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 …

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School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Computer Science,

#551

Wendy Mackay

#86813

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Wendy Elizabeth Mackay is a Canadian researcher specializing in human-computer interaction. She has served in all of the roles on the SIGCHI committee, including Chair. She is a member of the CHI Academy and a recipient of a European Research Council Advanced grant. She has been a visiting professor in Stanford University between 2010 and 2012, and received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award in 2014.

#552

Nobuko Yoshida

#100045

Overall Influence

Nobuko Yoshida is the Christopher Strachey Professor of Computing in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. She undertook her BSc and MSc at the University of Keio, Japan, before completing her PhD jointly at the universities of Keio and Manchester.

#553

Diane Litman

#95354

Overall Influence

Diane Litman is an American professor of computer science at the University of Pittsburgh. She also jointly holds the positions of senior scientist with the Learning Research and Development Center and faculty with the Intelligent Systems department. Litman is noted for her work in the areas of artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, knowledge representation and reasoning, natural language processing, and user modeling.

#554

Aretha Teckentrup

#46704

Overall Influence

Aretha Leonore Teckentrup is a UK-based mathematician, known for her research on uncertainty quantification and numerical analysis. Her work focuses on multilevel Monte Carlo methods for the numerical solution of partial differential equations, Gaussian processes and Bayesian inference. She is a reader in the mathematics of data science at the University of Edinburgh.

#555

Maureen C. Stone

#100157

Overall Influence

Maureen C. Stone is an American computer scientist, specializing in color modeling. Biography Stone has bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and another master's degree from the California Institute of Technology. She worked for many years at Xerox PARC. After leaving PARC, she founded a consulting firm in the Seattle, Washington area in 1998, and became is an adjunct professor in the School for Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She joined Tableau Research in 2011, and headed the com...

#556

Allison Mankin

#63363

Overall Influence

Allison Mankin is an American computer scientist and prominent figure in the area of Internet governance. She previously served as the Internet Research Task Force Chair and holds numerous leadership positions within the Internet Engineering Task Force , which is known for developing Internet standards.

#557

Katrina Ligett

#61932

Overall Influence

Katrina Ligett is an American computer scientist. She is Associate Professor of computer science and economics at the Hebrew University and Visiting Associate at California Institute of Technology. She is known for work on algorithmic game theory and privacy.

#558

Patricia Melin

#106218

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

#559

Kathryn Leonard

#68358

Overall Influence

Kathryn Leonard is an American mathematician and computer scientist. Leonard received a Henry L. Alder Award from the Mathematical Association of America in 2012. She received the AWM Service Award from the Association for Women in Mathematics in 2015. She served as the AWM Meetings Coordinator from 2015 - 2018. She was President of the AWM and is now AWM Past-President. She is also director of the NSF-funded Center for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics. She is currently on the American Mathematical Society Nominating Committee.

#560

Ziva Ben-Porat

#30259

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Ziva Ben-Porat is a literary theorist, writer, and editor who lives in Israel and is a professor at Tel Aviv University. Personal life Ben-Porat graduated with a bachelor's degree in English and Hebrew literature and a master's degree in English literature from Tel Aviv University, as well as a doctorate in comparative literature from University of California, Berkeley.

#561

Bin Gao

#106435

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

#562

Dru Lavigne

#98329

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Dru Lavigne is a network and systems administrator, IT instructor, technical writer and director at FreeBSD Foundation. She has been using FreeBSD since 1996, has authored several BSD books, and spent over 10 years developing training materials and providing training on the administration of FreeBSD systems.

#563

Andrea Rotnitzky

#54425

Overall Influence

Andrea Gloria Rotnitzky is an Argentine biostatistician whose research involves causal inference on the effects of medical interventions in the face of missing data. She is Prentice Endowed Professor of Biostatistics in the University of Washington School of Public Health.

#564

Brandeis Marshall

Brandeis Marshall

#64714

Overall Influence

Brandeis Marshall is an American data scientist, CEO of DataedX, and Full Professor of Computer Science at Spelman College, where she is the former Chair of the Department of Computer and Information Sciences. Starting in September 2019, Marshall is a faculty associate at Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. She has also worked to broaden participation in the field of data science to increase representation of underrepresented minorities, including her effort 'Black Women in Data'.

#565

Padma Raghavan

#88605

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Padma Raghavan is a computer scientist who works as vice provost for research at Vanderbilt University. Raghavan graduated in 1985 from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. She earned her Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University in 1991, with a dissertation on parallel algorithms for matrix decomposition supervised by Alex Pothen. She worked at the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, then returned as a faculty member to Penn State in 2000. At Penn State, she became a distinguished professor of computer science and engineering, associate vice president for research, and director of strategic initiatives.

#566

Karen Myers

#95641

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Karen L. Myers is the director of SRI International's Artificial Intelligence Center, where she is also principal scientist Biography Myers studied at the University of Toronto, graduating with a B.Sc. in mathematics and computer science. She obtained her Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University. Also, she earned a degree in piano performance from The Royal Conservatory of Music. She joined SRI in 1991.

#567

Carol Friedman

#77190

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Carol Friedman is a scientist and biomedical informatician. She is among the pioneers the use of expert systems in medical language processing and the explicit medical concept representation underpinning the use of entity–attribute–value modeling underpinning electronic medical records.

#568

Nicole Forsgren

#86543

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Nicole Forsgren Velasquez is an American technology executive, IT impact expert, and author. In 2020 she was named vice-president of Research & Strategy at Microsoft's GitHub and more recently Partner at Microsoft Research. She is coauthor of Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps which won the Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award in 2019.

#569

Cristina Basso

#107577

Overall Influence

#570

Olgica Milenkovic

#73077

Overall Influence

Olgica Milenkovic is a coding theorist from the former Yugoslavia, known for her work in compressed sensing, low-density parity-check codes, and DNA digital data storage. She is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

#571

Haesun Park

#58234

Overall Influence

Haesun Park is a professor and chair of Computational Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is an IEEE Fellow, ACM Fellow, and Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Fellow. Park's main areas of research are Numerical Algorithms, Data Analysis, Visual Analytics and Parallel Computing. She has co-authored over 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals and conferences.

#572

Lillian Barros

#107955

Overall Influence

#573

Maria L. Gini

#63587

Overall Influence

Maria Gini is an Italian and American Computer Scientist in artificial intelligence and robotics. She has considerable service to the computer science artificial intelligence community and for broadening participation in computing. She was Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group in Artificial Intelligence SIGAI from 2003 to 2010. She is currently a member of the CRA-W board.

#574

Julie Dorsey

#57259

Overall Influence

Julie Dorsey is an American computer scientist specializing in computer graphics. With architecture as a driving application, her research in computer graphics has included work on high-dynamic-range imaging, image-based modeling and rendering, and billboarding. She is the Frederick W. Beinecke Professor of Computer Science at Yale University, and the founder and Chief Scientist of 3D sketching software company Mental Canvas.

#575

Holly Yanco

#43051

Overall Influence

Holly Ann Yanco is an American roboticist and computer scientist who works as Distinguished University Professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and the director of the New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation center. She is known for her research in human–robot interaction, and has applied robotics as a way to broaden interest in computer science by schoolchildren, in assistive technology, in manufacturing, and for rescue robots.

#576

Lada Adamic

#38498

Overall Influence

Lada Adamic is an American network scientist, who researches information dynamics in networks. She studies how network structure influences the flow of information, how information influences the evolution of networks, and crowdsourced knowledge sharing.

#577

Xiuzhen Cheng

#105908

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Xiuzhen Cheng is a Chinese computer scientist whose research interests include wireless sensor networks, edge computing, and the internet of things. She is a professor of computer science at Shandong University.

#578

Monica Rogati

#102053

Overall Influence

Monica Rogati is a data scientist, computer scientist and the former Vice President of Data of Jawbone. Before that, she was a senior data scientist at LinkedIn. Early life and education Rogati was born in Romania, where she attended the Tudor Vianu National College of Computer Science. Rogati has a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of New Mexico, and an MS and PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

#579

Michelle Grabner

#50388

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Michelle Grabner is an artist, curator, and critic based in Wisconsin. She is the Crown Family Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has taught since 1996. She has curated several important exhibitions, including the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art along with Anthony Elms and Stuart Comer, and FRONT International, the 2016 Portland Biennial at the Oregon Contemporary, a triennial exhibition in Cleveland, Ohio in 2018. In 2014, Grabner was named one of the 100 most powerful women in art and in 2019, she was named a 2019 National Academy of Design's Academician, a lifetime honor.

#580

Petra Perner

#109204

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

#581

Ann Nicholson

#45207

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Professor Ann E. Nicholson , is Dean in the Faculty of Information Technology of Australia's largest university, Monash University in Melbourne. She is a researcher in the specialised area of Bayesian networks.

#582

Mirka Miller

#77362

Overall Influence

1949 - 2016 (67 years)

Mirka Miller was a Czech-Australian mathematician and computer scientist interested in graph theory and data security. She was a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Newcastle.

#583

Elena Ferrari

#105766

Overall Influence

Elena Ferrari is a Professor of Computer Science and Director of the STRICT Social Lab at the Università degli Studi dell’Insubria, Varese, Italy. Ferrari was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2013 for contributions to security and privacy for data and applications. She has been named one of the “50 Most Influential Italian Women in Tech” in 2018. She was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2019 "for contributions to security and privacy of data and social network systems".

#584

Leah Buechley

#74045

Overall Influence

Leah Buechley is an American educator, engineer and designer who is best known as the developer of the LilyPad Arduino toolkit and other smart textiles. Buechley is currently serving as an Associate Professor at the University of New Mexico's Department of Computer Science. Her research focuses on the intersection of computer science, art, architecture, and education in her work. She has done fundamental work in electronics based on paper and fabric.

#585

Liz Liddy

#84368

Overall Influence

Elizabeth DuRoss Liddy is an Emeritus Professor of Information Science and former Dean of the Syracuse University School of Information Studies. She is a pioneer in the field of natural language processing.

#586

Lorraine Borman

#97541

Overall Influence

Lorraine Borman is an American computer scientist associated with Northwestern University who specializes in information retrieval, computational social science, and human–computer interaction. She was one of the founders of SIGCHI, the Special Interest Group on Computer–Human Interaction of the Association for Computing Machinery, and became its first chair.

#587

Joan L. Mitchell

Joan L. Mitchell

#58455

Overall Influence

1947 - 2015 (68 years)

Joan Laverne Mitchell was an American computer scientist, data compression pioneer, and inventor who, as a researcher at IBM, co-invented the JPEG digital image format. Early life Mitchell was born on May 24, 1947, in Modesto, California. Mitchell's father was William Mitchell and her mother was Doris Mitchell.

#588

Judith S. Olson

#73200

Overall Influence

Judith S. Olson is an American researcher best known for her work in the field of human-computer interaction and the effect of distance on teamwork. Olson began her career at the University of Michigan before later moving to the University of California, Irvine. She retired in 2008 with over 110 research articles to her name.

#589

Carla Ellis

#85322

Overall Influence

Carla Schlatter Ellis is an American computer scientist and Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at Duke University. She is known for her work in energy management on mobile devices as well as for her dedication to increasing the number of women in the field of computer science. She is one of the founding members of Systers, an international email list of female computer scientists that was founded in 1987. Systers, which was initiated by Ellis and 12 other female computer scientists who met at a Symposium on Operating Systems Principles , has since grown to over 3000 members.

#590

Isao Noda

#109784

Overall Influence

#591

Gabrielle Rocap

#30000

Overall Influence

Gabrielle Rocap is an American marine biologist and academic noted for her research on the evolution and ecology of marine bacteria and phytoplankton. She is one of the researchers who discovered microorganisms in the Pacific Ocean that consume arsenic to survive. She is currently a professor in the Oceanography department of the University of Washington.

#592

Olga Sorkine-Hornung

#101945

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Olga Sorkine-Hornung is a professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich working in the fields of computer graphics, geometric modeling and geometry processing. She has received multiple awards, including the ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award in 2011.

#593

Valeria de Paiva

#48362

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Valeria Correa Vaz de Paiva is a Brazilian mathematician, logician, and computer scientist. Her work includes research on logical approaches to computation, especially using category theory, knowledge representation and natural language semantics, and functional programming with a focus on foundations and type theories.

#594

Rena Gasimova

#106917

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Rena Tofiq Gasimova is an Azerbaijani computer scientist, who holds the position of Sector Chief at the national Information Technology Institute . Career Gasimova graduated in 1985 from the Faculty of Automatics and Computer Science, Azerbaijan Polytechnic Institute named after Ch. Ildirim.

#595

Alexandra Newton

#46126

Overall Influence

Alexandra C. Newton is a Canadian and American biochemist. She is a Distinguished Professor of pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego. Newton runs a multidisciplinary Protein kinase C and Cell signaling biochemistry and cell biology research group in the School of Medicine, investigating molecular mechanisms of signal transduction in the Phospholipase C and Phosphoinositide 3-kinase signaling pathways. She has been continuously funded by the US National Institutes of Health since 1988.

#596

Claudia Patrignani

#110293

Overall Influence

#597

Nancy Paterson

#63022

Overall Influence

1957 - 2018 (61 years)

For the American jurist, see Nancy Paterson. Nancy Evelyn Paterson was a Canadian artist and writer known for her work in new media. She was an associate professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design University from 1990 to 2018, and was Facilities Coordinator at Charles Street Video, a non-profit, artist-run centre providing production and post-production facilities for digital video and audio.

#598

Yuanyuan Yang

#107190

Overall Influence

Yuanyuan Yang is a Chinese-American computer scientist whose interests include parallel and distributed computing, and wireless sensor networks. She is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Stony Brook University, Associate Dean for Diversity and Academic Affairs in the Stony Brook College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and program director for software and hardware foundations and principles and practice of scalable systems at the National Science Foundation.

#599

Jill S. Barnholtz-Sloan

#59697

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Jill Suzanne Barnholtz-Sloan is an American biostatistician and data scientist specialized in cancer epidemiology and etiologic investigations of brain tumors. She is a senior investigator and associate director for informatics and data science at the National Cancer Institute.

#600

Laurie Williams

#105410

Overall Influence

Laurie Williams is an American software engineer known for her writings on pair programming and agile software development. She is a distinguished professor of computer science at North Carolina State University, and interim head of the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University.

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