Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Education,

#101

Lisa F. Smith

#84744

Overall Influence

Lisa F. Smith is a US-New Zealand education academic. She has been emeritus professor at the University of Otago since 2019. Academic career Smith attended Rutgers University in New Jersey for a 1993 Ed.D titled 'The effects of motivation and anxiety on test performance' before working in New Jersey and New York, both teaching and researching in museums with her partner Jeffrey K. Smith. The pair moved to the University of Otago in 2005, both rising to full professor. Notable students include Kimberly Arcand.

#102

Donora Hillard

#47696

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (42 years)

Donora Shaw is an American writer and editor. She was first made notable in the fields of institutional critique and trauma studies, specifically for her first full-length collection of poetry published when she was 27 years old. Her projects have appeared on CNN, WBEZ Chicago, and MSNBC.

#103

Christine Sleeter

#79740

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Christine E. Sleeter is an American professor and educational reformer. She is known as the Professor Emerita in the School of Professional Studies, California State University, Monterey Bay. She has also served as the Vice President of Division K of the American Educational Research Association, and as president of the National Association for Multicultural Education. Her work primarily focuses on multicultural education, preparation of teachers for culturally diverse schools, and anti-racism. She has been honored for her work as the recipient of the American Educational Research Associatio...

#104

Erika Christakis

#62758

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Erika Christakis is an American educator and writer, specializing in early childhood education. She is author of The Importance of Being Little. Education and early career Christakis graduated from Harvard College with a degree in social anthropology in 1986. She was one of the first undergraduate interns at Harvard's Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations and studied in Kenya in 1985. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Christakis worked on public health projects in Bangladesh and Ghana and served as a case manager for indigent adults with mental illness and addiction in Boston.

#105

Elizabeth Topham Kennan

#50829

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Elizabeth Topham Kennan is an American academic who served as the 15th president of Mount Holyoke College from 1978 to 1995. She also served as president of the Five Colleges consortium from 1985 to 1994.

#106

Michelle Asha Cooper

Michelle Asha Cooper

#92986

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Michelle Asha Cooper is the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Higher Education Programs and Acting Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education in the U.S. Department of Education. She previously served as president of the Institute for Higher Education Policy , a Washington, D.C.-based independent, non-profit organization.

#107

Caroline van Eck

#22909

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Caroline Alexandra van Eck is a Dutch art historian and academic, specialising in the art and architecture of the early modern period. Since 2016, she has been Professor of Art History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. She was Professor of Art and Architecture before 1800 at Leiden University from 2006 to 2016, and previously taught at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the University of Groningen. She was the 2017 Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford.

#108

Susan Fuhrman

#36117

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Susan Harriet Fuhrman is an American education policy scholar and served from 2006 as the first female president of Teachers College, Columbia University. Fuhrman earned her doctorate in Political Science and Education from Columbia University. She became very engaged in issues of educational equity and emerged as an authority on school reform. Fuhrman is known for her early and ongoing critical analysis of the standards movement and for her efforts to foster research that provides a scientific basis for effective teaching.

#109

Bonny Norton

#51766

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Bonny Norton, , is a professor and distinguished university scholar in the Department of Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia, Canada. She is also research advisor of the African Storybook and 2006 co-founder of the Africa Research Network on Applied Linguistics and Literacy. She is internationally recognized for her theories of identity and language learning and her construct of investment. A Fellow of the American Educational Research Association , she was the first recipient in 2010 of the Senior Research Leadership Award of AERA's Second Language Research SIG. I...

#110

Mem Fox

#17669

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Merrion Frances Fox AM is an Australian writer of children's books and an educationalist specialising in literacy. Fox has been semi-retired since 1996, but she still gives seminars and lives in Adelaide, South Australia.

#111

Arlene Raven

#44464

Overall Influence

1944 - 2006 (62 years)

Arlene Raven was a feminist art historian, author, critic, educator, and curator. Raven was a co-founder of numerous feminist art organizations in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Life and work Arlene Raven's parents were Joseph and Annette Rubin, middle-class Jewish-American parents, in Baltimore, Maryland. Her father was a bar owner, and her mother a homemaker.

#112

Svetlana Alpers

#17139

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Svetlana Leontief Alpers is an American art historian, also a professor, writer and critic. Her specialty is Dutch Golden Age painting, a field she revolutionized with her 1984 book The Art of Describing. She has also written on Tiepolo, Rubens, Bruegel, and Velázquez, among others.

#113

Konai Helu Thaman

#54373

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Konai Helu Thaman is a poet and academic from Tonga. Career Between 1969 and 1972, Thaman was a teacher in Tonga. She has worked at the University of the South Pacific since 1974 and currently holds a Personal Chair in Pacific Education and Culture, a position she has held since its establishment in 1998. She has also held management positions at the university including Director of the Institute of Education, Head of the School of Humanities, and Pro-vice-chancellor.

