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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Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Engineering,

#1051

Rula Halawani

#156969

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Rula Halawani is a Palestinian photographer and educator who lives and works in Jerusalem. She was born in East Jerusalem and received a BA in photography from the University of Saskatchewan and an MA in photographic studies from the University of Westminster. Before turning to visual arts, she worked as a freelance photojournalist for a number of magazines and newspapers. Halawani is director of the photography department at Birzeit University. In 2016, she was given a residency fellowship at the Camargo Foundation, in Cassis.

#1052

Anna Kuzemko

#143619

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Anna Arkadyevna Kuzemko is a Ukrainian scientist in the fields of botany, ecology, and nature conservation, Doctor of Biological Sciences , a leading researcher at the M.G. Kholodny Institute of botany, NAS of Ukraine. She is a member of the executive committee of the Eurasian Dry Grassland Group , a member of the International Working Group "European Vegetation Survey" and a member of the International Association for Vegetation Science .

#1053

Janet Scott

#157362

Overall Influence

1964 - 2022 (58 years)

Janet L. Scott was a South African chemist who was Professor of Sustainable Chemistry at the University of Bath. She also worked as the Director of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Centre for Doctoral Training in Sustainable Chemical Technologies.

#1054

Allison Hubel

#180392

Overall Influence

Allison Hubel is an American mechanical engineer and cryobiologist who applies her expertise in heat transfer to study the cryopreservation of biological tissue. She is a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota, where she directs the Biopreservation Core Resource and the Technological Leadership Institute, and is president-elect of the Society for Cryobiology.

#1055

Namrata Vaswani

#93426

Overall Influence

Namrata Vaswani is an Indian-American electrical engineer known for her research in compressed sensing, robust principal component analysis, signal processing, statistical learning theory, and computer vision. She is a Joseph and Elizabeth Anderlik Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University, and a professor of mathematics at Iowa State.

#1056

Jacqueline Livingston

#69517

Overall Influence

1943 - 2013 (70 years)

Jacqueline Louise Livingston was an American photographer known for her work exploring woman's role as artist and person and investigating the boundaries of intimacy and propriety. Life and career Born Jaqueline Louise Barrett in Phoenix, Arizona in August 1943, reared in Chandler, Arizona and schooled at Arizona State University, with her then husband, John Livingston, she organized Students for a Democratic Society on the ASU campus in the mid-1960s, spearheading the major SDS activities of civil rights demonstrations, education about corrupt government practices, and protests against the w...

#1057

Patricia Ann Straat

#105903

Overall Influence

1936 - 2020 (84 years)

Patricia Ann Straat was an American space scientist. She was part of the labeled release experiment of Viking program and part of the infrared interferometer spectrometer and radiometer on the Mariner 9 mission. In 2019 Straat wrote the book To Mars With Love, which documented the 1976 Viking Mission to Mars.

#1058

Meeko Oishi

#178944

Overall Influence

Meeko Mitsuko Karen Oishi is an American engineer and control theorist. She is Gardner Zemke Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Mexico. Research Oishi's research focuses on the safety of human-in-the-loop systems for transportation, assistive technology, and robotics, using methods based on stochastic control. She has also studied motor control in Parkinson's disease patients, and the effects of intelligent lighting on circadian rhythms.

#1059

Sidonia Făgărășan

#52642

Overall Influence

Sidonia Făgărășan is a Romanian biological scientist who is a professor at the Riken Institute in Japan. Her research considers the molecular mechanisms that underpin processes in gut microbioata and the mucosal barrier. In 2020, she was awarded the Kobayashi Foundation Award.

#1060

Liz Lightstone

#172735

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Elizabeth Beatrice Lightstone is a British physician and consultant who is a Professor of Nephrology at Imperial College London. Her research investigates disease in kidneys such as lupus nephritis, glomerular disease and chronic kidney disease . Lighthouse has also investigated healthcare inequalities.

#1061

Alexandra Silverthorne

#148465

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Alexandra Silverthorne is a Washington, D.C.-based artist and photographer. Her work focuses on spatial theory and exploration. She has been an adjunct professor at American University for Film and Media Arts as well as the University of the District of Columbia since 2010 where she works with undergraduates in darkroom photography.

