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

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Engineering,

#51

Missy Cummings

#22883

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Mary Louise "Missy" Cummings is an American academic who is a professor at Duke University and director of Duke's Humans and Autonomy Laboratory. She was one of the United States Navy's first female fighter pilots. In November 2021, Dr. Cummings joined the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration .

#52

Sara Ishikawa

#16636

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Sara Ishikawa is an architect and academic specializing in people-space relationships. She is a professor emerita at the College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley. She is co-author of A Pattern Language, The Oregon Experiment and Houses Generated By Patterns.

#53

Radenka Maric

#11931

Overall Influence

Radenka Maric is an Bosnian-American engineer and academic who became the 17th president of the University of Connecticut on September 28, 2023. She was the first internal candidate to be named president since Harry J. Hartley in 1990 and is the institution’s second female president. She had served as interim president of the University of Connecticut since February 1, 2022 and previously served as UConn's vice president for research and innovation.

#54

Ann Dowling

#22395

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

#55

Thelma Estrin

#14886

Overall Influence

1924 - 2014 (90 years)

Thelma Estrin was an American computer scientist and engineer who did pioneering work in the fields of expert systems and biomedical engineering. Estrin was one of the first to apply computer technology to healthcare and medical research. In 1954, Estrin helped to design the Weizmann Automatic Computer, or WEIZAC, the first computer in Israel and the Middle East, a moment marked as an IEEE Milestone in Electrical and Computer Engineering. She was professor emerita in the Department of Computer Science, University of California at Los Angeles .

#56

Katya Echazarreta

#28205

Overall Influence

1995 - Present (29 years)

Katya Celeste Echazarreta González is a Mexican electrical engineer, science communicator, and Citizen Astronaut. She worked at NASA, first as an intern during her university undergraduate career, then later as a test lead for the Europa Clipper Ground Support Equipment group. She has contributed to a total of five NASA missions. Around 2019, Echazarreta began uploading engineering-related content to Instagram, later expanding her platforms to YouTube and TikTok.

#57

Norma Merrick Sklarek

Norma Merrick Sklarek

#14650

Overall Influence

1926 - 2012 (86 years)

Norma Merrick Sklarek was an American architect. Sklarek was the first African American woman to become a licensed architect in the states of New York and California . Her notable works include the United States Embassy in Tokyo, Japan and the Terminal One station at the Los Angeles International Airport .

#58

Riitta Nikula

#34918

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Riitta Nikula , is a Finnish art historian, author and professor emeritus in art and architecture history at the University of Helsinki. She obtained her PhD from the University of Helsinki in 1981 with a study of the architecture of the Töölö region of Helsinki. She was Professor of Art History at the University of Helsinki from 1994 to 2007. Nikula also acted as Head of Research at the Museum of Finnish Architecture from 1988 to 1994. Nikula is regarded as a generalist historian of Finnish architecture, with her writings covering a time-span from prehistoric times to the present day. But she...

#59

Sarah Springman

#26307

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Dame Sarah Marcella Springman is a British-Swiss triathlete, civil engineer, and academic. She was educated in England and spent much of her career in Switzerland. She is a former rector of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and currently Principal of St Hilda's College at the University of Oxford.

#60

Naomi Halas

#23303

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Naomi J. Halas is the Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and professor of biomedical engineering, chemistry and physics at Rice University. She is also the founding director of Rice University Laboratory for Nanophotonics, and the Smalley-Curl Institute. She invented the first nanoparticle with tunable plasmonic resonances, which are controlled by their shape and structure, and has won numerous awards for her pioneering work in the field of nanophotonics and plasmonics. She was also part of a team that developed the first dark pulse soliton in 1987 while working...

#61

Denice Denton

#29113

Overall Influence

1959 - 2006 (47 years)

Denice Dee Denton was an American professor of electrical engineering and academic administrator. She was the ninth chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Biography Early years Denton was born in El Campo, Texas, in Wharton County. She was the oldest child of Bob Glenn Denton and Carolyn Irene Drab. Denton earned her bachelor's and master's degrees , EE and PhD in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Denton spent two summers and an academic year in the late 1970s and early 1980s at Fairchild Semiconductor, where her projects included 64K static RAM design.

