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,
#1601
Laurence Arcadias
#94352
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (123 years)
Laurence Arcadias is a French/American experimental animator working in the United States. She has directed and written several short films including Tempête dans une chambre à coucher , Dust Off and Cowboy Up!, and Bavure. She is a professor and previous chair of the animation department at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Her films have been exhibited and won awards at numerous international film festivals around the world. Arcadias and Juliette Marchand's stop motion film Tempête dans une chambre à coucher was short-listed for a 2013 César Award, the French equivalent of an Academy Award.
Go to Profile#1602
Amy Lansky
#186030
Overall Influence
Amy Lansky is an American academic. She was the director of the Office of National AIDS Policy. Education Lansky earned a bachelor's degree in political science from Swarthmore College. She holds doctoral and master's degrees in public health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Go to Profile#1603
Kate Calder
#169736
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Catherine A. "Kate" Calder is an American statistician who works as chair of Statistics and Data Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. She was previously a professor of statistics at Ohio State University. Calder earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Northwestern University in 1999, and completed her Ph.D. in statistics from Duke University in 2003 under the joint supervision of David Higdon and Michael L. Lavine. She joined the Ohio State faculty in 2003, and was promoted to full professor in 2015.
Go to Profile#1604
Uta Klement
#177457
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Uta Klement is a senior professor at Chalmers University of Technology who works in the field of materials science with emphasis on electron microscopy. Education She completed her diploma in material physics in the year 1987 from Georg-August-Universität Göttingen,Germany. The title of her thesis is Recrystallization experiments on <111> tensile deformed copper single crystals supervised by Prof. P. Haasen. She then carried on to do a PhD in the same university and the title of her PhD thesis is 'In-situ HVEM-investigations of the early stages of recrystallization in Cu-0.2 at.% Mn-single crystals', also supervised by Prof.
Go to Profile#1605
Rebecca Moore
#56817
Overall Influence
Rebecca Moore is an American software engineer, director of Google Earth, and director and founder of the Google Earth Outreach and Google Earth Engine computer mapping projects. Early life and career Moore grew up in Roslyn, New York, with one sister and two brothers. Her father, Earle K. Moore, was a communications and civil rights lawyer in Manhattan, who won a landmark case establishing that broadcast stations must serve the interests of their viewers. Her brother, Frank C. Moore, was an artist and activist, including being an originator of the Red Ribbon project for AIDS solidarity. She...
Go to Profile#1606
Chris Ray
#186067
Overall Influence
#1607
Isabelle Aubert
#184131
Overall Influence
Isabelle Aubert is a Canadian neuroscientist with expertise in developing regenerative therapies for neurodegenerative disorders . She is a senior scientist at Sunnybrook Research Institute , and is a professor in laboratory medicine and pathobiology at the University of Toronto. In 2019, Aubert was appointed as a Canada Research Chair in Brain Repair and Regeneration.
Go to Profile#1608
Carmen Domene
#185100
Overall Influence
Carmen Domene is a Spanish academic who is a professor of chemistry at the University of Bath. Her research makes use of computational simulations to understand biological systems and processes. She was awarded the 2020 International Society of Quantum Biology and Pharmacology Loew Award and the 2023 Royal Society of Chemistry Corday-Morgan Prize.
Go to Profile#1609
Lezanne Ooi
#179070
Overall Influence
Lezanne Ooi is an Australian neuroscientist who is Professor and Head of Neurodevelopment at the University of Wollongong. Her research considers the development of cellular imaging techniques to understand neurodegenerative disease.
Go to Profile#1610
Eleonora Bilotta
#185632
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Eleonora Bilotta is an Italian researcher into complex systems and human–computer interaction, including educational entertainment, personal robots, and the use of chaos theory, cellular automata, and dynamical systems in the synthetic design of music and jewelry, especially focusing on the chaotic behavior of Chua's circuit.
Go to Profile#1611
Philippa Martin
#150045
Overall Influence
Philippa Anne Martin is a New Zealand electrical engineering academic and a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. She is currently a full professor at the University of Canterbury.
