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 Economics,
#451
Marta Verginella
#34610
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Marta Verginella is a Slovenian historian from the Slovene minority in Italy in Trieste, notable as one of the most prominent contemporary Slovene historians. Together with Alenka Puhar, she is considered a pioneer in the history of family relations in the Slovene Lands.
Go to Profile#452
Nancy Gordon
#80475
Overall Influence
Nancy May Gordon is an American economist and statistician who works for the United States Census Bureau. Education and career Gordon majored in economics and statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and earned a doctorate in economics from Stanford University. Her dissertation, Ex ante and Ex post Substitutability in Economic Growth, was supervised by Kenneth Arrow.
Go to Profile#453
Lourdes Casanova
#50263
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Lourdes S. Casanova is an academic, author and currently a Senior Lecturer of Management at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management and Gail and Rob Cañizares Director of the Emerging Markets Institute. Before her appointment to Johnson School, Casanova was a lecturer in the Strategy Department at INSEAD. She specializes in international business with a focus on Latin America and multinationals from emerging markets. In 2014 and 2015, Lourdes Casanova was appointed as one of the 50 most influential Iberoamerican intellectuals by Esglobal. Also, she is member of the Board of Dir...
Go to Profile#454
Sara Berry
#83922
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Sara Sweezy Berry is an American scholar of contemporary African political economies, professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and co-founder of the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins.
Go to Profile#455
Angela Wigger
#134539
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Angela Wigger is a political economist at the Political Science department at the Radboud University in the Netherlands. Her current research focuses on analyzing the global economic crisis, crisis responses and political challenges to these responses from a historical materialist perspective. Focal points are the geopolitics of industrial and antitrust policy, industrial reshoring attempts, the "competitiveness" fetish, internal devaluation and debt-led accumulation in the age of rentier capitalism.
Go to Profile#456
Eleonora Patacchini
#157290
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Eleonora Patacchini is an economist specializing in applied economics and applied statistics who grew up in Italy with her mother who was also a professor. She is a professor and associate department chair at Cornell University in the Department of Economics. Her research focuses on the empirical analysis of behavioral models of strategic interactions for decision making. Patacchini is an associate editor at Journal of Urban Economics and Statistical Methods & Applications. She is a columnist at the VOX CEPR Policy Portal where research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists are published frequently.
Go to Profile#457
Nancy Olewiler
#107445
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Nancy D. Olewiler is a Canadian economist who is currently a professor at the School of Public Policy at Simon Fraser University. She is affiliated with numerous organizations such as Powertech Labs Inc., BC Hydro, Powerex Corp, TransLink , and the Center for Public Research. Olewiler has received numerous awards for her contributions in the education and environmental economics sector. She was most recently a recipient of the 2017 YWCA Women of Distinction Award for her work at Queen's University and Simon Fraser University. She is also notable for her research in natural resource and enviro...
Go to Profile#458
Sheri Markose
#105402
Overall Influence
Sheri Marina Markose is a computational economist. She is a professor of Economics at the University of Essex, where she holds a personal chair since 2006. She is the founding director of the Centre for Computational Finance and Economic Agents at Essex. At CCFEA, with the support of the then Vice Chancellor, Ivor Crewe, she pioneered multi-disciplinary research as well as PhD and Masters programs, which include Agent-based computational economics, financial market modelling with extreme events and markets as complex adaptive systems.
Go to Profile#459
Shawna Grosskopf
#91625
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Shawna Patricia Grosskopf is an American economist who is Professor Emerita at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon, United States, and Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Environmental and Resource Economics in Umeå, Sweden. She was named one of the 250 most-cited scholars in economics and finance by the ISI Web of Knowledge in 2005.
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Denise R. Osborn
#139007
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Denise Rae Osborn is an Australian and British economist who currently works as the Secretary-General at the Royal Economic Society and as an Emeritus Professor of Econometrics at the University of Manchester. Her principal research interests have been in applied Time-Series modelling, particularly in seasonality in economic variables and dynamic modelling of macroeconomic relationships. Osborn has over 70 research publications in referred academic journals including Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Journal of the Royal Sta...
