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 …

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

Search Influential People

Clear Form

List of the most influential female people in Engineering,

#1001

Giulia Tagliabue

#179671
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (39 years)
Giulia Tagliabue is an Italian engineer specialized in nanophotonics. She is a professor at EPFL's School of Engineering, where she leads the Laboratory of Nanoscience for Energy Technologies . Career Tagliabue studied mechanical engineering at University of Udine and received her Master degree in 2009. The same year, she also received a Diploma from the School of Advanced Studies at the University of Udine. In 2009, she joined John Thome's laboratory at EPFL as a research assistant and then in 2010 moved to ETH Zurich to work as a graduate student with Dimos Poulikakos. She obtained a PhD in mechanical engineering in 2015 with a thesis on nanophotonic engineering for energy devices.
Go to Profile
#1002

Rose Mutiso

#141252
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (38 years)
Rose M. Mutiso is a Kenyan activist and materials scientist. She is co-founder and CEO of The Mawazo Institute. She is the research director of the Energy for Growth Hub. She was short listed for the 2020 Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award.
Go to Profile
#1003

Irene Beyerlein

#61180
Overall Influence
Irene Jane Beyerlein is an American materials scientist who is the Mehrabian Interdisciplinary Endowed Chair at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a Fellow of the Materials Research Society.
Go to Profile
#1004

Kristin Yvonne Rozier

#114661
Overall Influence
Kristin Yvonne Rozier is an American aerospace engineer and computer scientist whose research investigates formal methods including temporal logic and model checking for the formal verification of safety-critical systems, especially those involving air transport, unmanned aerial vehicles, and air traffic control. She is Black & Veatch Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Mathematics at Iowa State University, where she heads the Laboratory for Temporal Logic.
Go to Profile
#1005

Laura Heyderman

#178758
Overall Influence
Laura Jane Heyderman is a physicist, materials scientist, academic and Professor of Mesoscopic Systems at the Department of Materials, ETH Zurich and Paul Scherrer Institute. Her research is focused on magnetism and magnetic materials.
Go to Profile
#1006

Julie Swann

#91773
Overall Influence
Julie LeAnne Swann is an American systems engineer and operations researcher who studies optimization-based improvements to supply chains, logistics, health care, the mathematical modelling of infectious disease, and disaster relief. She is A. Doug Allison Distinguished Professor and head of the Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at North Carolina State University. She was elected President-Elect of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences in 2023
Go to Profile
#1007

Lin Cai

#124905
Overall Influence
Lin Cai is a Chinese-Canadian telecommunications engineer known for her work on topology control in wireless networks and in the applications of wireless communications to self-driving cars. She was educated at the University of Waterloo and is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Victoria.
Go to Profile
#1008

Deborah Thurston

#73839
Overall Influence
Deborah Lee Thurston is an American civil engineer specializing in the engineering design process and sustainable engineering. She is Gutsgell Professor Emerita of Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Go to Profile
#1009

Nina-Marie Lister

#137359
Overall Influence
Nina-Marie Lister is Professor and Graduate Director of the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Toronto Metropolitan University , where she also leads the Ecological Design Lab. In 2021, she was appointed a Senior Fellow of Massey College. From 2010 to 2014, she was a Visiting Associate Professor of landscape architecture and urban planning at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her career has spanned private and public-sector work, integrating ecological science with planning and design. As both a researcher and a practitioner, she is founding principal of PLANDFORM, a creative design practice.
Go to Profile
#1010

Lorna Thorpe

#170287
Overall Influence
Lorna E. Thorpe is an American epidemiologist who is a professor and Director of the Division of Epidemiology at NYU Langone Health. She serves as Vice Chair of Strategy and Planning in the Department of Population Health and on the Board of the American College of Epidemiology.
Go to Profile
#1011

Lynette Willoughby

Lynette Willoughby
#170271
Overall Influence
Helen Lynette Estelle Willoughby is a feminist electronic engineer and champion of teaching women about technology, whose career has spanned 50 years. She was a lecturer on microprocessor engineering at Leeds Polytechnic and Leeds Beckett University for 24 years. She was the president of the Women's Engineering Society from 1993 to 1995.
Go to Profile
#1012

Minerva Yeung

#175536
Overall Influence
Minerva Yeung is an American research scientist and educator best known for her work in video processing, multimedia information systems, and digital watermarking. She was selected as an IEEE Fellow in 2019 "for leadership in multimedia signal processing." Yeung's research and work have been featured in publications The New York Times, Bloomberg News, and Sina News.
Go to Profile
#1013