Go to Profile#1612
Jane K. Hart
#174078
Overall Influence
Jane K Hart is a Professor of Physical Geography in the School of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Southampton UK. She has a BSc in Physical Geography from the University of Reading and a PhD in Glaciology from the University of East Anglia. She was Lecturer in Physical Geography at the University of Manchester. Currently, she is EGU General Secretary, President of the Quaternary Research Association and Chair of the "Funds for Women Graduates".
Go to Profile#1613
Melanie Yazzie
#73625
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Melanie A. Yazzie is a Navajo sculptor, painter, printmaker, and professor. She teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Early life and education Melanie A. Yazzie was born in 1966 in Ganado, Arizona, United States. She is Navajo of the , born for . She grew up on the Navajo Nation. Melanie Yazzie is of the Salt Water Clan born for the Bitter Water Clan.
Go to Profile#1614
Karine Auclair
#109779
Overall Influence
Karine Auclair is a professor of chemistry at McGill University in Montréal, Canada. She is the current Canada Research Chair in Antimicrobials and Green Enzymes. Education and career Auclair completed a Bachelor of Science in chemistry at Université du Québec à Chicoutimi in 1994, followed by a Doctor of Philosophy in organic chemistry at the University of Alberta in 1999. She then completed a post-doctoral fellowship in pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco from 1999 to 2001.
Go to Profile#1615
Lucy Orta
#40502
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Lucy Orta is an English contemporary visual artist living and working between London and Paris where she has resided since 1991. After graduating with an honours degree in fashion-knitwear design, Orta began practising as a visual artist in 1991. Her sculptural work investigates the boundaries between the body and architecture, exploring their common social factors such as communication and identity. Orta's most emblematic works include: Refuge Wear and Body Architecture , portable architecture, lightweight and autonomous structures representing issues of survival. Nexus Architecture are par...
Go to Profile#1616
Alanis Obomsawin
#81818
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Alanis Obomsawin, is an Abenaki American-Canadian filmmaker, singer, artist, and activist primarily known for her documentary films. Born in New Hampshire, United States and raised primarily in Quebec, Canada, she has written and directed many National Film Board of Canada documentaries on First Nations issues. Obomsawin is a member of Film Fatales independent women filmmakers.
Go to Profile#1617
Suzan Shown Harjo
#32773
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Suzan Shown Harjo is an advocate for Native American rights. She is a poet, writer, lecturer, curator, and policy advocate who has helped Native peoples recover more than one million acres of tribal lands. After co-producing the first American Indian news show in the nation for WBAI radio while living in New York City, and producing other shows and theater, in 1974 she moved to Washington, D.C., to work on national policy issues. She served as Congressional liaison for Indian affairs in the President Jimmy Carter administration and later as president of the National Council of American Indi...
Go to Profile#1618
Elizabeth Jessup
#84268
Overall Influence
Elizabeth Redding Jessup is an American computer scientist specializing in numerical linear algebra and the generalized minimal residual method. She is a professor emerita of computer science at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Go to Profile#1619
Donna Pastore
#86264
Overall Influence
Donna L. Pastore a professor of sport management at Ohio State University, in the School of Physical Activity & Educational Services. In addition, Pastore is the coordinator of Sport and Exercise Management at Ohio State and is a past president of the National Association for Girls and Women in Sport.
Go to Profile#1620
Pat Lipsky
#32109
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Pat Lipsky is an American painter associated with Lyrical Abstraction and Color Field Painting. Education Lipsky grew up in New York City. She graduated with a BFA from Cornell University in 1963, receiving an MFA from the Graduate Program in Painting at Manhattan's Hunter College, where she studied with the painter and sculptor Tony Smith.