#62

Candida Höfer

#21860

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Candida Höfer is a German photographer. She is a former student of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Like other Becher students, Höfer's work is known for technical perfection and a strictly conceptual approach. From 1997 to 2000, she taught as professor at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe. Höfer is the recipient of the 2018 Outstanding Contribution to Photography award, as part of the Sony World Photography awards. She is based in Cologne.

#63

Barbara Bielecka

#33442

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Barbara Bielecka is a Polish Functionalist architect and a member of the Faculty of Architecture at the Gdańsk University of Technology. She designed the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lichen, Poland's largest church, the sixth largest by area in the world. It was constructed between 1994 and 2004. In May 1985, she joined the Commission of Urban Planning and Architecture at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków.

#64

Susan Hackwood

#40969

Overall Influence

Susan Hackwood is the executive director of the California Council on Science and Technology . She is a professor and researcher of electrical engineering credited for inventing the concept of electrowetting with Gerardo Beni in 1981.

#65

Deborah Berke

#20433

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Deborah Berke is an American architect and academic. She is the founder of TenBerke, formerly Deborah Berke Partners, a New York City-based architectural design firm. Berke is currently Dean and J.M. Hoppin Professor at the Yale School of Architecture, where she began teaching as an associate professor in 1987. At the time of her appointment in 2016, Berke became the first woman Dean of the school. In 2022, Deborah received the AIA/ACSA Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education.

#66

Eleanor K. Baum

Eleanor K. Baum

#25811

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Areas of Specialization: Electrical Engineering Eleanor K. Baum was born in Poland. She is currently Dean Emeritus of the Albert Nerken School of Engineering at Cooper Union. As a young child, Baum and her family were forced to flee their homeland by the Nazi invasion and occupation of their country. After escaping from Poland to the Soviet Union, they traveled across Siberia to reach Japan. From there, the family immigrated to Canada, before entering the US and settling in Brooklyn, New York, where Baum, an only child, attended Midwood High School. Baum received her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1959 from City College of New York, where she was the only woman in her class.

#67

Ayanna Howard

#21447

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Ayanna MacCalla Howard is an American roboticist, entrepreneur and educator currently serving as the dean of the College of Engineering at Ohio State University. Assuming the post in March 2021, Howard became the first woman to lead the Ohio State College of Engineering.

#68

Jeanette Epps

#35266

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Jeanette Jo Epps is an American aerospace engineer and NASA astronaut. Epps received both her M. S. and Ph.D. degrees in aerospace engineering from the University of Maryland, where she was part of the rotor-craft research group and was a NASA GSRP Fellow. She was chosen for the 20th class of NASA astronauts in 2009, graduating in 2011. Epps currently serves as a member of the ISS Operations Branch and has completed analog astronaut missions, including NEEMO 18 and CAVES 19. She is the second woman and first African-American woman to have participated in CAVES. She has been selected to fly to...

#69

Andrea Goldsmith

#24554

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Andrea Goldsmith is an American electrical engineer and the Dean of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University. She is also the Arthur LeGrand Doty Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton. She was previously the Stephen Harris Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University, as well as a faculty affiliate at the Stanford Neurosciences Institute. Her interests are in the design, analysis and fundamental performance limits of wireless systems and networks, and in the application of communication theory and signal processing to neuroscience. She also co-founded and served as chief technology officer of Plume WiFi and Quantenna Communications.

#70

Sabina Jeschke

#19833

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Sabina Jeschke is a German university professor for information sciences in mechanical engineering at the RWTH Aachen University. As of 10 November 2017, she was named member of the management board of Deutschen Bahn AG for digitalization and technology. She is also the director of the Cybernetics Lab IMA/ZLW & IfU. In the summer semester of 2017, she is on sabbatical leave to develop her research in the area of artificial consciousness , and is involved in building a think tank "Strong Artificial Intelligence" at the Volvo Car Corporation in Göteborg. Since May 2015, Jeschke has been a member of the supervisory board of Körber AG, since April 2012 chairman of the board of VDI Aachen.