Jeanne VanBriesen

#130414
Overall Influence
Jeanne M. VanBriesen is an American civil engineer who is Vice Provost and the Duquesne Light Company Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research considers the realization of sustainable natural and engineered water systems. She is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Environmental and Water Resources Institute, Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors and American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Go to Profile
#1014

Eve Sonneman

#112301
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Eve Sonneman is an American photographer and artist. She did a series of similar sequences in color and black and white and for diptychs. Obtained a BFA in painting from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1967. Obtained a MFA from University of New Mexico in Photography in 1969.
Go to Profile
#1015

Sonia Aïssa

#131405
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Sonia Aïssa is a professor in the Institut national de la recherche scientifique of the Université du Québec, in the INRS Research Centre for Energy, Materials, and Telecommunications. Aïssa earned a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering in 1998 from McGill University, following which she joined the INRS.
Go to Profile
#1016

Shalinee Kishore

#166164
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Shalinee Kishore is an American electrical engineer whose research includes wireless networks, network schedulers, and energy management for smart buildings and smart grids. She is Iacocca Chair Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Director of the Institute for Cyber Physical Infrastructure & Energy at the Lehigh University P. C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science.
Go to Profile
#1017

Maya Nasr

#172832
Overall Influence
1997 - Present (27 years)
Maya Nasr is a Lebanese postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University. She previously received her BS'18, MS'21, and PhD'23 in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research areas include aerospace engineering and international space law, policy, and politics.
Go to Profile
#1018

Valeria De Antonellis

#129486
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Valeria De Antonellis is Professor Emeritus at University of Brescia, Italy, since February 2021. Previously she was a professor of computer science and engineering at University of Brescia, Italy, where she led the research group on "Databases, Information Systems and Web" at Department of Information Engineering.
Go to Profile
#1019

Jasna Jakobsen

#112819
Overall Influence
Jasna Bogunović Jakobsen is a Norwegian wind engineer who studies the structural loads and aeroelastic flutter caused by wind on bridges and bridge cables. She is a professor in the Department of Machinery, Building and Materials Technology at the University of Stavanger.
Go to Profile
#1020

Corina Sandu

#178830
Overall Influence
Corina Sandu is a Romanian-American mechanical engineer, the Robert E. Hord Jr. Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech. Her research topics include multibody systems, vehicle dynamics, and terramechanics, the interactions between soil properties and vehicle dynamics.
Go to Profile
#1021

Namrata Joshi

#56236
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (123 years)
Namrata Joshi is an Indian film critic based in New Delhi. Originally working for Outlook, she remained there from 1999 till 2015, when she joined The Hindu. She won the National Film Award for Best Film Critic in 2004
Go to Profile
#1022

Kutlu Ö. Ülgen

#143107
Overall Influence
Kutlu Özergin Ülgen is a Turkish biochemical engineer researching pharmacophore modelling to identify pharmacological chaperones used to treat infectious diseases, genetic diseases, and cancer. Ülgen is a professor in the department of chemical engineering at Boğaziçi University.
Go to Profile
#1023

Christina Cogdell

#107144
Overall Influence
Christina Grace Cogdell is an American art historian and educator. Cogdell is currently Professor of Design and Chair of the Department of Design at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on the intersection between architecture and biology, as well as eugenics.
Go to Profile
#1024

Elisa Valero

#174696
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Elisa Valero Ramos is a Spanish architect and professor at the High Technical Architecture School of the University of Granada . Her work has been recognized in 2018 with the Swiss Architectural Award.
Go to Profile
#1025

Ecaterina Andronescu

#112039
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Ecaterina Andronescu is a Romanian engineer, professor, and politician. A member of the Social Democratic Party , she sat in the Romanian Chamber of Deputies from 1996 to 2008, representing Bucharest, and was a Senator from 2008 until 2020, for the same city. In the Adrian Năstase cabinet, she was Education Minister from 2000 until June 2003. She held the same position in the cabinet of Emil Boc from 2008 to 2009, in the Victor Ponta cabinet during 2012, and finally in the Viorica Dăncilă cabinet for under 9 months between November 2018 and August 2019. She is married and has one child.
Go to Profile
#1026

