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 …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Computer Science,

#1301

Ling Liu

#170324

Overall Influence

Ling Liu from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for contributions to scalable Internet data management and decentralized trust management.

#1302

Barbara Bullock

#84061

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Barbara J. Bullock is an African American painter, collagist, printmaker, soft sculptor and arts instructor. Her works capture African motifs, African and African American culture, spirits, dancing and jazz in abstract and figural forms. She creates three-dimensional collages, portraits, altars and masks in vibrant colors, patterns and shapes. Bullock produces artworks in series with a common theme and style.

#1303

Huda Totonji

#108816

Overall Influence

Huda Ahmad Totonji is an American artist who was born and raised in Saudi Arabia. Totonji is also a master calligrapher and is certified to teach Arabic Calligraphy. In addition to her calligraphic work, she also creates mixed media art, installations and performance art. Totonji is the president of Huda Art, LLC, which creates custom art for clients. Totonji is also the first person from Saudi Arabia to lecture at Harvard University.

#1304

Hu Qiheng

#169030

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Hu Qiheng is a Chinese computer scientist. Hu was the vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences from 1987 to 1996 and led the National Computing and Networking Facility of China which connected China to the Internet in April 1994. Hu was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2013 as a global connector.

#1305

Hui Meng

#173479

Overall Influence

Hui Meng is a mechanical engineer whose research focuses on hemodynamics , particularly with respect to intracranial aneurysms. Educated in China, Germany, and the US, she is a University at Buffalo Distinguished Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and chief scientific officer of Neurovascular Diagnostics.

#1306

Irena Spasić

#175464

Overall Influence

Irena Spasić is a Serbian computer scientist specializing in text mining of biomedical information, with applications including exometabolomics. She is a professor of computer science and informatics at Cardiff University, director of the Cardiff University Data Innovation Research Institute, chief scientist for AI development at IPwe, and since 2020 a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.

#1307

Adele Howe

#173971

Overall Influence

1961 - 2017 (56 years)

Adele E. Howe was an American computer scientist specializing in artificial intelligence. She was one of the developers of the Planning Domain Definition Language for automated planning and scheduling, and was also known for her work on metasearch engines. She was a Professor Laureate in the College of Natural Sciences at Colorado State University.

#1308

Marcelle Ferron

Marcelle Ferron

#23964

Overall Influence

1924 - 2001 (77 years)

Marcelle Ferron, , a Canadian Québécoise painter and stained glass artist, was one of the original 16 signatories of Paul-Émile Borduas's Refus global manifesto, and a major figure in the Quebec contemporary art scene, associated with the Automatistes.

#1309

Maria Serna

#114273

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Maria José Serna Iglesias is a Spanish computer scientist and mathematician whose research includes work on parallel approximation, on algorithms for cutwidth and linear layout of graphs, on algorithmic game theory, and on adversarial queueing networks.

#1310

Xing-Fang Li

#160309

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Xing-Fang Li is a toxicologist whose research involves the discovery and identification of water contaminants through the development of new analytical technologies, as well as the engineering of solutions to ensure safe drinking water. Li is a professor at the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at the University of Alberta in Canada. She is a Canada Research Chair in Analytical and Environmental Toxicology, and was appointed as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2021.

#1311

Chelsea Finn

#104957

Overall Influence

Chelsea Finn is an American computer scientist and assistant professor at Stanford University. Her research investigates intelligence through the interactions of robots, with the hope to create robotic systems that can learn how to learn. She is part of the Google Brain group.

#1312

Laurie J. Patterson

#122026

Overall Influence

Laurie J. Patterson is an American author and computer science professor. Her books focus on the lyricists of the Tin Pan Alley era. She has also published articles on gender and technology. Biography Patterson was born in Westbrook, Minnesota. She attended the University of Minnesota receiving a Bachelor of Arts in Biology and a Master of Education in Training and development focusing on Information Technology training. She received her Doctor of Education from Nova Southeastern University in Computer Information Technology.

#1313

Carol Shoshkes Reiss

#112182

Overall Influence

Carol Shoshkes Reiss, an American viral immunologist, was professor in New York University's department of biology 1991-2020; she is currently Professor Emerita. Her research focused on the dynamic contest between the mouse immune system and virus replication during infection of the central nervous system. Reiss was editor-in-chief of the journal Viral Immunology and is currently editor-in-chief of the journal DNA and Cell Biology .

