Receiving her Ph.D. at NYU in Sociocultural Anthropology in 2004, Vail's dissertation focused on the "backpacker subculture," travel narratives and the 'gentrification' of the Bolivian tourism industry, a topic she would return to in her award-winning feature-length documentary film, Gringo Trails. Upon its release, Gringo Trails was featured in a number of international publications, including The Hollywood Reporter, Condé Nast, Der Spiegel, and Globo.
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#564

Monica L. Smith

#159703
Overall Influence
Monica Louise Smith is an American archaeologist, anthropologist, and historian of ancient cities and their household activities. She is Professor and Navin and Pratima Doshi Chair in Indian Studies in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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#565

Blaga Aleksova

#159039
Overall Influence
1922 - 2007 (85 years)
Blaga Aleksova was a Macedonian archaeologist. Bibliography She graduated from high school and studied at the Art History Department of the Saints Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. She obtained her doctorate in medieval archeology in 1958 at the University of Lublin. In the years 1948–1950 she worked as a curator at the Skopje City Museum, and then for 15 years managed the Department of Medieval Archeology at the Archeological Museum. In 1962–1975 she was the director of this museum. In 1971 and 1983 she was a scholarship holder at Dumbarton Oaks. In the years 1975–1983 she worked at the Institute of Art History as a professor of medieval and early Christian archeology.
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#566

Alexandra Brewis Slade

#56990
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Alexandra Brewis Slade is a New Zealand-American anthropologist and professor who studies how health reflects the interaction of human biology and culture. as well as an advocate for a reduction in global health stigma.
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#567

Lynne Goldstein

#123341
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Lynne Goldstein is an American archaeologist, known for her work in mortuary analysis, Midwestern archaeology, campus archaeology, repatriation policy, and archaeology and social media. She is a professor of anthropology at Michigan State University and was the editor of American Antiquity between 1995 and 2000.
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#568

Melinda S. Allen

#169833
Overall Influence
Melinda S. Allen is an American–New Zealand archaeologist. She is currently a full professor at the University of Auckland. Academic career Melinda gained her BA in anthropology and biology from the University of Arizona, followed by her Master of Arts in anthropology from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. After a PhD titled 'Dynamic landscapes and human subsistence: Archaeological investigations on Aitutaki Island, southern Cook Islands' at the University of Washington , Allen moved to the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum. In 1996 she took up a position as lecturer at the University of Auckla...
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#569

Helena Hamerow

#69452
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Helena Francisca Hamerow, is an American archaeologist, best known for her work on the archeology of early medieval communities in Northwestern Europe. She is Professor of Early Medieval archaeology and former Head of the School of Archaeology, University of Oxford.
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#570

Hanna Snellman

#170937
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Hanna Kyllikki Snellmann is Professor of Ethnology and Vice-rector at the University of Helsinki. The focus of her research is on migration within and from the Arctic. Career Snellmann completed her PhD in ethnology at the University of Helsinki in 1997. From 2004 to 2007 she was a research fellow with the Academy of Finland. In 2007 and 2008 she worked at the Lakehead University and the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki. From 2009 to 2012 she was Professor of Ethnology at the University of Jyväskylä, leaving this post in 2014 to take up her current role ...
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#571

Robyn Rodriguez

Robyn Rodriguez
#41612
Overall Influence
Robyn Magalit Rodriguez is an Filipina American professor, author, and activist. She is currently a professor and chair of the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis. In 2018, Rodriguez founded the Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies; which is noted to be the first Filipino Studies center in the United States. She is a former associate professor at Rutgers.
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#572

Katja Werthmann

#45192
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Katja Werthmann is a German ethnologist with a regional focus on West Africa. She is a professor for 'Society, politics and economy of Africa' at the Institute for African Studies at the University of Leipzig. K. Werthmann conducts research in Anglophone and Francophone Africa on the handling of material and symbolic resources in the context of spatial and social mobility in contemporary Africa. She has made contributions to political, economic, religious and urban ethnology. After the Doctorate at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Habilitation at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz she taught at universities in Germany , Switzerland and Sweden .
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#573

Sonia Nimr

#70951
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Sonia Nimr is a Palestinian writer, storyteller, translator, ethnographer and academic. She writes for children and youth in Arabic and English, and relates folk-tales in colloquial Arabic. She is the winner of the 2014 Etisalat Award for Arabic Children's Literature for Best Young Adult Book for her book Extraordinary Journeys to Unknown Places. Nimr is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Birzeit University.
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#574

Frédérique Apffel-Marglin

#65268
Overall Influence
Frédérique Apffel-Marglin is a professor emerita of anthropology. She taught at Smith College in Massachusetts. Life Apffel-Marglin finished high school at the Lycée Regnault, Tangier, Morocco. She received both her B.A. and her Ph.D. from Brandeis University.
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#575

Joanna Sofaer

#173126
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Joanna Rachel Sofaer Derevenski , known as Joanna Sofaer, is a British archaeologist and academic, who specialises in the European Bronze Age, using theoretical approaches, and material culture studies. She is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton.
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#576

Hester A. Davis

Hester A. Davis
#92507
Overall Influence
1930 - 2014 (84 years)
Hester A. Davis was an American archaeologist. Arkansas' first State Archaeologist, she was instrumental in creating national public policy and conservancy standards for cultural preservation as well as developing professional and ethical standards for archaeologists. She was the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including two distinguished service awards and induction into the Arkansas Women's Hall of Fame.
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#577

Katie Hinde

Katie Hinde
#97555
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Katherine Hinde is an Associate Professor of Evolutionary Biology and Senior Sustainability Scientist at Arizona State University, where she researches lactation. She is also a science writer and science communicator.
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#578

Marlene Dobkin de Rios

#83357
Overall Influence
1939 - 2012 (73 years)
Marlene Dobkin de Rios was an American cultural anthropologist, medical anthropologist, and psychotherapist. She conducted fieldwork in the Amazon for almost 30 years. Her research included the use of entheogenic plants by the indigenous peoples of Peru.
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#579

Andrea Cornwall

#145915
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Andrea Cornwall is Professor of Global Development and Anthropology at King's College London. Professional career Andrea Cornwall is a political anthropologist who specialises in the anthropology of gender and sexuality, citizen participation and participatory research.
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#580

Corinne Hofman

Corinne Hofman
#66855
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Corinne Lisette Hofman FBA is a Dutch professor of Caribbean Archaeology at Leiden University since 2007. She was a winner of the 2014 Spinoza Prize. Hofman was born in Wassenaar. She obtained a PhD at Leiden University in 1993.
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#581

Clarisa Hardy

#149178
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Clarisa Rut Hardy Raskovan is an Argentinian-born psychologist, anthropologist, writer and politician from Chile, Minister for Social Development and Planning during the first term of Michelle Bachelet.
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#582

Rosemary J. Coombe

#111372
Overall Influence
Rosemary J. Coombe is a Canadian anthropologist and lawyer, She is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Law, Communication and Cultural Studies. Previously, she was a full professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto.
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#583

Anne Stone

Anne Stone
#81586
Overall Influence
Anne C. Stone is an American anthropological geneticist and a Regents' Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on population history and understanding how humans and the great apes have adapted to their environments, including their disease and dietary environments. Stone is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences.
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#584

Raminder Kaur

#156431
Overall Influence
Raminder Kaur is a Professor of Anthropology and Cultural Studies in the Departments of Anthropology and International Development at the University of Sussex. She has conducted fieldwork in India and Britain researching topics such as migration, race/ethnicity/gender, the creative arts, heritage, public culture, aesthetics, censorship, human rights, religion and politics, public representations of, and the socio-political, health and environmental implications of nuclear developments, and 'cultures of sustainability'.
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#585

Sonia Chadwick Hawkes

#80999
Overall Influence
1933 - 1999 (66 years)
Sonia Chadwick Hawkes, was a leading specialist in early Anglo-Saxon archaeology, described by fellow medieval archaeologist Paul Ashbee as a "discerning systematiser of the great array of Anglo-Saxon grave furnishings". She led major excavations on Anglo-Saxon cemeteries at Finglesham in Kent and Worthy Park in Hampshire.
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#586

Nicole Boivin

#109613
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Nicole Lise Boivin is an archaeologist and former director of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. Education and career Boivin has a BSc in cellular, molecular and microbial biology from the University of Calgary , and an MPhil and PhD in archaeology from the University of Cambridge. Following her PhD she held a Fyssen Foundation postdoctoral research fellowship at Université de Paris X and CNRS in 2005, and a research fellowship at the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies in Cambridge . This was followed by a senior research fellowship at the University of Oxford.
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#587

Elisabeth Schmid

#74993
Overall Influence
1912 - 1994 (82 years)
Elisabeth Schmid was a German archaeologist and osteologist. She is best known for her work concerning the prehistoric statue, the lion-man, and for her book, Atlas of Animal Bones. Early life and career Schmid was born in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1912 and graduated with a PhD from the University of Freiburg.
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#588