Go to Profile#461
Asli Demirguc-Kunt
#144120
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Asli Demirgüç-Kunt is a Turkish economist. She is a non-resident Fellow at the Center for Global Development and a former chief economist of the Europe and Central Asia Region of The World Bank. During her 33-year career at The World Bank, she also served as the Director of Research, Director of Development Policy, and the Chief Economist of the Finance and Private Sector Development Network, conducting research and advising on financial and private sector development issues. She has authored more than 100 research papers, as well as books, is widely published in academic journals, and is among the most-cited researchers in the world.
Go to Profile#462
Mariam Atlas
#110626
Overall Influence
1912 - 2006 (94 years)
Mariam Semyonovna Atlas was a Soviet and Russian economist, full Ph.D. in Economics, professor of Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation , Honoured Scientist of the Russian Federation, one of the oldest employees of the State Bank of the USSR.
Go to Profile#463
Madhavi Venkatesan
#106051
Overall Influence
Madhavi Venkatesan is an American economist and environmental activist. She is an associate teaching professor of economics at Northeastern University. Biography Venkatesan received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Economics from Vanderbilt University. She then held senior level positions in investor relations for three Fortune 250 companies in the insurance sector. In 2014, she re-entered academic employment as an assistant professor of Economics at Bridgewater State University and in 2017, she joined the faculty of the Department of Economics at Northeastern University as an assistant teaching p...
Go to Profile#464
Elena Yanovskaya
#74777
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Elena Yanovskaya is a Soviet and Russian mathematician and economist known for her contributions to cooperative game theory. Biography Elena Yanovskaya was born in Leningrad on May 20, 1938. She studied at the School of Mathematics and Mechanics of the Leningrad State University majoring in probability theory and statistics. After graduation in 1959, she started working as a junior researcher at the Leningrad Department of Steklov Institute of Mathematics, where she worked until 1965. Yanovskaya defended her doctoral thesis in 1964. From 1965 to 1975, Yanovskaya worked at the Leningrad branc...
Go to Profile#465
Danuše Nerudová
#124040
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Danuše Nerudová, née Peslarová is a Czech economist and university professor. She was formerly the chair of the Commission for Fair Pensions and rector of Mendel University in Brno, both from 2018 to 2022. She was a candidate in the 2023 Czech presidential election, finished in third place in the first round vote.
Go to Profile#466
Catherine C. Eckel
#159864
Overall Influence
Catherine Millay Coleman Eckel is the Sarah and John Lindsey Professor in the Liberal Arts and University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Economics at Texas A&M University, where she directs the Behavioral Economics and Policy Program. She has been a faculty member at the University of British Columbia, Virginia Tech, and the University of Texas at Dallas, where she founded and oversaw the Center for Behavioral and Experimental Economic Science. Her research focuses on experimental economics, and she has studied charitable giving; cooperation, trust, and risk tolerance in poor, ur...
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Rhonda M. Williams
#118125
Overall Influence
1957 - 2000 (43 years)
Rhonda Michèle Williams was an American professor, activist and political economist whose work combined economics with multiple other social fields including race and gender analysis, law, politics, public policy and cultural studies. She aimed to show how the examination of the roles of race and gender in economics benefitted from an inclusive approach rather than a separate and fragmented analysis in order to ensure that issues of economic inequality and discrimination were aptly addressed. Williams was also noted as being consistent in aligning her own ethics with economic analysis resulti...
Go to Profile#468
Valarie Zeithaml
#21665
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Valarie Zeithaml is a marketing professor and author. She is the David S. Van Pelt Family Distinguished Professor of Marketing at Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Zeithml is an expert in the area of services marketing and service quality. In the 1980s Zeithaml and her co-authors developed SERVQUAL, a quality management framework for services. She was named a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher in the report on "The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds."
Go to Profile#469
Susana Mourato
#168944
Overall Influence
Susana Mourato is a professor of environmental economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She holds a leader position at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
Go to Profile#470
Lise Vesterlund
#169582
Overall Influence
Lise Vesterlund is a behavioral and experimental economist, and the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. From 1997 to 2001 she was assistant professor at the Iowa State University. She is on the board of editors of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and of the Experimental Economics journal. Since 2018, she is a visiting professor at the Norwegian School of Economics.