#1314

Louise Ryan

#175819

Overall Influence

#1315

Susan Bennett

#112254

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Susan Bennett is a Canadian Professor of English in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Calgary. Early life Bennett was born in London to musical parents. Her father was a musician who played in theatre orchestras. As a result, she was exposed to theatre at a young age.

#1316

Soromini Kallichurum

#85960

Overall Influence

1932 - 2002 (70 years)

Soromini Kallichurum was a South African medical doctor and medical school professor, the first woman to serve as Dean of the medical faculty at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Early life Soromini Kallichurum was born in Ladysmith, KwaZulu-Natal. Her father, S. Kallichurum, was a teacher. In 1950, she was one of the first twelve undergraduates enrolled in the "non-white" section at the University of Natal. She earned her medical degree there in 1957, and also held a D.M., earned in 1967 for her research on lung disease in black South Africans.

#1317

Viola Frey

#75188

Overall Influence

1933 - 2004 (71 years)

Viola Frey was an American artist working in sculpture, painting and drawing, and professor emerita at California College of the Arts. She lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area and was renowned for her larger-than-life, colorfully glazed clay sculptures of men and women, which expanded the traditional boundaries of ceramic sculpture.

#1318

Shelley Sweeney

#118432

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Shelley Sweeney is a Canadian archivist. She was university archivist at the University of Regina from 1983 to 1998, and the Head of the University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections from 1998 to 2020. She helped found two regional archival organizations, the Saskatchewan Council of Archives and the Saskatchewan Archivists Society, and the University and Research Institutions section of the International Council on Archives. Sweeney is a charter member of the Academy of Certified Archivists and, with colleagues, wrote the first code of ethics for the Canadian archival profession.

#1319

Carol MacKintosh

#174085

Overall Influence

Carol MacKintosh FRSB, is a cell and developmental biologist, Professor of Molecular Signalling and Head of Postgraduate Studies, at the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee. Early career and research Carol MacKintosh received her education at the University of Aberdeen. She went on to do her PhD at the University of Glasgow. The PhD study focused on the branch-point between the tricarboxylic acid cycle and glyoxylate bypass in Escherichia coli, and was conducted alongside Professor Hugh Nimmo at the University of Glasgow. From 2003, Carol MacKintosh has worked at the University of Dundee and is working as a Professor of Molecular Signalling and Head of Postgraduate Studies.

#1320

Meganne Christian

#63510

Overall Influence

1987 - Present (37 years)

Meganne Louise Wyatt is an member of the 2022 European Space Agency Astronaut Group, and Reserve Astronaut and Exploration Commercialisation Lead at the UK Space Agency. She was previously a materials scientist at the National Research Council in Bologna, Italy, and atmospheric physicist at Concordia Station in Antarctica.

#1321

Jennifer L Martin

#176250

Overall Influence

#1322

Birgitte Bak-Jensen

#175513

Overall Influence

Birgitte Bak-Jensen is a Danish professor and researcher at the Department of Energy Technology at Aalborg University. Her research is aimed at intelligent energy systems and active electrical grids.

#1323

Glorianna Davenport

#125071

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Glorianna Davenport is a New York-born media maker. A co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, Davenport directed the Interactive cinema research group from 1987–2004 and the Media Fabrics research group from 2004-2008. Davenport retired from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Summer of 2008. From 2008 to the present, she has managed the transition of Tidmarsh Farms, a former 610 acre cranberry farm in Plymouth Massachusetts, into conservation and wetland restoration. In 2011, Davenport founded Living Observatory, a non-profit, learning collaborative that focuses on documenting and sharing the long term story of wetland restoration of former cranberry farms.

#1324

Kristin Schirmer

#169700

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Kristin Schirmer is a German cell biologist and toxicologist. She is the Head of Department of Environmental Toxicology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology ] and also a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and ETH Zurich. Schirmer specializes in Molecular and Cellular Mechanisms of Toxicity, Aquatic Organisms, Chemical Hazard Assessment, Adverse Outcome Pathways, in vitro Alternatives to Animal Testing, Fish Cell Lines and Biomonitoring.

#1325

Sophia Hober

#173919

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Sophia Hober is a Swedish researcher in biotechnology and professor at The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Sophia Hober got her Master of Science in chemical engineering at KTH in 1989 and defended her doctorate in biochemistry in 1996. Since 2007, Hober is a professor of molecular biotechnology at KTH. During 2011–2015, Professor Hober served as dean at KTH and was part of the management team. Sophia Hober was elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences in 2012.

#1326

Ilaria Perugia

#109040

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Ilaria Perugia is an Italian applied mathematician and numerical analyst whose research concerns numerical methods for partial differential equations, especially Galerkin methods. She works at the University of Vienna in Austria as Professor of the Numerics of Partial Differential Equations.

#1327

Hsiao-Wen Chen

#121912

Overall Influence

Hsiao-Wen Chen is a Taiwanese-American astronomer who uses absorption spectroscopy to study baryonic "normal matter" in the intergalactic medium and galactic halos, and the connections between this matter and the matter in star-forming regions of galaxies. She is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago.

#1328

Judith Gal-Ezer

#163559

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Judith Gal-Ezer is an Israeli computer scientist and computer science educator known for her development of the high school computer science curriculum in Israel. She is a professor emerita at the Open University of Israel.

#1329

Sally Davenport

#65016

Overall Influence

Sally Jane Davenport is an Aotearoa-New Zealand academic and a full professor at the Victoria University of Wellington. She is also Director of the National Science Challenge, Science for Technological Innovation . SfTI is a 10-year science investment by the Aotearoa-New Zealand Government with a mission to enhance the capacity of Aotearoa-New Zealand to use physical sciences and engineering for economic growth and prosperity.

#1330

Keiko Nishikawa

#175025

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Keiko Nishikawa is a Japanese physical chemist known for her studies of supercritical fluids. She is an emeritus professor at Chiba University and research fellow at the Toyota Physical and Chemical Research Institute.

#1331

Huia Jahnke

#72156

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Huia Jahnke, sometimes known as Huia Tomlins-Jahnke, is a New Zealand academic. She is Māori, of Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Toa Rangātira, Ngāi Tahu and Ngāti Hine descent and as of 2018 is a full professor of Māori and indigenous education at Massey University.

#1332

Annalu Waller

#168661

Overall Influence

Annalu Waller is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Dundee and leads the Augmentative and Alternate Communication Research Group at the university. Career Waller was appointed an OBE in the 2016 New Year Honours for services to people with Complex Communication Needs. In September 2017 she was awarded an honorary fellowship of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists for her work on AAC. She received the honour from the RCSLT's patron, the Countess of Wessex. She is a trustee of Capability Scotland.

#1333

Amparo Galindo

#171091

Overall Influence

Amparo Galindo is a Spanish chemist who is Professor of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London. She is the co-director of the Institute for Molecular Science and Engineering. Her research considers the development of statistical mechanics and simulations to understand industrial processes. She was awarded the 2023 Institution of Chemical Engineers Guggenheim Medal.

#1334

Ashley Adamson

#170122

Overall Influence

Ashley Adamson is a British dietician, Professor of Public Health Nutrition at Newcastle University. She is director of the National Institute for Health and Care Research School for Public Health Research. Her research looks to understand the relationship between nutrient intake, food choices, socio-demographic characteristics and health outcomes. She was made a NIHR Senior Investigator in 2023.

#1335

Eriko Takano

#115441

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Eriko Takano is a professor of synthetic biology and a director of the Synthetic Biology Research Centre for Fine and Speciality Chemicals at the University of Manchester. She develops antibiotics and other high-value chemicals using microbial synthetic biology tools.

#1336

Rachel Stevens

#68567

Overall Influence

Rachel Stevens is a sculptor, emeritus professor of art at New Mexico State University and a Fulbright Scholar. Stevens has exhibited both in the United States and internationally. Exhibitions and installations Stevens's public sculpture, "You are Here", is displayed at Ventanas Ranch Park, in Albuquerque, NM. Her work has been exhibited at the Artists Space, New York, El Paso Museum of Art, Siddhartha Gallery, Kathmandu, Nepal, the Boise Art Museum, Albany Institute of History and Art and the Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY. In 2018, her work, "A Key to the City: Three Ways of Visualizing Jewish...

#1337

Andrea LaPaugh

#158330

Overall Influence

Andrea Suzanne LaPaugh is an American computer scientist and professor emerita of computer science at Princeton University. Her research has concerned the design and analysis of algorithms, particularly for graph algorithms, problems involving the computer-aided design of VLSI circuits, and document retrieval.

