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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Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Communications,

#651

Cecilia Bartoli

#66135

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Cecilia Bartoli OMRI is an Italian coloratura mezzo-soprano opera singer and recitalist. She is best known for her interpretations of the music of Bellini, Handel, Mozart, Rossini and Vivaldi, as well as for her performances of lesser-known music from the Baroque and Classical period. She is known for singing both soprano and mezzo roles.

#652

Kara DioGuardi

#27970

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Kara Elizabeth DioGuardi is an American songwriter, record producer, music publisher, A&R executive, and singer. She writes music primarily in the pop rock genre. DioGuardi has worked with many popular artists; sales of albums on which her songs appear exceed 160 million worldwide. DioGuardi is a 2011 NAMM Music for Life Award winner, 2009 NMPA Songwriter Icon Award winner, 2007 BMI Pop Songwriter of the Year, and has received 20 BMI Awards for co-writing the most performed songs on the radio.

#653

Gillian Weir

#72090

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Dame Gillian Constance Weir is a New Zealand-British organist. Biography Weir was born in Martinborough, New Zealand, on 17 January 1941. Her parents were Clarice Mildred Foy and Cecil Alexander Weir. She received her schooling at Queen's Park School, Wanganui Intermediate, and Wanganui Girls' College. When she was 19, she was a co-winner of the Auckland Star Piano Competition, playing Mozart. A year later she won a scholarship of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music in London. There, she studied with the concert pianist Cyril Smith and the renowned organist Ralph Downes, and in her second year won the prestigious St.

#654

Elizabeth Jane Lloyd

#71954

Overall Influence

1928 - 1995 (67 years)

Elizabeth Jane Lloyd was a British artist and teacher. As an artist she worked in oils and watercolours, produced murals and also painted film sets. Biography Lloyd was born in London to a well-connected artistic family, her mother was a painter and several relatives were architects, including her grandfather, William Curtis Green. Lloyd attended Queen Anne's School in Caversham and began studying painting at the Chelsea School of Art in 1946. She then studied mural design at the Royal College of Art, RCA, from 1949 to 1952. Before she had even graduated from the RCA Lloyd completed several p...

#655

Claire Hardaker

#78074

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Claire Hardaker is a British linguist. She is senior lecturer at the Department of Linguistics and English Language of Lancaster University, United Kingdom. Her research involves forensic linguistics and corpus linguistics. Her research focuses on deceptive, manipulative, and aggressive language in a range of online data. She has investigated behaviours ranging from trolling and disinformation to human trafficking and online scams. Her research typically uses corpus linguistic methods to approach forensic linguistic analyses.

#656

Whitney "Strix" Beltrán

#59721

Overall Influence

Whitney "Strix" Beltrán is a narrative designer and Project Narrative Director at Hidden Path Entertainment. Her writing and design career includes the indie game Bluebeard's Bride. She also founded the advocacy initiative Gaming as Other to promote inclusivity in the gaming community.

#657

Anne Sofie von Otter

#65813

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Anne Sofie von Otter is a Swedish mezzo-soprano. Her repertoire encompasses lieder, operas, oratorios and also rock and pop songs. Early life Von Otter was born in Stockholm, Sweden. Her father was Göran von Otter, a Swedish diplomat in Berlin during World War II. She grew up in Bonn, London and Stockholm. She studied in Stockholm and at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, where her teachers included Vera Rózsa. In 1982, she won second prize in the ARD International Music Competition.

#658

Gwen Verdon

#41035

Overall Influence

1925 - 2000 (75 years)

Gwyneth Evelyn "Gwen" Verdon was an American actress and dancer. She won four Tony Awards for her musical comedy performances, and she served as an uncredited choreographer's assistant and specialty dance coach for theater and film. Verdon was a critically acclaimed performer on Broadway in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, having originated many roles in musicals, including Lola in Damn Yankees, the title character in Sweet Charity and Roxie Hart in Chicago.

