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,

#451

Pippa Wetzell

#45728

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Pippa Wetzell is a New Zealand television personality and journalist with TVNZ 1. Early life Wetzell attended Takapuna Grammar School on Auckland's North Shore, where she was Head Girl in 1994. She went on to study at the Auckland University of Technology, graduating with a Bachelor of Communications degree.

#452

JoAnne Yates

#17671

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

JoAnne Yates Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management, Emerita at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has worked at the intersection of organization studies and information technology. She has contributed to a number of fields including organizational theory, rhetoric and writing studies, genre theory, business history, archival studies, history of computing, and standardization.

#453

Amy Atkins

#82843

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (123 years)

Amy Atkins is an American journalist and university professor. Career Amy Atkins, a former correspondent for ABC's Good Morning America, has anchored newscasts and programs on MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, Court TV, and the Oxygen Network and she has reported for Oprah and The Daily Show. For five years, Ms. Atkins was a weekend anchor and reporter at WNYW, Fox channel 5 in New York, where she hosted “Fox Style News,” a syndicated feature that focused on fashion, trends and ideas. Amy Atkins received two New York Emmy awards while at Channel 5, for feature reporting and Outstanding On-camera Achievement.

#454

Kaija Saariaho

#36554

Overall Influence

1952 - 2023 (71 years)

Kaija Anneli Saariaho was a Finnish composer based in Paris, France. During the course of her career, Saariaho received commissions from the Lincoln Center for the Kronos Quartet and from IRCAM for the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the BBC, the New York Philharmonic, the Salzburg Music Festival, the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, and the Finnish National Opera, among others. In a 2019 composers' poll by BBC Music Magazine, Saariaho was ranked the greatest living composer.

#455

Grace Slick

#23552

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Grace Slick is an American painter and retired musician whose musical career spanned four decades. Slick was a prominent figure in San Francisco's psychedelic music scene during the mid-1960s to the early 1970s.

#456

Johanne Paradis

#72309

Overall Influence

Johanne Catherine Paradis is a language scientist and expert on bilingual language development. She is Professor of Linguistics and Adjunct Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Alberta, where she directs the Language Acquisition Lab and the Child English Second Language Center.

#457

Justine Cassell

#21590

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Justine M. Cassell is an American professor and researcher interested in human-human conversation, human-computer interaction, and storytelling. Since August 2010 she has been on the faculty of the Carnegie Mellon Human Computer Interaction Institute and the Language Technologies Institute, with courtesy appointments in Psychology, and the Center for Neural Bases of Cognition.

#458

Gillian Lynne

#50831

Overall Influence

1926 - 2018 (92 years)

Dame Gillian Barbara Lynne was an English ballerina, dancer, choreographer, actress, and theatre-television director, noted for her theatre choreography associated with two of the longest-running shows in Broadway history, Cats and The Phantom of the Opera. At age 87, she was made a DBE in the 2014 New Year Honours List.

#459

Senta Trömel-Plötz

#64025

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Senta Trömel-Plötz is a German linguist. Together with Luise F. Pusch she introduced feminist linguistics in Germany. Life Trömel-Plötz studied linguistics in the USA. She received her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania with the dissertation, Simple Copula Structures in English. This was followed by her habilitation. From 1980 to 1984 she was a professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Konstanz. The professorship was not converted into a permanent position. Trömel-Plötz believes that anti-feminist beliefs at the time prevented her being given tenure. She then chose to move to the USA for better opportunities at Universities.

#460

Leontyne Price

#31075

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (97 years)

Mary Violet Leontyne Price is an American spinto soprano who was the first African American soprano to receive international acclaim. From 1961 she began a long association with the Metropolitan Opera, where she was the first African American to be a leading performer. She regularly appeared at the world's major opera houses, including the Royal Opera House, San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and La Scala; at La Scala, she was also the first African American to sing a leading role. She was particularly renowned for her performances of the title role in Verdi's Aida.

