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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Communications,

#151

Lurma Rackley

#15963

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Lurma M. Rackley is an American author, journalist and publicist. The daughter of a civil rights activist, she participated in civil rights demonstrations and was arrested 16 times before she was 13 years old. After college, she became a journalist and later, a publicist with the Washington, D.C. city government. In 1981, Petey Greene asked her to collaborate with him on his autobiography, recording audiotaped interviews with her shortly before his death. Rackley published her book about Greene in 2004.

#152

Melissa Bowerman

#17683

Overall Influence

1942 - 2011 (69 years)

Melissa Bowerman was a leading researcher in the area of language acquisition. From 1982-2007, she was a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Education and career In 1971, Bowerman earned her PhD in social psychology from Harvard University, where she studied under Roger Brown. She held positions at the University of Kansas from 1970 until 1982, when she joined the Max Planck Institute.

#153

Gillian Sankoff

#22186

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Gillian Elizabeth Sankoff is a Canadian-American sociolinguist, and professor emerita of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. Sankoff's notable former students include Miriam Meyerhoff. Biography She earned her PhD in 1968 from McGill University, with a dissertation entitled, "Social aspects of multilingualism in New Guinea."

#154

Luise F. Pusch

#27952

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Luise F. Pusch is a German linguist. She is regarded as the co-founder of feminist linguistics in Germany, along with Senta Trömel-Plötz. Life and education Luise Pusch studied English, Latin and linguistics at the University of Hamburg. In 1972 she received her doctorate in English. In 1978, she qualified for the linguistics faculty at the University of Konstanz. From 1979 to 1984 she was a Heisenberg Fellow in the field of feminist linguistic research. Before feminist linguistics became her specialty, she worked on syntactic issues such as construction of gerunds. From 1982 to 1985 she h...

#155

Marysol Castro

#33353

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Marysol Castro is a public address announcer at Citi Field, home of the New York Mets. She is also an American broadcast journalist who is employed as a morning news anchor at WPIX in New York City, a weather forecaster for The Early Show on CBS in 2011, and a features correspondent for the weekend edition of Good Morning America on ABC from 2004 to 2010. In June 2015, Castro joined New Haven-based WTNH-TV to fill in for weekday morning traffic reports and anchor until mid-November 2015. In January 2019, Castro joined the booth of the Android and iOS app BallparkDJ making it possible for any youth softball or baseball team to be announced by her professional voice.

#156

Kate Burridge

#23646

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Kathryn "Kate" Burridge is a prominent Australian linguist specialising in the Germanic languages. Burridge currently occupies the Chair of Linguistics in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University.

#157

Jean Erdman

#8184

Overall Influence

1916 - 2020 (104 years)

Jean Erdman was an American dancer and choreographer of modern dance as well as an avant-garde theater director. Biography Early years and background Erdman was born in Honolulu. Erdman's father, John Piney Erdman, a doctor of divinity and missionary from New England, settled in Honolulu as a minister at the non-denominational Protestant Church of the Crossroads where he preached, in both English and Japanese, to a multi-ethnic congregation. Her mother, Marion Dillingham Erdman, was a member of one of the founding industrialist families of Hawaii.

#158

Carole Simpson

#23512

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Carole Simpson is an American broadcast journalist, news anchor, and author. She is the first African-American woman to anchor a major United States network newscast. Education and career Simpson, a graduate of the University of Michigan, began her career on radio at WCFL in Chicago, Illinois, and was later hired at WBBM. She moved to television at Chicago's WMAQ and onto NBC News in 1975, becoming the first African-American woman to anchor a major network newscast. She joined ABC News in 1982, and was an anchor for the weekend edition of World News Tonight from 1988 until October 2003.

#159

Korina Sanchez

#11025

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Korina Maria Baluyot Sanchez-Roxas , known professionally as Korina Sanchez, is a Filipino broadcast journalist, television news anchor, senior field reporter, magazine show host, radio anchor, and newspaper columnist. She served as Chief Reporter for the Integrated News and Current Affairs Division of ABS-CBN airing on TV Channel 2, AM Radio Station DZMM and cable TV ABS-CBN News Channel. She also has a regular column in The Philippine Star entitled That Does It, as well as a Tagalog column entitled K Ka Lang in its sister newspaper, Pilipino Star Ngayon.

#160

Irene Heim

#25277

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Irene Roswitha Heim is a linguist and a leading specialist in semantics. She was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and UCLA before moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989, where she is Professor Emerita of Linguistics. She served as Head of the Linguistics Section of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.

