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,

#1151

Máire O'Neill

#140637

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Máire O'Neill is an Irish Professor of Information Security and inventor based at the Centre for Secure Information Technologies Queen's University Belfast. She was named the 2007 British Female Inventors & Innovators Network Female Inventor of the Year. She was the youngest person to be made a professor of engineering at Queen's University Belfast and youngest person to be inducted into the Irish Academy of Engineering.

#1152

María-Esther Vidal

#72363

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

María-Esther Vidal Serodio is a Venezuelan professor at the Computer Science Department of the Simón Bolívar University since 2005 and dean assistant for research and development in applied science and engineering since 2011, on-leave since 2015. She currently leads the Semantic Web Group, which includes members from multiple fields such as databases, distributed systems and artificial intelligence, and whose research is focused on the solving problems from said fields.

#1153

Claudia Wiesemann

#35820

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Claudia Wiesemann is a German medical ethicist and medical historian. She is full professor and head of the Department of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine at Göttingen University Medical Center. Being a member of the German Ethics Council since 2012, she was elected Deputy Chair in 2016.

#1154

Emily Mower Provost

#115980

Overall Influence

Emily Mower Provost is a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan. She directs the Computational Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Professional history Provost received her B.S. in electrical engineering from Tufts University in 2004, and her M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA in 2007 and 2010, respectively. After postdoctoral research in the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab at the University of Southern California, Provost joined the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the ...

#1155

Heidrun Schumann

#163553

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Heidrun Schumann is a German computer scientist specializing in data visualization. She is a professor emerita in the Institute for Computer Science of the University of Rostock. Education Schumann completed her doctorate at the University of Rostock in 1981. Her dissertation, Automatische Wegfindung von Rohrleitungen, was jointly supervised by Karl-Heinz Kutschke, Helmut Kiesewetter, , and K. Willnow. In 1989, she received her post-doctoral degree .

#1156

Panagiota Fatourou

#166329

Overall Influence

Panagiota Fatourou is a Greek computer scientist, specializing in distributed computing and concurrent computing, including the design of data structures that can be used in non-blocking algorithms. She is a professor of computer science at the University of Crete, the former chair of the ACM Europe Council, and the founder of the Greek chapter of the ACM Council on Women in Computing.

#1157

Clarissa Tossin

#94987

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Clarissa Tossin is a visual artist from Brazil and based in Los Angeles. Her collaborative, research-based practice develops alternative narratives found in the built environment, using elements of installation, sculpture, and moving image to explore intersections of place, history, and aesthetics.

#1158

Sandra Mitchell Hedetniemi

#101978

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Sandra Mitchell Hedetniemi is an American mathematician and computer scientist, known for her research in graph theory and algorithms on graphs. She is a professor of computer science at Clemson University.

#1159

Jeanne L. Noble

Jeanne L. Noble

#45783

Overall Influence

1926 - 2002 (76 years)

Jeanne Laveta Noble was an American educator who served on education commissions for three U.S. presidents. Noble was the first to analyze and publish the experiences of African American women in college. She served as president of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority within which she founded that group's National Commission on Arts and Letters. Noble was the first African-American board member of the Girl Scouts of the USA, and the first to serve the U.S. government's Defense Department Advisory Committee on Women in the Services . She headed the Women's Job Corps Program in the 1960s, and was th...

#1160

Sarah Ann Douglas

#117633

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Sarah Ann Douglas is a distinguished computer scientist, known for her work in human-computer interaction , a field of computer science that she has helped pioneer, and, in particular, pointing devices and haptic interactions, WWW interfaces and bioinformatics, and visualization and visual interfaces. She is a Professor Emerita of Computer and Information Science and a member of the Computational Science Institute at the University of Oregon.

#1161

Sonia Aïssa

#131405

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Sonia Aïssa is a professor in the Institut national de la recherche scientifique of the Université du Québec, in the INRS Research Centre for Energy, Materials, and Telecommunications. Aïssa earned a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering in 1998 from McGill University, following which she joined the INRS.

#1162

Rhonda Franklin

#106500

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Rhonda Franklin is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Minnesota. She is a microwave and radio frequency engineer whose research focuses on microelectronic mechanical structures in radio and microwave applications. She has won several awards, including the 1998 NSF Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the 2013 Sara Evans Leadership Award, the 2017 John Tate Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Advising, and the 2018 Minnesota African American Heritage Calendar Award for her contributions to higher education.

#1163

Holly Martin Smith

#17285

Overall Influence

Holly Martin Smith is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Her publications focus on questions in normative ethics, moral responsibility and structural questions common to normative theories.

#1164

Catherine Richards

#169042

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Catherine Richards is a Canadian new media artist. Richards is known for her work with early virtual reality technologies. She was the first artist to use VR technology in a work of art in Canada, which was incorporated in her 1991 artwork Spectral Bodies.

#1165

Sylvia Snowden

#93346

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Sylvia Snowden is an African American abstract painter who works with acrylics, oil pastels, and mixed media to create textured works that convey the "feel of paint". Many museums have hosted her art in exhibits, while several have added her works to their permanent collections.

#1166

Almadena Chtchelkanova

#140623

Overall Influence

Almadena Yurevna Chtchelkanova is a Russian-American scientist. She is a program director in the Division of Computing and Communication Foundations at the National Science Foundation. Education Chtchelkanova completed a Ph.D. in physics from Moscow State University in 1988. In 1996, she earned a M.A. in the department of computer sciences at University of Texas at Austin. Her master's thesis was titled The application of object-oriented analysis to sockets system calls library testing. James C. Browne was her advisor.

#1167

Peipei Ping

#165593

Overall Influence

Peipei Ping is an academic specializing in cardiac physiology, system biology and data science. Education Peipei Ping received a BS in biomedical engineering at Zhejiang University in 1985, and a PhD in cardiovascular physiology at University of Arizona in 1990, under the direction of Paul C. Johnson. She completed post-doctoral research at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at University of California San Diego .

#1168

Ute Ebert

#50751

Overall Influence

Ute M. Ebert is a German physicist known for her research on plasma physics and electric discharge in gases. She is a researcher in the Netherlands at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, where she heads the research group on multiscale dynamics, and a part-time full professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology, affiliated with the Elementary Processes in Gas Discharges group.

#1169

Kavitha Telikepalli

#158599

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Kavitha Telikepalli is an Indian computer scientist known for her research on graph algorithms and combinatorial optimization, particularly concerning matchings, cycle bases, and graph spanners. She is a professor in the School of Technology & Computer Science at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.

#1170

Cristina Bazgan

#70743

Overall Influence

Cristina Bazgan is a French computer scientist who studies combinatorial optimization and graph theory problems from the points of view of parameterized complexity, fine-grained complexity, approximation algorithms, and regret.

#1171

Andrea L. Thomaz

#111810

Overall Influence

Andrea L. Thomaz is a senior research scientist in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin and Director of Socially Intelligent Machines Lab. She specializes in Human-Robot Interaction, Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Machine Learning.

#1172

Ying Lu

#155851

Overall Influence

Ying Lu is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Life Lu received her Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville in 2005. She then began her work at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln as an Assistant Professor.

#1173

Guðbjörg Vilhjálmsdóttir

Guðbjörg Vilhjálmsdóttir

#70432

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Guðbjörg Vilhjálmsdóttir is a professor in Career Guidance and Counselling on the Faculty of Sociology, Anthropology and Folkloristics at the University of Iceland. Education and professional positions Guðbjörg received a BA degree in 1982 in Educational Science and Philosophy from the University of Iceland. A year later, she received her Teacher's Diploma from the same university. In 1979, she had completed a diploma in French from the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail in France. She received a post-graduate diploma in 1985 in school counselling from the University of Lyon in France and a master's degree in Educational Science in 1987 from Université Paris V - La Sorbonne.

#1174

Harmony Hammond

#52845

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Harmony Hammond is an American artist, activist, curator, and writer. She was a prominent figure in the founding of the feminist art movement in 1970s New York. Early life and education Harmony Hammond was born on February 8, 1944, in Hometown, Illinois. At 17, Hammond attended Miliken University in Decatur, Illinois. Later, she moved to Minneapolis and enrolled at the University of Minnesota. Hammond graduated with a B.A. of Arts in painting in 1967.

#1175

Adrian Piper

#9151

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Adrian Margaret Smith Piper is an American conceptual artist and Kantian philosopher. Her work addresses how and why those involved in more than one discipline may experience professional ostracism, otherness, racial passing, and racism by using various traditional and non-traditional media to provoke self-analysis. She uses reflection on her own career as an example.

#1176

Frances Brazier

#152918

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Frances Mary Theresa Brazier is a Dutch computer scientist, known as one of the founders of NLnet, the first Internet service provider in the Netherlands and one of the first in Europe. She is a professor in Engineering Systems Foundations at the Delft University of Technology, where her research concerns multi-agent systems and participatory systems design.

#1177

Ruth J. Person

#58985

Overall Influence

Ruth J. Person was the first woman and the seventh chancellor of the University of Michigan–Flint. In January 2014, she announced her intention to resign as chancellor and return to the faculty in the University of Michigan–Flint School of Management in January 2015. Her term as chancellor ended on July 31, 2014.

#1178

Fatmah Baothman

#155058

Overall Influence

Fatmah Baothman is Saudi Arabian computer scientist who is the first woman in the Middle East with a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence. She was recently appointed the board president for the Artificial Intelligence Society. Baothman has worked over 25 years as, and is currently, an assistant professor at King Abdulaziz University Faculty of Computing & Information Technology Baothman established the women's Department which is the foundation of the Computer Science College at King Abdulaziz University, and became the first teaching assistant faculty member.

#1179

Danielle Dixson

#60909

Overall Influence

Danielle L. Dixson is an Associate Professor of Marine Ecology in the School of Marine Science and Policy at the University of Delaware. Her research focusses on how human-induced change to marine ecosystems impacts animal behaviour. Her work, now known to be fraudulent, was about understanding how ocean acidification affects the behaviour of coral reef fishes.

#1180

Shim Hwa-jin

#30280

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Shim Hwa-jin is a South Korean academic specialising in the history of clothing and textiles. She was president of Sungshin Women's University from 2007 until 2017, when she was imprisoned for embezzlement.

#1181

Carola Wenk

#152041

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Carola Wenk is a German-American computer scientist known for her research on algorithms for finding similarities between geometric shapes, such as matching vehicle trajectories to road networks, comparing trajectories with each other using Fréchet distance, or testing similarity for gel electrophoresis data. Her work has also involved biomedical applications of geometric algorithms, including the use of virtual reality to diagnose glaucoma. She is a professor of computer science at Tulane University.

#1182

Simone Fischer-Hübner

#94542

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Simone Fischer-Hübner is an expert on IT security and personal integrity and a professor at the Department of Computer Science at Karlstad University. Fischer-Hübner has been a member of the Cyber Security Council at the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency since 2011. Moreover, she is the Swedish representative and vice chair of IFIP Technical Committee 11 on Information Security and Privacy, board member of the Swedish Forum för Dataskydd, advisory board member of PETS and NordSec, and coordinator of the Swedish IT Security Network for PhD Students .

#1183

Catherine Meadows

#73950

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Catherine Ann Meadows is an American cryptographer known for her development of tools for the formal verification and automated discovery of flaws in cryptographic protocols. She is a senior researcher in the Center for High Assurance Systems at the Naval Research Laboratory and the head of the laboratory's Formal Methods Section.

#1184

Alicia Alonso

#170267

Overall Influence

#1185

Vicky Goh

#89983

Overall Influence

Vicky Goh is a professor, chair of clinical cancer imaging, and head of cancer imaging department at the King's College London, England, United Kingdom. She joined King's College London in 2011. She is also a consultant radiologist at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital in London.

#1186

Linda Kitson

#93646

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Linda Kitson is a British artist. She is best known for her work as an official war artist during the Falklands Conflict. Early life Kitson studied at St Martins School of Art and the Royal College of Art, where she specialised in illustration. She then taught at Camberwell College of Arts, Chelsea College of Art and Design the City and Guilds Art School and the Royal College of Art.

#1187

Judy Baca

#27324

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Judith Francisca Baca is an American artist, activist, and professor of Chicano studies, world arts, and cultures based at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the co-founder and artistic director of the Social and Public Art Resource Center in Venice, California. Baca is the director of the mural project that created the Great Wall of Los Angeles, which was the largest known communal mural project in the world as of 2018.

#1188

Catherine D'Ignazio

#131993

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Catherine D'Ignazio is an American professor, artist, and software developer who focuses on feminism and data literacy. She is the director of the Data + Feminism lab at MIT. D'Ignazio is best known for her hackathons, such as "Make the Breast Pump Not Suck", and for her book Data Feminism, co-authored with Lauren Klein.

#1189

Lana Yarosh

#156935

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Svetlana “Lana” Yarosh is an associate professor in the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering at University of Minnesota. She is a Distinguished University Teaching Professor and recipient of the McKnight Presidential Fellowship. Yarosh does research as part of the GroupLens Research group.

#1190

Linda Pagli

#152225

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Linda Pagli is an Italian computer scientist specializing in computer networks and distributed algorithms. She is a professor at the University of Pisa, and a Fellow of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America. She has also worked with UNESCO and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to help spread expertise in computer science to developing countries.

#1191

Anne Truitt

#14298

Overall Influence

1921 - 2004 (83 years)

Anne Truitt , born Anne Dean, was an American sculptor of the mid-20th century. She became well known in the late 1960s for her large-scale minimalist sculptures, especially after influential solo shows at André Emmerich Gallery in 1963 and the Jewish Museum in 1966. Unlike her contemporaries, she made her own sculptures by hand, eschewing industrial processes. Drawing from imagery from her past, her work also deals with the visual trace of memory and nostalgia. This is exemplified by a series of early sculptures resembling monumental segments of white picket fence.

#1192

Judith Gersting

#98096

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Judith Lee MacKenzie Gersting is an American mathematician, computer scientist, and textbook author. She is a professor emerita of computer science at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis and at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo.

#1193

Weiping Wu

#62965

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Weiping Wu is a China urban specialist and Professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she directs the Urban Planning program. In January 2022, she was appointed interim dean and served until August. She became the Vice Provost for Academic Programs at Columbia in September 2023.

#1194

Sharon Grace

#36646

Overall Influence

Sharon Grace is an American artist, currently a Professor Emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute, who is known for initiating the use of many forms of electronic media based in audiovisual technology. Since 1970, Grace has worked with telecommunications as art, embedding interactive video and speech recognition in her work including video installation, electronic synthesis, interactive digital systems, and sculpture in stone and steel.

#1195

Robin Reid

#101290

Overall Influence

Robin S. Reid is an American environmental scientist who is a professor at Colorado State University. She led research activity at the International Livestock Research Institute, Kenya, for almost twenty years. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2021.

#1196

Bissan Al-Lazikani

#108266

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Professor Bissan Al-Lazikani PhD FRSB MBCS is a data scientist and drug discoverer. She applies computational techniques to help solve critical bottlenecks in cancer drug discovery and development. Since 2021 she has been professor of genomic medicine at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

#1197

Judy Fierstein

#86031

Overall Influence

Judith Ellen Fierstein is a geologist and researcher employed by the U.S. Geological Survey . She is affiliated with the USGS California Volcano Observatory. Fierstein is a member and fellow of the Geological Society of America , having been nominated by Charles R. Bacon.

#1198

Delwyn Clark

#81106

Overall Influence

Delwyn N Clark is a New Zealand strategic management academic. She is a life member and past president of the Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management. Academic career After an undergraduate at the University of Auckland, Clark moved to the University of Waikato for a PhD thesis entitled 'The role of MS/OR in strategic management : a NZ/UK comparative evaluation' on management systems and operations research.

#1199

Hatice Gunes

#147012

Overall Influence

Hatice Gunes is a Turkish computer scientist who is Professor of Affective Intelligence & Robotics at the University of Cambridge. Gunes leads the Affective Intelligence & Robotics Lab. Her research considers human robot interactions and the development of sophisticated technologies with emotional intelligence.

#1200

Mona Zaghloul

#156364

Overall Influence

Mona Elwakkad Zaghloul is an Egyptian-American electronics engineer known for her work in integrated circuits, neural networks, and CMOS-based microelectromechanical systems. She is a professor of electrical and computer engineering in the George Washington University School of Engineering and Applied Science, where she directs the Institute of MEMS and VLSI Technologies.

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