Go to Profile#1621
Judy Liu
#140596
Overall Influence
Judy Shih-Hwa Liu is the Sidney A. Fox and Dorothea Doctors Fox Professor of Ophthalmology and Neuroscience at Brown University. She works on the cortical malformations that cause epilepsy. Education and early career Liu earned a Bachelor of Science at Yale University. She moved to New York for her graduate studies, and completed a PhD and MD at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. After her MD she completed a medical internship in internal medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She was appointed as a neurological resident at Beth Israel in 2001.
Go to Profile#1622
Emma Amos
#45465
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Emma Amos was a postmodern African-American painter and printmaker. Early life Amos was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1937 to India DeLaine Amos and Miles Green Amos. She also has an older brother named Larry. Amos took an interest in art at an early age, creating "masses of paper dolls" and learning figure drawing from issues of Esquire and the art of Alberto Vargas, was painting the figure by the age of nine. Her mother had aspirations of Amos studying with Hale Woodruff, but he did not accept many private students and left the area before she had the opportunity to study with him.
Go to Profile#1623
Loredana Sasso
#169166
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Loredana Sasso is professor of nursing at the University of Genoa, Italy. She was president of the European Federation of Nursing Regulators Brussels office from 2006 to 2009 during which period she worked on the creation of the Code of Ethics and Conduct for European Nursing. She is Founding President of the first Italian Sigma nursing chapter Alpha Alpha Beta based at the University of Genoa. In July 2022, she was appointed Scientific Director of the Centre of Excellence for Nursing Research and Development - Italian National Federation of Nursing Orders in Rome, Italy.
Go to Profile#1624
Tava Olsen
#139066
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Tava Maryanne Lennon Olsen is a New Zealand academic specialising in supply chain management. She is currently a full professor at the University of Auckland. Academic career After a 1994 PhD titled Response-time approximations for multi-server polling models, with manufacturing applications at the Stanford University, she worked at the University of Michigan and the Washington University in St Louis before moving to the University of Auckland, rising to full professor.
Go to Profile#1625
Mildred Dunnock
#73518
Overall Influence
1901 - 1991 (90 years)
Mildred Dorothy Dunnock was an American stage and screen actress. She was twice nominated for an Academy Award: first Death of a Salesman in 1951, then Baby Doll in 1956. Early life Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Dunnock graduated from Western High School. She developed an interest in theater while she was a student at Goucher College where she was a member of Alpha Phi sorority and the Agora dramatic society. After graduating, she taught English at Friends School of Baltimore and helped with productions of plays there.
Go to Profile#1626
Ruth McVey
#37855
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Ruth Thomas McVey is an American scholar of Indonesia and Southeast Asia known especially for her writings on Communism and the Indonesian Communist Party. With Benedict Anderson, she co-wrote the Cornell Paper, a 1966 work which examined the failed September 30 Movement in Indonesia. She has written and edited a number of books about Indonesian and Southeast Asian politics, including The rise of Indonesian communism and The Soviet view of the Indonesian revolution .
Go to Profile#1627
Kendra Stearns O'Donnell
#99489
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Kendra Stearns O'Donnell is an American educator and painter who served as the 12th principal of Phillips Exeter Academy. Biography She attended Emma Willard School, graduating in 1960, Barnard College, graduating in 1965, and Columbia University, where she received an M.A. and Ph.D. degree in English. As an assistant professor of English at Princeton University, entering the faculty in 1971, she received, as the first woman to do so, the title of university marshal. She served as a program officer at the Markle Foundation, the program director of the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and as a consultant and special assistant to the president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
Go to Profile#1628
Galina Rumiantseva
#68844
Overall Influence
1927 - 2004 (77 years)
Galina Alexeevna Rumiantseva was a Russian Soviet realist painter and graphic artist, who lived and worked in Saint Petersburg . She was regarded as one of representatives of the Leningrad school of painting.
Go to Profile#1629
Rosemarie Trockel
#9403
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Rosemarie Trockel is a German conceptual artist. She has made drawings, paintings, sculptures, videos and installations, and has worked in mixed media. From 1985, she made pictures using knitting-machines. She is a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, in Düsseldorf in Nordrhein-Westfalen.
