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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Engineering,

#601

Andrea Leers

#109401

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (123 years)

Andrea Leers is an American architect and educator. Together with Jane Weinzapfel, Leers created the Boston-based architecture firm Leers Weinzapfel Associates which was the first woman-owned firm to win the American Institute of Architects Architecture Firm Award in 2007. In 1991, she was elected to the American Institute of Architects College of Fellows.

#602

Donna Riley

#81448

Overall Influence

Donna Riley is currently the Jim and Ellen King Dean of Engineering and Computing at University of New Mexico. Riley is known for her work in challenging traditional notions of engineering education. Riley has worked to incorporate a intersectional approach to engineering and uses STS as a framework for understanding how engineering affects society in a social and political way.

#603

Ashley Schafer

#110423

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (123 years)

Ashley Schafer is a professor of architecture at the Ohio State University, where she was head of architecture from 2005 to 2009. Prior to joining the faculty at Ohio State, she was an associate professor of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

#604

Jan Evans-Freeman

#87249

Overall Influence

Jan H. Evans-Freeman was the pro-vice-chancellor of the University of Canterbury College of Engineering between 2009 until 2021, and is an English-New Zealand professor of engineering. She is now the pro-vice-chancellor of sustainability at the University of Canterbury After obtaining a Ph.D. at the University of Manchester she moved to Sheffield Hallam University and then University of Canterbury in 2009. As well as her academic roles, she holds a number of industry roles.

#605

Gabriele Villarini

#144358

Overall Influence

#606

Marilyn Wolf

#90585

Overall Influence

Marilyn Claire Wolf is an American computer engineer who works as Elmer E. Koch Professor of Engineering and Founding Director of the School of Computing at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She is an expert in embedded computing.

#607

Harriet Edquist

#100882

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Harriet Edquist is an Australian historian and curator, and Professor Emerita in the School of Architecture and Urban Design at RMIT University in Melbourne. Born and educated in Melbourne, she has published widely on and created numerous exhibitions in the field of Australian architecture, art and design history. She has also contributed to the production of Australian design knowledge as the founding editor of the RMIT Design Archives Journal and is a member of the Design Research Institute at RMIT University.

#608

Lori Lamel

#131610

Overall Influence

Lori Faith Lamel is a speech processing researcher known for her work with the TIMIT corpus of American English speech and for her work on voice activity detection, speaker recognition, and other non-linguistic inferences from speech signals. She works for the French National Centre for Scientific Research as a senior research scientist in the Spoken Language Processing Group of the Laboratoire d'Informatique pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l'Ingénieur.

#609

Janet Allen

#107345

Overall Influence

Janet Katherine Allen is an American biochemist and industrial engineer whose research concerns uncertainty in the engineering design process and its quantification and control through robust design processes, statistical methods, simulation of alternative designs, and the use of the design of experiments to systematically explore alternatives in large design spaces. She is a professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Oklahoma, where she holds the John and Mary Moore Chair of Engineering.

#610

Eleni Chatzi

#109419

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Eleni Chatzi is a Greek civil engineer, researcher, and an associate professor and Chair of Structural Mechanics and Monitoring at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

#611

Zeynep Çelik

#43450

Overall Influence

Zeynep Çelik is a Turkish born architect, architectural historian, theorist, and academic. She is Sakıp Sabancı Visiting Professor at Columbia University. She is a retired distinguished professor of architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Her work focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth century urban history, colonialism, orientalism and modernity.

#612

Julia A. Kornfield

#102062

Overall Influence

Julia A. Kornfield is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. A world expert in polymer science, Kornfield's research encompasses the development of mega-supramolecular systems for fuel additives and intraocular lenses, as well as the influence of flow on polymer chains.

#613

Ilene Busch-Vishniac

#90507

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Ilene Busch-Vishniac is an American-born mechanical engineer and university administrator. She served as Dean of the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University from 1998 to 2003 then resigned the position to serve as President of the Acoustical Society of America , an elected non-gratis position, from 2003 to 2005. She served as Provost and Vice-President for Academic Affairs at McMaster University from 2007 to 2012, and as President of the University of Saskatchewan from 2012 to 2014. In 2018 she joined startup Sonavi Labs as Chief Innovation Officer. She has written research p...

#614

Nicole Grobert

#111580

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Nicole Grobert FRSC FYAE is a German-British materials chemist. She is a professor of nanomaterials at the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford, fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and a Royal Society industry fellow at Williams Advanced Engineering. Grobert is the chair of the European Commission's Group of Chief Scientific Advisors.

#615

Jennifer Barton

#137395

Overall Influence

Jennifer Kehlet Barton is an American biomedical engineer who is Director of the BIO5 Institute at the University of Arizona. Barton develops optical techniques for the detection and treatment of cancer.

#616

Ruth Cameron

#122363

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Ruth Cameron FInstP FIOM3 is a British materials scientist and professor at the University of Cambridge. She is co-director of the Cambridge Centre for Medical Materials. She studies materials that interact therapeutically with the body.

#617

Alice E. Smith

#109970

Overall Influence

Alice E. Smith is an American industrial engineer whose research concerns mathematical optimization for complex applications in manufacturing, business planning, advanced materials, and communication networks, based on problems including facility location and network design. She is Joe W. Forehand/Accenture Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Auburn University, where she also holds an adjunct appointment in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering.

#618

Alma Carlisle

#93121

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (97 years)

Alma Fairfax Carlisle , is an American architect and architectural historian who worked in Los Angeles. Her work led to the preservation of many historic districts and sites in the city of Los Angeles.

#619

Mónica Bertolino

Mónica Bertolino

#130880

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Mónica Bertolino is an Argentinean architect and professor of architecture. She also owns and operates Estudio Bertolino-Barrado, an architecture studio with several locations in Argentina and Spain. The studio obtained the Diploma to the Merit - Architecture 2002-2006 for Visual Arts at the Konex Awards in 2012.

#620

Deb Niemeier

#92838

Overall Influence

Deb A. Niemeier is an American transportation engineer known for her work on measuring vehicle emissions and its impact on the air quality in nearby neighborhoods, on the effects of carbon dioxide on climate change, on gender differences in commuting behavior, and on the quantification of transport accessibility. She is James & Alice B. Clark Distinguished Chair Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park.

#621

Barbara Klemm

#80328

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Barbara Klemm is a German press photographer. She worked for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung for 45 years. She photographed many of the most important events in recent German history and has received honors, including Fellowship of the Academy of Arts, Berlin and the Pour le Mérite. She was inducted into the Leica Hall of Fame in recognition of her status as "a driving force in reportage photography" and as "an exemplary photographer".

#622

Polina Golland

#112649

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Polina Golland is an Israeli-American computer scientist specializing in medical image computing and biomedical image analysis. She is Henry Ellis Warren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and heads the medical vision group at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

#623

Zhang Jinqiu

#111813

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Zhang Jinqiu is a Chinese architect and professor at Tsinghua University. She was titled “Construction Master’ and “Academician of China” by the Chinese government. She has been appointed as the Chief Architect for China’s Capital Construction Design Group since 1987 and remained in this position until the present day. Zhang was also amongst the first round of winners of the Xi'an Science and Technology Award for Outstanding Contributions in 2005. By 2011, she was elected as a member of the prestigious Chinese Academy of Engineering.

#624

Kalina Hristova

#127635

Overall Influence

Kalina A. Hristova is a Bulgarian–American engineer. She is a professor of materials science and engineering at Johns Hopkins University's Whiting School of Engineering. Early life and education Hristova received her Bachelor of Science degree and Master's degree in physics from Sofia University in 1987 and 1988, respectively, before moving to the United States. She subsequently earned her PhD in mechanical engineering and materials science from Duke University in 1994 and worked as a post-doctoral associate and research scientist at the University of California, Irvine. During college, she b...

#625

Natalie Stingelin

Natalie Stingelin

#95256

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Natalie Stingelin , Fellow of the Materials Research Society and Royal Society of Chemistry , is a materials scientist and current chair of the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology , the University of Bordeaux and Imperial College . She led the European Commission Marie Curie INFORM network and is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Materials Chemistry C and Materials Advances.

#626

Virginia L. Miller

#147394

Overall Influence

#627

Sarah Haigh

#129247

Overall Influence

Sarah Jane Haigh is a Professor in the School of Materials at the University of Manchester. She investigates nanomaterials using transmission electron microscopy, including two-dimensional materials such as graphene.

