The Most Influential People Across History

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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List of the most influential female people in Computer Science,

#1551

Margaret Weitz

#41196
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Margaret Collins Weitz is a professor emeritus at Suffolk University. Weitz is the author of books and many articles on French culture, French women, and the role of women in the French Resistance. Dr. Weitz graduated from St. Ursula’s High School in Toledo, Ohio and went on to obtain her bachelor's degree from Ohio State University in humanities in 1953. She was awarded a Fulbright grant and proceeded to study for the next two years at University of Poitiers. After studying at Poitiers, she became the first Fulbright scholar to lecture at University of Aix-Marseilles. She later returned to the United States and earned her M.A.
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#1552

Concettina Buccella

#183132
Overall Influence
Concettina Buccella is an Italian power engineer whose research topics include "modeling of electrostatic precipitators, impact of electromagnetic fields, electromagnetic compatibility, composite materials, modeling of power converters, control and modulation techniques for power converters, renewable energy, smart grids, analytical and numerical modeling of electric systems". She is Professor in Power Converters, Electric Machines and Drives at the University of L'Aquila.
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#1553

Rebekah Jones

#45837
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (35 years)
Rebekah Jones is an American geographer, data scientist, and activist. She managed the team that created the Florida Department of Health's COVID-19 dashboard using ArcGIS software. She was fired from her position in May 2020 for repeated insubordination. In May 2021, she was granted whistleblower protections while the state investigated her allegations.
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#1554

Sarah Onuora

#105845
Overall Influence
Sarah Onuora is a Canadian rheumatologist and the chief editor of Nature Reviews Rheumatology. Education Onuora has a bachelor's degree in biology from McMaster University, Canada. Career In 2005 she worked in the editorial department of Rheumatology journal and she joined Nature Publishing in 2007, initially working on Nature Reviews Neurology before becoming a senior editor at Nature Reviews Rheumatology. She became the chief editor of Nature Reviews Rheumatology in 2015.
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#1555

Victoria Fu

#114239
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Victoria Fu is an American visual artist who is working in the field of digital video and analog film, and the interplay of photographic, screen based, and projected images. Education Fu received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts , MA in art history from the University of Southern California, and BA in art from Stanford University. Fu attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Whitney Independent Study Program.
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#1556

Martine Culty

#183530
Overall Influence
Martine Culty is a scholar and professor at the Alfred E. Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. Career and Research Martine Culty earned a Ph.D. in Molecular Chemistry from the University of Grenoble in Grenoble, France. Culty has held Associate Professor positions at Georgetown University, McGill University, and the University of Southern California.
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#1557

Bonnie Collura

#142805
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Bonnie Collura is an American artist known for figurative multi-media sculptures, textiles and installations created by processes of compositing and sampling. Her art oscillates between abstraction and figuration, mixing aesthetics from baroque sculpture, contemporary animation and quilting with iconic fragments from pop culture, art history and myth. She has embraced theatricality and excess, intertextuality and digital-age influences in her work, often exploring hybridized, disjointed bodies, surrogate characters and reconfigured literary tropes. Sculpture critic Ann Landi has written, "Col...
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#1558

Sylvia Noble Tesh

#53543
Overall Influence
Sylvia Noble Tesh, born 1937, is an American academic, professor at Yale and the University of Michigan for over two decades, and currently a professor at the University of Arizona. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Hawaiʻi in political science. She also served as a Fulbright professor at the Universidade Federal da Bahia, in Salvador, Brazil, in 1999. She is best known for her well-cited book Hidden Arguments: Political Ideology and Disease Prevention Policy. Her most recent book, Uncertain Hazards Environmental Activists and Scientific Proof, was published in 2000 by Cornell Universi...
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#1559

May Stevens

#84395
Overall Influence
1924 - 2019 (95 years)
May Stevens was an American feminist artist, political activist, educator, and writer. Early life and education May Stevens was born in Boston to working-class parents, Alice Dick Stevens and Ralph Stanley Stevens, and grew up in Quincy, Massachusetts. She had one brother, Stacey Dick Stevens, who died of pneumonia at the age of fifteen. By Stevens's account, her father expressed his racism at home but "never said these things publicly, nor did he act on them—to my knowledge. But he said them over and over."
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#1560

Deborah Dancy

#99909
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Deborah Dancy, also known as Deborah Muirhead , is an American painter of large-scale abstractions in oil; she is also a printmaker and mixed media artist. Her work is also known to encompass digital photography. In 1981, she began to teach at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, where she taught painting for thirty-five years until her retirement in 2017. She has received awards such as a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Women’s Studio Workshop Studio Residency Grant, and a YADDO fellowship.
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#1561

Janice Kluge

#88267
Overall Influence
Janice Kluge is an American artist who specializes in large and small scale sculpture. She holds a BFA with honors from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an MFA for the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Kluge is Professor Emeritus of sculpture and drawing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham where she has taught since 1982. After serving three years as Interim Chair for the art and art history department she returned to full-time art making and teaching. Kluge is married to Cam Langley, a glass artist who specializes in fine art pieces.
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#1562

Bryndís Benediktsdóttir

Bryndís Benediktsdóttir
#181149
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Bryndís Benediktsdóttir is a professor emerita in the faculty of medicine at the University of Iceland. Professional career Bryndís completed a matriculation examination from Reykjavik Junior College in 1971 and in the same year, began studying medicine at the University of Iceland. She completed a Cand. degree from the University in 1977 and pursued studies in general practice and internal medicine during the period 1979 to 1987 in Uppsala, Sweden. She received Specialist Rights in General Practice in Sweden 1984, in Iceland 1987 and European Specialist Rights in Sleep Medicine 2009.
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#1563

Diane Tuft

#105185
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Diane Tuft is an American photographer focusing on nature and landscape photography, documenting the effects of the environment on the Earth's landscape. She is based in New York City. Early life and education Tuft was born and raised in East Hartford, Connecticut. She graduated from the University of Connecticut with a degree in mathematics. After graduating, she moved to New York City to work as an actuarial assistant. She later held jobs with the Burroughs Corporation and Computer Design Corporation. During this time, she studied photography at The New School and the International Center of Photography.
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#1564

Kate Hone

#145989
Overall Influence
Kate Samara Hone is a British psychologist and computer scientist specialising in human–computer interaction and digital user experience, particularly as applied to the performance, evaluation, and acceptance of educational technology and massive open online courses. She has also been noted for her research on gender stereotypes in preferences for computer speech synthesis. She is a professor of computer science at Brunel University London, where she heads the department of computer science.
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#1565

Sonja McIlfatrick

#177176
Overall Influence
Sonja Jayne McIlfatrick is a nurse and Professor in Nursing and Palliative Care and Dean of Ulster Doctoral College at Ulster University. She was the first non-American President of the International Network of Doctoral Education in Nursing.
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#1566

Noa Marom

#164550
Overall Influence
Noa Marom is an Israeli materials scientist and computational physicist at Carnegie Mellon University. She was awarded the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics Young Scientist Prize. Early life and education Marom studied materials engineering at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and earned her bachelor's degree in 2003. After graduating, she worked as an application engineer in the Process and Control Division. She joined the Weizmann Institute of Science for her doctoral studies, earning a PhD under the supervision of Leeor Kronik in 2010. Marom won the Shimon Reich Memorial Prize for her PhD thesis.
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#1567

Ann Purcell

#137173
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Ann Purcell is an American painter. Born in Arlington County, Virginia, Purcell earned her bachelor's degree in painting from the Corcoran School of Art and George Washington University in 1973, after independent study in Mexico from 1969 to 1971. In 1995 she received a Master of Arts degree in Liberal Studies from New York University. She has been invited to many exhibitions, solo and group, both in the United States and abroad. An abstract expressionist, she received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 1989 and in 2018; a Lester Hereward Cooke foundation grant for mid-career achievement i...
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#1568

Haiyan Wang

#171234
Overall Influence
Haiyan Wang is an American engineer. As the Basil S. Turner Professor of Engineering at Purdue University's School of Materials Engineering and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, she is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Ceramic Society, and American Physical Society.
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#1569

Jean Fan

#151629
Overall Influence
Jean Fan is an American Biomedical Engineer who emigrated from China. She is known for her research in molecular biology in regards to cancer. In addition, throughout her life she has facilitated young girls to pursue a career in science.
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#1570

Cecilia Metra

#45375
Overall Influence
Cecilia Metra is an electrical engineer at the University of Bologna in Italy. She was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2014 "for her contributions to the online testing and fault-tolerant design of digital circuits and systems".
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#1571

Lynne Parker

#83957
Overall Influence
Lynne Edwards Parker is Associate Vice Chancellor and Director of the AI Tennessee Initiative at the University of Tennessee. Previously, she was Deputy United States Chief Technology Officer and Founding Director of the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office at the United States' White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She is an American roboticist specializing in multi-robot systems, swarm robotics, and distributed artificial intelligence.
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#1572

Lesley Wyborn

#129496
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Lesley Wyborn is an Australian geoscientist and geoinformatics specialist, with a focus in high performance computing for geography and online analytics. She is an Adjunct Fellow at the Australian National University.
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#1573

Debbie Millman

Debbie Millman
#22499
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Debbie Millman is an American writer, educator, artist, curator, and designer who is best known as the host of the podcast Design Matters. She has authored six books and is the President Emeritus of the American Institute of Graphic Arts and chair, one of only five women to hold the position over 100 years. She co-founded the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City with Steven Heller. She was previously the editorial and creative director of Print magazine. Her illustrations have appeared in many major publications, including New York Magazine, Design Observe...
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#1574