Go to Profile#1630
Bita Daryabari
#156697
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Bita Daryabari is an Iranian-American philanthropist, entrepreneur and computer scientist. She is the founder of several community organizations which focus on Persian immigrants in society and arts in the United States. Daryabari has provided financial assistance to various educational institutions for research on the Iranian studies in higher education, including endowments to Stanford, Pembroke College, U.C. Davis, and U.C. Berkeley. She has a named Chair at U.C. Davis in Persian Language and Literature and at U.C. Berkeley in Iranian Studies.
Go to Profile#1631
Elizabeth A. Wilson
#182494
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Elizabeth A. Wilson is a Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Emory University. She is a scholar of feminist science studies, and her work brings together psychoanalytic theory, affect theory, feminist and queer theory, and neurobiology. She is the author of Neural Geographies: Feminism and the Microstructure of Cognition , Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body , Affect and Artificial Intelligence , and Gut Feminism .
Go to Profile#1632
Stephanie A. White
#158097
Overall Influence
Stephanie Ann White is an American neuroscientist who is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research looks to understand how social interactions impact the brain. She serves as Director of the Neural Systems and Behavior programme at the Marine Biological Laboratory.
Go to Profile#1633
Yuanyuan Zhou
#183275
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Yuanyuan Zhou is a Chinese and American computer scientist and entrepreneur. She is a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, San Diego, where she holds the Qualcomm Endowed Chair in Mobile Computing. Her research concerns software reliability, including the use of data mining to automatically detect software bugs and flexible system designs that can adapt to hardware platform variations. She is also the founder of three start-up companies, Emphora, Pattern Insight, and Whova.
Go to Profile#1634
Sofia Quaglioni
#135169
Overall Influence
Sofia Quaglioni is a nuclear physicist. She is Deputy Group Leader at the Nuclear Data and Theory Group in the Nuclear and Chemical Sciences Division in Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory . Biography Quaglioni completed her undergraduate degree from the University of Trento, Italy, and then PhD from the same institution in 2005. She was then a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arizona. She joined LLNL in 2006.
Go to Profile#1635
Cherry A. Murray
#53465
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Cherry A. Murray is an American academic who is professor of physics and the director of the Biosphere2 Institute at the University of Arizona at Tucson. She is the Benjamin Peirce Professor of Technology and Public Policy emerita at, and former dean of, the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences .
Go to Profile#1636
Karen Devine
#61481
Overall Influence
Karen Dragon Devine is an American computer scientist specializing in high-performance technical computing. She is a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff in the Center for Computing Research at Sandia National Laboratories. At Sandia, she is part of the development team for the Zoltan and Trilinos scientific computing packages.
Go to Profile#1637
Uta Barth
#56076
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Uta Barth is a contemporary German-American photographer whose work addresses themes such as perception, optical illusion and non-place. Her early work emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s, "inverting the notion of background and foreground" in photography and bringing awareness to a viewer's attention to visual information with in the photographic frame. Her work is as much about vision and perception as it is about the failure to see, the faith humans place in the mechanics of perception, and the precarious nature of perceptual habits. Barth's says this about her art practice: “The question ...
Go to Profile#1638
Aileen Plant
#116984
Overall Influence
1940 - 2007 (67 years)
Aileen Joy Plant was a leading Australian infectious diseases epidemiologist. She was professor of international health at Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia. Born in the Victorian country town of Warragul, the fourth of eight children, her parents had a car dealership and petrol station. When she was 13, the family moved to a farm near Denmark on the south coast of Western Australia. She left school at 14 to work in a bank, and later completed high school. In her early 20s, she began a medical degree at the University of Western Australia.
Go to Profile#1639
Virginia A. Myers
#110446
Overall Influence
1927 - 2015 (88 years)
Virginia A. Myers was an American artist, professor, and inventor. She was born in Greencastle, Indiana, and grew up with her parents and younger sister mostly in Cleveland, Ohio, where her father taught at various colleges and schools.