Susan Derges

#53148
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Susan Derges is a British photographic artist living and working in Devon. She specialises in camera-less photographic processes, most often working with natural landscapes. She has exhibited extensively in Europe, America and Japan and her works are in several important museum collections.
Go to Profile
#1027

Adriana Lita

#65696
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Adriana Eleni Lita is a materials scientist. She works in the Faint Photonics Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where her research has included Bell test experiments and the practical implementation of quantum key distribution. She completed a Ph.D. at University of Michigan in 2000. Her dissertation was titled Correlation between microstructure and surface structure evolution in polycrystalline films. Her doctoral advisor was John E. Sanchez, Jr.
Go to Profile
#1028

Christine P. Hendon

#87291
Overall Influence
Christine P. Hendon is an electrical engineer and computer scientist and an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University in New York City. Hendon is a pioneer in medical imaging. She develops biomedical optics technologies, using optical coherence tomography and near infrared spectroscopy systems, that enable physicians to perform guided interventional procedures and allow for structure-function dissection of human tissues and organs. Her advances in imaging technologies have led to improved diagnostic abilities and treatments for cardiac arrhythmias as well as breast cancer and preterm birth.
Go to Profile
#1029

Judith Lodge

#129449
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Judith Lodge is an American Canadian painter and photographer who often explores how the two mediums play off of and inform one another. Her abstract portraits of memories, situations, events, and people are inspired by the unconscious, dreams, journals, and nature. She has worked in Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto, Banff, Minnesota, and New York, where she has lived for more than thirty years.
Go to Profile
#1030

Susan Stroman

Susan Stroman
#6043
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Susan P. Stroman is an American theatre director, choreographer, film director and performer. Her notable theater productions include Oklahoma!, The Music Man, Crazy for You, Contact, The Producers, The Frogs, The Scottsboro Boys, Bullets Over Broadway, POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive, and New York, New York.
Go to Profile
#1031

Monique Chyba

#89389
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Monique Chyba is a control theorist who works as a professor of mathematics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her work on control theory has involved the theory of singular trajectories, and applications in the control of autonomous underwater vehicles. More recently, she has also applied control theory to the prediction and modeling of the spread of COVID-19 in Hawaii.
Go to Profile
#1032

Amina Zoubeidi

#178841
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Amina Zoubeidi is a Canadian research scientist and prostate cancer researcher. She's a scientist at the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute and an associate professor in the Department of Urologic Sciences at the University of British Columbia. During her tenure at UBC, Zoubeidi and her research team developed the first drug that targets and blocks BRN2, thus stopping Neuroendocrine prostate cancer tumours and creating a possible treatment for the previously thought incurable disease.
Go to Profile
#1033

Claudia Mazzà

#176743
Overall Influence
Claudia Mazzà is a professor of biomechanics at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Sheffield. Her research centres on biomechanics of human movement. She is the director of the EPSRC funded MultiSim project and a leading scientist in the Mobilise-D research project.
Go to Profile
#1034

Liesl Folks

#148242
Overall Influence
Liesl Folks has been a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Arizona since 2019. She served as the provost for the University of Arizona from 2019 to 2023. Since 2023, she also serves as the Vice President for Semiconductor Strategy at the University of Arizona.
Go to Profile
#1035

Polly Fordyce

#104325
Overall Influence
Polly Fordyce is an Associate Professor of Genetics and Bioengineering and fellow of the ChEM-H Institute at Stanford University. Her laboratory's research focuses on developing and applying new microfluidic platforms for quantitative, high-throughput biophysics and biochemistry and single-cell genomics.
Go to Profile
#1036

Christine Ortiz

#171895
Overall Influence
Christine Ortiz is the dean of graduate education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and Morris Cohen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. The goal of Ortiz's research program is a mechanistic-based understanding of tissue function, quality, and pathology. She is planning to create a new university, centered on project-based learning.
Go to Profile
#1037

Esther Rodriguez-Villegas

#179154
Overall Influence
Esther Rodriguez-Villegas is a Spanish engineer, inventor and the Professor of Low Power Electronics at Imperial College London. Rodriguez-Villegas develops lightweight, low-power electronic devices for real-time monitoring of physiological signals. She was awarded the 2020 Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal for her work on wearable medical devices. In 2020, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Go to Profile
#1038

Limor Fried

Limor Fried
#170762
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Limor Fried is an American electrical engineer and owner of the electronics hobbyist company Adafruit Industries. She is influential in the open-source hardware community, having participated in the first Open Source Hardware Summit and the drafting of the Open Source Hardware definition, and is known by her moniker ladyada, an homage to Lady Ada Lovelace.
Go to Profile
#1039