Joanne Pransky

Joanne Pransky
#86107
Overall Influence
Joanne Pransky was an American robotics enthusiast and futurist who provided professional advice on using and marketing robotics devices. Her professional focus was on issues concerning human–robot interaction.
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#1575

Chantal Zakari

#113747
Overall Influence
Chantal Zakari is an interdisciplinary artist, designer and art educator; a Turkish Levantine now residing in the Boston area. She is a full-time faculty member at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, where she chaired the Graphic Arts area from 1998 until 2015, and was an active faculty voice while the SMFA was undergoing the transition in its long-standing affiliation with Tufts University. She was an associate member of the Goat Island performance group from 1995 to 2009 and has served on the board of Belmont World Film.
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#1576

Peggy Weil

#36936
Overall Influence
Peggy Weil is an American artist working in digital media. Early life and education She graduated from Harvard University in 1976, and received a master's degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982.
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#1577

Ulrike Müller

#149389
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Ulrike Müller is a contemporary visual artist. Müller is a member of the New York-based feminist genderqueer group LTTR as well as an editor of its eponymous journal. She also represented Austria at the Cairo Biennale in 2011. She is currently a professor and Co-Chair of Painting at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.
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#1578

Myra B. Cohen

#181898
Overall Influence
Myra B. Cohen is an American software engineer whose research focuses on software testing. She is Susan J. Rosowski Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and Professor and Lanh and Oanh Nguyen Chair in Software Engineering at Iowa State University.
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#1579

Sandra K. Ellston

#119767
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Sandra K. Ellston, also published under the pen names Sandra K. Fischer and Sandra Mason is an American Shakespearean scholar and professor of English and writing at Eastern Oregon University, where she also served as dean of the college of arts and sciences and where she was recipient of the Woman of Vision and Courage Award.
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#1580

Gladys Maestre

#148947
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Gladys Elena Maestre is a neuroscientist from Venezuela who is a professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine. She is known for her work on Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia.
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#1581

Lisa Hopp

#94989
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Lisa Hopp is Dean and Professor of nursing at Purdue University Northwest. She founded and directs the Indiana Center for Evidence-Based Nursing Practice: A Center of Excellence of The Joanna Briggs Institute.
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#1582

Maya Kopitseva

Maya Kopitseva
#60008
Overall Influence
1924 - 2005 (81 years)
Maya Kuzminichna Kopitseva was a Soviet Russian still-life painter and an Honored Artist of the RSFSR who lived and worked in Leningrad - Saint Petersburg. She was a member of the Saint Petersburg Union of Artists, which before 1992 was the Leningrad branch of Union of Artists of the Russian Federation, and was regarded as one of the major representatives of the Leningrad school of painting.
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#1583

Sarah Cohen-Boulakia

#170390
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Sarah Cohen-Boulakia is a French computer scientist and data scientist known for her research on data provenance in science, and especially in bioinformatics. She is a professor of bioinformatics in the Laboratory for Computer Science of the French National Centre for Scientific Research and Paris-Saclay University.
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#1584

Kerala J. Snyder

#128800
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Kerala Johnson Snyder is an American musicologist and educator. She is Professor Emerita of Musicology and Affiliate Faculty of Organ, Sacred Music and Historical Keyboards at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester. She previously taught at Yale University.
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#1585

Senam Okudzeto

#135109
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Senam Okudzeto is an American and British artist and educator who lives and works in Basel, London, Ghana and New York City. Life and work Okudzeto was born in Chicago, to an American mother and Ghanaian father and grew up between London, Chicago and Lagos. She received a bachelor's degree from the Slade School of Fine Art in 1995 and a master's degree from the Royal College of Art in 1997. Okudzeto continued with post-graduate studies in the Whitney Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art and earned a doctorate in the field of Humanities and Cultural Studies from th...
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#1586

Caroline Nevejan

#88314
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Caroline Irma Maria Nevejan is Chief Science Officer with the City of Amsterdam and professor by special appointment of Designing Urban Experience at the University of Amsterdam. She is responsible for research, science and knowledge development in Amsterdam. She is known as a Dutch internet pioneer.
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#1587

Stacy Jo Scott

#170746
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Stacy Jo Scott is an American artist, art educator, curator, and writer based in Eugene, Oregon, who works in ceramics and digital fabrication. Early life and education Scott earned a BFA in Ceramics from the University of Oregon in 2010, and an MFA in Ceramics at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2012. Scott resided in Nottingham Cooperative in Madison, Wisconsin from 2000 to 2003
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#1588

Jane Skok

#155757
Overall Influence
Jane Skok is the Sandra and Edward H. Meyer Professor of Radiation Oncology at New York University. Biography Skok was born in Johannesburg. She earned a PhD at University College London in immunology and genetics. After completing her PhD, she left science to care for her two children, one of whom was chronically ill.
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#1589

