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 Engineering,
#751
Athanassia Athanassiou
#166733
Overall Influence
#752
Anna Ploszajski
#103232
Overall Influence
1991 - Present (33 years)
Anna Ploszajski is a materials scientist, engineer, and writer. Her book, Handmade: A Scientist's Search for Meaning Through Making, was published by Bloomsbury Publishing on 18 May 2021. Education Ploszajski attended Dame Alice Harpur School choosing to study A-Level mathematics, further mathematics, physics and music. She went on to study at Mansfield College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#753
Debra Laefer
#162387
Overall Influence
Debra Laefer is the Director of Citizen Science program within NYU's Center for Urban Science + Progress and Associate Professor of NYU's Tandon School of Engineering. Previously a professor at University College, Dublin, her research in geotechnical and structural engineering focuses on ways to preserve architecturally significant buildings from sub-surface construction.
Go to Profile#754
Dagmar Sternad
#117853
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Dagmar Sternad is a German-American scientist and engineer. Sternad is University Distinguished Professor of Biology, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Physics at Northeastern University. She is also a core member of the Institute of Experiential Robotics at Northeastern University.
Go to Profile#755
Despina Stratigakos
#122775
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Despina Stratigakos is a Canadian-born architectural historian, writer, former vice provost, and professor of architecture at the University at Buffalo. Education Stratigakos was born in Montreal, Quebec, and received her undergraduate education from the University of Toronto and her Master of Arts from the University of California Berkeley. She earned her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College. She taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan before joining the School of Architecture and Planning at the University at Buffalo.
Go to Profile#756
Stéphanie P. Lacour
#133315
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Stéphanie P. Lacour is a French neurotechnologist and full professor holding the Foundation Bertarelli Chair in Neuroprosthetic Technology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne . Lacour is a pioneer in the field of stretchable electronics and directs a laboratory at EPFL which specializes in the development of Soft BioElectronic Interfaces to enable seamless integration of neuroprosthetic devices into human tissues. Lacour is also a co-founding member and director of the Center for Neuroprosthetics at the EPFL Satellite Campus in Geneva, Switzerland.
Go to Profile#757
Linda Doyle
#62539
Overall Influence
Linda E. Doyle is an Irish academic and educator who is the 45th provost and president of Trinity College Dublin , the university's chief officer. An electrical engineer, she has had a long academic career at Trinity, from the 1990s, most recently as Professor of Engineering and the Arts, in addition to holding other management roles such as Dean of Research. She has also led one telecommunications research centre at the university, and was the founding director of another, the multi-institution organisation known as CONNECT. Doyle has worked as a member of regulatory and advisory bodies in both Ireland, on broadband network strategy, and the UK, on mobile spectrum allocation.
Go to Profile#758
Ljiljana Trajković
#152190
Overall Influence
Ljiljana Trajković is Professor with the School of Engineering Science, Simon Fraser University in Canada. She graduated from University of Pristina in 1974, got her master's degrees in electrical engineering and computer engineering from Syracuse University and PhD in electrical engineering from University of California, Los Angeles in 1986.
Go to Profile#759
Jennifer Mueller
#68346
Overall Influence
Jennifer L. Mueller is an applied mathematician and biomedical engineer whose research concerns inverse problems and their applications, particularly to problems in medical imaging related to electrical impedance tomography. She is a professor of mathematics at Colorado State University, where she also holds a joint appointment in the school of biomedical engineering and the department of electrical and computer engineering.
Go to Profile#760
Alicia El Haj
#140748
Overall Influence
Alicia El Haj is a Professor and the Interdisciplinary Chair of Cell Engineering at the School of Chemical Engineering and the Healthcare Technologies Institute at the Institute of Translational Medicine, University of Birmingham. She is the President of the UK Bioengineering Society and Director of MICA Biosystems. She is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. She was president of the European Council of the International Society for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine .
Go to Profile#761
LaToya Ruby Frazier
#49248
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
LaToya Ruby Frazier is an American artist and professor of photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Early life From Braddock, Pennsylvania, Frazier began photographing her family and hometown at the age of 16, revising the social documentary traditional of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange to imagine documentation from within and by the community, and collaboration between the photographer and her subjects. Inspired by Gordon Parks, who promoted the camera as a weapon for social justice, Frazier uses her tight focus to make apparent the impact of systemic problems, from racism...
Go to Profile#762
Malgorzata Marek-Sadowska
#162964
Overall Influence
Malgorzata Marek-Sadowska is a Polish-American electronics engineer known for her research in VLSI circuit design. She is a professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a member of the university's Institute for Energy Efficiency, and the director of the VLSI CAD Lab at the university.