#1338

Jeanne Clare Adams

#124648

Overall Influence

1921 - 2007 (86 years)

Jeanne Clare Adams was an American computer scientist. She was Chairman of the ANSI X3J3 Fortran Standards Committee that "developed the controversial Fortran 8X proposal". She graduated with a BS in economics from the University of Michigan in 1943, and an MS in telecommunications and electrical engineering from the University of Colorado in 1979. Her longest held position was at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, from 1960 to 1981, serving from 1984 to 1997 as deputy head of the Computing Division. Adams was also chair of the International Standards Organizatio...

#1339

Dana R. Thomson

#176656

Overall Influence

#1340

Karin Schnass

#110630

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Karin Schnass is an Austrian mathematician and computer scientist known for her research on sparse dictionary learning. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Innsbruck. Education and career Schnass was born in Klosterneuburg. She earned a master's degree in mathematics at the University of Vienna in 2004, with a thesis surveying Gabor multipliers supervised by Hans Georg Feichtinger. She completed her Ph.D. in communication and information sciences at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in 2009. Her dissertation was Sparsity & Dictionaries – Algorithms & Design, and ...

#1341

Astrid Lambrecht

#80964

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Astrid Lambrecht is a German physicist who is Director at Forschungszentrum Jülich. She previously worked as the Deputy Director of the French National Centre for Scientific Research Institute of Physics.

#1342

Yu Morton

#169189

Overall Influence

Yu Morton is a professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She was a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Colorado State University from 2014 to 2017, and at Miami University of Ohio from 2000 to 2014.

#1343

Emily Ying Yang Chan

Emily Ying Yang Chan

#59475

Overall Influence

Emily Ying Yang Chan is a clinical humanitarian doctor and global academic expert in public health and humanitarian medicine based in Hong Kong. She is Assistant Dean and Professor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Medicine, Professor at the Jockey Club School of Public Health and Primary Care, Director at the Centre for Global Health , Director of the Collaborating Centre for Oxford University and CUHK for Disaster and Medical Humanitarian Response , Director of the Centre of Excellence of Integrated Research on Disaster Risk , Visiting Professor of Public Health Medicine at...

#1344

Sarah Charlesworth

Sarah Charlesworth

#33870

Overall Influence

1947 - 2013 (66 years)

Sarah Edwards Charlesworth was an American conceptual artist and photographer. She is considered part of The Pictures Generation, a loose-knit group of artists working in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s, all of whom were concerned with how images shape our everyday lives and society as a whole.

#1345

Helena Edlund

#102005

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Helena Edlund is a Swedish professor and molecular biologist. She received her Ph.D. from Umeå University in 1991. She is a professor in Molecular Developmental Biology at Umeå University where she researches Type 2 diabetes and β-cell function. She is one of the founders, along with Thomas Edlund and Olof Karlsson, of the biopharmaceutical company Betagenon.

#1346

Sally Brailsford

#109662

Overall Influence

Sally Brailsford is a British professor of management science within Southampton Business School at the University of Southampton. Her research focuses on operational research and healthcare modelling to evaluate treatments and screening programmes, and to improve health service delivery.

#1347

Edith Elkind

#111992

Overall Influence

Edith Elkind is an Estonian computer scientist who works as a professor of computing science at the University of Oxford and as a non-tutorial fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. She is known for her work in algorithmic game theory and computational social choice.

#1348

Yukiko Goda

#170039

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Yukiko Goda is a Japanese molecular biologist who is a professor and group leader at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. Her research considers neural communication through synapses. She was elected a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2023.

#1349

Etta D. Pisano

#105860

Overall Influence

Etta Driscoll Pisano is an American breast imaging researcher. She is a professor in residence of radiology at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and chief research dean at the American College of Radiology. In 2008, she was elected a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

#1350

Tracy Montminy

#87395

Overall Influence

1911 - 1992 (81 years)

Tracy Montminy, who completed early works as Elizabeth Tracy, was an American artist and muralist. During the WPA's era, she painted murals in civic buildings, including murals in the library in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the fire and police building of Saugus, Massachusetts; the Milton, Massachusetts, post office; Medford, Massachusetts City Hall; the post office of Downers Grove, Illinois; and the post office in Kennebunkport, Maine, as well as others both in the U.S. and abroad. She was an art instructor at the University of Missouri and the American University of Beirut, continuing her own painting projects simultaneously with her teaching into the 1980s.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions