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,

#1651

Susan Tedeschi

#73560

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Susan Tedeschi is an American singer and guitarist. A multiple Grammy Award nominee, she is a member of the Tedeschi Trucks Band, a conglomeration of her band, her husband Derek Trucks’ band, and other musicians.

#1652

Zoe Lister-Jones

Zoe Lister-Jones

#108496

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (44 years)

Zoe Lister-Jones is an American actress and filmmaker who co-starred as Jen Collins Short in the CBS sitcom Life in Pieces from 2015 to 2019. She is also known for her roles in the television shows Delocated , Whitney , and New Girl . Lister-Jones made her directorial debut with the 2017 comedy-drama film Band Aid. In 2020, she wrote and directed the horror film The Craft: Legacy. She also co-wrote and co-directed the comedy-drama film How It Ends with Daryl Wein.

#1653

Janet Sung

#127201

Overall Influence

Janet Sung is an American classical violinist. Born in New York City, she began studying the violin at age 7 and debuted at the age of nine with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. She then studied privately with Josef Gingold for ten years. She received her B.A. from Harvard University, and then studied at the Juilliard School.

#1654

Vera Gornostayeva

#131836

Overall Influence

1929 - 2015 (86 years)

Vera Gornostayeva was a Russian pianist and pedagogue. An Emeritus Artist of the Russian Federation at the time of her death, Gornostayeva was a graduate of the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, where her teacher was Heinrich Neuhaus.

#1655

Judy Loman

#114727

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Judy Loman is a harpist and harp teacher, born and educated in the United States and active in Canada. She was the principal harp of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra from 1959 until her retirement in 1991, and won a Juno award for Best Classical Album in 1980. She taught at the University of Toronto and established a summer school for harpists. Loman was appointed a member of the Order of Canada in 2015.

#1656

Ann Ronell

#99955

Overall Influence

1906 - 1993 (87 years)

Ann Ronell was an American composer and lyricist. She was best known for the standards "Willow Weep for Me" and "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf" . Early life Ronell was born in Omaha, Nebraska, to Morris and Mollie Rosenblatt. Ronell graduated from Omaha's Central High School in 1923. She enrolled in Wheaton College, Massachusetts, but transferred after her sophomore year to pursue a more serious music education. She graduated from Radcliffe College, where she studied music with Walter Piston. While at Radcliffe, Ronell wrote music for college plays and contributed reviews and interviews to the school's music publication.

#1657

May Cutler

#132686

Overall Influence

1923 - 2011 (88 years)

May Ebbitt Cutler was a Canadian writer, journalist, playwright, and publisher. She founded Tundra Books in her home in 1967, becoming Canada's first female publisher of children's books. She served a four-year term as the first female mayor of Westmount, Quebec from 1987 to 1991. As a writer of "literary works" she used the pseudonym Ebbitt Cutler.

#1658

Siri Tuttle

#104313

Overall Influence

Siri Tuttle is the former director of the Alaska Native Language Center, the Alaska Native Language Archive, and a former Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. She specializes in Dene languages of interior Alaska and has contributed to the fields of acoustic phonetics, phonology, and morphology. She retired in 2021.

#1659

Thea King

#140345

Overall Influence

1925 - 2007 (82 years)

Dame Thea King DBE FRCM FGSM was a British clarinettist. Biography Early life Thea King was born in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, the daughter of Henry Walter Mayer King, the manager of his family engineering business, and Dorothea . She was educated at Bedford High School and won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music where she studied the piano with Arthur Alexander and the clarinet with Frederick Thurston. In January 1953 she married Frederick Thurston but he died from lung cancer in December of the same year. She never remarried.

#1660

Marisa Merlini

#157582

Overall Influence

1923 - 2008 (85 years)

Marisa Merlini was an Italian character actress active in Italy's post-World War II cinema. Merlini appeared in over fifty films during her career, which spanned from World War II to 2005. In Luigi Comencini's 1953 film Pane, amore e fantasia, she portrayed Annarella, a village midwife, who marries the local police marshal, played by Vittorio De Sica.

