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 Communications,
#1101
Judith Becker
#42827
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (93 years)
Judith O. Becker is an American academic and educator. She is a scholar of the musical and religious cultures of South and Southeast Asia, the Islamic world and the Americas. Her work combines linguistic, musical, anthropological, and empirical perspectives. As an ethnomusicologist and Southeast Asianist, she is noted for her study of musics in South and Southeast Asia, including Javanese gamelan, Burmese harp, music and trance, music and emotion, neuroscience, and a theoretical rapprochement of empirical and qualitative methods. Becker teaches at the University of Michigan. In 2000, Becker w...
Go to Profile#1102
Anastasia Giannakidou
#119644
Overall Influence
Anastasia Giannakidou is a professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago. She is co-director of Center for Gesture, Sign and Language at the University of Chicago, along with Diane Brentari and Susan Goldin-Meadow. She is best known for her work on nonveridicality, a theory of the licensing of polarity items.
Go to Profile#1103
Sheila Jordan
#85210
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (97 years)
Sheila Jordan is an American jazz singer and songwriter. She has recorded as a session musician with an array of critically acclaimed artists in addition to recording her own albums. Jordan pioneered a bebop and scat jazz singing style with an upright bass as the only accompaniment. Jordan's music has earned praise from many critics, particularly for her ability to improvise lyrics; Scott Yanow describes her as "one of the most consistently creative of all jazz singers." Charlie Parker often introduced Jordan as "the lady with the million dollar ears."
Go to Profile#1104
Clydie King
#68229
Overall Influence
1943 - 2019 (76 years)
Clydie Mae King was an American singer, best known for her session work as a backing vocalist. King also recorded solo under her name. In the 1970s, she recorded as Brown Sugar, and her single "Loneliness " reached No. 44 on the Billboard R&B charts in 1973.
Go to Profile#1105
June Carter Cash
#49621
Overall Influence
1929 - 2003 (74 years)
Valerie June Carter Cash was an American singer, songwriter and dancer. A five-time Grammy award-winner, she was a member of the Carter Family and the second wife of singer Johnny Cash. Prior to her marriage to Cash, she was professionally known as June Carter and continued to be credited as such even after her marriage . She played guitar, banjo, harmonica, and autoharp, and acted in several films and television shows. Carter Cash won five Grammy Awards and was inducted into the Christian Music Hall of Fame in 2009.
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Lauren Gawne
#111309
Overall Influence
Lauren Gawne is a linguistics researcher and academic communicator, most known for her work on gestural languages and in the linguistics of emoji. Early life and education Lauren Gawne was educated at the University of Melbourne, studying a BA in linguistics and art history and subsequently a linguistics PhD under the supervision of Barbara Kelly and Rachel Nordlinger which she received in 2013.
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Lydia Mordkovitch
#100973
Overall Influence
1944 - 2014 (70 years)
Lydia Mordkovitch was a Russian violinist. Lydia was born in Saratov, Russia, on 30 April 1944. She returned with her parents to Kishinev after the war. In 1960, she moved to Odessa, where she studied at the Stolyarsky School of Music until 1962. She then moved to Moscow where she studied at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory under David Oistrakh, later serving as his assistant from 1968 to 1970. During this period, she married and had a daughter, and won the National Young Musicians Competition in Kiev in 1967 and the Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibaud Competition in Paris in 1969.
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Ellen Peters
#82425
Overall Influence
Ellen Peters is an American academic and the Philip H. Knight Chair, Director of the Center for Science Communication Research, and Professor both in the School of Journalism and Communication and in Psychology at the University of Oregon. She is also an associate in the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact. Prior to moving to the University of Oregon in 2019, she spent nine years in the psychology department at The Ohio State University where she was a Distinguished Professor. She also directed the Decision Sciences Collaborative in the College of Arts and Science ...
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Constance Bumgarner Gee
#37884
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Constance Bumgarner Gee is an American scholar, memoirist, animal rights activist, and advocate of the medical use of cannabis. She was the founder and director of the Arts Policy and Administration Program at The Ohio State University, and later an assistant professor at Brown University and tenured associate professor at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Higher Education: Marijuana at the Mansion, a 2012 memoir about her life as "first lady" of several American research universities, in which she writes of the no-holds barred corporate maneuverings of university leadership and hypo...
