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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Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Engineering,

#101

Jayathi Murthy

#44465

Overall Influence

Jayathi Y. Murthy is an Indian-American mechanical engineer who is the current President of Oregon State University. Previously, she was the Ronald and Valerie Sugar Dean of the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of California, Los Angeles where she was also a distinguished professor. Her research interests include macroelectronics, computational fluid dynamics, heat transfer, and phase-change materials. Murthy has served on the Engineering and Computer Science jury for the Infosys Prize since 2018.

#102

Diana Balmori

#37900

Overall Influence

1932 - 2016 (84 years)

Diana Balmori Ling was a landscape and urban designer. She was the founder of the landscape design firm Balmori Associates. Early life and education Born in Gijón, Spain, Diana Balmori spent most of her childhood in Spain and England before her family settled in Argentina. Her mother Dorothy Ling was a musician and musicologist. Her father Clemente Hernando Balmori was a linguistic expert. At an early age Balmori learned to sing, dance, play piano, and her parents encouraged her to explore a wide range of mediums. She brought many of these influences with her into the design world.

#103

Susan Hough

#36216

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Susan Elizabeth Hough is a seismologist at the United States Geological Survey in Pasadena, California, and scientist in charge of the office. She has served as an editor and contributor for many journals and is a contributing editor to Geotimes Magazine. She is the author of five books, including Earthshaking Science .

#104

Maria Schwarz

#48708

Overall Influence

1921 - 2018 (97 years)

Maria Schwarz was a German architect and professor best known for her church architecture. Maria Lang was born on 3 October 1921 in Aachen, Germany. Her father, a contractor sparked her interest in architecture at a young age. In 1941, Lang enrolled in RWTH Aachen University, making her the first woman to study architecture at the school. She graduated for the university with a master's degree in 1946.

#105

Dara Huang

#51712

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

Dara Huang is an American architect. In 2013, she founded the architecture and design firm Design Haus Liberty. She is the co-founder of Vivahouse, which converts disused commercial properties into co-living spaces.

#106

M. Elizabeth Cannon

#26803

Overall Influence

Margaret Elizabeth Cannon is a Canadian engineer specializing in geomatics engineering and president Emerita of the University of Calgary. From 2010 to 2018, she served as the university's eighth president and vice-chancellor, the first alumna to hold that position.

#107

Rivka Oxman

#28728

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Rivka Oxman is an Israeli architect, researcher, and professor at the Technion Institute in Haifa. Her research interests are related to design and computation, including digital architecture and methods, and exploring their contribution to the emergence of new paradigms of architectural design and practice.

#108

Kathleen Howell

#40784

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Kathleen Connor Howell is an American scientist and aerospace engineer known for her contributions to dynamical systems theory applied to spacecraft trajectory design which led to the use of halo orbit in multiple NASA space missions. She is currently the Hsu Lo Distinguished Professor at Purdue University in the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics. In acknowledgment of her many achievements, Discover magazine recognized her in 2002 as one of the 50 most important women in science.

#109

Lale Akarun

#23886

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Lale Akarun is a Turkish electrical engineer and computer scientist researching sign language and gesture recognition, human–computer interaction, and biometrics. She is a professor in the computer engineering department and ex-vice rector at Boğaziçi University.

#110

Lynda Benglis

#13653

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Lynda Benglis is an American sculptor and visual artist known especially for her wax paintings and poured latex sculptures. She maintains residences in New York City, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Kastellorizo, Greece, and Ahmedabad, India.

#111

Razelle Kurzrock

#67423

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

#112

Claire Deschênes

#42228

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Claire Deschênes is a Canadian mechanical engineer, an engineering professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering Université Laval, and a member of the Order of Canada. She is the first female professor of engineering at the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Laval University, and is an expert in hydraulic turbine technology, hydrodynamics, and fluid mechanics.

#113

Helen M. Chan

#30939

Overall Influence

Helen M. Chan is the New Jersey Zinc Professor at Lehigh University. Her work considers the development of ceramic-metal nanocomposites. She is on the board of directors of the American Ceramic Society.

#114

Molly Shoichet

#41261

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Molly S. Shoichet , is a Canadian science professor, specializing in chemistry, biomaterials and biomedical engineering. She was Ontario's first Chief Scientist. Shoichet is a biomedical engineer known for her work in tissue engineering, and is the only person to be a fellow of the three National Academies in Canada.