#659

Georgia M. Green

#77337

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Georgia M. Green is an American linguist and academic. She is an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research has focused on pragmatics, speaker intention, word order and meaning. She has been an advisory editor for several linguistics journals or publishers and she serves on the usage committee for the American Heritage Dictionary.

#660

Jill Nelson

#37520

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Jill Nelson is a prominent African-American journalist and novelist. She has written several books, including the autobiographical Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience, which won an American Book Award. She was Professor of Journalism at the City College of New York from 1998 to 2003.

#661

Susan King

#71879

Overall Influence

Susan King is an American journalist and currently the Dean and John Thomas Kerr Distinguished Professor at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Education King received a bachelor's degree in English from Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York in 1969. King then received a master's degree in mass communications from the Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut in 1973, where she is currently a member of the Board of Trustees.

#662

Toby Saks

#66934

Overall Influence

1942 - 2013 (71 years)

Toby Saks was an American cellist, the founder of the Seattle Chamber Music Society and a member of the New York Philharmonic. Music history Born in New York City to an immigrant family, Saks began music lessons at the age of five, first on the piano and then, at age nine, on the cello. She studied at New York's High School of Performing Arts and later at the Juilliard School with Leonard Rose. She gave prize-winning performances at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow and the Casals Competition in Israel. In 1964, she won a Young Concert Artists's award.

#663

Apoorva Mandavilli

#62162

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Apoorva Mandavilli is an American investigative journalist whose work has focused on medical science. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she joined The New York Times as a health and science writer. In the spring of 2019, she was writer-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin, where she joined a panel discussion on vaccine refusal while writing about containing a measles outbreak in Lowell, Massachusetts.

#664

Caroline Heycock

#95523

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Caroline Heycock is a Scottish syntactician and professor of linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. Heycock received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991, with a dissertation entitled Layers of predication: The non-lexical syntax of clauses.

#665

Elizabeth McGovern

Elizabeth McGovern

#53126

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Elizabeth Lee McGovern is a British-American actress. She has received many awards, including a Screen Actors Guild Award, three Golden Globe Award nominations, and one Academy Award nomination. Born in Evanston, Illinois, McGovern spent most of her early life in Los Angeles. After attending the American Conservatory Theater and the Juilliard School, she made her feature film debut in Ordinary People . For her role as Evelyn Nesbit in the musical film Ragtime , she received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She subsequently had lead roles in a number of major stu...

#666

Elizabeth Cowper

#51953

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Elizabeth Cowper is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Toronto. Career She received her PhD from Brown University in 1976. She then took up a position at the University of Toronto, where she remained until she retired from teaching and administration in June 2014. A Workshop on Contrast in Syntax was organized in her honor upon her retirement.

#667

Peggy Speas

#83366

Overall Influence

Margaret "Peggy" Speas is a linguist who works on syntax, specifically evidentiality and Navajo. She is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Speas received her PhD in Linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986. Speas's work focuses on differences between elicitation, documentation and linguistic data analysis on North American Native Languages. She also works with preservation of Navajo and is a founding member of the Navajo Language Academy.

#668

María Olivia Mönckeberg

María Olivia Mönckeberg

#68195

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

María Olivia Mönckeberg Pardo is a Chilean journalist, essayist, and academic. She received the National Prize for Journalism in 2009. She is a full professor at the University of Chile and has been the director of its since 2010. Her work has focused on investigative journalism, and she has written several books which caused great impact at the time of their publication.

#669

Andrea Seabrook

#55056

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Andrea Seabrook is an American journalist reporting in various formats: radio, print, podcast & digital. She is known for her coverage of politics, Congress and the White House, and for her work hosting NPR's signature news programs, All Things Considered, Weekend Edition, Talk of the Nation, and others.

#670

Rosa Manchón

#66439

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Rosa María Manchón Ruiz is a Spanish linguist. She is currently a professor of applied linguistics at the University of Murcia, Spain. Her research focuses on second language acquisition and second language writing. She was the editor of the Journal of Second Language Writing between 2008 and 2014.