#71

Antonia Terzi

#44832

Overall Influence

1971 - 2021 (50 years)

Antonia Terzi was an Italian aerodynamicist who worked for the Ferrari and Williams Formula One teams. Education Terzi held a Master's degree in Materials Engineering from University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy and a PhD in engineering, focused on aerodynamics, from University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.

#72

Lorna Gibson

#43728

Overall Influence

Lorna Jane Gibson is an American materials scientist and engineer currently the Matoula S. Salapatas Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Education Lorna Gibson received her Bachelor of Applied Science in Civil Engineering from the University of Toronto in 1978. Gibson then attended the University of Cambridge, where she received her PhD in Materials Engineering in 1981 for research supervised by Michael F. Ashby, and focused on the elastic and plastic behavior of cellular materials.

#73

Banu Onaral

#34222

Overall Influence

Banu Onaral is the H.H. Sun Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Electrical Engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1997, she founded Drexel University's School of Biomedical Engineering Science and Health Systems.

#74

Linsey Marr

#16592

Overall Influence

Linsey Chen Marr is an American scientist who is the Charles P. Lunsford Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech. Her research considers the interaction of nanomaterials and viruses with the atmosphere. During the COVID-19 pandemic Marr studied how SARS-CoV-2 and other airborne pathogens could be transported in air. In 2023, she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and named a MacArthur Fellow.

#75

Alice Agogino

#29600

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Alice Merner Agogino is an American mechanical engineer known for her work in bringing women and people of color into engineering and her research into artificial intelligence, computer-aided design, intelligent learning systems, and wireless sensor networks.

#76

Xin Zhang

#56130

Overall Influence

Xin Zhang is a Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Boston University . Education Zhang received her Ph.D. from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology . She was a postdoctoral researcher and then a research scientist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .

#77

Leah Jamieson

#18595

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Leah H. Jamieson is an American engineering educator, currently the Ransburg Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. Jamieson was a founder of the Engineering Projects in Community Service program , a multi-university engineering design program that operates in a service-learning context. She is a recipient of the Gordon Prize. From 2006-2017, she served as the John A. Edwardson Dean of Engineering at Purdue.

#78

Toshiko Mori

#17137

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Toshiko Mori is a Japanese architect and the founder and principal of New York–based Toshiko Mori Architect, PLLC and Vision Arc. She is also the Robert P. Hubbard Professor in the Practice of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. In 1995, she became the first female faculty member to receive tenure at the GSD.

#79

Yonina Eldar

#42308

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Yonina C. Eldar is an Israeli professor of electrical engineering at the Weizmann Institute of Science, known for her pioneering work on sub-Nyquist sampling. Early life and education Eldar was born in Toronto, Canada. She is the third daughter of Rabbi Meyer and Vicky Berglas. She moved with her family to Israel in 1979. She received her B.Sc. degrees in physics and electrical engineering both from Tel Aviv University , Israel, in 1995 and 1996, respectively.

#80

Julia Weertman

#51469

Overall Influence

1926 - 2018 (92 years)

Julia Randall Weertman was an American materials scientist who taught at Northwestern University as the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. Education She was the first female student of the College of Science and Engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where she earned her baccalaureate and graduate degrees.

#81

Elizabeth Farrelly

Elizabeth Farrelly

#27275

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Elizabeth Margaret Farrelly , is a Sydney-based author, architecture critic, essayist, columnist and speaker who was born in New Zealand but later became an Australian citizen. She has contributed to current debates about aesthetics and ethics; design, public art and architecture; urban and natural environments; society and politics, including criticism of the treatment of Julian Assange. Profiles of her have appeared in the New Zealand Architect, Urbis, The Australian Financial Review, the Australian Architectural Review, and Australian Geographic.

#82

Christine Darden

Christine Darden

#14479

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Christine Darden is an American mathematician, data analyst, and aeronautical engineer who devoted much of her 40-year career in aerodynamics at NASA to researching supersonic flight and sonic booms. She had an M.S. in mathematics and had been teaching at Virginia State University before starting to work at the Langley Research Center in 1967. She earned a Ph.D. in engineering at George Washington University in 1983 and has published numerous articles in her field. She was the first African-American woman at NASA's Langley Research Center to be promoted to the Senior Executive Service, the to...

#83

Anne Tyng

#33122

Overall Influence

1920 - 2011 (91 years)

Anne Griswold Tyng was an architect and professor. She is best known for having collaborated for 29 years with Louis Kahn at his practice in Philadelphia. She served as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania for 27 years, teaching classes in urban morphology. She was a fellow of the American Institute of Architects and an academician of the National Academy of Design. She is the first woman licensed as an architect by the state of Pennsylvania.

#84

Anne S. Kiremidjian

#58068

Overall Influence

Anne Setian Kiremidjian is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. Biography Kiremidjian was born on August 11, 1949, in Sofia, Bulgaria. She earned her BA in physics from Queens College, City University of New York and BS in civil engineering from Columbia University. She then earned her MS and PhD from Stanford University. From 1987 to 2002 she served as the Co-Director and Director of the John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center at Stanford University. Her research has focused on earthquake hazard as well as structural risk analysis.

#85

Ellen von Unwerth

Ellen von Unwerth

#5357

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Ellen von Unwerth is a German photographer. She began her career as a fashion model, before becoming a fashion, editorial, and advertising photographer. Early life and education Von Unwerth was born in Frankfurt, West Germany. As an orphan, during her early childhood, she often ended up in Bavarian foster care systems. Eventually, von Unwerth was able to graduate high school in Munich, where she would work as a circus magician's assistant for three years.

#86

Tessy Thomas

#10748

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Tessy Thomas is an Indian scientist and Director General of Aeronautical Systems and the former Project Director for Agni-IV missile in Defence Research and Development Organisation. She is the first ever woman scientist to head a missile project in India.

#87

Blanche Lemco van Ginkel

Blanche Lemco van Ginkel

#32607

Overall Influence

1923 - 2022 (99 years)

Blanche Lemco van Ginkel was a British-born Canadian architect, city planner, and educator who worked mostly in Montreal and Toronto. She is known for her Modernist designs, as well as for planning Expo 67 and spearheading the preservation of Old Montreal. Lemco van Ginkel was the first woman to head a faculty of architecture in Canada and be elected a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. She was also the first woman to be awarded a fellowship by the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and in 2020, was awarded their highest honour, the RAIC Gold Medal.

#88

Caroline Bos

#43014

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Caroline Bos is a Dutch architect. She is a co-founder of UNStudio, a large award-winning architecture firm in Amsterdam. Bos writes, lectures and teaches architecture at various schools. Her architectural drawings and models are shown at museums like MoMA.

#89

Sarah Whiting

#26075

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Sarah M. Whiting is an American architect, critic, and academic administrator. Whiting is currently Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design, in addition to being a founding partner of WW Architecture, along with her husband, Ron Witte. She previously served as Dean and William Ward Watkin Professor of Architecture at Rice School of Architecture. In addition to her work as an academic administrator, Whiting is most commonly identified as an intellectual figure within the field of architecture's "post-critical" turn in the early 2000s.

#90

Cristina Amon

#33368

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (123 years)

Cristina H. Amon is a mechanical engineer, academic administrator and was the 13th dean of the University of Toronto Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering. She was the Faculty's first female dean. Prior to her appointment at the University of Toronto in 2006, she was the Raymond J. Lane Distinguished Professor and director of the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems at Carnegie Mellon University.

#91

Sheila Widnall

#21312

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Sheila Marie Evans Widnall is an American aerospace researcher and Institute Professor Emerita at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . She served as United States Secretary of the Air Force from 1993 to 1997, making her the first woman to hold that post and the first woman to lead an entire branch of the United States Armed Forces in the Department of Defense. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2003.

#92

Elisabeth Pate-Cornell

Elisabeth Pate-Cornell

#35937

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Marie-Elisabeth Lucienne Paté-Cornell, , is a Stanford University Professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering and was the Founding Chair of the Department. Pate-Cornell is an expert in engineering risk analysis and management and more generally, the use of Bayesian probability to process incomplete information. Her research and that of her Engineering Risk Research Group have focused on the inclusion of technical and management factors in probabilistic risk analysis models with applications to the NASA shuttle tiles, offshore oil platforms and medical systems. Since 2001,...

#93

Ingeborg Hochmair

Ingeborg Hochmair

#18598

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Ingeborg J. Hochmair-Desoyer is an Austrian electrical engineer and the CEO and CTO of hearing implant company MED-EL. Dr Hochmair and her husband Prof. Erwin Hochmair co-created the first micro-electronic multi-channel cochlear implant in the world. She received the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for her contributions towards the development of the modern cochlear implant. She also received the 2015 Russ Prize for bioengineering.

#94

Ellen Arruda

#40635

Overall Influence

Ellen Marie Arruda is an American mechanical engineer known for her research on the mechanical properties of polymers and on tissue engineering, with applications including the design of improved football helmets, artificial tooth enamel that can withstand high-shock and high-vibration environments, and nanolayered composite materials that are lightweight, as strong as steel, and transparent. The Arruda–Boyce model for the behavior of rubber-like polymers is named for her and her doctoral advisor Mary Cunningham Boyce, with whom she published it in 1993. She is Maria Comninou Collegiate Profes...

#95

Amalia Ercoli Finzi

#52185

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Amalia Ercoli Finzi is an Italian engineer and professor, Principal Investigator of the SD2 drill aboard the Philae spacecraft. Early life and education Ercoli Finzi was born at Gallarate, near Milan.

#96

Elizabeth Croft

#46706

Overall Influence

Elizabeth A. Croft is a Canadian roboticist known for her work on human–robot interaction. She is the vice president and provost of the University of Victoria. Education and career Croft graduated from the University of British Columbia in 1988, she earned a master's degree at the University of Waterloo in 1992, and completed her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto in 1995.

#97

Tejal A. Desai

#44094

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Tejal Ashwin Desai is Sorensen Family Dean of Engineering at Brown University. Prior to joining Brown, she was the Deborah Cowan Endowed Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at University of California, San Francisco, Director of the Health Innovations via Engineering Initiative , and head of the Therapeutic Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory. She was formerly an associate professor at Boston University and an assistant professor at University of Illinois at Chicago . She is a researcher in the area of therapeutic micro and nanotechnology and has authored ...

#98

Catherine Ingraham

#41173

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Catherine Ingraham is a professor of architecture in the graduate architecture program at Pratt Institute in New York City, a program for which she was chair from 1999 to 2005. Biography Ingraham was born to Gordon Ingraham and Elizabeth Wright Ingraham. Ingraham was raised in Colorado and earned her doctorate at Johns Hopkins University. Ingraham has held academic appointments at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Iowa State University and been a visiting professor at Princeton, the GSD, and Columbia University, before joining Pratt as chair in 1999.

#99

Dolores Hayden

#23601

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Dolores Hayden is an American professor emerita of architecture, urbanism, and American studies at Yale University. She is an urban historian, architect, author, and poet. Hayden has made innovative contributions to the understanding of the social importance of urban space and to the history of the built environment in the United States.

#100

Julia Hsu

#37062

Overall Influence

Julia Wan-Ping Hsu is an American materials scientist. In her research, she uses scanning probe microscopy to study the nanostructure, optics, and photoelectric properties of thin films and crystal surfaces, with particular application to solar cells, and has used nanotransfer printing to make electrical connections to single-molecule sensing devices. She is a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Texas at Dallas, where she holds the Texas Instruments Distinguished Chair in Nanoelectronics.

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