#628

Pearl Sullivan

#138965

Overall Influence

1961 - 2020 (59 years)

Pearl Sullivan was a Malaysian Canadian engineer and the former Dean of Engineering at the University of Waterloo, the first woman to hold the position. Early life and education Sullivan was born in 1961 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and immigrated to Canada in the 1980s. She graduated from the Technical University of Nova Scotia, now part of Dalhousie University, in 1985 with a master's degree in Metallurgical Engineering. Following her time in Halifax, Sullivan completed a PhD in materials engineering at the University of British Columbia in 1990. Her doctoral studies were supervised by Anoush Po...

#629

Dagmar Hülsenberg

Dagmar Hülsenberg

#109576

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Dagmar Hülsenberg is a German materials scientist and university professor. In 1975, at age 34, she became the youngest full professor in the German Democratic Republic. By that time she had already distinguished herself by obtaining doctorates in two barely related disciplines: Economics/Cost accounting and Engineering/Materials science .

#630

Noël Bakhtian

#68870

Overall Influence

Noël Bakhtian is the former director of the Berkeley Lab Energy Storage Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She has served as the director of the Center for Advanced Energy Studies at Idaho National Laboratory and as a senior policy advisor for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

#631

Antoinette Galvin

#109229

Overall Influence

Antoinette Galvin is space physicist at the University of New Hampshire. She is known for her research on the solar wind. Education and career Galvin earned her B.S. in physics from Purdue University, and has an M.S. and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Maryland. Galvin was a research faculty member of the University of Maryland before moving to the University of New Hampshire in 1997. As of 2011, Galvin is a research professor in physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire and the director of the New Hampshire NASA Space Grant program and the New Hampshire NASA EPSCoR p...

#632

Doris Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf

#59122

Overall Influence

1922 - 2010 (88 years)

Doris Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf was a German metallurgist. Biography Doris Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf was born in Bremen, Germany on February 15, 1922, to Adolph Friedrich and Elsa Kuhlmann. She attended the University of Göttingen from 1942 where she received her doctorate in materials science in 1947. Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf continued her research under Sir Nevill Francis Mott at the University of Bristol. She married Heinz Wilsdorf in 1950, with whom she travelled to University of the Witwatersrand to work as a lecturer in the same year. In 1956 they moved to the United States. In 1957, the University of Pennsy...

#633

Wu Lusheng

#66644

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Wu Lusheng is a Chinese architect and a professor of Tongji University. In 2004, she was named by the Ministry of Construction of China as a "National Master of Engineering and Design". Over a career spanning more than 50 years, she collaborated with her husband Dai Fudong on about 100 projects.

#634

Zhen Jane Wang

#131897

Overall Influence

Zhen Jane Wang is a Chinese-Canadian signal processing researcher whose research includes work on statistical signal processing, image fusion, digital video fingerprinting, biological network inference, and deep learning. She is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia, and the editor-in-chief of IEEE Signal Processing Letters.

#635

Julie Ezold

#125571

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Julie Ezold is a nuclear engineer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She is campaign manager for the 252-Californium Campaign and was involved with the discovery of Tennessine. Early life and education Ezold took lessons and performed in ballet, tap, jazz, and baton at Merritt's Dance Center in Schenectady, New York. In fifth year she received an award for her examinations at Merritt. During high school Ezold completed a summer program in nuclear chemistry at the University of Lynchburg. She studied nuclear engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, graduating in 1990. She earned he...

#636

Mary-Anne Williams

Mary-Anne Williams

#91120

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Mary-Anne Williams FTSE is the Michael J Crouch Chair for Innovation at the University of New South Wales in Sydney Australia based in the UNSW Business School. She is founder and director of the UNSW Business AI Lab and deputy director of the UNSW AI Institute.

#637

Susan Fainstein

#91567

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Susan Saltzman Fainstein is an American educator and scholar of urban planning. Fainstein is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Her research and writing has focused on the distributive effects of urban development strategies and megaprojects, the role of democracy and community control in local public institutions, and establishing a moral theory of "the just city."

#638

Tania Douglas

#109177

Overall Influence

1969 - 2021 (52 years)

Tania S. Douglas was a Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Research Chair in Biomedical Engineering and Innovation as well as Director of the Medical Imaging Research Unit in the University of Cape Town , South Africa. She conducted research concerning medical innovation, image analysis, and the development of technologies to improve medical device innovation in South Africa. She was also the founding Editor-in-Chief of Global Health Innovation, a journal which disseminates research results about health innovation in developing settings.