#461

Yuen-Ying Chan

#60338

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Yuen-Ying Chan is a Hong Kong-based American journalist and journalism academic whose investigative work and subsequent successful defence of a libel suit helped establish Taiwanese media freedom. Background and career overview A Hong Kong native with American citizenship, Chan received a bachelor's degree in social sciences from the University of Hong Kong and a master's in journalism from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Chan moved to the United States in 1972 to pursue a graduate degree at the University of Michigan. She later worked for the New York Daily News.

#462

Jo Stafford

#36782

Overall Influence

1917 - 2008 (91 years)

Jo Elizabeth Stafford was an American traditional pop music singer, whose career spanned five decades from the late 1930s to the early 1980s. Admired for the purity of her voice, she originally underwent classical training to become an opera singer before following a career in popular music, and by 1955 had achieved more worldwide record sales than any other female artist. Her 1952 song "You Belong to Me" topped the charts in the United States and United Kingdom, becoming the second single to top the UK Singles Chart, and the first by a female artist to do so.

#463

Kathleen Matthews

#42028

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Kathleen Ann Matthews is the former chief communications and public affairs officer for hotel company Marriott International. Prior to joining Marriott International, she was a reporter for 25 years at WJLA-TV. She was a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives for Maryland's 8th congressional district in the 2016 elections. She is the former chair of the Maryland Democratic Party.

#464

Kiri Te Kanawa

#45919

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Dame Kiri Jeanette Claire Te Kanawa, , is a retired New Zealand opera singer. She had a full lyric soprano voice, which has been described as "mellow yet vibrant, warm, ample and unforced". Her extensive discography includes three albums which featured in the top forty in charts in Australia in the mid-1980s.

#465

Helen de Hoop

#79158

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Helen de Hoop is a Dutch linguist and Professor of Theoretical Linguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen. She is known for her works on the relationship between the form and interpretation of language.

#466

Jessye Norman

#37913

Overall Influence

1945 - 2019 (74 years)

Jessye Mae Norman was an American opera singer and recitalist. She was able to perform dramatic soprano roles, but did not limit herself to that voice type. A commanding presence on operatic, concert and recital stages, Norman was associated with roles including Beethoven's Leonore, Wagner's Sieglinde and Kundry, Berlioz's Cassandre and Didon, and Bartók's Judith. The New York Times music critic Edward Rothstein described her voice as a "grand mansion of sound", and wrote that "it has enormous dimensions, reaching backward and upward. It opens onto unexpected vistas. It contains sunlit rooms,...

#467

Louise Sandhaus

#58073

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Louise Sandhaus is an American graphic designer and design educator. She is a professor at California Institute of the Arts and is principal of Louise Sandhaus Design. Early life and education Louise Sandhouse was born in 1955 outside of Boston, Massachusetts to Norman, an art director, and Harriet Sandhaus, a newspaper columnist. The family later relocated to Orlando, Florida.

#468

Samah Selim

#37476

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Samah Selim is an Egyptian scholar and translator of Arabic literature. She studied English literature at Barnard College, and obtained her PhD from Columbia University in 1997. At present she is an associate professor at the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She has also taught at Columbia, Princeton and Aix-en-Provence universities.

#469

Diane McFarlin

#61253

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (123 years)

Diane McFarlin is an American educator and author. She retired in 2021 as dean of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. Career McFarlin began her journalism career in high school and took a reporting job at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune after earning her degree at the University of Florida. She became managing editor at 30 and was named executive editor of The Gainesville Sun three years later. She then returned to the Herald-Tribune, serving as executive editor for a decade and publisher for 13 years. McFarlin became dean of the UFC College of Journalism and Commu...

#470

Juice Newton

#36221

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Judith Kay "Juice" Newton is an American pop and country singer, songwriter, and musician. Newton has received five Grammy Award nominations in the Pop and Country Best Female Vocalist categorieswinning once in 1983as well as an ACM Award for Top New Female Artist and two consecutive Billboard Female Album Artist of the Year awards. Newton's other awards include a People's Choice Award for "Best Female Vocalist" and the Australian Music Media's "Number One International Country Artist".

#471

Aileen Adams

#55446

Overall Influence

1923 - Present (101 years)

Aileen Kirkpatrick Adams is a British retired consultant anaesthetist. Early life Aileen Adams was born on 5 September 1923. She graduated from the University of Sheffield. Career Adams worked as a junior anaesthetist at Addenbrooke's Hospital from 1946 to 1951

#472

Judy Davis

#33288

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Judith Davis is an Australian actress in film, television, and on stage. With a career spanning over 40 years, she has been commended for her versatility and regarded as one of the finest actresses of her generation. Frequent collaborator Woody Allen described her as "one of the most exciting actresses in the world". She is the most awarded recipient for the AACTA Award with nine accolades and has received numerous accolades, including three Emmy Awardss, two BAFTA Awards, and two Golden Globe Awards, and two nominations for Academy Awards.

#473

Robin Queen

#56360

Overall Influence

Robin M. Queen is an American linguist and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan. In 2010 she was named a Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Professor of Linguistics, English Languages and Literatures, and Germanic Languages and Literatures. She also served as the Chair of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Michigan.

#474

Nancy Baym

#65102

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Nancy Baym is an American scholar and Senior Principal Research Manager at Microsoft Research, formerly a Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. She was a member of the founding board and former president of the Association of Internet Researchers, and serves on the board of several academic journals covering new media and communication. She has published research and provided media commentary on the topics of social communication, new media, and fandom.

#475

Susan Hunston

#69520

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Susan Elizabeth Hunston is a British linguist. She received her PhD in English under the supervision of Michael Hoey at the University of Birmingham in 1989. She does research in the areas of corpus linguistics and applied linguistics. She is one of the primary developers of the Pattern Grammar model of linguistic analysis, which is a way of describing the syntactic environments of individual words, based on studying their occurrences in large sets of authentic examples, i.e. language corpora. The Pattern Grammar model was developed as part of the COBUILD project, where Hunston worked for se...

#476

Sezen Aksu

#31406

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Sezen Aksu is a Turkish singer, songwriter and producer. She is one of the most successful Turkish singers, having sold over 40 million albums worldwide. Her nicknames include the "Queen of Turkish Pop" and "Minik Serçe" .

#477

Sarah Silverman

Sarah Silverman

#21426

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Sarah Kate Silverman is an American stand-up comedian, actress, and writer. Silverman first rose to prominence for her brief stint as a writer and cast member on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live during its 19th season between 1993 and 1994. She then starred in and produced The Sarah Silverman Program, which ran from 2007 to 2010 on Comedy Central. For her work on the program, Silverman was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series.

#478

Diane Larsen-Freeman

Diane Larsen-Freeman

#20390

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Diane Larsen-Freeman is an American linguist. She is currently a Professor Emerita in Education and in Linguistics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. An applied linguist, known for her work in second language acquisition, English as a second or foreign language, language teaching methods, teacher education, and English grammar, she is renowned for her work on the complex/dynamic systems approach to second language development.

#479

Mary Beckman

#43471

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Mary Esther Beckman is a Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the Ohio State University. Career Beckman received her PhD from Cornell University in 1984. She was a Postdoctoral member of the technical staff in "Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence Research" at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, before joining the linguistics faculty at Ohio State University in 1985. She has directed at least twenty-five PhD dissertations to completion at Ohio State University.

#480

Sarah Kendzior

#33395

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Sarah J. Kendzior is an American author, anthropologist, researcher, and scholar. Kendzior is the author of The View from Flyover Country – a collection of essays first published by Al Jazeera – and is a former co-host of the Gaslit Nation podcast. In 2020, she published her second book, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America, which was a New York Times bestseller. In September 2022, she published her third book, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent, which was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

#481

Alison Krauss

#23712

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Alison Maria Krauss is an American bluegrass-country singer and fiddler. She entered the music industry at an early age, competing in local contests by the age of eight and recording for the first time at 14. She signed with Rounder Records in 1985 and released her first solo album in 1987. She was invited to join Union Station, releasing her first album with them as a group in 1989 and performing with them ever since.

#482

Anna Sokolow

#18758

Overall Influence

1910 - 2000 (90 years)

Anna Sokolow was an American dancer and choreographer. Sokolow's work is known for its social justice focus and theatricality. Throughout her career, Sokolow supported of the development of modern dance around the world, including in Mexico and Israel.

#483

Yuki Kajiura

#45204

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Yuki Kajiura is a Japanese composer, arranger and music producer. She has provided the music for several popular anime series, such as Sword Art Online, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Fate/Zero, The Garden of Sinners, Pandora Hearts and Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba.

#484

Leslie A. Baxter

#27688

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Dr. Leslie A. Baxter is an American scholar and teacher in communication studies, best known for her research on family and relational communication. Her work is focused on relationships: romantic, marital, and friendly. She is best known for her Relational Dialectics theory. She is a professor emeritus at The University of Iowa's department of Communication Studies.

#485

Fredricka Whitfield

Fredricka Whitfield

#46864

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Fredricka Whitfield is an American journalist and news anchor. She anchors the weekend edition of CNN Newsroom from CNN's world headquarters in Atlanta, and she is also a fill-in and substitute anchor for CNN's At This Hour With Kate Bolduan.

#486

Emily Watson

#46693

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Emily Margaret Watson is an English actress. She began her career on stage and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1992. In 2002, she starred in productions of Twelfth Night and Uncle Vanya at the Donmar Warehouse, and was nominated for the 2003 Olivier Award for Best Actress for the latter. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her debut film role as Bess McNeil in Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves and for her role as Jacqueline du Pré in Hilary and Jackie , winning the British Independent Film Award for Best Actress for the latter. For her role as Margaret Hum...

#487

Marilyn Horne

#45267

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Marilyn Horne is an American mezzo-soprano opera singer. She specialized in roles requiring beauty of tone, excellent breath support, and the ability to execute difficult coloratura passages. She is a recipient of the National Medal of Arts and the Kennedy Center Honors, and has won four Grammy Awards.

#488

Régine Crespin

#70446

Overall Influence

1927 - 2007 (80 years)

Régine Crespin was a French singer who had a major international career in opera and on the concert stage between 1950 and 1989. She started her career singing roles in the dramatic soprano and spinto soprano repertoire, drawing particular acclaim singing Wagner and Strauss heroines. She went on to sing a wider repertoire that embraced Italian, French, German, and Russian opera from a variety of musical periods. In the early 1970s Crespin began experiencing vocal difficulties for the first time and ultimately began performing roles from the mezzo-soprano repertoire. Throughout her career she ...

#489

Ann Hamilton

#26514

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Ann Hamilton is an American visual artist who emerged in the early 1980s known for her large-scale multimedia installations. After receiving her BFA in textile design from the University of Kansas in 1979, she lived in Banff, Alberta, and Montreal, Quebec, Canada before deciding to pursue an MFA in sculpture at Yale in 1983. From 1985 to 1991, she taught on the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Since 2001, Hamilton has served on the faculty of the Department of Art at the Ohio State University. She was appointed a Distinguished University Professor in 2011.

#490

Pearl Primus

#18120

Overall Influence

1919 - 1994 (75 years)

Pearl Eileen Primus was an American dancer, choreographer and anthropologist. Primus played an important role in the presentation of African dance to American audiences. Early in her career she saw the need to promote African dance as an art form worthy of study and performance. Primus' work was a reaction to myths of savagery and the lack of knowledge about African people. It was an effort to guide the Western world to view African dance as an important and dignified statement about another way of life.