#114

Claire Van Ummersen

#46913

Overall Influence

2000 - 2021 (21 years)

Claire Van Ummersen was an American scholar and academic administrator, who served as President of Cleveland State University from 1993 to 2001. She was also national leader in career flexibility in higher education and women's advancement and leadership.

#115

Julie Underwood

#55829

Overall Influence

Julie K. Underwood is a former dean of the University of Wisconsin School of Education and is the first woman to lead UW's School of Education as dean. She served in her role as dean of UW's School of Education from August 2005 to July 2015.

#116

Pamela Balch

#37046

Overall Influence

Pamela Balch is the 18th president of West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon, West Virginia. Balch is a 1971 graduate of West Virginia Wesleyan College, and was the unanimous choice as the eighteenth president of the college by the board of trustees.

#117

Elizabeth Fennema

#45521

Overall Influence

1928 - 2021 (93 years)

Ann Elizabeth Fennema was an American educator specializing in the teaching of mathematics. Early life and education Fennema was born in El Dorado, Kansas, on April 8, 1928, and attended the local Methodist college for two years, before transferring to Kansas State University where she majored in psychology. She received her master's degree in education from the University of Wisconsin in 1952.

#118

Agneta Marell

#27957

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Agneta Marell is professor in Business Administration and since 2010, Deputy vice-chancellor for external relations and innovation at Umeå University in northern Sweden. Between 2004 and 2007, she was the Dean of Umeå School of Business, succeeding Anders Söderholm. In 2008–2011, she was a municipal manager for Örnsköldsvik municipality. She received the assignment as vice rector for collaboration and innovation at Umeå University. As such, she was also chairman of Uminova Holding, the business incubator Uminova Innovation AB and Uminova eXpression AB, which runs Sliperiet at the Umeå Arts Ca...

#119

Nínive Clements Calegari

#45522

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Nínive Clements Calegari is an educator in the United States. Following ten years of classroom experience in public schools, she became an author and founded a national literacy program, 826 National. She also founded The Teacher Salary Project. Currently she is the CEO of Enterprise for Youth, an organization that empowers young people to prepare for and discover career opportunities in the San Francisco area through a three-phase program model of job-readiness training, paid internships with college credit, and ongoing career development and networking support.

#120

Naledi Pandor

#61837

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Grace Naledi Mandisa Pandor is a South African politician, educator and academic serving as the Minister of International Relations and Cooperation since 2019. She has served as a Member of Parliament for the African National Congress since 1994.

#121

Nancy E. Gary

#23780

Overall Influence

1937 - 2006 (69 years)

Nancy E. Gary was president and chief executive officer of the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates, executive vice president of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and dean of its F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine. She was also clinical professor of medicine at George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences. She was considered a change agent in medical education and "a 'powerhouse' in academic medicine."

#122

Minnie Bruce Pratt

#28553

Overall Influence

1946 - 2023 (77 years)

Minnie Bruce Pratt was an American poet, educator, activist, and essayist. She retired in 2015 from her position as Professor of Writing and Women's Studies at Syracuse University where she was invited to help develop the university's first LGBT studies program.

#123

Teresa P. Pica

#56317

Overall Influence

1945 - 2011 (66 years)

Teresa P. Pica , also known as Tere Pica, was Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, a post she held from 1983 until her death in 2011. Her areas of expertise included second language acquisition, language curriculum design, approaches to classroom practice, and classroom discourse analysis. Pica was well known for her pioneering work in task-based language learning and published widely in established international journals in the field of English as a foreign or second language and applied linguistics.

#124

Claire Bishop

#21794

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Claire Bishop is a British art historian, critic, and Professor of Art History at CUNY Graduate Center, New York where she has taught since September 2008. Bishop is known as one of the central theorists of participation in visual art and performance. Her 2004 essay titled “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” which was published in October, remains an influential critique of relational aesthetics. Bishop's books have been translated into over eighteen languages and she is a frequent contributor to art journals including Artforum and October.

#125

Margaret Just Butcher

#50622

Overall Influence

1913 - 2000 (87 years)

Margaret Just Butcher was an American educator and civil rights activist. Butcher worked as an English professor at Howard University and Federal City College. She also taught for years overseas. She was a fellow of the Julius Rosenwald Foundation. In the 1950s, she was a Fulbright Visiting Professor at two universities in France. In the early 1960s she taught in two cities in Morocco, and then served as a cultural affairs attache in Paris, returning to Washington, D.C., in 1968. She taught in its public schools for a time.