#161

Viola Spolin

#7991

Overall Influence

1906 - 1994 (88 years)

Viola Spolin was an American theatre academic, educator and acting coach. She is considered an important innovator in 20th century American theater for creating directorial techniques to help actors to be focused in the present moment and to find choices improvisationally, as if in real life. These acting exercises she later called Theater Games and formed the first body of work that enabled other directors and actors to create improvisational theater. Her book Improvisation for the Theater, which published these techniques, includes her philosophy and her teaching and coaching methods, and is considered the "bible of improvisational theater".

#162

Charlayne Hunter-Gault

Charlayne Hunter-Gault

#14253

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Alberta Charlayne Hunter-Gault is an Americann civil rights activist, journalist and former foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, CNN, and the Public Broadcasting Service. Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes were the first African-American students to attend the University of Georgia.

#163

Mona Hatoum

#11666

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Mona Hatoum is a British-Palestinian multimedia and installation artist who lives in London. Biography Mona Hatoum was born in 1952 in Beirut, Lebanon, to Palestinian parents. Although born in Lebanon, Hatoum was ineligible for a Lebanese identity card and does not identify as Lebanese. As she grew up, her family did not support her desire to pursue art. She continued to draw throughout her childhood, though, illustrating her work from poetry and science classes.

#164

Elizabeth C. Traugott

#39165

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Elizabeth Closs Traugott is an American linguist and Professor Emerita of Linguistics and English, Stanford University. She is best known for her work on grammaticalization, subjectification, and constructionalization.

#165

Claire Denis

#26248

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Claire Denis is a French film director and screenwriter. Her feature film Beau Travail has been called one of the greatest films of the 1990s and of all time. Other acclaimed works include Trouble Every Day , 35 Shots of Rum , White Material , High Life and Both Sides of the Blade , the last of which won her the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin International Film Festival. For her film Stars at Noon , Denis competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. She won the Grand Prix, sharing the award with Lukas Dhont's film Close.

#166

Naomi Sager

#16469

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (97 years)

Naomi Sager is an American computational linguistics research scientist. She is a former research professor at New York University, now retired. She is a pioneer in the development of natural language processing for computers.

#167

Tanya Reinhart

#18771

Overall Influence

1943 - 2007 (64 years)

Tanya Reinhart was an Israeli linguist who wrote frequently on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. She contributed columns to the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot and longer articles to the CounterPunch, Znet, and Israeli Indymedia websites.

#168

Erlinda K. Alburo

#23393

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Erlinda Kintanar Alburo is a prolific contemporary Cebuano language scholar and promoter of the language. She is the former Director of the Cebuano Studies Center of the University of San Carlos, Philippines. She is an active member of Women in Literary Arts , and writes poetry both in English and cebuano. She teaches on the anthropology of linguistics. She has written 54 works in 4 languages.

#169

Rachel Nichols

#23970

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Rachel Michele Nichols is an American journalist and sportscaster. She has covered the National Football League , National Hockey League , Major League Baseball , professional tennis, college sports, the Olympics and is most notable for her work with the National Basketball Association . In 2014, Sports Illustrated called Nichols "the country's most impactful and prominent female sports journalist".

#170

Angela D. Friederici

Angela D. Friederici

#15366

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Angela Friederici is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and is an internationally recognized expert in neuropsychology and linguistics. She is the author of over 400 academic articles and book chapters, and has edited 15 books on linguistics, neuroscience, language and psychology.

#171

Melba Pattillo Beals

Melba Pattillo Beals

#15652

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Melba Joy Patillo Beals is an American journalist and educator who was a member of the Little Rock Nine, a group of black students who were the first to racially integrate Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

#172

Erin McKean

#25501

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Erin McKean is an American lexicographer. Early life and education McKean was born in Charlotte, North Carolina. She graduated from the University of Chicago with a BA/MA in Linguistics. As an undergraduate, she worked in a junior capacity on the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary. She has since served on the Visiting Committee to the University of Chicago's Regenstein Library, and she helped organize a dictionary-themed exhibit, The Meaning of Dictionaries, there in 2007.

#173

Eleanor Jorden

#30184

Overall Influence

1920 - 2009 (89 years)

Eleanor Harz Jorden was an American linguistics scholar and an influential Japanese language educator and expert. Born Eleanor Harz, she married William Jorden, reporter and diplomat; the marriage ended in divorce.

#174

Kira Hall

#10614

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Kira Hall is professor of Linguistics and Anthropology, as well as director for the Program in Culture, Language, and Social Practice , at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The majority of Hall's work focuses on language in India and the United States, with special attention to organizations of gender and sexuality. A special focus of her work has been the linguistic and sociocultural practices of Hindi-speaking Hijras in northern India, a transgender group often discussed in the anthropological literature as a "third sex."

#175

Alicia Shepard

#17940

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Alicia Cobb "Lisa" Shepard was an American journalist, media writer and expert on the work and lives of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. In February 2014, she moved to Kabul, Afghanistan to work with Afghan journalists. In fall 2012, she joined the University of Nevada, Las Vegas faculty as a visiting professor for the Greenspun College of Urban Affairs.

#176

Carol Myers-Scotton

#35074

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Carol Myers-Scotton is an American linguist. She was a Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Linguistics Program and Department of English at the University of South Carolina until 2003. Education She received her Bachelor of Arts from Grinnell College in 1955, and her Master of Arts in English in 1961 and Doctor of Philosophy in linguistics in 1967, both from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

#177

Kim Kashkashian

#21646

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Kim Kashkashian is an American violist. She has spent her career in the U.S. and Europe and collaborated with many major contemporary composers. In 2013 she won a Grammy Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo. She is recognized as one of the world's top violists.

#178

Saroj Khan

#18244

Overall Influence

1948 - 2020 (72 years)

Saroj Khan was an Indian dance choreographer in Hindi cinema. She was born in Bombay State , India. She was best known for the dance form mujra and the first woman choreographer in Bollywood. With a career spanning over forty years, she choreographed more than 3000 songs. She died on 3 July 2020 of a sudden cardiac arrest.

#179

Christiane Nord

#24678

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Christiane Nord is a German translation scholar. Biography She studied translation at Heidelberg University ; in 1983 she obtained her PhD in Romance Studies, with habilitation in applied translation studies and translation pedagogy. From 1967 she has been involved in translator training at the universities of Heidelberg, Vienna, Hildesheim, Innsbruck and Magdeburg .

#180

Connie Willis

#10014

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Constance Elaine Trimmer Willis , commonly known as Connie Willis, is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. She has won eleven Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards for particular works—more major SF awards than any other writer—most recently the "Best Novel" Hugo and Nebula Awards for Blackout/All Clear . She was inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2009 and the Science Fiction Writers of America named her its 28th SFWA Grand Master in 2011.

#181

Dana Priest

#13026

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Dana Louise Priest is an American journalist, writer and teacher. She has worked for nearly 30 years for the Washington Post and became the third John S. and James L. Knight Chair in Public Affairs Journalism at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism in 2014. Before becoming a full-time investigative reporter at the Post, Priest specialized in intelligence reporting and wrote many articles on the U.S. "War on terror" and was the newspaper's Pentagon correspondent. In 2006 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting citing "her persistent, painstaking reports on se...

#182

Svetlana Geier

#23746

Overall Influence

1923 - 2010 (87 years)

Svetlana Geier, born Svetlana Michailovna Ivanova, was a literary translator who translated from her native Russian into German. She lived in Germany from 1943 until her death in 2010. Biography Svetlana Geier was born in Kiev in 1923, the daughter of Russian parents. Her father was a scientist with a specialty in plant breeding. Her mother came from a family of Tsarist officers. Her father was arrested in 1938 during the period of Stalin's Great Purge, and died in 1939 from illnesses stemming from his time in prison. Geier had a sheltered childhood, receiving private tuition in both France and Germany early in her life.

#183

Debbie Millman

#22499

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Debbie Millman is an American writer, educator, artist, curator, and designer who is best known as the host of the podcast Design Matters. She has authored six books and is the President Emeritus of the American Institute of Graphic Arts and chair, one of only five women to hold the position over 100 years. She co-founded the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City with Steven Heller. She was previously the editorial and creative director of Print magazine. Her illustrations have appeared in many major publications, including New York Magazine, Design Observe...

#184

Daphne Caruana Galizia

Daphne Caruana Galizia

#7056

Overall Influence

1964 - 2017 (53 years)

Daphne Anne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese writer, journalist, blogger and anti-corruption activist, who reported on political events in Malta and was known internationally for her investigation of the Panama Papers, and subsequent assassination by car bomb. In particular, she focused on investigative journalism, reporting on government corruption, nepotism, patronage, and allegations of money laundering, links between Malta's online gambling industry and organized crime, Malta's citizenship-by-investment scheme, and payments from the government of Azerbaijan. Caruana Galizia's national and in...

#185

Mary Alice Williams

#15660

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Mary Alice Williams is a pioneering journalist and broadcast executive who broke gender barriers by becoming the first female Prime Time anchor of a network news division and first woman to hold the rank of Vice President of a news division. Her work and visibility put her in the vanguard, whether at the birth of CNN or later at the dawn of the revolution in information technology. In addition to CNN, she has also served as anchor at many prominent networks, including PBS, Discovery, and NBC.

#186

Sarah Caldwell

#17332

Overall Influence

1924 - 2006 (82 years)

Sarah Caldwell was an American opera conductor, impresario, and stage director. Early life Caldwell was born in Maryville, Missouri, and grew up in Fayetteville, Arkansas. She was a child prodigy and gave public performances on the violin by the time she was ten years old. She graduated from Fayetteville High School at the age of 14.

#187

Katherine Boo

#17431

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Katherine "Kate" J. Boo is an American investigative journalist who has documented the lives of people in poverty. She has won the MacArthur "genius" award and the National Book Award for Nonfiction , and her work earned the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for The Washington Post. She has been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 2003. Her book Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity won nonfiction prizes from PEN, the Los Angeles Times Book Awards, the New York Public Library, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in addition to t...

#188

Julie Beth Lovins

#14791

Overall Influence

1945 - 2018 (73 years)

Julie Beth Lovins was a computational linguist who published The Lovins Stemming Algorithm - a type of stemming algorithm for word matching - in 1968. The Lovins Stemmer is a single pass, context sensitive stemmer, which removes endings based on the longest-match principle. The stemmer was the first to be published and was extremely well developed considering the date of its release, having been the main influence on a large amount of the future work in the area. -Adam G., et al

#189

Jean Aitchison

#31199

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Jean Margaret Aitchison is a Professor Emerita of Language and Communication in the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. Her main areas of interest include socio-historical linguistics; language and the mind; and language and the media.

#190

Anaridis Rodriguez

#25110

Overall Influence

Anaridis Rodriguez-Starnino is an American journalist. She currently anchors and reports for the CBS owned-and-operated WBZ-TV in Boston. The journalist also worked for The Weather Channel. She is the former news anchor on America's Morning Headquarters.

#191

Missy Elliott

#5521

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Melissa Arnette "Missy" Elliott , also known as Misdemeanor, is an American rapper, singer, songwriter, and record producer. She embarked on her music career with R&B girl group Sista in the 1990s, and later became a member of the Swing Mob collective alongside her childhood friend and longtime collaborator Timbaland, with whom she wrote and produced music for acts such as 702, Aaliyah, SWV, and Total. Following several collaborations and guest appearances, she began her solo career in 1997 with her debut album Supa Dupa Fly, which spawned the top 20 single "Sock It 2 Me". The album debuted at No.

#192

Emmylou Harris

#7763

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Emmylou Harris is an American singer, songwriter, musician, bandleader, and activist. A highly regarded figure in contemporary music, she is known for having a consistent artistic direction. Harris is considered one of the leading music artists behind the country rock genre in the 1970s and the Americana genre in the 1990s. Her music united both country and rock audiences in live performance settings. Her characteristic voice, musical style and songwriting have been acclaimed by critics and fellow recording artists.

#193

Barbara Leaming

#16459

Overall Influence

Barbara Leaming is an American biographer, whose subjects have included Roman Polanski, Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe, John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

#194

Melissa Harris-Perry

Melissa Harris-Perry

#10339

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Melissa Victoria Harris-Perry , formerly known as Melissa Victoria Harris-Lacewell, is an American writer, professor, television host, and political commentator with a focus on African-American politics. Harris-Perry hosted the Melissa Harris-Perry weekend news and opinion television show on MSNBC from 2012 to February 27, 2016.

#195

Farai Chideya

#34178

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Farai Chideya is an American novelist, multimedia journalist, and radio host. She produced and hosted Pop and Politics with Farai Chideya, a series of radio specials on politics for 15 years. She is the creator and host of the podcast Our Body Politic, which launched in September 2020.

#196

Ann Compton

#17641

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 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.

#197

Alice ter Meulen

#25444

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Alice Geraldine Baltina ter Meulen is a Dutch linguist, logician, and philosopher of language whose research topics include genericity in linguistics, intensional logic, generalized quantifiers, discourse representation theory, and the linguistic representation of time. She is a professor emerita at the University of Geneva.

#198

Patricia Cornwell

Patricia Cornwell

#6707

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Patricia Cornwell is an American crime writer. She is known for her best-selling novels featuring medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, of which the first was inspired by a series of sensational murders in Richmond, Virginia, where most of the stories are set. The plots are notable for their emphasis on forensic science, which has influenced later TV treatments of police work. Cornwell has also initiated new research into the Jack the Ripper killings, incriminating the popular British artist Walter Sickert. Her books have sold more than 100 million copies.

#199

Susan Ormiston

#45867

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Susan Ormiston is a Canadian television journalist, correspondent for CBC Television's The National and guest host for several CBC radio and television programs. She has covered prominent events including the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994 in the first free elections in South Africa.

#200

Laurie Anderson

Laurie Anderson

#14116

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, musician and filmmaker whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York during the 1970s, focusing particularly on language, technology, and visual imagery. She achieved unexpected commercial success when her song "O Superman" reached number two on the UK singles chart in 1981.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions