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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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Computer Science,

#101

Susanne Albers

#11167

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Susanne Albers is a German theoretical computer scientist and professor of computer science at the Department of Informatics of the Technical University of Munich. She is a recipient of the Otto Hahn Medal and the Leibniz Prize.

#102

Cathy O'Neil

#10969

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Catherine Helen O'Neil is an American mathematician, data scientist, and author. She is the author of the New York Times best-seller Weapons of Math Destruction, and opinion columns in Bloomberg View. O'Neil was active in the Occupy movement.

#103

Ellen Fetter

#4944

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Ellen Cole Fetter Gille is an American computer scientist. She worked with Edward Norton Lorenz on chaos theory. Early life and education Fetter was born to Frank Whitson Fetter and Elizabeth Garrett Pollard. Her mother created an endowment for chamber music at Swarthmore College, which has been supported by successive generations of her family. Fetter attended the Ecole Préalpina in Chexbres, Switzerland and New Trier High School, from which she graduated in 1957. She studied mathematics at Mount Holyoke College and graduated in 1961.

#104

Tracy Chou

#18463

Overall Influence

1987 - Present (37 years)

Tracy Chou is a software engineer and advocate for diversity in technology related fields. She previously worked at Pinterest and Quora with internship experience at Rocket Fuel, Google, and Facebook.

#105

Susanne Bødker

#7780

Overall Influence

Susanne Bødker is a Danish computer scientist known for her contributions to human–computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, and participatory design, including the introduction of activity theory to human–computer interaction. She is a professor of computer science at Aarhus University, and a member of the CHI Academy.

#106

Donna Cox

#14438

Overall Influence

Donna J. Cox is an American artist and scientist, Michael Aiken Endowed Chair; Professor of Art + Design; Director, Advanced Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ; Director, Visualization and Experimental Technologies at National Center for Supercomputing Applications ; and Director, edream . She is a recognized pioneer in computer art and scientific visualization, specifically cinematic scientific visualization.

#107

Lydia Kavraki

#14323

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Lydia E. Kavraki is a Greek-American computer scientist, the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science, a professor of bioengineering, electrical and computer engineering, and mechanical engineering at Rice University. She is also the director of the Ken Kennedy Institute at Rice University. She is known for her work on robotics/AI and bioinformatics/computational biology and in particular for the probabilistic roadmap method for robot motion planning and biomolecular configuration analysis.

#108

Olga Russakovsky

#22146

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Olga Russakovsky is an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton University. Her research investigates computer vision and machine learning. She was one of the leaders of the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition challenge and has been recognised by MIT Technology Review as one of the world's top young innovators.

#109

Anima Anandkumar

#18962

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Animashree Anandkumar is the Bren Professor of Computing at California Institute of Technology. She is a director of Machine Learning research at NVIDIA. Her research considers tensor-algebraic methods, deep learning and non-convex problems.

#110

Martha E. Pollack

Martha E. Pollack

#8743

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Martha Elizabeth Pollack is an American computer scientist who has served as the 14th president of Cornell University since April 2017. Previously, she served as the 14th provost and executive vice president for academic affairs of the University of Michigan from 2013 to 2017.

#111

Leslie P. Kaelbling

Leslie P. Kaelbling

#20795

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Leslie Pack Kaelbling is an American roboticist and the Panasonic Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is widely recognized for adapting partially observable Markov decision processes from operations research for application in artificial intelligence and robotics. Kaelbling received the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 1997 for applying reinforcement learning to embedded control systems and developing programming tools for robot navigation. In 2000, she was elected as a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial I...

#112

Rediet Abebe

#13873

Overall Influence

1991 - Present (33 years)

Rediet Abebe is an Ethiopian computer scientist working in algorithms and artificial intelligence. She is an assistant professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, she was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

#113

Cicely Popplewell

Cicely Popplewell

#21628

Overall Influence

1920 - 1995 (75 years)

Cicely Mary Williams was a British software engineer who worked with Alan Turing on the Manchester Mark 1 computer. Early life and education Popplewell was born on 29October 1920 in Bramhall, Stockport, England. Her parents were Bessie and Alfred Popplewell, a chartered accountant. She attended Sherbrook Private Girls School at Greaves Hall in Lancashire.