#491

Patricia Keating

#70386

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Patricia Ann Keating is an American linguist and noted phonetician. She is distinguished research professor emeritus at UCLA. Life She received her PhD in Linguistics at Brown University in 1980. In 1980 she joined the faculty of the Linguistics Department at University of California, Los Angeles, where she remained until her retirement. She became a Full Professor and director of the UCLA Phonetics Laboratory in 1991. She also held a position as Distinguished Professor and served as Chair of UCLA Linguistics Department.

#492

Beth Levin

#53201

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Beth Levin is an American linguist who is currently the William H. Bonsall Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University. Her research investigates the lexical semantics of verbs, particularly the representation of events and the kind of morphosyntactic devices that English and other languages use to express events and their participants.

#493

Cyd Charisse

#39384

Overall Influence

1921 - 2008 (87 years)

Cyd Charisse was an American dancer and actress. After recovering from polio as a child and studying ballet, Charisse entered films in the 1940s. Her roles usually featured her abilities as a dancer, and she was paired with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly; her films include Singin' in the Rain , The Band Wagon , Brigadoon with Gene Kelly and Van Johnson , and Silk Stockings . She stopped dancing in films in the late 1950s, but continued acting in film and television, and in 1991 made her Broadway debut. In her later years, she discussed the history of the Hollywood musical in documentaries, and was featured in That's Entertainment! III in 1994.

#494

Aneta Pavlenko

#66145

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Aneta Pavlenko is a Ukrainian-American linguist, specializing in the study of bilingualism, particularly the relations between bilingualism and cognition and emotion. She is a professor of education at Temple University.

#495

Wendy Bacon

#50471

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Professor Wendy Bacon is an Australian academic, investigative journalist, and political activist who was head of the Journalism Program at the University of Technology, Sydney. She was awarded Australian journalism's highest prize, a Walkley Award in 1984 for her articles about police corruption in New South Wales.

#496

Stella Adler

#35519

Overall Influence

1901 - 1992 (91 years)

Stella Adler was an American actress and acting teacher. A member of Yiddish Theater's Adler dynasty, Adler began acting at a young age. She shifted to producing, directing, and teaching, founding the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York City in 1949. Later in life she taught part time in Los Angeles, with the assistance of her protégée, actress Joanne Linville, who continued to teach Adler's technique.

#497

Miriam Meyerhoff

#80384

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Miriam Meyerhoff is a New Zealand sociolinguist. In 2020 she was appointed as a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Early life and family Meyerhoff was born in 1964, the daughter of poet Mary Cresswell and philosopher . Her father died in a car accident the following year, and her mother married logician Max Cresswell in 1970. The family subsequently moved to New Zealand.

#498

Rana Foroohar

#16976

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Rana Aylin Foroohar is an American author, business columnist and an associate editor at the Financial Times. She is also CNN's global economic analyst. Life and career Foroohar was born Rana Aylin Dogar in Frankfort, Indiana, graduating from Frankfort Senior High School in 1988. Her father Aygen Erol Dogar is a Turkish immigrant and an engineer who started a small manufacturing business in the Midwest. Her mother Ann was a school teacher, and herself the daughter of immigrants from Sweden and England. In 1992, Foroohar graduated from Barnard College with a B.A. in English literature.

#499

Lisa Matthewson

#62864

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Lisa Christine Matthewson is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at University of British Columbia with specialties in pragmatics and semantics. She has also done significant work with semantic fieldwork and in the preservation and oral history of First Nations languages, especially St'át'imcets and Gitksan. Matthewson's appointment at UBC was notable because she was the first female full professor in the department's history.

#500

Tomris Uyar

#49496

Overall Influence

1941 - 2003 (62 years)

Tomris Uyar was a Turkish writer and translator. She was born in Istanbul, the daughter of two lawyers and granddaughter of Republican People's Party politician Süleyman Sırrı Gedik. She was educated at the British Girls' Secondary School and at Arnavutköy American Girls' College, now called Robert College . She graduated from the Journalism Institute affiliated to the Faculty of Economics of Istanbul University .

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