Wei Chen

#70327
Overall Influence
Wei Chen is a Chinese-American mechanical engineer known for her work on robust engineering design, robust design of experiments, metamodeling in design, uncertainty quantification, and design under uncertainty. She is the Wilson-Cook Professor in Engineering Design at Northwestern University, where she chairs the mechanical engineering department.
Go to Profile
#1040

Felicia Hardison Londré

#98768
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Felicia Hardison Londré is Curators’ Professor of Theatre at the University of Missouri-Kansas City . She specializes in 19th and 20th-century American, French, and Russian theatre history, as well as in Shakespearean dramaturgy.
Go to Profile
#1041

Jionghua Jin

#177029
Overall Influence
Jionghua Jin is a Chinese-American industrial engineer whose research involves quality engineering, advanced manufacturing, and data fusion. She is a professor of industrial and operations engineering at the University of Michigan, where she directs the manufacturing program in the division of integrative systems and design.
Go to Profile
#1042

Giorgina Madìa

#172674
Overall Influence
1904 - Present (120 years)
Giorgina Madìa was an Italian physicist and electrical engineer, specializing in electrical communications, and a member of the Italian resistance during World War II. Biography Her parents were Ernesto and Olga Ferrari.
Go to Profile
#1043

Margaret Ackerman

#173101
Overall Influence
Margaret Ackerman is an American engineer who is a professor at Dartmouth College. Ackerman develops high throughput tools to evaluate the antibody response in disease states. She oversees biological and chemical engineering in the Thayer School of Engineering.
Go to Profile
#1044

Laurel Larsen

#170886
Overall Influence
Laurel G. Larsen is an Associate professor of Earth Systems Science for the Department of Geography and Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley where she also heads the Environmental Systems Dynamics Laboratory. Her areas of expertise include hydroecology, geomorphology, complex systems, and environmental modeling.
Go to Profile
#1045

Paula Whitman

#177824
Overall Influence
1960 - 2006 (46 years)
Paula Whitman was an Australian architect, academic, writer, and Australian Institute of Architects chapter president—the first woman to hold the position since its inception in 1888—who made a significant contribution to Australian architectural education, and as an advocate for Australian women in architecture. The Australian Institute of Architects’ Paula Whitman Leadership in Gender Equity Prize is named in her honour.
Go to Profile
#1046

Silvia Bolland

#181042
Overall Influence
Silvia Bolland is an American biomedical scientist serving as chief of the autoimmunity and functional genomics section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. She earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Cantabria and received postdoctoral training at Harvard and Rockefeller University. Her areas of research include the identification of new genetic modifiers of systemic autoimmune disease, dose effect of Toll-like receptor genes and its role in autoimmune pathologies, and inhibitory signaling pathways mediated by the IgG Fc receptor and the phosphoin...
Go to Profile
#1047

Doreen Thomas

#75000
Overall Influence
Doreen Anne Thomas, is a mathematician and electrical and mechanical engineer. She is an emeritus professor of Mechanical Engineering at Melbourne University and director of the start-up company MineOptima.
Go to Profile
#1048

Elisa Riedo

#118111
Overall Influence
Elisa Riedo is a physicist and researcher known for her contributions in condensed matter physics, nanotechnology and engineering. She is the Herman F. Mark Chair Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering and the director of the picoForce Lab.
Go to Profile
#1049

Jacqueline Bishop

#36100
Overall Influence
Jacqueline Bishop is a writer, visual artist and photographer from Jamaica, who now lives in New York City, where she is a professor at the School of Liberal Studies at New York University . She is the founder of Calabash, an online journal of Caribbean art and letters, housed at NYU, and also writes for the Huffington Post and the Jamaica Observer Arts Magazine. In 2016 her book The Gymnast and Other Positions won the nonfiction category of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.
Go to Profile
#1050

Erica Plambeck

#172066
Overall Influence
Erica L. Plambeck is an American operations researcher specializing in supply chain management and environmental sustainability. She is Charles A. Holloway Professor of Operations, Information & Technology in the Stanford Graduate School of Business, professor in the Stanford University Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, senior fellow in the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and the 2022–2023 Dhirubhai Ambani Faculty Fellow in Entrepreneurship at Stanford University.
Go to Profile