#1661

Pascale Braconnot

Pascale Braconnot

#152425

Overall Influence

Pascale Braconnot is a Climate Scientist in the Climate and Environmental Sciences at the Institute Pierre Simon Laplace. She was involved in writing the IPCC Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports. Early life and education During her doctoral studies Braconnot worked on tropic ocean models using statistical methods. She is interested in the amplification of Asian and African monsoons during the holocene. Braconnot was one of the first to use a three-dimensional coupled ocean model to show the importance of ocean feedback in glacial inception. She has worked on El Niño and the Holocene insolation.

#1662

Betteke van Ruler

Betteke van Ruler

#121890

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Alberta Arnolda "Betteke" van Ruler is emeritus Professor of Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam. Biography Born in Hilversum, Betteke van Ruler is a scholar in academic theory and practice in public relations and communication science.

#1663

Carol Welsman

#152893

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Carol Welsman is a Canadian jazzy pianist who accompanies her own easy listening, conversational style ‘singing’.She is the granddaughter of the founder and first conductor of the first Toronto Symphony Orchestra Frank Welsman and the sister of composer John Welsman. She has been nominated six times for the Juno Award, Canada's equivalent to the Grammy.

#1664

Mary Jane Saunders

#32919

Overall Influence

Mary Jane Saunders is an American academic who served as president of Florida Atlantic University from 2010 to 2013. She has a background in scientific research and administration, specializing in biology.

#1665

Sun-Ah Jun

#157502

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Sun-Ah Jun is a Korean-American professor of linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Education Jun received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Ohio State University in 1993, with a dissertation entitled, The Phonetics and Phonology of Korean Prosody.

#1666

Valentina Igoshina

Valentina Igoshina

#152956

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Valentina Igoshina is a Russian classical pianist. She has won several international piano competitions. Biography Valentina Igoshina began studying piano with her mother, and first took lessons at home at the age of four. At the age of twelve she began attending the Moscow Central School of Music for gifted students and became a pupil of Sergei Dorensky and Larissa Dedova at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory.

#1667

Sarah Jones

#128108

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Sarah Jones is an American playwright, actress, and poet. Called "a master of the genre" by The New York Times, Jones has written and performed four multi-character solo shows, including Bridge & Tunnel, which was produced Off-Broadway in 2004 by Oscar-winner Meryl Streep, and then on to Broadway in 2006 where it received a Special Tony Award.

#1668

Marja Leinonen

#143037

Overall Influence

1946 - 2019 (73 years)

Marja-Leena Leinonen was a Finnish linguist. Biography Leinonen graduated from the Varkaus High School in 1967 and completed studies for a correspondent in the Helsinki School of Economics, after which she studied the Russian language and general linguistics at Helsinki University, graduating in 1975. After that she taught linguistics at the university for three years. She completed her Ph.D. in 1983.

#1669

Aya Hirano

#127875

Overall Influence

1987 - Present (39 years)

is a Japanese actress and singer. Beginning in the entertainment industry as a child actor in television commercials, she appeared in her first voice acting role in the anime television series Angel Tales .

#1670

Margaret Eliot

#120333

Overall Influence

1914 - 2011 (97 years)

Margaret Augusta Eliot was an English music teacher and musician. She was a professor of oboe at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and her best-known student was George Martin; in 2011, just before her death at age 97, she appeared in the documentary film Produced by George Martin. In the early 1960s she also taught Paul McCartney to successfully play the recorder, which he later used to effect, for the recording of, "The Fool on the Hill".

#1671

Beyoncé

#93802

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter Beyoncé started performing in various singing and dancing competitions as a child. She rose to fame in the late 1990s as a member of the R&B girl group Destiny's Child, one of the best-selling girl groups of all time. Their hiatus saw the release of her debut album Dangerously in Love . She then released the commercially successful solo albums B'Day , I Am... Sasha Fierce , and 4 . After creating her own management company Parkwood Entertainment, Beyoncé achieved acclaim for releasing the sonically experimental visual albums Beyoncé and Lemonade , which explored multiple societal themes such as feminism, relationships and womanism.

#1672

Benita Valente

#146089

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Benita Valente is an American soprano whose career has encompassed the operatic stage as well as performance of lieder, chamber music and oratorio. She is especially lauded for her interpretations of Mozart and Handel, but she also excelled in certain Verdi roles. The New York Times once referred to her as "as gifted a singer as we have today, worldwide."