Go to Profile#763
Natalya Sats
#32749
Overall Influence
1903 - 1993 (90 years)
Natalya Il'inichna Sats was a Russian stage director who ran theaters for children for many years, including the Moscow Musical Theater for Children, now named after her. In 1937, she fell victim to Soviet repressions, but was rehabilitated in 1953. She was a recipient of the USSR State Prize, People's Artist of the USSR award, Lenin Prize, Hero of Socialist Labor medal, and the Lenin Komsomol Prize.
Go to Profile#764
Roselyn J. Eisenberg
#130909
Overall Influence
Roselyn J. Eisenberg is a professor at The University of Pennsylvania and a member of the University's School of Veterinary Medicine and School of Dental Medicine. The majority of Eisenberg's research is focused on the herpes simplex virus and the poxvirus and how they enter into susceptible cells. She also studies glycoproteins, vaccines, virology and microbiology.
Go to Profile#765
Karla Miller
#133858
Overall Influence
Karla Loreen Miller is an American neuroscientist and professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Oxford. Her research investigates the development of neuroimaging techniques, with a particular focus on Magnetic Resonance Imaging , neuroimaging, diffusion MRI and functional magnetic resonance imaging. She was elected a Fellow of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine in 2016.
Go to Profile#766
Pinshane Huang
#133143
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (38 years)
Pinshane Yeh Huang is an Associate Professor of Materials Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She develops transmission electron microscopy to investigate two-dimensional materials. During her PhD she discovered the thinnest piece of glass in the world, which was included in the Guinness World Records. Huang was awarded the 2019 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.
Go to Profile#767
Anna Fox
#84418
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Anna Fox is a British documentary photographer, known for a "combative, highly charged use of flash and colour". In 2019 she was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society. Career and work Fox completed her degree in Photography at West Surrey College of Art and Design in Farnham, Surrey in 1986 under tutors Martin Parr, Paul Graham and Karen Knorr.
Go to Profile#768
Rhonda Franklin
#106500
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Rhonda Franklin is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Minnesota. She is a microwave and radio frequency engineer whose research focuses on microelectronic mechanical structures in radio and microwave applications. She has won several awards, including the 1998 NSF Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the 2013 Sara Evans Leadership Award, the 2017 John Tate Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Advising, and the 2018 Minnesota African American Heritage Calendar Award for her contributions to higher education.
Go to Profile#769
Carmen Córdova
#120610
Overall Influence
1929 - 2011 (82 years)
Carmen Córdova was an Argentine architect who was part of the . In 1994 she became the first woman dean of the at the University of Buenos Aires. In 2004, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes.
Go to Profile#770
Ingeborg Sølvberg
#123704
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Ingeborg Sølvberg is a Norwegian engineer. Career Graduating from the Norwegian Institute of Technology in 1966, Sølvberg was assigned to the Computing Center at the Norwegian Institute of Technology, and was responsible for the design and implementation of the library information system BIBSYS. The BIBSYS project started in February 1972, and Sølvberg was project leader from 1972 to 1986. As of 2005, 112 libraries were connected to the BIBSYS database.
Go to Profile#771
Shaista Wahab
#57493
Overall Influence
Shaista Wahab has written Dari language books. Her book A Brief History of Afghanistan was published in 2007. Wahab was a librarian and professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha where she coordinated the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection in the Dr. C.C. and Mabel L. Criss Library Archives & Special Collections. An oral history specialist, she served as a consultant to the Afghanistan Unveiled film project by Independent Lens, which was later picked up by PBS.
Go to Profile#772
Mireille Broucke
#148626
Overall Influence
Mireille Esther Broucke is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto, interested in control theory, mathematical systems theory, and swarm robotics. Broucke did her undergraduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where her father Roger A. Broucke, an immigrant from Belgium, was a professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics. She graduated in 1984, with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. She went on to graduate study in electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, earning a m...
Go to Profile#773
Shelly Peyton
#90373
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Shelly R. Peyton is an American chemical engineer who is the Armstrong Professional Development Professor in the Department of CHemical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research considers the development of biomaterials to investigate metastatic cancer and potential new therapies.
Go to Profile#774
Andrea Baschirotto
#168904
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Andrea Baschirotto is a full professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Milano, Italy and a Director of the Microelectronics Group. In 2014 Andrea Baschirotto was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers "for contributions to analog filters."
Go to Profile#775
Susan Albin
#112941
Overall Influence
Susan Lee Albin is an American industrial engineer known for her research in quality engineering, queueing theory, and industrial process monitoring. She is a professor of industrial engineering at Rutgers University, the former president of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, and the former editor-in-chief of IIE Transactions , the flagship journal of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers.
Go to Profile#776
Julie Ivy
#56543
Overall Influence
Julie Simmons Ivy is the department chair of and professor in the department of industrial and operations engineering at the University of Michigan. Her research involves health care statistics and the application of systems engineering to health care and to other social services including food bank distribution systems.
Go to Profile#777
Aimy Bazylak
#163541
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Aimy Ming Jii Bazylak is a Canadian professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Toronto, where she holds a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Thermofluidics for Clean Energy. Her research involves microfluidics, nanofluidics, and their applications in fuel cell design and in carbon sequestration.
Go to Profile#778
Laura Kurgan
#123739
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Laura Kurgan is a South African architect and an associate professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation . She directs the interdisciplinary Center for Spatial Research at GSAPP, which she founded as the Spatial Information Design Lab in 2004. Since 1995, the architect has operated her own New York City based interdisciplinary design firm called Laura Kurgan Design. She has been awarded the Rockefeller Fellowship and a Graham Foundation Grant. Kurgan's work has been presented at prestigious institutions including the ZKM Karlsruhe, the Museum of M...
Go to Profile#779
Kimmen Sjölander
#106746
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Kimmen Sjölander is professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Bioengineering. She is well known for her work on protein sequence analysis. Biography Sjölander did both her undergraduate and graduate work at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the Department of Computer Science, earning a bachelor's degree in 1993 and a PhD in 1997 under the supervision of David Haussler. She was the chief scientist in the Molecular Applications Group from 1997-1999 and then principal scientist in Protein Informatics at Celera Genomics from 1999-2001, where she was a member of the team who assembled and annotated the Human Genome.
Go to Profile#780
Rosalind Archer
#152816
Overall Influence
Rosalind Ann Archer is a New Zealand academic. She is currently Head of the School of Engineering and Built Environment at Griffith University. Academic career After a 2000 PhD titled 'Computing flow and pressure transients in heterogeneous media using boundary element methods' at Stanford University, Archer moved to Texas A&M University and then to the University of Auckland in 2002, rising to full professor in 2013. In 2013 she also became head of the University of Auckland's Department of Engineering Science. She held the Mercury / Mighty River Power Chair in Geothermal Reservoir Engine...
Go to Profile#781
Diana Aga
#142750
Overall Influence
Diana S. Aga is a Filipino-American chemist who is the Henry M. Woodburn Chair at the University at Buffalo. She was awarded the 2017 American Chemical Society Schoellkopf Medal in recognition of her work in environmental chemistry. The Schoellkopf Medal is a local section award of the American Chemical Society. Over the years, numerous University at Buffalo faculty have received this recognition.
Go to Profile#782
Laura Marcu
#164948
Overall Influence
Laura Marcu is an American scientist and a professor of biomedical engineering and neurological surgery at the University of California, Davis. She is also a Fellow of numerous professional societies: the Biomedical Engineering Society, SPIE, The Optical Society and the National Academy of Inventors.
Go to Profile#783
Caroline Miller
#58568
Overall Influence
Caroline Miller is a planning professor and historian at Massey University, Palmerston North, and is the author of New Zealand’s first book on planning history; The Unsung Profession. Biography Caroline Miller graduated from the University of Auckland with a BA, and entered the planning profession in 1980. She worked for the Palmerston North City Council as a planning practitioner. She became associated with Massey University as a teacher in programmes offered by the Property Studies Programme.
Go to Profile#784
Alyssa Panitch
#156800
Overall Influence
Alyssa Panitch is an American biomedical engineer. She is a Professor and Department Chair in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. Panitch focuses on designing biopolymers that improve tissue healing and regeneration by researching intracellular and extracellular approaches to direct molecular and cellular processes.
Go to Profile#785
Ronke Olabisi
#143072
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Ronke Mojoyinola Olabisi is an associate professor of biomedical engineering at University of California, Irvine. She works on speciality of bone and human tissue. She is working with Mae Jemison on 100 Year Starship, an interdisciplinary initiative that is exploring the possibility of human interstellar travel.
Go to Profile#786
Deniz Başkent
#134552
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Deniz Başkent is a Turkish-born Dutch auditory scientist who works on auditory perception. As of 2018, she is Professor of Audiology at the University Medical Center Groningen, Netherlands. Biography Born and raised in Turkey, Başkent trained as an electrical engineer, obtaining undergraduate and MS degrees in electrical engineering at Bilkent University in Ankara. Başkent then moved to Los Angeles, CA, where she obtained a PhD in Biomedical engineering from the University of Southern California in 2003 for her work on "Speech recognition under conditions of frequency-place compression and expansion", under supervision of Robert V.
Go to Profile#787
Kate Snodgrass
#90211
Overall Influence
Kate Snodgrass is an American theater director and playwright. She is the artistic director of Boston Playwrights' Theatre. She is a professor of the practice of playwriting in the English Department of Boston University. Snodgrass won the 2012 Elliot Norton Award for Excellence.
Go to Profile#788
Jos Boys
#138670
Overall Influence
Jos Boys is an architect, activist, educator, and writer. She was a founder member of Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative and co-author of their 1984 book Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment . Since 2008 she has been co-director of The DisOrdinary Architecture Project with disabled artist Zoe Partington, a disability-led platform that works with disabled artists to explore new ways to think about disability in architectural and design discourse and practice.
Go to Profile#789
Christine Luscombe
#128775
Overall Influence
Christine Luscombe is a Japanese-British chemist who is a professor at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. Her research investigates polymer chemistry, organic electronics, organic photovoltaics and the synthesis of novel materials for processable electronics. She serves on the editorial boards of Macromolecules, Advanced Functional Materials, the Annual Review of Materials Research and ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.
Go to Profile#790
Vivian Chu
#128395
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (37 years)
Vivian Chu is an American roboticist and entrepreneur, specializing in the field of human-robot interaction. She is Chief Technology Officer at Diligent Robotics, a company she co-founded in 2017 for creating autonomous, mobile, socially intelligent robots.
Go to Profile#791
Gillian Howell
#100191
Overall Influence
1927 - 2000 (73 years)
Gillian Margaret "Jill" Howell , was a British architect. Early life She was born Gillian Margaret Sarson, on 3 November 1927 in Multan, in the western Punjab, British India, the daughter of Colonel Edward Vipan Sarson, commandant of the Royal Artillery training centre, and his Norwegian wife, Dagny Sarson. She was educated at the Royal School, Bath, followed by the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.
Go to Profile#792
Donglei Fan
#158457
Overall Influence
Donglei "Emma" Fan is an associate professor of Mechanical Engineering of the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin and the principal investigator in its Nanomaterials Innovation Lab. In 2014, her team built a nanomotor that was significantly smaller, faster, and longer running than any previously designed. The techniques that they developed have been referred to as a "breakthrough technology". The achievement was noted as a highlight of 2014 in Science Year by Year .
Go to Profile#793
Marcy Zenobi-Wong
#168925
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Marcy Zenobi-Wong is an American engineer and professor of Tissue Engineering and Biofabrication at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology . She is known for her work in the field of Tissue Engineering.
Go to Profile#794
Karen Panetta
#134060
Overall Influence
Karen Ann Panetta is an American computer engineer and inventor who is a professor and Dean of Graduate Education at Tufts University. Her research considers machine learning and automated systems. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the National Academy of Inventors.
Go to Profile#795
Joan Littlewood
#33745
Overall Influence
1914 - 2002 (88 years)
Joan Maud Littlewood was an English theatre director who trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and is best known for her work in developing the Theatre Workshop. She has been called "The Mother of Modern Theatre". Her production of Oh, What a Lovely War! in 1963 was one of her more influential pieces.
Go to Profile#796
Kimberly Bryant
#87792
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Kimberly Bryant is an American electrical engineer who worked in the biotechnology field at Genentech, Novartis Vaccines, Diagnostics, and Merck. In 2011, Bryant founded Black Girls Code, a nonprofit organization that focuses on providing technology and computer programming education to African-American girls. After founding Black Girls Code, Bryant was listed as one of the "25 Most Influential African-Americans In Technology" by Business Insider.
Go to Profile#797
Carla Seatzu
#168815
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Carla Seatzu is an Italian electrical engineer whose research concerns discrete-event simulation, Petri nets, fault detection and isolation, and networked control systems, with applications in manufacturing and transportation. She is an ordinary professor in the faculty of engineering at the University of Cagliari.
Go to Profile#798
Wendy Ewald
#43107
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Wendy Ewald is an American photographer and educator. Early life and education Wendy Ewald was born in Detroit, Michigan, graduated from Abbot Academy in 1969 and attended Antioch College between 1969 and 1974, as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied photography with Minor White.
Go to Profile#799
Vicki Chen
#126452
Overall Influence
Prof. Vicki Chen is an Australian engineer, a former Executive Dean for the Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology at the University of Queensland, and current Provost and Senior Vice-President of the University of Technology Sydney.[10] In 2020 she was elected as the Fellow of Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering.
Go to Profile#800
Anne Noggle
#102196
Overall Influence
1922 - 2005 (83 years)
Anne Noggle was an American aviator, photographer, curator and professor. After receiving her pilot's license as a teenager, she enrolled as a WASP pilot during World War II, flying missions in 1943 and 1944. Following her time as a pilot, she returned to school to study art and photography. The photographs she subsequently made, documenting how women age, received wide recognition and are held in numerous museum collections. She taught art at the University of New Mexico from 1980 to 1994, and was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1992.
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