Go to Profile#471
Barbara Fraumeni
#129084
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Barbara Morry Fraumeni is a Special-term Professor at the Central University of Finance and Economics, a Senior Fellow at Hunan University in China, Professor Emerita of Public Policy at the Muskie in the School of Public Service, University of Southern Maine, Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, United States, and a Research Fellow of the IZA Network, Germany. She is an authority on human capital and nonhuman capital, economic growth, productivity, and non-market accounts. She is a former program officer with the National Science Foundation and Chief Economist at the U.S.
Go to Profile#472
Juliet Elu
#110358
Overall Influence
Juliet U. Elu is an American economist who is currently Charles E. Merrill Professor of Economics and Chair of the Division of Business and Economics at Morehouse College. She was previously Vice Chancellor of Gregory University in Nigeria and she is a former president of both the National Economic Association and the African Finance and Economics Association.
Go to Profile#473
Ruth Cohen
#125755
Overall Influence
1906 - 1991 (85 years)
Ruth Louisa Cohen, CBE was a British economist, who served as Principal of Newnham College of the University of Cambridge from 1954 to 1972. Life She studied at Newnham College as an undergraduate in the 1920s. In 1930, she received a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship to go to the US. She spent two years at Stanford and Cornell.
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Christine Ennew
#161385
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Christine Thelma Ennew OBE is the Provost of the University of Warwick. Ennew's early academic career was as an agricultural economist at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. She subsequently moved into marketing and became the professor of marketing at the University of Nottingham.
Go to Profile#475
Ulrike Leopold-Wildburger
#98080
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Ulrike Leopold-Wildburger is an Austrian mathematical economist, applied mathematician, and operations researcher. She is a professor emeritus at the University of Graz, where she headed the department of statistics and operations research, and is a former president of the Austrian Society of Operations Research.
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Deanna M. Church
#62838
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Deanna Church is a scientist working in the areas of bioinformatics and genomics. She is known for her work on the human genome, "making the genome a friendlier place". Life Church graduated with a bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia in 1990. She received a doctorate in Genomics from University of California, Irvine in 1997. Church describes her passion for bioinformatics as connected to her enjoyment of problem solving and being in a team that has direct impacts on people's medical care.
Go to Profile#477
Abena Oduro
#108813
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Abena Frempongmaa Daagye Oduro is the Vice Dean of the Faculty of Social Science at the University of Ghana where she also holds the position of Associate Professor of the Department of Economics. Having had 30 years of experience teaching, her areas of specialization are centred around gender and asset management, international economics, poverty analysis, macroeconomic theory and trade policy. Abena Oduro is the first Vice President of the Association for the Advancement of African Women Economists where Professor of Economics in University of Kansas, Elizabeth Asiedu, is the founder and president.
Go to Profile#478
Monique Jeanblanc
#32332
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Monique Jeanblanc-Picqué is a French mathematician known for her work in mathematical finance; other topics in her research have included control theory and probability theory. She is a professor emerita at the University of Évry Val d'Essonne.
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Ann Lee
#65832
Overall Influence
Ann Lee is a Hong Kong-born American author and commentator on global economics and finance issues. Overview Biography Lee was born in Hong Kong to Chinese parents who had escaped from the turmoil of the early years of the PRC; subsequently the family emigrated to the United States. She attended U.C. Berkeley, Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and Harvard Business School . After working for two investments banks, she became a hedge fund partner and a trader in credit derivatives. She also taught at Pace University from 2006 to 2007. From 2010 ...
Go to Profile#480
Claudia R. Binder
#41136
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Claudia R. Binder is a Swiss, Canadian and Colombian environmental scientist working in the field of human-environment systems and sustainability s. Since March 2016 she has been a full professor the La Mobilière Chair on Urban Ecology and Sustainable Living at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and founding director of the Laboratory for Human-Environment Relations in Urban Systems at School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering of EPFL. Since January 2020 she has been serving as dean of ENAC at EPFL.
Go to Profile#481
Christine Maria Jasch
#95391
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Christine Maria Jasch is an Austrian economist, author and accountant. Life and career Christine Jasch completed secondary school in Vienna, where she matriculated in 1979 to study at the University of Vienna's Department of Economics, and at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna. In 1984 she applied for a Studium Irregulare for Ecological Economics. She became a certified public accountant in 1989 and lead verifier according to the EU EMAS Regulation in 1995. In 1989 she founded the Vienna Institute for Environmental Management and Economics, IÖW. In 1999, she habilitated in Environmental Management and Economics at the Austrian University for Agriculture.
Go to Profile#482
Françoise Forges
#102852
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Françoise Forges is a Belgian and French economist known for her work in game theory. She is professor of economics at Paris Dauphine University. Education and career Forges was born on 3 July 1958 in Brussels, but is a French citizen. She studied mathematics at the Université catholique de Louvain, earning a licenciate in 1980 and completing her doctorate there in 1984, advised by Jean-François Mertens. She earned a habilitation at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University in 1992.
Go to Profile#483
Gisela Mashayekhi-Beer
#99948
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Gisela Mashayekhi-Beer is an Austrian flautist and professor at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna as well as lecturer at the . Life Mashayekhi-Beer was born in Passau. She studied from 1983 at the Mozarteum University Salzburg with Helmut Zangerle, who was the solo flautist of the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg. During her time in Salzburg, she also took part in the master classes of the Summer school with Peter-Lukas Graf.
Go to Profile#484
Lisa M. Lynch
#121110
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Lisa M. Lynch is an American economist working as Maurice B. Hexter Professor of Social and Economic Policy at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management and Director of the Institute for Economic and Racial Equity. She was previously Provost and Interim President of Brandeis University and Dean of the Heller School, a faculty member at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ohio State University, and University of Bristol, and a co-editor of the Journal of Labor Economics. She is a past chief economist of the United States Department of Labor, chair of the board of d...
Go to Profile#485
Heather Joshi
#89691
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Heather Evelyn Joshi, is a British academic, economist, and demographer. She is Emeritus Professor of Economic and Developmental Demography at the University of London. She was Director of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies from 2003 to 2010.
Go to Profile#486
Susan St John
#140583
Overall Influence
Susan Margaret St John is an economist from New Zealand. She is a lecturer at the University of Auckland and spokesperson for the Child Poverty Action Group. St John graduated with a Master of Arts in Economics from the University of Auckland in 1979. She has been a member of the university's teaching staff since 1981, initially in economics, and since 2012 in public policy. Her research has focused on the Accident Compensation Corporation, public sector and retirement policy. In 1994 she became a founding member of the Child Poverty Action Group, and has edited and authored a large number of...
Go to Profile#487
Prue Hyman
#121746
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Prudence Janet Hyman is a New Zealand anti-trans activist and former cricketer. She was associate professor of economics and gender and women's studies at Victoria University of Wellington until controversial restructuring between 2008 and 2010 abolished Gender and Women's Studies. During the 2023 New Zealand general election, Hyman stood as a candidate for the Women's Rights Party's.
Go to Profile#488
Désirée H. Ladwig
#84334
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Désirée H. Ladwig is a German economist. Early life Désirée Ladwig attended high school Harksheide in Norderstedt . She studied Business Administration and Economics at the University of Hamburg and graduated in Business Administration and Economics . From 1990 to 1995 Désirée Ladwig was scientific assistant at the Institute of Human Resources and International Management at the Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg. In 1995 she obtained her doctorate with a dissertation called "research and development cooperation in small and medium-sized enterprises - an empirical and conceptual contribution ...
Go to Profile#489
Eva Ferreira
#99835
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
María Eva Ferreira García is the Rector of the University of the Basque Country . She graduated from the University of the Basque Country with a degree in Mathematics. She obtained a master's degree in Probability and Statistics from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and a PhD in Economics from the University of the Basque Country. Since 2005, she has held a full professorship in Applied Economics. On 25 January 2021, she was named Rector of the University of the Basque Country .
Go to Profile#490
Gillian Leng
#44353
Overall Influence
Gillian Catherine Leng, Lady Cosford CBE is a British health administrator, academic, visiting professor at King's College London and the former Chief Executive of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence , where she was responsible for several programmes and guidelines including the guidelines on COVID-19. In 2023 she was elected president-elect of the Royal Society of Medicine .
Go to Profile#491
Kosali Simon
#105723
Overall Influence
Kosali Ilayperuma Simon is the Herman B Wells Endowed Professor in health economics at School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University which she joined in 2010. Academic career She graduated with a bachelor's in economics and German Literature from Hamilton College in 1994. After a year studying in Europe as a Watson Fellow, she obtained a doctorate degree in economics from University of Maryland, College Park in 1999.
Go to Profile#492
Eleanor Hadley
#48926
Overall Influence
1916 - 2007 (91 years)
Eleanor Martha Hadley was an American economist and policymaker. Because of her relatively rare research specialization in Japanese economics, during World War II Hadley was recruited first into OSS and then the State Department to support the United States' war effort while she was a doctoral candidate in economics at Radcliffe College. Hadley helped draft the United States' plans for dissolving zaibatsu business conglomerates as part of a planned effort to democratize Japan after the war, and she participated in implementing this economic deconcentration program when the postwar occupation...
Go to Profile#493
Donna Ginther
#98480
Overall Influence
Donna Ginther is a Roy A. Roberts and Regents Distinguished Professor of economics and the director of the Institute for Policy and Social Research at the University of Kansas. She is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She is known for her expertise on scientific labor markets, wage inequality, and gender differences in employment outcomes.
Go to Profile#494
Eva Lang
#118129
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Eva Lang is a German economist. Before her retirement, she was full professor at Bundeswehr University Munich for economic policy in special consideration of political economy. Vita Lang studied economics and political science and obtained her doctorate and habilitation on the topics of infrastructure, business cycle theory and public finance. After an assistantship at University of Würzburg, she was appointed to a professorship at Fachhochschule Westküste in Heide, Germany. Starting in 1996, she was professor at Bundeswehr University Munich. She is founder member and since 2014 anew presiden...
Go to Profile#495
Joanna M. Shepherd
#78313
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Joanna Mehlhop Shepherd-Bailey is an American legal scholar and economist. Shepherd earned a Bachelor of Business Administration at Baylor University in 1997, and completed a juris doctor degree in law and a PhD in economics at Emory University in 2002. She began teaching at Clemson University, returning to Emory as a faculty member in 2005. A 2016 analysis by Gregory Sisk considered Shepherd a highly cited legal scholar. In December 2019, Shepherd was named the Thomas Simmons Professor of Law.
Go to Profile#496
Lourdes Beneria
#159683
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Lourdes Benería is a Spanish–American economist. She was Professor Emerita at Cornell University's Department of City and Regional Planning. The author and editor of many books and articles, her work has concentrated on topics having to do with labor economics, women's work, the informal economy, Gender and development, Latin American Development and globalization. Before Cornell, she taught at Rutgers University and has given courses in other international centers. She worked at the ILO for two years and has collaborated with other UN organizations, such as UNIFEM and UNDP, and with several NGOs.
Go to Profile#497
Alla O. Starostina
#156037
Overall Influence
Alla Oleksiivna Starostina is a Ukrainian economist. She is a professor and heads the international economics and marketing department at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Starostina was the head of the industrial marketing department at National Technical University of Ukraine from 1993 to 2002.
Go to Profile#498
Elizabeth Asiedu
#141909
Overall Influence
Elizabeth Asiedu is a professor of economics at the University of Kansas. She has facilitated research that is centered around foreign aid, foreign directed investment , and gender. She is a founder of the Association for the Advancement of African Women , as well as the current president of the organization. Asiedu is an editor of the Journal of African Development.
Go to Profile#499
Yvonne Tsikata
#112935
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Yvonne Tsikata is a Ghanaian economist and currently serves as the World Bank Vice President and Corporate Secretary. She previously served as the Chief of Staff and Director of the Office President of the World Bank Group. Yvonne was also the sector director for Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Department of the Europe and Central Asia Region.
Go to Profile#500
Jeanne Lafortune
#165227
Overall Influence
Jeanne Lafortune is a Canadian economist who currently works as an Full Professor in Economics and Director of Research at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. She is also a researcher at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab , which is a global research center that aims to reduce poverty and improve life quality of people in the Caribbean and Latin America. Lafortune holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her research interests focus on three main fields, including economic history, family and development economics.
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