#114

Anne-Marie Eklund Löwinder

Anne-Marie Eklund Löwinder

#21946

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Monika Ann-Mari Eklund Löwinder , born 26 September 1957 in Stockholm, is a Swedish Internet expert. Biography She is the Chief Information Security Officer at IIS, The Internet Foundation in Sweden. She also serves on the boards of internet-related organisations including the Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries and the Swedish Law and Informatics Research Institute.

#115

Joëlle Pineau

#23022

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Joëlle Pineau is a Canadian computer scientist and associate professor at McGill University. She is the lead of Facebook's Artificial Intelligence Research lab in Montreal, Quebec. Early life and education Pineau was born in 1974 in Ottawa, Ontario. She played the viola in the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra. She eventually studied engineering at the University of Waterloo. She completed her postgraduate education in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in 2004. A chapter of Pineau's Masters thesis, Point-based value iteration: An anytime algorithm for POMDPs, has been published and cited almost 1,000 times.

#116

Enid Mumford

#7364

Overall Influence

1924 - 2006 (82 years)

Enid Mumford was a British social scientist, computer scientist and Professor Emerita of Manchester University and a visiting fellow at Manchester Business School, largely known for her work on human factors and socio-technical systems.

#117

Rebecca Bace

#19676

Overall Influence

1955 - 2017 (62 years)

Rebecca "Becky" Gurley Bace was an American computer security expert and pioneer in intrusion detection. She spent 12 years at the US National Security Agency where she created the Computer Misuse and Anomaly Detection research program. She was known as the "den mother of computer security". She was also influential in the early stages of intelligence community venture capital and was a major player in Silicon Valley investments in cyber security technology.

#118

Margaret Burnett

#20046

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Margaret M. Burnett is a computer scientist specializing in work at the intersection of human computer interaction and software engineering, and known for her pioneering work in visual programming languages, end-user software engineering, and gender-inclusive software. She is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Oregon State University,, a member of the CHI Academy, and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

#119

Margaret Mitchell

#21315

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Margaret Mitchell is a computer scientist who works on algorithmic bias and fairness in machine learning. She is most well known for her work on automatically removing undesired biases concerning demographic groups from machine learning models, as well as more transparent reporting of their intended use.

#120

Dana Moshkovitz

#18702

Overall Influence

Dana Moshkovitz Aaronson is an Israeli theoretical computer scientist whose research topics include approximation algorithms and probabilistically checkable proofs. She is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin.

#121

Jennifer Seberry

#25570

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Jennifer Roma Seberry is an Australian cryptographer, mathematician, and computer scientist, currently a professor at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She was formerly the head of the Department of Computer Science and director of the Centre for Computer Security Research at the university.

#122

Lise Getoor

#26488

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Lise Getoor is a professor in the computer science department, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an adjunct professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her primary research interests are in machine learning and reasoning with uncertainty, applied to graphs and structured data. She also works in data integration, social network analysis and visual analytics. She has edited a book on Statistical relational learning that is a main reference in this domain. She has published many highly cited papers in academic journals and conference proceedings.

#123

Farinaz Koushanfar

#12516

Overall Influence

Farinaz Koushanfar is an Iranian-American computer scientist whose research concerns embedded systems, ad-hoc networks, and computer security. She is a professor and Henry Booker Faculty Scholar of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, San Diego.

#124

Ellen Spertus

#14552

Overall Influence

Ellen R. Spertus is an American computer scientist who is currently the Elinor Kilgore Snyder Professor of computer science at Mills College, Oakland, California, and a former senior research scientist at Google.

#125

Lea Verou

#21880

Overall Influence

1986 - Present (38 years)

Lea Verou is a computer scientist, front end web developer, speaker and author, originally from Lesbos, Greece. Verou is currently a research assistant at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory , an elected participant in the World Wide Web Consortium Technical Architecture Group , and an Invited Expert in the W3C CSS Working Group. She is the author of CSS Secrets: Better Solutions to Everyday Web Design Problems .