Go to Profile#1110
Marge Champion
#83032
Overall Influence
1919 - 2020 (101 years)
Marjorie Celeste Champion was an American dancer and actress. At fourteen, she was hired as a dance model for Walt Disney Studios animated films. Later, she performed as an actress and dancer in film musicals, and in 1957 had a television show based on song and dance. She also did creative choreography for liturgy, and served as a dialogue and movement coach for the 1978 TV miniseries, The Awakening Land, set in the late 18th century in the Ohio Valley.
Go to Profile#1111
Elena Obraztsova
#95607
Overall Influence
1939 - 2015 (76 years)
Elena Vasilyevna Obraztsova was a Soviet and Russian mezzo-soprano. She was awarded the People's Artist of the USSR in 1976 and Hero of Socialist Labour in 1990. Life As a child, Obraztsova lived in Leningrad through the severe long siege during World War II. In 1948, at the age of nine, she began singing in the children's chorus of the Pioneers Palace in Leningrad.
Go to Profile#1112
Amanda D. Lotz
#70380
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Amanda D. Lotz is an American educator, television scholar, and media scholar based in Australia since 2019. She is known for her research in television studies, digital disruption, the economics of television and media companies, and also popularizing the terms network era, post-network era, and the multi-channel transition describing the television industry's transition to cable and to internet distribution.
Go to Profile#1113
Molissa Fenley
#61170
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Molissa Fenley is an American choreographer, performer and teacher of contemporary dance. Early life and education Molissa Fenley was born in Las Vegas, Nevada on November 15, 1954. She is the youngest of three children born to Eileen Allison Walker and John Morris Fenley. At the age of six months Fenley and her family moved to Ithaca, NY where her father was a professor of Agricultural Extension at Cornell University. At the age of six, her family moved to Ibadan, Nigeria where her father worked for the US State Department's USAID program. Fenley attended high school in Spain, and at 16 returned to the US where she received her BA in Dance from Mills College in 1975.
Go to Profile#1114
Antonella Lualdi
#99256
Overall Influence
1931 - 2023 (92 years)
Antonella Lualdi was an Italian actress and singer. She appeared in many Italian and French films in the 1950s and 1960s, notably in Claude Autant-Lara's film The Red and the Black in 1954. Life and career Lualdi began her career in 1949, after having won a contest for new talents of the cinema magazine Hollywood, in which she was presented as "Signorina X" , inviting the readers to choose her stage name.
Go to Profile#1115
Yvonne Craig
#56446
Overall Influence
1937 - 2015 (78 years)
Yvonne Joyce Craig was an American actress who was renowned for her role as Barbara Gordon/Batgirl in the 1960s television series Batman. Other notable roles in her career include Dorothy Johnson in the 1963 movie It Happened at the World's Fair, Azalea Tatum in the 1964 movie Kissin' Cousins and as the green-skinned Orion Marta in the Star Trek episode "Whom Gods Destroy" .
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Sandra Chung
#113230
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Sandra Chung is an American linguist and distinguished professor emerita at the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on Austronesian languages and syntax.
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Kay Walsh
#89101
Overall Influence
1911 - 2005 (94 years)
Kathleen "Kay" Walsh was an English actress, dancer, and screenwriter. Her film career prospered after she met her future husband film director David Lean, with whom she worked on prestige productions such as In Which We Serve and Oliver Twist.
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Ellen Wartella
#77838
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Ellen A. Wartella is a leading scholar of the role of media in children's development. She is the chair and professor of communication, director of Northwestern University's Center on Media and Human Development, and an adviser for the review at Northwestern University. She studies social policy, media studies, psychology, and child development at the University. She believes that smartphones are disruptive in a way that's different from earlier technology.
Go to Profile#1119
Anita Kerr
#79325
Overall Influence
1927 - 2022 (95 years)
Anita Jean Kerr was an American singer, arranger, composer, conductor, pianist, and music producer. She recorded and performed with her vocal harmony groups in Nashville, Los Angeles, and Europe. Career
Go to Profile#1120
Emma Sulkowicz
#42316
Overall Influence
1992 - Present (33 years)
Emma Sulkowicz is best known as a political activist and performance artist. While still a college student, Sulkowicz developed a national reputation with the performance artwork Mattress Performance . In 2019, she said she had stopped making art and began a master's program in traditional Chinese medicine.
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Natalie Cassidy
#96841
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (42 years)
Natalie Ann Cassidy is an English actress. She has played Sonia Fowler in EastEnders since 1993, appeared in the BBC Two sitcom-horror Psychoville and was a contestant on the seventh series of Strictly Come Dancing and the ninth series of Celebrity Big Brother.
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Joanne Dru
#81130
Overall Influence
1922 - 1996 (74 years)
Joanne Dru was an American film and television actress, known for such films as Red River, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, All the King's Men, and Wagon Master. Career Born in Logan, West Virginia, Dru moved to New York City in 1940 at the age of eighteen. After finding employment as a model, she was chosen by Al Jolson to appear in the cast of his Broadway show Hold On to Your Hats. When she moved to Hollywood, she found work in the theater. Dru was spotted by a talent scout and made her first film appearance in Abie's Irish Rose . Over the next decade, Dru appeared frequently in films and on television.
Go to Profile#1123
Martha S. Feldman
#79534
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Martha S. Feldman is an organization theorist best known for her work on organizational routines and, particularly, routine dynamics. Other areas of research she has contributed to include inclusive management and qualitative research methods. Feldman is the Johnson Chair for Civic Governance and Public Management in the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine She has published four books as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles.
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Charlotte Cornwell
#95274
Overall Influence
1949 - 2021 (72 years)
Charlotte Cornwell was an English actress, singer, and a teacher of acting on the faculty at the University of Southern California . She began her career as an actress, making her debut for Richard Cottrell's Cambridge Theatre Company in November 1971 as Miss Brewster in Arthur Wing Pinero's Trelawny of the 'Wells'. before joining Val May's Bristol Old Vic Theatre Company where she performed in a wide variety of productions from 1972 through 1975. In 1974 she made her screen debut as Sally Potter in the musical film Stardust. She rose to fame for her portrayal of the drug-addicted rock star A...
Go to Profile#1125
Jennifer Higdon
#86801
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Jennifer Elaine Higdon is an American composer of contemporary classical music. She has received many awards, including the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Music for her Violin Concerto and three Grammy Awards for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for her Percussion Concerto in 2010, Viola Concerto in 2018, and Harp Concerto in 2020. Elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019, she was a professor of composition at the Curtis Institute of Music from 1994 to 2021.
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Stacy Blake-Beard
#102136
Overall Influence
Stacy Blake-Beard has a BS in Psychology from the University of Maryland, an MA and a Ph.D. in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan. Since 2002, Blake-Beard has been teaching organizational behavior at the Simmons College School of Management and is currently a tenured Professor of Management. Before Blake-Beard joined Simmons, she was Assistant Professor of Administration, Planning, and Social Policy at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. At HGSE she lectured on organizational behavior, cultural diversity in organizations, and mentoring relationships at w...
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Sherlie Matthews
#75288
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (91 years)
Sherlie Matthews is an American singer, songwriter and former Motown Records producer, best known as a backing vocalist for pop, R&B and rock groups from the mid-1960s to the present time. Mirwood Employing her as both a lyricist and composer, she created many of the 1960s and 1970s hits for Mirwood Records' artists, including Jackie Lee, The Olympics, Bobby Garrett, The Mirettes, The Belles and Bob & Earl.
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Helen Merrill
#92342
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (95 years)
Helen Merrill is an American jazz vocalist. Her first album, the eponymous 1954 recording Helen Merrill , was an immediate success and associated her with the first generation of bebop jazz musicians. After an active 1950s and 1960s, Merrill spent time recording and touring in Europe and Japan, falling into obscurity in the United States. In the 1980s and 1990s, she was recorded by EmArcy, JVC and Verve; and her performances in America revived her profile. Known for her emotional, sensual vocal performances, her career continues in its sixth decade with concerts and recordings.
Go to Profile#1129
Allissa Richardson
#95822
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (44 years)
Allissa V. Richardson is an American journalist and college professor. She is best known as a proponent of mobile journalism and citizen journalism. Richardson has trained students in the United States and Africa to report news using only smartphones, tablets and MP3 players. She is assistant professor of journalism in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. Additionally, Richardson is a Nieman Foundation Visiting Journalism Fellow at Harvard University, the 2012 Educator of the Year for the National Association of Black Journalists, and ...
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Patricia Shehan Campbell
#35962
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Patricia Shehan Campbell is an American musicologist. Life and career She is the Donald E. Peterson Professor of Music at the University of Washington, where she teaches courses at the interface of music education and ethnomusicology. Prior to this position, she was a member of the faculties of Washington University in St. Louis and Butler University. Her training includes Dalcroze Eurhythmics, piano and vocal performance, and specialized study in Bulgarian choral song, Indian vocal repertoire, and Thai mahori, the latter two of which were launched during the period of her PhD studies in Music Education at Kent State University.
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Henriette Gezundhajt
#128344
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Henriette Gezundhajt is a professor of French linguistics at Glendon College and York University. Gezundhajt was born in France and studied Enunciative Linguistics at the University Paris 7 until 1988. She received her Ph.D. in French linguistics from the University of Toronto in 1995 and has taught at several universities in Toronto, including Ryerson University , York University and U of T. She has published on the morphology of adverbs. She has created several websites dedicated to the study of linguistics. Among them, "Sur Les Sentiers de La Linguistique" offers a comprehensive introductory guide to French linguistics.
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Mitsuko Uchida
#90000
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Dame Mitsuko Uchida, DBE is a Japanese-British classical pianist and conductor. Born in Japan and naturalised in Britain, she is particularly notable for her interpretations of Mozart and Schubert. She has appeared with many notable orchestras, recorded a wide repertory with several labels, won numerous awards and honours and is the Co-Artistic Director, with Jonathan Biss, of the Marlboro Music School and Festival. She has also conducted several major orchestras.
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Ikue Mori
#85080
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Ikue Mori , also known as Ikue Ile, is a drummer, electronic musician, composer, and graphic designer. Mori was awarded a "Genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation in 2022. Biography Ikue Mori was born and raised in Japan. She says she had little interest in music before hearing punk rock. In 1977, she went to New York City, initially for a visit, but she became involved in the music scene, and has remained in New York since.
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Eileen Farrell
#85105
Overall Influence
1920 - 2002 (82 years)
Eileen Farrell was an American soprano who had a nearly 60-year-long career performing both classical and popular music in concerts, theatres, on radio and television, and on disc. NPR noted, "She possessed one of the largest and most radiant operatic voices of the 20th century." While she was active as an opera singer, her concert engagements far outnumbered her theatrical appearances. Her career was mainly based in the United States, although she did perform internationally. The Daily Telegraph stated that she "was one of the finest American sopranos of the 20th century; she had a voice of ...
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Sheila McNamee
#24532
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Sheila McNamee is an American academic known for her work in human communication and social constructionism theory and practice. She is a Professor of Communication at the University of New Hampshire and founding member, Vice President and board member of the Taos Institute. She has authored numerous, books, chapters, and journal articles. Her work focuses on appreciative dialogic transformation within a variety of social and institutional contexts including psychotherapy, organizations, education, healthcare, and local communities. She engages constructionist practices in a variety of conte...
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Ethel Winter
#83133
Overall Influence
1924 - 2012 (88 years)
Ethel Winter was an American dancer and dance instructor. Winter was specifically a modern dancer - a member of the Martha Graham Dance Company from the 1940s through the 1960s, working with other notable members of the company, including Martha Graham, Bertram Ross, Yuriko, Pearl Lang, Ethel Butler, Jean Erdman, and Patricia Birch. She taught modern dance at the Juilliard School Dance Division for fifty years, retiring in 2003.
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Trifonia Melibea Obono
#83927
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (43 years)
Trifonia Melibea Obono Ntutumu Obono is an Equatorial Guinean novelist, political scientist, academic and LGBT activist. Her novel La Bastarda is the first novel by a female Equatorial Guinean writer to be translated into English.
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Michelle Hartman
#90593
Overall Influence
Michelle Hartman is an academic and translator. She obtained a BA from Columbia College in 1993 and a DPhil from Oxford University in 1998. She is currently a professor of Arabic and francophone literature at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. She is the author of a number of academic papers and several monographs including "Breaking Broken English: Black Arab Literary Solidarities and the Politics of Language", which won the College Language Association award for creative scholarship in 2020. She is also a translator of contemporary Arabic literature, and has translated twel...
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Valerie Henitiuk
#91262
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Valerie Henitiuk is a scholar researching aspects of the intersection of translation studies, world literature, Inuit literature, Japanese literature, and women's writing. She is a Canadian citizen, recently retired as Vice-president Academic & Provost at Concordia University of Edmonton. Henitiuk has been a visiting scholar at both Harvard and Columbia Universities in the US and at Kokugakuin University in Japan. She was previously executive director of the Centre for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence and Professor of English at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta, on the facul...
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Janice N. Harrington
#98241
Overall Influence
Janice N. Harrington is an American storyteller, poet, and children's writer. Life She grew up in Vernon, Alabama. Her family moved to Lincoln, Nebraska to escape racial segregation when she was eight. She now lives in Illinois.
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Donca Steriade
#107391
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Donca Steriade is a professor of Linguistics at MIT, specializing in phonological theory. Education She began her academic career studying classics in Bucharest, after earning her B.A. in Philology from the University of Bucharest in 1974. She left Romania after her father emigrated to Canada. She earned her M.A. from Université Laval in 1976, She studied for her PhD at the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy under Morris Halle. Her 1982 dissertation is titled, "Greek prosodies and the nature of syllabification".
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Robin Reisig
#93968
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (124 years)
Robin Reisig is an American journalist and journalism professor. A graduate of Wellesley College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she is a lecturer at the Columbia School of Journalism and a visiting faculty at the Asian College of Journalism.
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Bettye LaVette
#71216
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Bettye LaVette is an American soul singer-songwriter who made her first record at sixteen, but achieved only intermittent fame until 2005, when her album I've Got My Own Hell to Raise was released to widespread critical acclaim, and was named on many critics' "Best of 2005" lists. Her next album, The Scene of the Crime, debuted at number one on Billboard's Top Blues Albums chart and was nominated for Best Contemporary Blues Album at the 2008 Grammy Awards. She received the Legacy of Americana Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2023 Americana Music Honors & Awards.
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Lyubov Sova
#111339
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Ljubov Zinovjevna Sova is a Russian philologist notable for contributions in the field of linguistics and orientalistics. Her main fields of professional interest include linguistics, African philology, semiotics, typology, Slavic languages and journalism.
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Norma Winstone
#98300
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Norma Ann Winstone MBE is an English jazz singer and lyricist. With a career spanning more than 50 years, she is best known for her wordless improvisations. Musicians with whom she has worked include Michael Garrick, John Surman, Michael Gibbs, Mike Westbrook, as well as pianist John Taylor, who was her former husband.
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Natalya Semenchenko
#53683
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (49 years)
Natalya Semenchenko is a DPhil in Economics, professor, writer and publicist, Head of the Center of scientific thought "Dosvіd". Biography She was born on January 24, 1976, in Kyiv, at the time in the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union. In 1998, she graduated from the publishing and printing department of the National Technical University of Ukraine specialty "Management of non-manufacturing sector". In 1999 she enrolled in graduate studies at the Department of Management and Marketing NTUU "KPI".
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Ebba Segerberg
#118431
Overall Influence
1999 - Present (26 years)
Ebba Segerberg is an academic and translator, noted for her translations of Swedish literature into English. Segerberg is a Director of Communications at Washington University in St. Louis. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley, Department of Scandinavian in 1999. She has contributed to The Dictionary of Literary Biography: 20th Century Swedish Writers.
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Patty Loveless
#41819
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Patty Loveless is an American country music singer. She began performing in her teenaged years before signing her first recording contract with MCA Records' Nashville division in 1985. While her first few releases were unsuccessful, she broke through by decade's end with a cover of George Jones's "If My Heart Had Windows". Loveless issued five albums on MCA before moving to Epic Records in 1993, where she released nine more albums. Four of her albumsHonky Tonk Angel, Only What I Feel, When Fallen Angels Fly, and The Trouble with the Truthare certified platinum in the United States. Loveless h...
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Holly Cole
#94247
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Holly Cole is a Canadian jazz singer and actress. For many years she performed with her group The Holly Cole Trio. Background Cole was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her father, Leon Cole, was a noted radio broadcaster for the CBC Stereo network.
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Hilary Hahn
#83124
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (46 years)
Hilary Hahn is an American violinist. A three-time Grammy Award winner, she has performed throughout the world as a soloist with leading orchestras and conductors, and as a recitalist. She is an avid supporter of contemporary classical music, and several composers have written works for her, including concerti by Edgar Meyer and Jennifer Higdon, partitas by Antón García Abril, two serenades for violin and orchestra by Einojuhani Rautavaara, and a violin and piano sonata by Lera Auerbach.
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