Allison Randal

Allison Randal
#175065
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Allison Randal is a software developer and author. She was the chief architect of the Parrot virtual machine, a member of the board of directors for The Perl Foundation, a director of the Python Software Foundation from 2010 to 2012, and the chairman of the Parrot Foundation. She is also the lead developer of Punie, the port of Perl 1 to Parrot. She is co-author of Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials and the Synopses of Perl 6. She was employed by O'Reilly Media. From August 2010 till February 2012, Randal was the Technical Architect of Ubuntu at Canonical.
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#1590

Stephanie Cole

Stephanie Cole
#61175
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Patricia Stephanie Cole is an English stage, television, radio and film actress, known for high-profile roles in shows such as Tenko , Open All Hours , A Bit of a Do , Waiting for God , Keeping Mum , Doc Martin , Cabin Pressure , Still Open All Hours , Man Down and as Sylvia Goodwin in ITV soap opera Coronation Street .
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#1591

Lea McGee

#125639
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Lea M. McGee, a professor emeritus of early literacy at Ohio State University, was the Marie Clay Chair of Reading Recovery and Early Literacy. Her research interests include alphabet learning, the role of fingerpoint reading in making the transition from emergent to conventional reading, and young children's responses to literature.
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#1592

Linda Threadgill

#168167
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Linda Threadgill is an American artist whose primary emphasis is metalsmithing. Her metal work is inspired by forms of nature and the interpretations she gleans from the intricate patterns it presents. She explores the foundation of nature to allude to nature and transform it into re-imagined, stylized plants forms.
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#1593

Barbara Jayne Orser

#172807
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Barbara Jayne Orser is a Professor of Management in the Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa where she teaches Entrepreneurship. Her research focuses on gender influences in the venture creation process.
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#1594

Natalie Munro

#118320
Overall Influence
Natalie Munro is an American anthropologist and professor, specializing in zooarchaeology, the study of animal remains found at archaeological sites. She is known for her research on the critical transition from hunter-gatherer to agrarian societies, which took place between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago. Munro's work primarily focuses on early human communities in southwest Asia, particularly in Israel, Turkey, and Greece.
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#1595

Ebony Patterson

Ebony Patterson
#85837
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Ebony Grace Patterson is a Jamaican-born visual artist and educator. She is known for her large and colorful tapestries created out of various materials such as, glitter, sequins, fabric, toys, beads, faux flowers, jewelry, and other embellishments. Her "Gangstas for Life series" of dancehall portraits, and her garden-inspired installations.
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#1596

Amalie Frischknecht

#181703
Overall Influence
Amalie L. Frischknecht is an American theoretical polymer physicist at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2012 for "her outstanding contributions to the theory of ionomers and nanocomposites including the development and application of density functional theory to polymers". Her research focuses on understanding the structure, phase behavior, and self-assembly of polymer systems, such as complex fluids polymer nanocomposites, lipid bilayer assemblies, and ionomers.
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#1597

Chunyang Hu

#125044
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Chunyang Hu is a professor at the Fudan University in China. She is nationally known for her research and writing on interpersonal communication, discourse analysis applied in communication. Chunyang Hu has also done research and published books on discourse analysis, mobile communication and interpersonal interaction, and textbook on Interpersonal Communication. She translated the Sage Handbook of Interpersonal Communication from English into Chinese. She developed the course on interpersonal communication on Fudan campus. .
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#1598

Cecilia Vicuña

Cecilia Vicuña
#124685
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Cecilia Vicuña is a Chilean poet and artist based in New York and Santiago, Chile. Her work is noted for themes of language, memory, dissolution, extinction and exile. Critics also note the relevance of her work to the politics of ecological destruction, cultural homogenization, and economic disparity, particularly the way in which such phenomena disenfranchise the already powerless. Her commitment to feminist forms and methodologies is considered to be a unifying theme across her diverse body of work, among which her fibre art quipus, knotted or unknotted strings, palabrarmas and precarios, made from natural, delicate materials, stand out.
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#1599

Lauren Fensterstock

#141709
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Lauren Fensterstock is an American artist, writer, curator, critic, and educator living and working in Portland, Maine. Fensterstock’s work has been widely shown nationally at venues such as the John Michael Kohler Art Center , the Bowdoin College Museum of Art , the Portland Museum of Art , and is held in public and private collections throughout the U.S, Europe, and Asia.
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#1600

Helen Hastie

#181753
Overall Influence
Helen Hastie is the Head of the School of Informatics of the University of Edinburgh and a RAEng/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow. She specialises in Human-Robot Interaction and Multimodal interfaces. Hastie has undertaken projects such as AI personal assistants for remote robots, autonomous systems and spoken dialogue systems for sectors in defence and energy. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
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