#126

Jennifer Rexford

#19977

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Jennifer Rexford is an American computer scientist who is currently the Provost, Gordon Y. S. Wu Professor in Engineering, Professor of Computer Science, and formerly the Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. Her research focuses on analysis of computer networks, and in particular network routing, performance measurement, and network management.

#127

Jennifer Tour Chayes

Jennifer Tour Chayes

#12510

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Jennifer Tour Chayes is dean of the college of computing, data science, and society at the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining Berkeley, she was a technical fellow and managing director of Microsoft Research New England in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which she founded in 2008, and Microsoft Research New York City, which she founded in 2012.

#128

Dorit Aharonov

#14786

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Dorit Aharonov is an Israeli computer scientist specializing in quantum computing. Aharonov was born in Washington and grew up in Haifa, the daughter of the mathematician Dov Aharonov and the niece of the physicist Yakir Aharonov.

#129

Yanhong Annie Liu

#27515

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Yanhong Annie Liu is a computer scientist and professor of computer science at Stony Brook University where she works on new programming languages, software systems, algorithms, program design, optimizing, analysis, and transformations, intelligent systems, distributed computing systems, and computer security.

#130

Kira Radinsky

#29841

Overall Influence

1986 - Present (38 years)

Kira Radinsky is a Ukraine-born Israeli computer scientist, inventor and entrepreneur, specializing in predictive data mining. She gained recognition after being selected by the MIT Technology Review to the "35 Innovators Under 35" list. Her work was described in the popular press as predicting the first in 130 years outbreak of cholera in Cuba, based on the pattern identified by mining of 150 years of data from various sources: in poor countries, floods within a year after a drought often follow by a cholera outbreak.

#131

Maxine D. Brown

Maxine D. Brown

#23182

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Maxine D. Brown is an American computer scientist and retired director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago . Along with Tom DeFanti and Bruce McCormick, she co-edited the 1987 NSF report, Visualization in Scientific Computing, which defined the field of scientific visualization.

#132

Sally Shlaer

#19478

Overall Influence

1938 - 1998 (60 years)

Sally hashim Shlaer was an American mathematician, software engineer and methodologist, known as co-developer of the 1980s Shlaer–Mellor method for software development. Biography Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Shlaer received a BS in Mathematics in 1960 from Stanford University and started a graduate study at the Australian National University.

#133

Radhika Nagpal

#8121

Overall Influence

Radhika Nagpal is an Indian-American computer scientist and researcher in the fields of self-organising computer systems, biologically-inspired robotics, and biological multi-agent systems. She is the Augustine Professor in Engineering in the Departments of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Computer Science at Princeton University. Formerly, she was the Fred Kavli Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University and the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In 2017, Nagpal co-founded a robotics company under the name of Root Robotics. This educational company works to c...

#134

Mona Singh

#24799

Overall Influence

Mona Singh is a Professor of Computer Science in the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University. Education Singh was educated at Indian Springs School, Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she was awarded a PhD in 1996 for research supervised by Ron Rivest and Bonnie Berger.

#135

Carla Gomes

#17154

Overall Influence

Carla Pedro Gomes is a Portuguese-American computer scientist and professor at Cornell University. She is the founding Director of the Institute for Computational Sustainability and is noted for her pioneering work in developing computational methods to address challenges in sustainability. She has conducted research in a variety of areas of artificial intelligence and computer science, including constraint reasoning, mathematical optimization, and randomization techniques for exact search methods, algorithm selection, multi-agent systems, and game theory. Her work in computational sustainabil...

#136

Abigail Sellen

#30637

Overall Influence

Abigail Jane Sellen is a Canadian cognitive scientist, industrial engineer, and computer scientist who works for Microsoft Research in Cambridge. She is also an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham and University College London.

#137

Jessica Hodgins

#21336

Overall Influence

Jessica K. Hodgins is an American roboticist and researcher who is a professor at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute and School of Computer Science. Hodgins is currently also Research Director at the Facebook AI Research lab in Pittsburgh next to Carnegie Mellon. She was elected the president of ACM SIGGRAPH in 2017. Until 2016, she was Vice President of Research at Disney Research and was the Director of the Disney Research labs in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles.

#138

Marsha Berger

#16152

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Marsha J. Berger is an American computer scientist. Her areas of research include numerical analysis, computational fluid dynamics, and high-performance parallel computing. She is a Silver Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. She is Group Leader of Modeling and Simulation in the Center for Computational Mathematics at the Flatiron Institute.

#139

Sarita Adve

#22427

Overall Influence

Sarita Vikram Adve is the Richard T. Cheng Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests are in computer architecture and systems, parallel computing, and power and reliability-aware systems.

#140

Anna Lysyanskaya

#29382

Overall Influence

Anna A. Lysyanskaya is an American cryptographer known for her research on digital signatures and anonymous digital credentials. She is a professor of computer science at Brown University. Early life and education Lysyanskaya grew up in Kyiv, Ukraine, and came to the US in 1993 to attend Smith College, where she graduated in 1997. She went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for graduate study, earning a master's degree in 1999 and completing her Ph.D. in 2002. Her dissertation, Signature Schemes and Applications to Cryptographic Protocol Design, was supervised by Ron Rivest.

#141

Hannah Bast

#32593

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Hannah Bast is a German computer scientist known for her work on routing in transportation networks and search engines. She works as a professor at the University of Freiburg, where she holds the chair in algorithms and data structures and is dean of the faculty of engineering. She is one of the members of the Enquete Commission on Artificial Intelligence of the German federal parliament.

#142

Yael Moses

#27280

Overall Influence

Yael Moses is a professor in the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, Israel. Education and career Moses received her Ph.D. in computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot. She was a post-doctoral fellow in the Robotics group at the University of Oxford from 1993 to 1994 and at the Weizmann Institute of Science from 1994 to 1997. Moses has been on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence since 2013.

#143

Jill Zimmerman

#22735

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Jill Loraine Zimmerman is an American computer scientist and the James M. Beall Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Goucher College. Since 2006, she has been the head of the Goucher Robotics Lab.

#144

Doina Precup

#26006

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Doina Precup is a Romanian researcher currently living in Montreal, Canada. She specializes in artificial intelligence . Precup is associate dean of research at the faculty of science at McGill University, Canada research chair in machine learning and a senior fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. She also heads the Montreal office of Deepmind.

#145

Valerie Taylor

#22382

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Valerie Elaine Taylor is an American computer scientist who is the director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Her research includes topics such as performance analysis, power analysis, and resiliency. She is known for her work on "Prophesy," described as "a database used to collect and analyze data to predict the performance on different applications on parallel systems."

#146

Jaime Teevan

#28985

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Jaime Teevan is an American computer scientist and Microsoft executive known for her work on AI and productivity. Education and background Teevan received a B.S. in Computer Science from Yale University. As an undergraduate, she sold her senior thesis to Infoseek, an early web search engine. In it she invented an early approach to using the web link graph to support information seeking.

#147

Sue Black

#18142

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Susan Elizabeth Black is a British computer scientist, academic and social entrepreneur. She is known for saving Bletchley Park, with her Saving Bletchley Park campaign. Since 2018, she has been Professor of Computer Science and Technology Evangelist at Durham University. She was previously based at the University of Westminster and University College London.

#148

Tracy Camp

#27709

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Tracy Kay Camp is an American computer scientist noted for her research on wireless networking. She is also noted for her leadership in broadening participation in computing. She was the co-chair of CRA-W from 2011 to 2014 and she was the co-chair of ACM-W from 1998 to 2002.

#149

Wanda Orlikowski

Wanda Orlikowski

#8240

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Wanda J. Orlikowski is a US-based organizational theorist and Information Systems researcher, and the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Information Technologies and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#150

Cherri M. Pancake

#26206

Overall Influence

Cherri M. Pancake is an ethnographer and computer scientist who works as a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and Intel Faculty Fellow at Oregon State University, and as the director of the Northwest Alliance for Computational Science & Engineering. She is known for her pioneering work on usability engineering for high performance computing. In 2018 she was elected for a two-year term as president of the Association for Computing Machinery.

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