Antoinette Jackson

#171257
Overall Influence
Antoinette T. Jackson is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Her research focusses on sociocultural and historical anthropology, the social construction of race, class, gender, ethnicity; heritage resource management, and American, African American and African Diaspora culture.
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#589

Penelope Wilson

#50876
Overall Influence
Penelope Wilson is a British lecturer of Egyptology in the Department of Archaeology at Durham University, UK. She is a member of the Centre for the Study of the Ancient Mediterranean and the Near East. She is also the field director of the joint Durham University/Egypt Exploration Society/Supreme Council of Antiquities project at Sais, Egypt.
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#590

Margaret Orbell

#104654
Overall Influence
1934 - 2006 (72 years)
Margaret Rose Orbell was a New Zealand author, editor and academic. She was an associate professor of Māori at the University of Canterbury from 1976 to 1994. During her career, Orbell wrote several books on Māori literature and culture, edited numerous collections of songs, poetry and stories, and brought Māori works to a wider and international audience. She was an editor of bilingual magazine Te Ao Hou / The New World in the 1960s, and expanded the magazine's literary and historical content. In 2002, she was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to Māori an...
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#592

Kari Bruwelheide

#164531
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Kari Bruwelheide is an American archaeologist and anthropologist. She is known for her work as a physical anthropologist, bioarchaeologist, and forensic anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.
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#593

Karen Chin

#65702
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Karen Chin is an American paleontologist and taphonomist who is considered one of the world's leading experts in coprolites. Biography Chin loved studying living things as a child, and enjoyed memorizing the names of species that she read about. As a college student, she worked as a nature interpreter for the National Park Service.
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#594

Joyce Tyldesley

Joyce Tyldesley
#36603
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Joyce Ann Tyldesley is a British archaeologist and Egyptologist, academic, writer and broadcaster who specialises in the women of ancient Egypt. She was interviewed on the TV series 'Cunk on Earth', about Egypt's pyramids, in 2022.
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#595

Susan A. Phillips

#54139
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Susan A. Phillips is an American anthropologist and criminologist who works as a professor of environmental analysis at Pitzer College. She is known for research on graffiti, and her books on gangs and graffiti.
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#596

Andrée Rosenfeld

#87812
Overall Influence
1934 - 2008 (74 years)
Andrée Jeanne Rosenfeld FAHA was an archaeologist specialising in rock art. Early life and education Rosenfeld was born in 1934 in Liège, Belgium, the daughter of the physicists Yvonne and Léon Rosenfelds. After the Second World War the family moved to Manchester. She studied for a BSc in physics at Bristol University in 1956, where she took up caving. Rosenfeld studied for a Master of Science and then obtained a PhD in 1960 from the Institute of Archaeology, with a thesis on the sedimentology of caves from sites in Devon supervised by Frederick Zeuner. During her postgraduate research she ex...
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#597

Bianca Christel Williams

#174873
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (45 years)
Bianca Williams is an American cultural anthropologist, feminist, author and academic, whose work centers on Black Americans. Dr. Williams is an associate professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the . She earned her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D from Duke University. She went on to earn a graduate certificate in African and African American Studies as well. She has researched extensively the emotional labor undertaken by black women, feminist pedagogies, black feminist leadership, and emotional labor in higher education workplaces. She began teaching at the University of Colorado Boulder, w...
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#598

Gwendolyn Leick

#66999
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Gwendolyn Leick was an Austrian-born British historian and Assyriologist who wrote multiple books and encyclopedias in English about ancient Mesopotamia. Early life Gwendolyn Leick was born on 25 February 1951 in Oberaichwald, Austria, to parents Reginald and Herta Leick. Her father was a physician and her mother was a social worker.
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#599

Isabel Behncke

Isabel Behncke
#108617
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (49 years)
Isabel Behncke Izquierdo is a field ethologist who studies animal behaviour to understand other animals, as well as to understand humans and our place in nature. Originally from Chile, she is a primatologist, a pioneer adventurer-scientist and the first South American in following great apes in the wild. Behncke is currently director of the Centro de Estudios Públicos , and advisor to the Chilean government, working on long-term strategies in science, technology, innovation and knowledge as a member of the National Council of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation for Development , of t...
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#600

Halyna Lozko

Halyna Lozko
#22948
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Halyna Lozko is Ukrainian ethnologist, theologian and neopagan leader. In 1993 she founded the group Pravoslavia in Kyiv, which adheres to Slavic Native Faith in the tradition established by Volodymyr Shaian. Lozko also co-founded the Native Faith Association of Ukraine , founded in 1998 and registered on 24 May 2001.
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