#115

Catherine J. Murphy

#41258

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Catherine "Cathy" J. Murphy is an American chemist and materials scientist, and is the Larry Faulkner Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . The first woman to serve as the head of the department of chemistry at UIUC, Murphy is known for her work on nanomaterials, specifically the seed-mediated synthesis of gold nanorods of controlled aspect ratio. She is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.

#116

Muriel Médard

#44171

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Muriel Médard is an information theorist and electrical engineer. She is the Cecil H. Green Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is known for her research in network coding.

#117

Rodica Baranescu

#39933

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Rodica A. Baranescu is a Romanian-American mechanical engineer known for her research in automotive diesel engines. Specifically she focuses on alternative fuels and optimization in emissions and performance of the engines.

#118

Georgia Louise Harris Brown

Georgia Louise Harris Brown

#45440

Overall Influence

1918 - 1999 (81 years)

Georgia Louise Harris Brown , is considered to be the second African American woman to become a licensed architect in the United States. She was also the first black woman to earn a degree in architecture from the University of Kansas. She was also the only black member of the Chicago chapter of Alpha Alpha Gamma .

#119

Geetam Tiwari

#49174

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Prof. Geetam Tiwari is currently the TRIPP Chair Professor at the Department of Civil Engineering of the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, India. She teaches transportation planning, traffic engineering, and transport economics and finance, transport safety, and non-motorised transportation to undergraduate and graduate students.

#120

Sarah Williams Goldhagen

#33608

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Sarah Williams Goldhagen is an American author and architecture critic. She sits on the board of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture and the Advisory Committee for the Intentional Spaces summit convened by the International Arts+ Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins Medical School . Her advocacy for science-informed, human-centered design, her scholarship on modern architecture, her criticism for the New Republic and Architectural Record, and her writings on the perceptual and social psychology of built environmental experience call for improved architectural and urban design practices and recognition of their profound social impact.

#121

Jennifer Elisseeff

Jennifer Elisseeff

#30832

Overall Influence

Jennifer Hartt Elisseeff is an American biomedical engineer, ophthalmologist and academic. She is the Morton Goldberg Professor and Director of the Translational Tissue Engineering Center at Johns Hopkins Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Wilmer Eye Institute with appointments in Chemical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Materials Science and Orthopedic Surgery. Elisseeff's research is in the fields of regenerative medicine and immunoengineering.

#122

Katie Bouman

#26435

Overall Influence

1988 - Present (36 years)

Katherine Louise Bouman is an American engineer and computer scientist working in the field of computer imagery. She led the development of an algorithm for imaging black holes, known as Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors , and was a member of the Event Horizon Telescope team that captured the first image of a black hole.

#123

Ada Karmi-Melamede

Ada Karmi-Melamede

#39560

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Ada Karmi-Melamede is a noted Israeli architect. Biography Karmi-Melamede was born on December 24, 1936, in Tel Aviv, in Mandate Palestine . She studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London from 1956 to 1959 and at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology from 1961 to 1962, being awarded her degree in 1963. She has taught extensively in the United States, first at Columbia University and then at Yale University and University of Pennsylvania .

#124

Naomi Leonard

#33701

Overall Influence

Naomi Ehrich Leonard is the Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. She is the director of the Princeton Council on Science and Technology and an associated faculty member in the Program in Applied & Computational Mathematics, Princeton Neuroscience Institute, and the Program in Quantitative and Computational Biology. She is the founding editor of the Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems.

#125

Sossina M. Haile

#34699

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Sossina M. Haile is an American chemist, known for developing the first solid acid fuel cells. She is a professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University, Illinois, US. Haile received the National Science Foundation National Young Investigator Award , Humboldt Fellowship , Fulbright Fellowship , and AT&T Cooperative Research Fellowship . The Humboldt and Fulbright fellowships supported her research at the Max Planck Institut für Festkörperforschung [Institute for Solid State Research], Stuttgart, Germany . She earned the 2001 J.B. Wagner Award of the High Temperature ...

#126

Eva Vecsei

#41739

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Eva Hollo Vecsei is a Hungarian-Canadian architect. She began her career in Budapest and emigrated to Montreal in 1957, where she established Vecsei Architects with her husband in 1984. Biography Vecsei was born Eva Hollo in 1930 in Vienna. She completed a Bachelor of Architecture at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, graduating in 1952. After graduating, she taught at the university's architectural school until 1953 as an assistant professor. In 1954 she designed housing for miners in Tatabánya and during 1955–1956 she worked on a school and housing projects.

#127

Carme Pigem

#56927

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Carme Pigem Barceló is a Spanish architect, a member of the Pritzker Prize-winning architectural firm RCR Arquitectes, together with Ramón Vilalta and Rafael Aranda. Biography Between 1977 and 1979, she studied at the School of Fine arts of Olot, and in 1987 graduated in architecture at ETSA Vallés. In 1987 she founded RCR Arquitectes together with Ramón Vilalta and Rafael Aranda.

#128

Nasrine Seraji

#45143

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Professor Nasrine Seraji-Bozorgzad AA Dipl FRIBA, is an Iranian-born French-British architect. She is a 2011 recipient of the Knight of the Legion of Honour, an Officier of l'Ordre national du Mérite and l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

#129

Martha Thorne

#49403

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Martha Thorne is an American architectural academic, curator, editor, and author. She is the Executive Director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize and Dean in the architecture school at IE University in Madrid. Formerly, she was a curator in architecture at the Art Institute of Chicago.

#130

Françoise-Hélène Jourda

#49587

Overall Influence

1955 - 2015 (60 years)

Françoise H Jourda was an award-winning French architect. Jourda has taught architecture internationally since 1979 at the Ecole d’Architecture de Lyon, the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, the University of Minnesota, the Polytechnic of Central London, the Technical University of Kassel, Germany, and since 1999 at the Vienna University of Technology. Jourda has her own firm, JAP , and heads EO-CITE, an architecture and urban planning consulting firm.

#131

Elsie Effah Kaufmann

Elsie Effah Kaufmann

#40598

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Elsie Akosua Biraa Effah Kaufmann is a Ghanaian academic, academic administrator, biomedical engineer, and current host of the National Science and Maths Quiz. In December 2020, Elsie Kaufmann was appointed an associate professor at the University of Ghana, and was appointed the Dean of the School of Engineering Sciences on 1 August 2022.

#132

Maria Chudnovsky

Maria Chudnovsky

#11135

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Maria Chudnovsky is an Israeli-American mathematician working on graph theory and combinatorial optimization. She is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow. Education and career Chudnovsky is a professor in the department of mathematics at Princeton University. She grew up in Russia and Israel, studying at the Technion, and received her Ph.D. in 2003 from Princeton University under the supervision of Paul Seymour. After postdoctoral research at the Clay Mathematics Institute, she became an assistant professor at Princeton University in 2005, and moved to Columbia University in 2006. By 2014, she was the Liu Family Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia.

#133

Anupama Kundoo

#56787

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Anupama Kundoo is an Indian architect. Biography Anupama Kundoo studied architecture at the Sir J. J. College of Architecture, University of Bombay and received her degree in 1989. She was awarded the Vastu Shilpa Foundation Fellowship in 1996 for her thesis on "Urban Eco-Community: Design and Analysis for Sustainability". She got her doctoral degree from the Technical University of Berlin in 2008.

#134

Ann Saterbak

#50651

Overall Influence

Ann Saterbak is a Professor of Biomedical engineering and Engineering Design and Communication at Duke University, and is a co-author of Bioengineering Fundamentals. She formerly worked at Rice University, also as a Professor of Biomedical engineering.

#135

Margrit Kennedy

#27987

Overall Influence

1939 - 2013 (74 years)

Margrit Kennedy was a German architect, professor, environmentalist, author and advocate of complementary currencies and an interest- and inflation-free economy. In 2011, she initiated the movement Occupy Money.

#136

Kiki Smith

#8242

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Kiki Smith is a German-born American artist whose work has addressed the themes of sex, birth and regeneration. Her figurative work of the late 1980s and early 1990s confronted subjects such as AIDS, feminism, and gender, while recent works have depicted the human condition in relationship to nature. Smith lives and works in the Lower East Side, New York City, and the Hudson Valley, New York State.

#137

Keller Easterling

#40548

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Keller Easterling is an American architect, urbanist, writer, and professor. She is Enid Storm Dwyer Professor and Director of the MED Program at Yale University. Biography She earned both her B.A. and M.Arch from Princeton University School of Architecture and has taught architectural design and history at Parsons The New School for Design, Pratt Institute, and Columbia University. She is Enid Storm Dwyer Professor of Architecture and director of the MED program at Yale University. Easterling is a contemporary writer working on the issues of urbanism, architecture, and organization in relatio...

#138

Claire F. Gmachl

#36273

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Claire F. Gmachl is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University. She is best known for her work in the development of quantum cascade lasers. Education and honors Gmachl earned her M.Sc. in physics from the University of Innsbruck in 1991. She went on to receive her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Vienna in 1995, graduating sub auspiciis Praesidentis . Her studies focused on integrated optical modulators and tunable surface-emitting lasers in the near infrared. From 1996 to 1998, she was a postdoctoral member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories.

#139

Kathryn Beers

#19149

Overall Influence

Kathryn L. Beers is an American polymer chemist. Beers is Leader of the Polymers and Complex Fluids group in the Materials Science and Engineering Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Her research interests include microreactors and microfluidics, advances in polymer synthesis and reaction monitoring, macromolecular separations, integrated and high throughput measurements of polymeric materials, degradable and renewable polymeric materials, and sustainable materials.

#140

Miriam Rafailovich

#45078

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Miriam Rafailovich is an American materials engineering researcher. She is the director of the Garcia Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at Stony Brook University as well as former co-director of the Chemical and Molecular Engineering program at Stony Brook University. Her publications focus mainly on nanoscale materials engineering, including nanofibers, supercritical carbon dioxide, and biodegradable polymers.

#141

Carrie Mae Weems

#11057

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Carrie Mae Weems is an American artist working in text, fabric, audio, digital images and installation video, and is best known for her photography. She achieved prominence through her early 1990s photographic project The Kitchen Table Series. Her photographs, films and videos focus on serious issues facing African Americans today, including racism, sexism, politics and personal identity.

#142

Elza Erkip

#32992

Overall Influence

Elza Erkip is a Turkish-American electrical and computer engineer, professor and wireless technology researcher at New York University. Education Erkip received her B.S. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Middle East Technical University in Turkey, and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. She ranked among the top 1% of highly cited scholars in computer science from 2002 to 2012 according to Thomson Reuters.

#143

Rebecca Richards-Kortum

#34895

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Rebecca Richards-Kortum is an American bioengineer and the Malcolm Gillis University Professor at Rice University. She is a professor in the departments of Bioengineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering, and she is the Director of Rice 360°: Institute for Global Health, and the Founder of Beyond Traditional Borders. She is the Director of the Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering, and serves as the advisor to the Provost on health-related research.

#144

Jelena Kovačević

#45745

Overall Influence

Jelena Kovačević is a Serbian American engineering professor, whose research has focused on signal processing and data science. She was named the first female dean of the New York University Tandon School of Engineering at New York University in August 2018. In May 2023, she announced she will be stepping down effective August 2024.

#145

Diane Lewis

#50404

Overall Influence

1951 - 2017 (66 years)

Diane Lewis was an American architect, author and academic. Biography Lewis received her bachelor's degree in architecture from Cooper Union in 1976. In 1977, Lewis was awarded the Rome Prize in architecture. Following her prestigious achievement she was employed at Richard Meier's office from 1977–78, followed by six years at I.M. Pei and Partners from 1978–83. Her mentor was the architect John Hejduk.

#146

Felice Frankel

#28919

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Felice Frankel is a photographer of scientific images who has received multiple awards, both for the aesthetic quality of her science photographs and for her ability to effectively communicate complex scientific information in images.

#147

Sheila O'Donnell

#47099

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Sheila O'Donnell is an Irish architect who co-founded the O'Donnell & Tuomey partnership in 1988. Her work has been cited as "thoughtful and inspired, rigorous and whimsical" by her Honorary Fellowship sponsor.

#148

Michelle Effros

#25119

Overall Influence

Michelle Effros is the George Van Osdol Professor of Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. She has made significant contributions to data compression. Early life and education Effros earned her bachelor's degree at Stanford University in 1989. She was awarded the Stanford University Frederick Emmons Terman Engineering Scholastic Award for excellence in engineering. She remained there for her graduate studies, earning a master's degree in 1990 and a PhD in 1994. She worked under the supervision of Robert M. Gray. She spent 1988 and 1989 at Hughes Aircraft Company, studying modulation schemes and future space technology.

#149

Swati Mohan

#54192

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

Swati Mohan is an Indian-American aerospace engineer and was the Guidance and Controls Operations Lead on the NASA Mars 2020 mission. Early life and education Mohan was born in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, and emigrated to the United States when she was one year old. She became interested in space upon seeing Star Trek at age 9. She had originally planned to be a pediatrician but at the age of 16 took a physics class and decided to study engineering as a way to pursue a career in space exploration. She studied Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University, before completing her master's degree and Ph.D.

#150

Jasmina Vujic

#63439

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Jasmina Vujic is an American professor of nuclear engineering at the University of California, Berkeley and the first woman to serve as chair of a collegiate nuclear engineering department in the United States.

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