#1673

Tansy Davies

#149823

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Tansy Davies is an English composer of contemporary classical music. She won the BBC Young Composers' Competition in 1996 and has written works for ensembles such as the London Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. In 2023 she was awarded the Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Works Collections at The Ivors Classical Award in recognition of her outstanding achievements in composition.

#1674

Anisa Mehdi

#120040

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Anisa Marie Mehdi is an Iraqi-Canadian film director and journalist. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1978 and obtained her master's degree in journalism from Columbia University. She worked as an associate producer at CBS News in New York on the news magazine series West 57th. Her most notable documentary was Inside Mecca, which she produced and directed for National Geographic television. As executive producer of the PBS Frontline special "Muslims", she received the 2002 Cine Golden Eagle Award.

#1675

Marilyn Crispell

#122370

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Marilyn Crispell is an American jazz pianist and composer. Scott Yanow described her as "a powerful player... who has her own way of using space... She is near the top of her field." Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote: "Hearing Marilyn Crispell play solo piano is like monitoring an active volcano... She is one of a very few pianists who rise to the challenge of free jazz." In addition to her own extensive work as a soloist or bandleader, Crispell is also known as a longtime member of saxophonist Anthony Braxton's quartet in the 1980s and '90s.

#1676

Joanna Frueh

#111208

Overall Influence

1948 - 2020 (72 years)

Joanna Frueh was an American artist, writer, and feminist scholar. Early life Frueh was born on January 18, 1948, in Chicago, Illinois to Erne Rene Frueh and Florence Frueh. Both parents were well educated; her father in visual arts and her mother in classical piano. Together they authored a book about stained glass in Chicago, which was published by Loyola University Press in 1983. Their two successive homes in Highland Park were designed by architects Crombie Taylor and Robert Bruce Tague.

#1677

Victoria Santa Cruz

#111798

Overall Influence

1922 - 2014 (92 years)

Victoria Eugenia Santa Cruz Gamarra was an Afro-Peruvian choreographer, composer and activist. Victoria Santa Cruz would go on to be called "the mother of Afro Peruvian dance and theatre." Along with her brother, Nicomedes Santa Cruz, she is credited as significant in a revival of Afro-Peruvian culture in the 1960s and 1970s. They both came from a long-line of artists and intellectuals. For her part she is said to have had "Afrocentrism" influences in her view of dance trying to discover "ancestral memory" of African forms. She helped to found the Cumanana company.

#1678

Noa Eshkol

#66553

Overall Influence

1924 - 2007 (83 years)

Noa Eshkol was an Israeli dance composer and textile artist. Eshkol is best known for her co-invention, alongside architect Avraham Wachman, of the Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation System. She and Wachman worked together for over two decades to refine the system and develop its various applications.

#1679

Sylvia Syms

#138863

Overall Influence

1917 - 1992 (75 years)

Sylvia Syms was an American jazz singer. Biography Syms was born Sylvia Blagman in Brooklyn, New York. As a child, she had polio. As a teenager, she went to jazz nightclubs on New York's 52nd Street and received informal training from Billie Holiday. She made her debut in 1941 at Kelly's Stable.

#1680

Phyllis Sellick

Phyllis Sellick

#155011

Overall Influence

1911 - 2007 (96 years)

Phyllis Sellick, OBE was a British pianist and teacher, best known for her partnership with her pianist husband Cyril Smith. Biography Born at Ilford, Essex, Phyllis Sellick started to play the piano by ear at the age of three and had her first music lesson on her fifth birthday. Four years later she won the Daily Mirrors "Pip, Squeak and Wilfred" contest for young musicians and was awarded two years' private tuition with Cuthbert Whitemore, subsequently winning an open scholarship to continue her study with him at the Royal Academy of Music. She later studied with Isidor Philipp in Paris. Sh...

#1681

Dorothy Sucher

#92105

Overall Influence

1933 - 2010 (77 years)

Dorothy Sucher was an American author and psychotherapist who worked as a reporter at the Greenbelt News Review, where an article that she wrote that quoted critics of a developers calling his plans "blackmail" initially resulted in a $17,500 judgement against the paper. The U.S. Supreme Court would later overturn the lower court verdict, ruling in Greenbelt Cooperative Publishing Assn. v. Bresler that the use of "rhetorical hyperbole" in such cases is covered by the First Amendment, a major victory that supported Freedom of the press in the United States.

#1682

Nicola LeFanu

#123222

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Nicola Frances LeFanu is a British composer, academic, lecturer and director. Life Nicola LeFanu was born in Wickham Bishops, Essex, England, to William LeFanu and Elizabeth Maconchy . She studied at St Hilda's College, Oxford, before taking up a Harkness Fellowship at Harvard. In 1972 she won the Mendelssohn Scholarship. She later became Director of Music at St Paul's Girls' School , taught at King's College London , and was then a Professor of Music at the University of York, where she was Head of Department from 1994 to 2001. She retired from teaching in 2008.

#1683

Hildegard Knef

#140652

Overall Influence

1925 - 2002 (77 years)

Hildegard Frieda Albertine Knef was a German actress, singer, and writer. She was billed in some English-language films as Hildegard Neff or Hildegarde Neff. Early years Hildegard Knef was born in Ulm in 1925. Her parents were Hans Theodor and Friede Augustine Knef. Her father, a decorated First World War veteran, died when she was only six months old, and her mother moved to Berlin and worked in a factory. Knef began studying acting at age 14 in 1940. She left school at 15 to become an apprentice animator with Universum Film AG. After she had a successful screen test, she went to the State Film School at Babelsberg, Berlin, where she studied acting, ballet, and elocution.

#1684

Cynthia Clawson

#112648

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Cynthia Clawson is a Grammy Award-winning American gospel singer. She has been called "The most awesome voice in gospel music" by Billboard Magazine, and has received five Dove Awards, 15 Dove Award nominations, and a Grammy for her work.

#1685

Valerie Coleman

#133449

Overall Influence

Valerie Coleman is an American composer and flutist as well as the creator of the wind quintet Imani Winds. Coleman is a distinguished artist of the century who was named Performance Today's 2020 Classical Woman of the year and was listed as “one of the Top 35 Women Composers” in the Washington Post. In 2019, Coleman's orchestral work, Umoja, Anthem for Unity, was commissioned and premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Coleman's Umoja is the first classical work by a living African American woman that the Philadelphia Orchestra has performed.

#1686

Dominique Brossard

#95332

Overall Influence

Dominique Brossard is a professor and chair of the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is a member of the steering committee for the university's Robert & Jean Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies and is affiliated with other institutes at the university, including the Energy Institute, the Global Health Institute, and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. Brossard also holds a position as a principal investigator at the Morgridge Institute for Research.

#1687

Jean Terrell

#79422

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Velma Jean Terrell is an American R&B and jazz singer. She replaced Diana Ross as the lead singer of The Supremes in January 1970. Biography Early life and career She is the sister of the former WBA heavyweight boxing champion Ernie Terrell, who fought Muhammad Ali.

#1688

Carol Stabile

#116958

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Carol Stabile is a professor in the department of Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. In 2014, Stabile received an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship for her work on blacklisted and conservative women's involvement in 1940s and 1950s television industries. Her project "examines the forms of employment progressive women were seeking in the new industry, as well as the opposition they faced from anti-communist men and women opposed to viewpoints they considered un-American." Prior to the ACLS fellowship, Stabile's peer-reviewed academic article "The Typhoid Marys of the Left: Gender, Race, and the Broadcast Blacklist" received the 2013 Ronald D.

#1689

Hanna Schwarz

#122509

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Hanna Schwarz is a German mezzo-soprano and contralto singer in opera and concert. In 1976 she performed the roles of Fricka and Erda in the centenary Jahrhundertring production at the Bayreuth Festival, directed by Patrice Chéreau.

#1690

Margherita Buy

#100321

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Margherita Buy is an Italian actress. She is a seven-time David di Donatello Awards winner and seven-time Nastro d'Argento winner. Overview After a long period of studying at the Academy of Dramatic Arts, she made her breakthrough role in Duccio Tessari's Una grande storia d'amore , which was followed by roles in Daniele Luchetti's two projects It's Happening Tomorrow and The Week of the Sphinx . For the last one, she won the best performance by an actress in a leading role award at the San Sebastian International Film Festival.

#1691

Julia Brown

#157399

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Julia Brown is an American-born artist who works in photography, installation and video. Her work is largely concerned with subject formation, visibility, invisibility and the political power of representation. Brown is an assistant professor of painting in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at George Washington University.

#1692

Eleanor Dickey

#86357

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Eleanor Dickey, FBA is an American classicist, linguist, and academic, who specialises in the history of the Latin and Greek languages. Since 2013, she has been Professor of Classics at the University of Reading in England.

#1693

Beata Tyszkiewicz

Beata Tyszkiewicz

#140665

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Beata Maria Helena Tyszkiewicz is a retired Polish actress and TV personality. Career Beata Tyszkiewicz has worked mostly on the big screen but acted in several French TV movies, becoming famous through her portrayal of distinguished ladies in costume dramas like The Doll by Wojciech Has and The Ashes by Andrzej Wajda. She has worked with leading directors such as Agnieszka Holland, Krzysztof Zanussi, André Delvaux and former husband Andrzej Wajda. Tyszkiewicz has appeared in more than a hundred films.

#1694

Joan Maling

#170802

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Joan Maling is an American linguist and a former program director at the National Science Foundation. Her primary research expertise is in the syntax of Icelandic. Her mother was Harriet Florence Maling.

#1695

Barbara Dilley

#41008

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Barbara Dilley is an American dancer, performance artist, improvisor, choreographer and educator, best known for her work as a prominent member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company , and then with the groundbreaking dance and performance ensemble The Grand Union, from 1969 to 1976. She has taught movement and dance at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, since 1974, developing a pedagogy that emphasizes what she calls “embodied awareness,” an approach that combines dance and movement studies with meditation, “mind training” and improvisational composition. She served as the president of ...

#1696

Julie Miller

#103245

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Julie Anne Miller is a songwriter, singer, and recording artist living in Nashville, Tennessee. She married Buddy Miller in 1981. They sing and play on each other's solo projects and have recorded three duet albums.

#1697

Juliane Banse

#142565

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Juliane Banse is a German opera soprano and noted singer. Banse received her vocal training at the Zürich Opera, and with Brigitte Fassbaender in Munich. She won first prize in the singing competition of the Kulturforum in Munich in 1989. She made her operatic debut that year as Pamina in Mozart's The Magic Flute at the Komische Oper Berlin. In 1993, the International Franz Schubert Institute, whose jury that year included Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, awarded her first prize in the International Franz Schubert Competition.

#1698

Charlene J. Sato

#169874

Overall Influence

1951 - 1996 (45 years)

Charlene J. Sato or Charlene Junko Sato, called "Charlie" , was a linguist known for her contributions to pidgin and creole studies. Life Sato grew up in Wahiawa and attended Leilehua High School. She was married at the time of her death. Sato died of ovarian cancer.

#1699

Barbara Schlick

#126918

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Barbara Schlick is a German soprano who is particularly admired for interpretations of the concert literature of the baroque era. Career Schlick studied singing under at the Hochschule für Musik Würzburg and in Essen under Hilde Wesselmann. She later pursued further studies with Rudolf Piernay and Gisela Rohmert. Starting in 1966, Schlick began to appear throughout Europe as a soloist with Adolf Scherbaum's Baroque ensemble. She appeared for the first time in North America in a tour with Paul Kuentz and his chamber orchestra. She has since appeared at major concert halls, performance venues...

#1700

Maria Lidka

#160460

Overall Influence

1914 - 2013 (99 years)

Maria Lidka was a German-born classical violinist. She was born Marianne Louise Liedtke in Berlin into a highly cultured Jewish family. Her father was an appellate court lawyer, a role he lost in April 1933 with the rise of the Nazis. She was a student of Josef Wolfsthal and Max Rostal. She fled to London in 1934 and taught German and violin lessons, as well as performing with the pianist Peter Gellhorn and her housemate, cellist Eva Heinitz. In 1939, she played at London's Wigmore Hall. In 1941, she joined the Czech Trio alongside Walter Susskind and Karel Horitz. To sound Czech, she changed...

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