Go to Profile#1640
Roberta Gottlieb
#56931
Overall Influence
Roberta Anne Gottlieb is an American oncologist, academic, and researcher. She is a Professor, and Vice-Chair of Translational Medicine in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and a Professor of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#1641
Barbara Bolt
#82145
Overall Influence
Barbara Bolt is an Australian academic and artist. She is the current director of the Victorian College of the Arts which is part of the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music at the University of Melbourne. She is a research theorist her research investigates art theory and criticism , art as research . Her art practice investigates the material possibilities of painting in a digital age and the relationship between painting and light . She was on the executive board of the international Society for Artistic Research , which produces the Journal of Artistic Research and is a member of the editorial...
Go to Profile#1642
Adelina Broadbridge
#186514
Overall Influence
Adelina Broadbridge is an academic specialising in research on charity retailing, retailing, and gender in management. She led the Stirling Management School in winning the Athena SWAN award. She is Senior Lecturer at Stirling Management School, University of Stirling, UK. She is Editor-in-Chief of the Gender in Management journal.
Go to Profile#1643
Eiman Kanjo
#177827
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Eiman Kanjo is a British computer scientist and engineer. She is professor of pervasive sensing at Nottingham Trent University. Her research considers the development of wireless sensing technologies. She was named as one of the Top 50 Influential Women in Engineering in 2022. She joins Imperial College London as Provost's Visiting Professor, October 2023.
Go to Profile#1644
Andrea Büttner
#79223
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Andrea Büttner is a German artist. She works in a variety of media including woodcuts, reverse glass paintings, sculpture, video, and performance. She creates connections between art history and social or ethical issues, with a particular interest in notions of poverty, shame, vulnerability and dignity, and the belief systems that underpin them.
Go to Profile#1645
Claudina Rodrigues-Pousada
#183534
Overall Influence
1941 - 2021 (80 years)
Claudina Rodrigues-Pousada was a Portuguese researcher in biochemistry. She was a research student at the Gulbenkian Institute of Science until 1973 and at the Institute of Physico-Chemical Biology , Paris from 1973 to 1979 and Paris Diderot University. In 1979 she completed her PhD studies and in 1976 was employed by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation as an adjoint researcher at the Gulbenkian Institute of Science; in 1984 she was a senior researcher until 31 December 1999. In 2000 she moved to the Institute of Technology Chemical Biology as an invited full professor, where she launched the Genomics and Stress laboratory.
Go to Profile#1646
Mary Walling Blackburn
#173953
Overall Influence
Mary Walling Blackburn is an artist, writer, and feminist who works and lives between New York, where she is an artist and director of the Anhoek School and its sister radio station WMYN, and Dallas where she teaches art at Southern Methodist University. She is also described as "“a singer, a tutor, a choreographer, a documentary filmmaker, a tourist, a critic and a translator” with a strong but politically uncategorizable activist streak."
Go to Profile#1647
Cheryl Goldsleger
#108985
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Cheryl Goldsleger is an American artist and educator. She has resided in Athens, Georgia, since 1977. Early life and education Goldsleger was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and began her formal education in art in 1969 at the Philadelphia College of Art where she received a full scholarship. In 1971 she attended Temple University's Tyler School of Art in Rome. She earned her degree of Master of Fine Arts from Washington University in St. Louis in 1975.
Go to Profile#1648
Lei Ge
#186996
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
#1649
Squeak Carnwath
#104404
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Squeak Carnwath is a contemporary American painter and arts educator. She is a Professor Emerita of Art at University of California, Berkeley. Background Carnwath has explained "Squeak" as "a childhood name that stuck".
Go to Profile#1650
Stephanie Syjuco
#69396
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Stephanie Syjuco , is a Filipino-American conceptual artist and educator. Born in the Philippines, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1977. Syjuco received her MFA from Stanford University in 2005, and BFA in Sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1995. She currently lives and works in Oakland, California.
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