#1062

Karen Rudie

#168914

Overall Influence

Karen Gail Rudie is a Canadian control theorist and electrical engineer known for her work on the decentralized control of discrete event dynamic systems. She is a professor of electrical and computer engineering in Queen's University at Kingston.

#1063

Rachel Davidson

#151961

Overall Influence

Rachel A. Davidson is an American civil engineer and professor in the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware. She is known for her research on natural disaster risk modeling, disaster risk management and civil infrastructure systems. She is a winner of the Dorothy Swanson Excellence in Teaching Award and a nominee for the Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize. She was the president of Society for Risk Analysis .

#1064

Elena Rodriguez-Falcon

Elena Rodriguez-Falcon

#173838

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Elena Rodriguez-Falcon is a Mexican academic who studies engineering. She is the Provost and Chief Academic Officer at Study Group. Rodriguez-Falcon was Professor of Enterprise and Engineering Education at the University of Sheffield until January 2018. Until September 2023, she was Deputy Vice Chancellor at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. Rodriguez-Falcon was the Founding President and Chief Executive Officer at the New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering having briefly served as its Provost and Chief Academic Officer.

#1065

Akiko Matsuo

#181956

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Akiko Matsuo is a Japanese engineer specialising in computational fluid dynamics. She is a professor at Keio University. Biography Matsuo was born in Saga Prefecture. She studied mathematics for her undergraduate degree at Tsuda University and became interested in computational fluid dynamics during her postgraduate studies in aeronautical engineering at Nagoya University. After graduating, she worked at a research institute that specialised in supercomputers, and completed further study at Princeton University in the United States.

#1066

Zahra Fakhraai

#142835

Overall Influence

Zahra Fakhraai is an Iranian-Canadian materials scientist who is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. Fakhraai does research focused on glass transition, nonlinear optics, nanoparticle plasmonics, and polymer physics. She studies the impact of nanoconfinement on the structure of materials. She was awarded the 2019 American Physical Society John H. Dillon Medal. Fakhraai was one of the researchers to start laying the ground work to better understand the optical properties of glass.

#1067

Hele Savin

#174406

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Hele Irene Savin is a Finnish scientist and inventor, best known for her research in solar cells and is a professor of micro and nanoelectronics at Aalto University. She is publicly known as an inventor and developer of high-efficiency solar cells using nanostructured, so-called black silicon.

#1068

Denise Bower

#150761

Overall Influence

Denise Bower is an English civil engineer and academic. She is Professor of Engineering Project Management at the University of Leeds, and an executive director at Mott MacDonald. Biography Education Bower received her Bachelor of Engineering in civil engineering from the University of Manchester in 1990. In 1995, she earned her Doctor of Philosophy in project management from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology.

#1069

Doris Derby

#51405

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Doris Adelaide Derby was an American activist and documentary photographer. She was the adjunct associate professor of anthropology at Georgia State University and the founding director of their Office of African-American Student Services and Programs. She was active in the Mississippi civil rights movement, and her work discusses the themes of race and African-American identity. She was a working member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and co-founder of the Free Southern Theater. Her photography has been exhibited internationally. Two of her photographs were published in Han...

#1070

Monica Riley

#83150

Overall Influence

1926 - 2013 (87 years)

Monica Riley was an American scientist who contributed to the discovery of messenger RNA in her Ph.D work with Arthur Pardee, and was later a pioneer in the exploration and computer representation of the Escherichia coli genome.

#1071

Camille Sophie Brès

#179318

Overall Influence

Camille-Sophie Brès is a French physicist who is a professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Her research considers optical communications and nonlinear processes in optical fibre platforms.

#1072

Abeer Alwan

#132167

Overall Influence

Abeer Alwan is an American electrical engineer and speech processing researcher. She is a professor of electrical and computer engineering in the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, and vice chair for undergraduate affairs in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering.

#1073

Renee M. Johnson

#95977

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Renee M. Johnson is an American scientist specializing in the mental health of adolescents and young adults. She researches substance abuse, substance use epidemiology, and violence in marginalized youth including persons of color, LGBTQ, and immigrants. Johnson is an associate professor in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

#1074

Anna Paradowska

#181847

Overall Influence

Anna Paradowska is an Australian engineer who is Professor in Advanced Structure Materials at the Australian Centre for Neutron Scattering and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation.

#1075

Yuri Suzuki

#132916

Overall Influence

Yuri Suzuki is a Professor of Applied Physics at Stanford University. She studies novel ground states and magnetic phenomena. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and an American Competitiveness and Innovation Fellow of the National Science Foundation.

#1076

Margaret Hyland

#174951

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Margaret Mary Hyland is a Canadian-born chemist based in New Zealand whose research focuses on aluminium technology, and the chemistry and engineering of material surfaces. She moved to New Zealand in 1989 and after holding many senior academic leadership roles supporting and developing research at the faculty, university and national level became recognised as an authority on the generation and capture of fluoride emissions from aluminium smelters and for coordinating the team that produced the 'Fluoride Emissions Management Guide' for the aluminium industry. This achievement was acknowledged when she became the first woman to win the Pickering Medal.

#1077

Maria Rubert de Ventós

#169691

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Maria Rubert de Ventós is a Spanish architect, winner of the 2004 . Among other works, she was co-designer of the expansion of the Palacio de las Cortes in 1994 and was project director for the Olympic Village on Barcelona's Avinguda Diagonal. In 2011, she became the first female university professor of Urban Planning in Spain.

#1078

Leigh McCue

#181883

Overall Influence

Leigh Shaw McCue-Weil is an American marine engineer who applies computational fluid dynamics to study the nonlinear and chaotic motion of watercraft . She is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at George Mason University, interim chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering there, and former executive director of the American Society of Naval Engineers.

#1079

Lisa Lockerd Maragakis

#182675

Overall Influence

Lisa Lockerd Maragakis is an infectious disease specialist and professor with dual appointments, both at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is also Senior Director of Infection Prevention at the Johns Hopkins Health System as well as the hospital epidemiologist. She is also a designated representative to the Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee at the Department of Health and Human Services.

#1080

Sonia Hirt

#139965

Overall Influence

Sonia Anguelova Hirt is a professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning and dean in the College of Environment + Design at the University of Georgia. Academic career After training as an architect at the University of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Geodesy in her hometown of Sofia, Hirt earned masters and doctoral degrees from the Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 2003 she became an assistant professor at the University of Toledo College of Languages, Literature and Social Sciences, and moved the next year to another assistant professorship at Virginia Tech's College of Architecture and Urban Studies.

#1081

Azra Aksamija

#134306

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Azra Akšamija is a Bosnian-Austrian artist and architectural historian. Her work focuses on the role of cultural and religious identity in conflicts, especially in the recent history of the Bosnian War and its aftermath. Akšamija is currently a professor at the Art, Culture and Technology program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .

#1082

Winnie Ye

#180682

Overall Influence

Winnie N. Ye is a Canadian electronics engineer specializing in silicon-based photonics. She is a professor of electronics at Carleton University. Education and career Ye's parents are both computer scientist professors. She studied electrical engineering as an undergraduate at Carleton University. After earning a master's degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Toronto, she returned to Carleton for her Ph.D.

#1083

Elizabeth Cosgriff-Hernandez

#108019

Overall Influence

Elizabeth Cosgriff-Hernandez is an American biomedical engineer who is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work involves the development of polymeric biomaterials for medical devices and tissue regeneration. She also serves on the scientific advisory board of ECM Biosurgery and as a consultant to several companies on biostability evaluation of medical devices. Cosgriff-Hernandez is an associate editor of the Journal of Materials Chemistry B and Fellow of the International Union of Societies for Biomaterials Science and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering Society, Royal Societ...

#1084

Deana Lawson

#161640

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Deana Lawson is an American artist, educator, and photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is primarily concerned with intimacy, family, spirituality, sexuality, and Black aesthetics. Lawson has been praised for her ability to communicate the nuances of African American experience: "Lawson's oeuvre explores intimacy, affinity, sexuality and relationships. She has work held in the International Center for Photography collections. Her photographs have been exhibited in a number of museums and galleries including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Art Ins...

#1085

Haiyan Wang

#171234

Overall Influence

Haiyan Wang is an American engineer. As the Basil S. Turner Professor of Engineering at Purdue University's School of Materials Engineering and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, she is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Ceramic Society, and American Physical Society.

#1086

Suzanne Barber

#183136

Overall Influence

Suzanne Barber is an American engineer, who is currently the AT&T Foundation Endowed Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin,

#1087

Sarah Bohndiek

#117423

Overall Influence

Sarah Elizabeth Bohndiek is a physicist whose research involves developing novel imaging approaches for early cancer detection. She is a Professor in Biomedical Physics at the University of Cambridge and a Group Leader at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute.

#1088

Ellen Moons

#118218

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Ellen Moons is a Belgian materials scientist who is a professor at Karlstad University. Her research considers the organisation of molecules and materials in thin films. She is mainly interested in organic and hybrid materials for solution processed photovoltaics.

#1089

Jean C. Chance

#84238

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Jean C. Chance is an American academic. She received her JM and MA from the University of Florida. She has served as a member of the Hearst Awards Committee for 25 of those years, and was also the chairman as well. In addition Chance has been a faculty member at UF since 1969. She was a professor of Journalism until her retirement in 2003, and was inducted into the UF Hall of Fame and Independent Florida Alligator Hall of Fame; she served as chairwoman of the Campus Communications Inc. board and Gator Wesley Foundation board.

#1090

Emilia Entcheva

#182391

Overall Influence

Emilia Entcheva is a Bulgarian–American engineer who is a professor of biomedical engineering at George Washington University. She serves as Director of the Cardiac Optogenetics and Optical Imaging Laboratory. She is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

#1091

Maria Ibáñez

#102703

Overall Influence

Maria Ibañez Sabaté is a Spanish materials scientist and Professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. Her research considers functional nanomaterials for next generation technologies. She was awarded the ETH Zurich Ružička Prize in 2017.

#1092

Su Donglin

#182831

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Su Donglin is a Chinese engineer specializing in electromagnetic compatibility. She is an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a professor at Beihang University. She has been hailed as "female electromagnetic detective".

#1093

Jean Langhorne

#119593

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Jean Langhorne is a British biologist who is a group leader at the Francis Crick Institute. Langhorne has studied immune responses to malaria and Plasmodium falciparum. She was awarded the 2016 EMBO-BioMalPar Lifetime Achievement Award for her work on malaria immunology. She is Associate Editor of PLOS Pathogens and on the Advisory Board of Trends in Immunology.

#1094

Sandy Skoglund

#29845

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Sandy Skoglund is an American photographer and installation artist. Skoglund creates surrealist images by building elaborate sets or tableaux, furnishing them with carefully selected colored furniture and other objects, a process of which takes her months to complete. Finally, she photographs the set, mostly including live models. The works are characterized by an overwhelming amount of one object and either bright, contrasting colors or a monochromatic color scheme.

#1095

Daphne Spain

#91980

Overall Influence

Daphne Spain is an American academic who studies urban and environmental planning. She is the James M. Page Professor in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia.

#1096

Joycelyn Harrison

#139309

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Joycelyn Harrison is an African-American engineer who is Associate Dean of the College of Aeronautics and Engineering at Kent State University. In 2006 she was awarded the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal. Her research considers the development of novel piezoelectric materials.

#1097

Hannah Lewi

#178737

Overall Influence

Hannah Lewi is an architectural historian and educator based in the Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne. Education and career Lewi was educated at the University of Western Australia, and worked at Curtin University before relocating to Melbourne. She has been a registered architect with the Australian Institute of Architects.

#1098

Aleksandra Filipovska

#113167

Overall Influence

Aleksandra Filipovska is a Professor, Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology and NHMRC Senior Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia, heading a research group at the Telethon Kids Institute. Specializing in biochemistry and molecular biology, she has made contributions to the understanding of human mitochondrial genetics in health and disease.

#1099

Beverly Grier

#82259

Overall Influence

Beverly Grier is an Americann academic in the study of child labor Sub-Saharan Africa, and former professor of government at Clark University. She is also the former president of the African Studies Association. She currently serves as Interim Associate Dean for Curriculum & Student Affairs at North Carolina A&T State University.

#1100

Marta Civil

#50665

Overall Influence

Marta Civil is an American mathematics educator. Her research involves understanding the cultural background of minority schoolchildren, particularly Hispanic and Latina/o students in the Southwestern United States, and using that understanding to promote parent engagement and focus mathematics teaching on students' individual strengths. She is the Roy F. Graesser Endowed Professor at the University of Arizona, where she holds appointments in the department of mathematics, the department of mathematics education, and the department of teaching, learning, and sociocultural studies.

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