#671

Peaches

#45385

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Merrill Nisker , better known by her stage name Peaches, is a Canadian electroclash musician and producer. Born in Ontario, Peaches began her musical career in the 1990s as part of a folk trio, Mermaid Cafe. In 1995, she established a rock band, the Shit. That year she also released her first solo album, Fancypants Hoodlum. After moving to Berlin, Germany, she was signed to the Kitty-Yo label and released her second album, The Teaches of Peaches . Touring as the opening act for bands like Marilyn Manson and Queens of the Stone Age, she subsequently released her third album, Fatherfucker .

#672

Anna Netrebko

#54332

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Anna Yuryevna Netrebko is a Russian and Austrian operatic coloratura soprano who has performed at the Salzburg Festival, Metropolitan Opera, Vienna State Opera, and the Royal Opera. Discovered and promoted by Valery Gergiev, she began her career at the Mariinsky Theatre, collaborating with the conductor in the theater and performances elsewhere. She was noticed globally after playing Donna Anna in Mozart's Don Giovanni at the 2002 Salzburg Festival. She had been known for her rendition of lyric and coloratura soprano roles yet later proceeded into heavier 19th-century romantic roles, such as Leonora in Il trovatore and the role of Lady Macbeth in Macbeth.

#673

Brooke Kroeger

#76769

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Brooke Kroeger is a journalist, writer, and professor emerita at New York University. She has written books on Nellie Bly, Fannie Hurst, and most recently a 2023 book on women in journalism. Education and career Kroeger as a B.S. in journalism and political science from Boston University , and an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University .

#674

M.I.A.

#35480

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam , known by her stage name M.I.A. , is a British rapper, record producer, and singer. Her music combines elements of alternative, dance, electronic, hip hop and world music with electronic instruments and samples.

#675

Adelaide Hall

#45574

Overall Influence

1901 - 1993 (92 years)

Adelaide Louise Hall was an American-born UK-based jazz singer and entertainer. Her career spanned more than 70 years from 1921 until her death. Early in her career, she was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance; she became based in the UK after 1938. Hall entered the Guinness Book of World Records in 2003 as the world's most enduring recording artist, having released material over eight consecutive decades. She performed with major artists such as Art Tatum, Ethel Waters, Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Cab Calloway, Fela Sowande, Rudy Vallee, and Jools Holland, and recorded...

#676

Anna Stroka

#90599

Overall Influence

1923 - 2020 (97 years)

#677

Liz Walker

#34110

Overall Influence

Liz Walker is an American pastor and retired journalist. She was the first black woman to co-anchor a newscast in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. She became the Pastor of the Roxbury Presbyterian Church in 2014.

#678

Susan Alexander-Max

#77904

Overall Influence

Susan Alexander-Max was an American-born British fortepianist best known for her period performances of baroque and classical music. A graduate of the Juilliard School of Music, she later studied with Ilona Kabos in London. She was a member of the period-instrument chamber group The Music Collection, with Simon Standage and Jennifer Ward Clarke . She was also a professor of piano at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.

#679

Ruby Dee

#30844

Overall Influence

1922 - 2014 (92 years)

Ruby Dee was an American actress, poet, playwright, screenwriter, journalist, and civil rights activist. She originated the role of "Ruth Younger" in the stage and film versions of A Raisin in the Sun . Her other notable film roles include The Jackie Robinson Story and Do the Right Thing .

#680

Lita Ford

#37419

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Lita Rossana Ford is an American guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter. She was the lead guitarist for the all-female rock band the Runaways in the late 1970s, and then embarked on a successful glam metal solo career that hit its peak in the late 1980s. The 1989 single "Close My Eyes Forever", a duet with Ozzy Osbourne, remains Ford's most successful song, reaching No. 8 on the US Billboard Hot 100.

#681

Deborah Nelson

#71612

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Deborah Nelson is a Pulitzer prize-winning freelance journalist at Reuters and the Associate Professor of Investigative Reporting at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.

#682

Marit Westergaard

#84594

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Marit Kristine Richardsen Westergaard is a Norwegian linguist, known for her work on child language acquisition and multilingualism. She defended her PhD thesis The Development of Word Order in Norwegian Child Language: The Interaction of Input and Economy Principles in the Acquisition of V2 at the University of Tromsø in 2005. She was hired as a professor at the University of Tromsø in 2009, and also has held an adjunct professor position at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology since 2015. She has been a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters since 2016.

#683

Perri Klass

#43935

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Perri Klass is an American pediatrician and writer who has published extensively about her medical training and pediatric practice. Among her subjects have been the issues of women in medicine, relationships between doctors and patients, and children and literacy. She is the author of both fiction and nonfiction novels, stories, essays, and journalism. Klass is Professor of Journalism and Pediatrics at New York University, and Medical Director of Reach Out and Read, a national childhood literacy program that works through doctors and nurses to encourage parents to read aloud to young children, and to give them the books they need to do it.

#684

Beverly Derewianka

#69237

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Beverly Derewianka is Emeritus Professor of linguistics at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She is a leading figure in educational linguistics and Sydney School genre pedagogy. Her major research contributions have been in the field of literacy education. Her research projects tracing students’ literacy development have had a direct and substantial impact on curriculum and syllabus development in Australia and internationally. She has authored 11 books and numerous book chapters and journal articles in the field of literacy education.

#685

Lucille Tenazas

#87526

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Lucille Tenazas is a graphic designer, educator, and the founder of Tenazas Design. Her work consists of layered imagery and typography, focusing on the importance of language. She was born in Manila, Philippines, yet has spent a large portion of her life practicing in the United States.

#686

Victoria de los Ángeles

Victoria de los Ángeles

#73345

Overall Influence

1923 - 2005 (82 years)

Victoria de los Ángeles López García was a Catalan Spanish operatic lyric soprano and recitalist whose career began after the Second World War and reached its height in the years from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s.

#687

Denise Welch

#74042

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Jacqueline Denise Welch is an English actress, television personality, writer and broadcaster. Her roles include Natalie Barnes in Coronation Street , Steph Haydock in Waterloo Road , and Trish Minniver in Hollyoaks . Welch also appears as a regular panellist on the ITV chat show Loose Women .

#688

Jila Ghomeshi

#81259

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Jila Ghomeshi is a Persian-Canadian linguist. She earned her Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Toronto, under the supervision of Diane Massam. She is currently a professor of linguistics at the University of Manitoba, where she has been since 1998.

#689

Geneva Overholser

#68422

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Geneva Overholser is a journalism consultant and adviser. A former editor of the Des Moines Register now living in New York City, Overholser speaks and writes about the future of journalism. She advises numerous organizations, including the Trust Project, Report for America, SciLine, the Democracy Fund and the Public Face of Science project at the Academy of American Arts and Sciences. She serves on the boards of the Rita Allen Foundation, Northwestern University in Qatar and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism Foundation.

#690

Mary Bucholtz

#52098

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Mary Bucholtz is professor of linguistics at UC Santa Barbara. Bucholtz's work focuses largely on language use in the United States, and specifically on issues of language and youth; language, gender, and sexuality; African American English; and Mexican and Chicano Spanish.

#691

A'Lelia Bundles

A'Lelia Bundles

#50438

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

A'Lelia Perry Bundles is an American journalist, news producer and author, known for her 2001 biography of her great-great-grandmother Madam C. J. Walker. Family and early life A'Lelia Bundles grew up in Indianapolis in a family of civic minded business executives. She was named after her great-grandmother A'Lelia Walker , a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance and daughter of entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker. Bundles' mother, A'Lelia Mae Perry Bundles , vice president of the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company and active in local and state Democratic politics, also served as a member...

#692

Marta Dynel

#81235

Overall Influence

Marta Dynel is a Polish linguist and professor at Łódź University, Poland. She is known for her works on pragmatics and is the editor-in-chief of the journal Lingua. Career Marta Dynel received her PhD from Łódź University, followed by habilitation in 2012 and a full professor degree in 2022. She is affiliated with the University of Łódź and Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, holding two research fellow positions. Since the beginning of her academic career, she has studied humour, irony, impoliteness and deception from both theoretical and empirical angles, based on film discourse and s...

#693

Laura Brown

#60028

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Laura Brown is an Australian fashion journalist. She is a former editor-in-chief of InStyle magazine and former Features/Special Projects and executive director of Harper's Bazaar magazine. She graduated from Charles Sturt University, where she received a B.A. in arts and communications.

#694

Arienne Dwyer

#46266

Overall Influence

Early and personal life Arienne Dwyer is the daughter of flutist Doriot Anthony Dwyer, and a descendant of women's rights activist Susan B. Anthony. Career Arienne Dwyer has been a professor of Linguistic Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kansas since 2001. She is also an affiliate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington. In 2010 she co-founded KU's Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities., and co-directed it until 2018.

#695

Lisa Beznosiuk

#97159

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Lisa Beznosiuk is an English flautist of Ukrainian and Irish descent, specializing in period performance of baroque and classical music on historical flutes. Biography and career Lisa Beznosiuk trained at the Guildhall School of Music in London, England. She studied modern flute with Kathryn Lukas and wooden flute with Stephen Preston, which developed her interest in early period instruments. She made her solo London debut in 1983. She has been a member of period-instrument orchestras The English Concert, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the English Baroque Soloists, The Academy of Ancient Music, the London Classical Players and New London Consort.

#696

Sandra Dee

#53134

Overall Influence

1942 - 2005 (63 years)

Sandra Dee was an American actress. Dee began her career as a child model, working first in commercials and then film in her teenage years. Best known for her portrayal of ingénues, Dee earned a Golden Globe Award as one of the year's most promising newcomers for her performance in Robert Wise's Until They Sail . She became a teenage star for her performances in Imitation of Life and Gidget , which made her a household name.

#697

Penny Marshall

#38575

Overall Influence

1943 - 2018 (75 years)

Carole Penny Marshall was an American actress, director and producer. She is known for her role as Laverne DeFazio on the television sitcom Laverne & Shirley , receiving three nominations for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Television Series Musical or Comedy for her portrayal.

#698

Elisa Pérez Vera

#27534

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Elisa Pérez Vera is a Spanish jurist, a professor of Private International Law at the National University of Distance Education and magistrate of the Constitutional Court of Spain from 2001 to 2012. In 1982 she was appointed Rector of the UNED, becoming the first woman rector at a Spanish public university. The UNED has instituted the Elisa Pérez Vera Award to recognize research work on gender or feminism.

#699

Joan Donaldson

#83874

Overall Influence

1946 - 2006 (60 years)

Joan Marsha Donaldson was a Canadian journalist, and was the founding head of CBC Newsworld . She came to Newsworld from CBC's main network. Biography Born in Toronto, Donaldson first joined the CBC in 1967 as an editor with National Radio News. During her time with CBC Radio, she served as Senior Editor of The World at Six, Sunday Morning Magazine and various news specials. She reported from Viet Nam during the war, and later produced Michael Maclear's Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War, a series of documentary films on the conflict. In 1971, Donaldson went to CBC Winnipeg as the producer of...

#700

Alicja Sakaguchi

Alicja Sakaguchi

#63743

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Alicja Sakaguchi is a linguist and university professor in the fields of Esperanto and interlinguistics. Biography Alicja Sakaguchi earned a master's degree after studying Hungarian and Esperantology at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest ; she completed her doctorate in 1982. From 1981 to 1985 she was a lecturer at the University of Paderborn, then from 1986 to 1998 at the Goethe University Frankfurt. She received her habilitation in 2000 after publishing a book on interlinguistics. From 2001 to 2002 she was assistant professor of modern languages at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań; s...

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