#126

Sheng-Ching Chang

#45281

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Sheng-Ching Chang is a Taiwanese art historian. She serves as the director of the Graduate Institute of Museum Studies at Fu Jen Catholic University and the professor at the Department of History of Fu Jen Catholic University in Taipei.

#127

Jennifer Chang

#53453

Overall Influence

Jennifer Chang is an American poet and scholar. Life and career Jennifer Chang was born in New Jersey. She earned a BA from the University of Chicago in 1998, and an MFA from University of Virginia in 2002, where she returned to pursue a PhD and received her degree in 2017.

#128

Shirley Raines

#54232

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Shirley C. Raines is an American public speaker, author and leadership consultant who retired from academia after serving as president of the University of Memphis from 2001 to 2013. Before entering administration she was a professor of education, specializing in early childhood.

#129

Lynn Okagaki

#62860

Overall Influence

Lynn Okagaki is deputy provost for academic affairs at the University of Delaware. She was appointed to this position in January 2016, after serving as interim since July 2015. As chief advisor to the Provost and a member of the senior leadership team for the University of Delaware, Okagaki oversees a number of academic and administrative units. Her major responsibilities include academic program planning and review, working with the Faculty Senate and deans to establish and review academic programs, working with the colleges in the design and delivery of general education, and overseeing the ...

#130

Donda West

#30671

Overall Influence

1949 - 2007 (58 years)

Donda C. West was an American educator and chair of Chicago State University's Department of English, Communications, Media, and Theater. She was best known for being the mother of the American rapper Kanye West.

#131

Barbara Jatta

#41734

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Barbara Jatta is an Italian art historian who has been the director of the Vatican Museums since June 2016. Early life and education Jatta has joked that she was born among the smell of solvents. Her mother was a painter and conservator, and her sister a conservator.

#132

Margarita McCoy

#55396

Overall Influence

1923 - 2016 (93 years)

Margarita Piel McCoy was an American urban planner and educator. McCoy was among the first women in the United States to achieve academic tenure as a professor of urban planning, and the first to chair an urban planning department.

#133

T. J. Bryan

#62356

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

T. J. Bryan is an American educator who rose from poverty in rural Maryland to become the first African-American woman to be elected by the University of North Carolina Board of Governors to serve as Chancellor of one of its constituent institutions.

#134

Ruth Farwell

#33011

Overall Influence

Ruth Sarah Farwell retired as Vice-Chancellor and Chief Executive of Buckinghamshire New University in February 2015. Farwell held a research fellowship in theoretical physics at Imperial College, London, in the early eighties. Her research is at the boundary between applied mathematics and theoretical physics. Her use of Clifford algebras in her mathematics generated her interest in the Victorian mathematician William Kingdon Clifford. She continues to research the mathematical contribution of Clifford, and mathematical models of particle physics, as well as undertaking research on higher education policy.

#135

N'Dri Thérèse Assié-Lumumba

#37577

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

N'Dri Thérèse Assié-Lumumba is Ivorian researcher who studies the African diaspora and education. She is a Professor of Africana Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University. She also serves as President of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies and Chair of UNESCO's Management of Social Transformations Scientific Advisory Committee.

#136

Rebecca Zwick

#43148

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Rebecca Zwick is an American statistician and researcher in educational assessment and psychometrics. She is a professor emeritus in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the author of a book on university and college admission, Who Gets In? Strategies for Fair and Effective College Admissions .

#137

Johanna Drucker

Johanna Drucker

#11992

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Johanna Drucker is an American author, book artist, visual theorist, and cultural critic. Her scholarly writing documents and critiques visual language: letterforms, typography, visual poetry, art, and lately, digital art aesthetics. She is currently the Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. In 2023, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

#138

Ursula Franklin

Ursula Franklin

#24032

Overall Influence

1921 - 2016 (95 years)

Ursula Martius Franklin was a Canadian metallurgist, research physicist, author, and educator who taught at the University of Toronto for more than 40 years. Franklin is best known for her writings on the political and social effects of technology. She was the author of The Real World of Technology, which is based on her 1989 Massey Lectures; The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as a Map, a collection of her papers, interviews, and talks; and Ursula Franklin Speaks: Thoughts and Afterthoughts, containing 22 of her speeches and five interviews between 1986 and 2012. Franklin was a practising Quaker and actively worked on behalf of pacifist and feminist causes.

#139

Sheri Everts

#46859

Overall Influence

Sheri Everts is an American academic and educator serving as the chancellor of Appalachian State University in North Carolina. Early life and education Born and raised in Nebraska, Everts attended elementary school in a one-room schoolhouse. She completed her undergraduate education at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1980. She worked as a high school English teacher in Nebraska and Kansas for several years, later returning to UNL to complete an Master of Arts in literacy education and Doctor of Education.

#140

Claire McLachlan

#37739

Overall Influence

Claire Jane McLachlan is a New Zealand teaching academic. She is currently professor and dean at Federation University Australia. Her speciality is early-childhood literacy. Career McLachlan did a M.A by thesis at Massey entitled 'Experience as a mother of a "crying baby": a single collaborative case study' completed in 1991, and then a PhD 'Emergent literacy in New Zealand kindergartens : an examination of policy and practices' in 1996. Between 2000 and 2006 she worked in Auckland at the University of Auckland and Auckland University of Technology before returning to Massey University, where she rose to full professor in 2013.

#141

Patty Murray

#33216

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Patricia Lynn Murray is an American politician who has served as president pro tempore of the United States Senate since 2023 and the senior United States Senator from Washington since 1993. A member of the Democratic Party, Murray served in the Washington State Senate from 1989 to 1993. She was Washington's first female U.S. senator and is the first woman in American history to hold the position of president pro tempore. Murray is also the youngest senator to occupy the office of president pro tempore in more than five decades. As president pro tempore, Murray is third in the line of succession to the U.S.

#142

Sue Middleton

#42198

Overall Influence

Sue Middleton is a retired New Zealand academic who spent her career at the University of Waikato focused on life histories. Career After a 1979 MSc thesis, A phenomenological perspective for the classroom teacher and its application to the education of women at Victoria University of Wellington and a 1985 PhD dissertation Feminism and education in post-war New Zealand: a sociological analysis at University of Waikato, New Zealand, Middleton joined the faculty.

#143

Gayle Conelly Manchin

#38913

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Gayle Conelly Manchin is an American educator and government official who was the First Lady of West Virginia from 2005 to 2010 and is the current Federal Co-Chair of the Appalachian Regional Commission. Manchin previously served as the president of the West Virginia Board of Education from 2013 to 2014 and West Virginia Secretary of Education and the Arts from 2017 until her termination in March 2018. She is the wife of former governor and current U.S. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

#144

Carol Geary Schneider

#68419

Overall Influence

Carol Geary Schneider was president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities from 1998 to 2016. Schneider received her B.A. in history from Mount Holyoke College, Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude in 1967. She received her Ph.D. in history from Harvard University and taught at the University of Chicago, DePaul University, Chicago State University and Boston University.

#145

Monique Boekaerts

#75121

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Monique Boekaerts is a Belgian educationalist. She was a professor of pedagogy at the Radboud University Nijmegen and Leiden University . Career Boekaerts was born in 1946 in Belgium. She studied psychology at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, obtaining a degree in 1974. She obtained her PhD at Tilburg University in 1978, with a thesis titled: "Towards a theory of learning based on individual differences".

#146

Cathy Bao Bean

#52201

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Cathy Bao Bean is a Chinese-American writer and educator, and is the author of The Chopsticks-Fork Principle: A Memoir and Manual . She lives in Frelinghuysen Township, New Jersey, with her husband, artist Bennett Bean.

#147

Nancy L. Zimpher

#35131

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Nancy L. Zimpher is an American educator, state university leader, and former Chancellor of the State University of New York . Prior to her service at SUNY, Zimpher was a dean and professor of education at Ohio State University ; then Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee between 1998 and 2003; and President of the University of Cincinnati from 2003 through May 2009. Zimpher was the first woman to serve as Chancellor of SUNY, UWM's first woman chancellor, and UC's first female president. Zimpher is a native of the village of Gallipolis in southern Ohio.

#148

Joan Targ

#51007

Overall Influence

1937 - 1998 (61 years)

Joan Fischer Targ was an American educator who was an early proponent of computer literacy and initiated peer tutoring programs for students of all ages. As a child, she bought her younger brother, Bobby Fischer, his first chess set and taught him how to play the game.

#149

Jóhanna Einarsdóttir

Jóhanna Einarsdóttir

#61943

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Jóhanna Einarsdóttir is a professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Iceland. Education and recognitions Jóhanna received a teacher's certificate from the Teachers College of Iceland in 1973 and a matriculation examination from the same school a year later. She then completed a BS in Pedagogy from the University of Illinois in 1976 and a master's degree in Education Science from the same school in 1977. She completed a PhD in Early Childhood Education from the University of Illinois in 2000. Jóhanna has participated for years in shaping the Icelandic education system as a dir...

#150

Gráinne Conole

#103952

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Gráinne Conole is an Irish-born professor and educational researcher, based in England. She was Professor of Learning Innovation and Director of the Institute of Learning Innovation, University of Leicester. Prior to this, she was Professor of eLearning at the Institute of Educational Technology in the UK's Open University. Previously she had a chair in education at the University of Southampton and was also previously director of the Institute for Learning and Research Technology at the University of Bristol. Professor Conole was named an EDEN Fellow in 2013 and was awarded a National Teachi...

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