#639

Maria Auböck

#111653

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Maria Auböck is an Austrian landscape architect and educator. In 1985, she opened her own firm where, since 1987, she has been working together with János Kárász. Biography Born in Vienna on 20 June 1951, Auböck is the daughter of the Austrian industrial designer and architect Carl Auböck , who was himself the son of the designer and painter Carl Auböck . She studied architecture at the Vienna University of Technology, specializing in urban development. Thereafter she attended the Technical University of Munich on a research grant.

#640

Vivienne Sze

#122232

Overall Influence

Vivienne Sze is an American electrical engineer and computer scientist whose research focuses on low-power electronics and on the trade-offs between energy use and computing power in the combined design of software and hardware, for applications including video coding and deep neural networks. She is an associate professor in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, where she heads the Energy-Efficient Multimedia Systems Group.

#641

Bettina Lotsch

#95043

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Bettina Valeska Lotsch is a German chemist. She is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany. Life Lotsch studied chemistry at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and completed it with a diploma in Chemistry in 2000. In 2006, she finished on her dissertation in the group of Wolfgang Schnick at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. From 2007 to 2008, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the group of G. A. Ozin at the University of Toronto. From 2009 to the beginning of 2017, she was an assistant professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

#642

Deborah Greaves

#133673

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Deborah Mary Greaves is a British engineer, Professor of Ocean Engineering and Head of the School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics at the University of Plymouth. In 2020 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

#643

Dana Cuff

#84647

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Dana Cuff is an American architecture theorist, professor of architecture and urban design, and founding director of cityLAB at the University of California, Los Angeles . She received her Ph.D. in architecture from University of California, Berkeley and her B.A., psychology and design from University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of books including Fast Forward Urbanism and The Provisional City .

#644

Nimmi Ramanujam

Nimmi Ramanujam

#131422

Overall Influence

Nirmala Ramanujam is an educator, innovator, and entrepreneur. Ramanujam is recognized for creating globally accessible technologies for women’s health related to cancer screening, diagnosis, and treatment. She is the Robert W. Carr Professor of Engineering and Professor of Cancer Pharmacology and Global Health at Duke University. She founded the Center for Global Women’s Health Technologies in 2013 to catalyze impactful research, educational and community outreach activities that promote women’s health. In 2023, she won the IEEE Biomedical Engineering Technical Field Award, given annually ...

#645

Katherine Kuchenbecker

#104937

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Katherine Julianne Kuchenbecker is an American researcher in haptic technology and robot-assisted surgery, and a former high school and college volleyball player. She is director of the Haptic Intelligence department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany.

#646

Min Hall

#137725

Overall Influence

Min Hall is a New Zealand architect and academic. She was the first female graduate in architecture at Victoria University of Wellington, in 1979. After practising in Nelson, she moved to lecturing at Unitec Institute of Technology in Auckland. She specialises in sustainable building materials such as earth and straw bales, and environmental issues in architecture. Hall is a Fellow of the New Zealand Institute of Architects.

#647

Anita Ho-Baillie

#149138

Overall Influence

Anita Ho-Baillie is an Australian scientist who is the John Hooke Chair of Nanoscience at the University of Sydney. Her research considers the development of durable perovskite solar cells and their integration into different applications. She was named as one of the Web of Science's most highly cited researchers in 2019–2022.

#648

Gabriela Hug

#117362

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Gabriela Hug-Glanzmann is a Swiss electrical engineer and an associate professor and Principal Investigator of the Power Systems Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich within the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. Hug studies the control and optimization of electrical power systems with a focus on sustainable energy.

#649

Carmen Ayuso

#149836

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

#650

Phyllis Birkby

#58243

Overall Influence

1932 - 1994 (62 years)

Noel Phyllis Birkby was an American architect, feminist, filmmaker, teacher, and founder of the Women's School of Planning and Architecture. Early life and education Noel Phyllis Birkby was born in Nutley, New Jersey to Harold S. and Alice Birkby. As a child, she made drawings of cities and towns, and miniature three-dimensional environments in her mother's garden. An early fascination with architecture led her to express interest in the profession at the age of 16, to a career counselor who would tell her the profession was inaccessible to her, despite her aptitude: "Well, Miss Birkby, it a...

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions