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,

#1251

Stephanie Cole

#61175

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Patricia Stephanie Cole is an English stage, television, radio and film actress, known for high-profile roles in shows such as Tenko , Open All Hours , A Bit of a Do , Waiting for God , Keeping Mum , Doc Martin , Cabin Pressure , Still Open All Hours , Man Down and as Sylvia Goodwin in ITV soap opera Coronation Street .

#1252

Lisa Kron

#88030

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Elizabeth S. "Lisa" Kron is an American actress and playwright. She is best known for writing the lyrics and book to the musical Fun Home for which she won both the Tony Award for Best Original Score and the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical. Fun Home was also awarded the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2015 and the 2014 Obie Award for writing for musical theater.

#1253

Leslie Reid

#184655

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Leslie Reid is a Canadian painter and printmaker from Ottawa, Ontario, known for adding a visual and sensory experience of light to the landscape tradition of painting in Canada. She is also an educator.

#1254

Dannielle Engle

#188543

Overall Influence

Dannielle Engle is an American biologist and assistant professor of the regulatory biology laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Engle’s research aims at improving detection and treatment of pancreatic cancer.

#1255

Hillary Brown

#173729

Overall Influence

Hillary Brown is an American architect, and professor at City College of New York. She is a fellow of the American Institute of Architects. She won a Berlin Prize. Life She graduated from Oberlin College and Yale University. As assistant commissioner at New York City's Department of Design and Construction, Brown founded the Office of Sustainable Design in 1996. While working for New York City's Department of Design and Construction, the firm published the City of New York's High Performance Building Guidelines in Spring of 1999. Brown is founding principal of the firm New Civic Works. She is ...

#1256

Sharon Mazer

#174910

Overall Influence

Sharon Mazer is an academic in New Zealand who is professor of theatre and performance studies at Auckland University of Technology. She is known for her book, Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle, and as a researcher of popular performance.

#1257

Patricia Broderick

Patricia Broderick

#70392

Overall Influence

1925 - 2003 (78 years)

Patricia Biow Broderick was an American playwright and painter. She was the wife of actor James Broderick and the mother of actor Matthew Broderick. Early life and career Broderick was born Patricia Biow in New York City, the daughter of Sophie and Milton H. Biow , president of an advertising firm. Her family were Jewish immigrants from Germany and Poland. When she was 18, her mother died in 1943 at the age of 48. Her father died 33 years later. In Mexico, Broderick studied painting with Rufino Tamayo who had been her art teacher at the Dalton School in Manhattan. She began writing plays in the 1940s and several of them were performed in New York and London.

#1258

Elizabeth Xu

#187460

Overall Influence

Elizabeth Xu is a Chinese businesswoman, author, and professor specializing in the developing advanced technology and digital business including software-as-a-service, big data, and mobile enterprise software.

#1259

Ka-Man Tse

#173393

Overall Influence

Ka-Man Tse is a Hong Kong-born photographer, video artist, and educator based in New York. Influenced by her Asian-American and queer identity, Tse primarily uses portraiture to tell stories about the people, identity, visibility, and place in and around the queer community.

#1260

Joanne Leonard

#111578

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Joanne Leonard is an American photographer, photo collage artist, and feminist based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her work has been included in major art history textbooks and has been shown internationally in galleries and museums.

#1261

Marina Goldovskaya

#31293

Overall Influence

1941 - 2022 (81 years)

Marina Yevseyevna Goldovskaya was a Russian-American documentary filmmaker known for her candid portrayal of people. Early life and education Her father worked with Eisenstein in starting the VGIK. Career Goldovskaya documented ordinary people, seamstresses, a female astronaut, literary and artistic legends, as well as political leaders. Born in Moscow, she was the winner of USSR State Prize in 1989.

#1262

Joanne Jackson Johnson

#181845

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Joanne Jackson Johnson is a Canadian photographer. Early life and education Johnson was born on October 17, 1943, in Winnipeg, Manitoba. In 1965, Johnson received a BS from the University of Manitoba. In 1972, Johnson received an MFA in Film and Photography from the University of Minnesota.

#1263

Martha Davis

#74344

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Martha F. Davis is a professor of law at Northeastern University in Boston. She authored the book Brutal Need, a study of the welfare rights movement of 1960 to 1973. Early life and education Davis is a native of Kansas. She holds an A.B. in anthropology, magna cum laude from Harvard College , a B.A. and M.A. from Trinity College, Oxford, and a J.D. from University of Chicago Law School where she was a member of its Law Review.

#1264

Dory Reeves

#179962

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Dory Elizabeth Reeves is a New Zealand planning academic. As of 2018 she is a full professor at the University of Auckland. Academic career After a 1990 PhD titled 'An examination of building for sale under licence as a low cost home ownerhsip [sic] tool.' at the University of Sheffield, Reeves worked in the public sector, higher education and private practice in the UK before moving to the University of Auckland in 2008, rising to full professor.

#1265

Nora Sayre

#121886

Overall Influence

1932 - 2001 (69 years)

Nora Clemens Sayre was an American film critic and essayist. She was a reviewer of films for The New York Times in the 1970s, and, from 1981, a writing teacher for many years at Columbia University. She specialised in the Cold War and authored books such as Running Time: Films of the Cold War in which she examined Hollywood movie-making in the 1950s.

#1266

Felicia Lee

#180618

Overall Influence

1992 - Present (32 years)

Felicia Lee is an American competition swimmer. She is currently on the U.S. National Team, and was a member of the American silver medal team in the 4x50-meter medley relay at the 2014 FINA World Swimming Championships. She previously competed for Stanford University as a collegiate swimmer, and was recognized as the top college female swimmer in the United States in 2014.

#1267

Jacqueline Hayden

#169171

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jacqueline Hayden is an American feminist artist and professor emerita of film and photography at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Biography In the 1980s, Hayden created a Sightings Natural History Series, in which "she has traveled to the four corners of the zoo, and to the very ends of the natural history museum" according to a review by Pamela Kessler in The Washington Post. In a review of work from her Dislocation/Relocation series, Jo Ann Lewis writes for The Washington Post that Hayden "composes her layered color photographs within the camera, often reusing the same film in two different cameras, one to establish background, another for foreground.

#1268

Joanna Priestley

Joanna Priestley

#91471

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Joanna Priestley is an American contemporary film director, producer, animator and teacher. Her films are in the collections of the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Priestley has had retrospectives at the British Film Institute, Museum of Modern Art and Hiroshima International Animation Festival in Japan. Bill Plympton calls her the "Queen of independent animation". Priestley lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

#1269

Janet Allard

#177096

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Janet Allard is an American playwright and theatre educator. Allard was born and raised in Hawaii. She currently teaches in the Theatre Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Allard's plays have been produced at The Guthrie Lab, The Kennedy Center, Mixed Blood Theatre Company, Playwrights Horizons, Yale Repertory Theatre, The Yale Cabaret, The Women's Project and Productions, Perseverance Theatre, The House Of Candles, and Access Theater in New York City, as well as internationally in Ireland, England, Greece, and New Zealand. She has twice been awarded a Jerome Fello...

#1270

Lorraine Gilbert

#169403

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Lorraine Gilbert is a Canadian artist and photographer focusing on landscape as a genre, raising questions pertaining to the social and economic aspects of landscape as art, as nature, and as lived experience. She lives in Ottawa and in Quebec.

#1271

Kiana Aran

#191340

Overall Influence

Kiana Aran is an American biomedical entrepreneur who is Associate Professor in Medical Diagnostics at the Keck Graduate Institute. She is also the Chief Scientific Officer at Cardea Bio. Her research considers the application of two dimensional materials in disease detection and diagnosis. She was awarded the 2021 Nature – Estée Lauder Research Award for Inspiring Women in Science.

#1272

Sylvie Readman

#182999

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Sylvie Readman is a Canadian photographer. Her work is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.

#1273

Misaki Wayengera

#173420

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Misaki Wayengera is a Ugandan physician, academician, and a medical researcher. He serves as a lecturer for Pathology, Immunology and Molecular Biology at Makerere University College of Health Sciences. He is the chairperson of Uganda's Scientific Advisory Committee on COVID-19 for the Ministry of Health and the National Task Force.

#1274

Marian Garfinkel

#181388

Overall Influence

1932 - 2020 (88 years)

Marian S. Garfinkel was an early researcher in the field of complementary medicine, showing that yoga could be used to treat and possibly cure a variety of hand injuries resulting from repetitive use. She studied with B. K. S. Iyengar for over 40 years, making annual trips to yoga centers in India, France, California and Michigan. As a result of her contact with Iyengar, she and her former husband Marvin Garfinkel are credited with inspiring the sculptor Robert Engman to create the sculpture After Iyengar, currently on display at the Morris Arboretum at the University of Pennsylvania and at t...

#1275

Cecile Reynaud

#117454

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Cecile Reynaud is an American volleyball educator and retired coach of the Florida State Lady Seminoles volleyball team. After her retirement from coaching she was an associate professor with the sport management program at Florida State University until August, 2015. She also served as an interim assistant athletic director and senior women's administrator at Florida State University from 1994-95. She has served as a television color analyst for collegiate volleyball matches on ACCN, Fox Sports Net South, Sunshine Network and ESPN.

#1276

Nancy Davenport

#144956

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Nancy Davenport is a Canadian photographer. Her photography, animations and digital work have been exhibited at venues including the Liverpool Biennial, the Istanbul Biennial, the 25th Bienal de São Paulo, DHC/Art Fondation pour l’art Contemporain in Montreal and the First Triennial of Photography & Video at the International Center of Photography, NY.

#1277

Ivenue Love-Stanley

#191528

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Ivenue Love-Stanley, , , is an American architect. She co-founded Stanley, Love-Stanley P.C., an Atlanta-based architecture and design firm. She was the first African-American woman to graduate from Georgia Institute of Technology's College of Architecture, and in 1983 she became the first African-American woman licensed architect in the Southeast. Love-Stanley's projects include the Aquatic Center for the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games, the Lyke House Catholic Student Center at the Atlanta University Center, the Southwest YMCA and St. Paul's Episcopal Church , the Auburn Market in Sweet Aubur...

#1278

Chi Jang Yin

#191273

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Chi Jang Yin is an American filmmaker, photographer, curator and educator. She is best known for her experimental films that explore displacement, alienation, the absence of representation, and narrative memory. Yin left China in the latter part of The Cultural Revolution. Her mother, an artist from an aristocratic family, first led the family to Taiwan, and then to Canada. Yin received her undergraduate and graduate degrees at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied with Yvonne Rainer and Shellie Fleming. She was the Head of Media Art at the Department of Art, Media, and Design at DePaul University.

#1279

Cheryl J. Sanders

#62614

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Cheryl J. Sanders is an African-American professor and scholar of Christian Ethics. Her work on womanist ethics has been influential in the development of the field. She teaches Christian Ethics at Howard University School of Divinity. Her books include Ministry at the Margins, Saints in Exile: The Holiness Pentecostal Experience in African American Religion, and Empowerment Ethics for a Liberated People: A Path to African American Social Transformation.

#1280

Bea Nettles

#90530

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Bea Nettles is a fine art photographer and author currently residing in Champaign/Urbana, Illinois. Education Nettles earned her BFA at the University of Florida in 1968. She then went on to pursue an MFA at the University of Illinois, graduating in 1970.

#1281

Kelsey Leonard

#96692

Overall Influence

Kelsey Leonard is a water governance researcher specializing in Indigenous water rights at the University of Waterloo. She was the first Native American woman to earn a science degree from the University of Oxford, which she earned in 2012. She earned an MSc in water science, policy and management from St. Cross College, one of the thirty-eight colleges of the University of Oxford. Her master's thesis, “Water Quality For Native Nations: Achieving A Trust Responsibility”, discusses water quality regulation and how water resources on tribal land are not protected.

#1282

Barbara Rosenthal

Barbara Rosenthal

#88813

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Barbara Ann Rosenthal is an American avant-garde artist, writer and performer. Rosenthal's existential themes have contributed to contemporary art and philosophy. Rosenthal's pseudonyms are "Homo Futurus," which was taken from the title of one of her books, and "Cassandra-on-the-Hudson," which alludes to "the dangerous world she envisions" while creating art in her studio and residence on the Hudson River in Greenwich Village, NYC. Rosenthal successfully trademarked "Homo Futurus" in 2022.

#1283

Pat Ward Williams

Pat Ward Williams

#117523

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Pat Ward Williams is an African-American photographer whose work often engages with the complexities of race, gender, and history. In addition to her smaller-scale photographs and installations, she has designed three public artworks in Los Angeles.

#1284

Connie Imboden

#169661

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Connie Imboden was born in 1953 and is an American photographer known for her work in nudes, using reflections in water and mirrors. Her photographs are represented in many collections including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany, as well as many other public and private collections throughout Europe and the Americas.

#1285

Lynne Bentley-Kemp

#190079

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Dr. Lynne Austin Bentley-Kemp is an American fine arts photographer, photography educator, and researcher. Prior to becoming professor of photography at Florida Keys Community College,was an associate professor at Rochester Institute of Technology. She holds a Ph.D. from Florida Atlantic University . Bentley-Kemp has researched the act of collecting photos. Her work includes the 34 black-and-white infrared photographs series entitled, Windows to the Sun. Most recently she has designed three illustrated books and exhibited a solo show of iPhone images titled ‘Atmospheric Conditions’ at the Studios of Key West in 2020.

#1286

Masumi Hayashi

#115932

Overall Influence

1945 - 2006 (61 years)

Dr. Masumi Hayashi was an American photographer and artist who taught art at Cleveland State University, in Cleveland, Ohio, for 24 years. She won a Cleveland Arts Prize; three Ohio Arts Council awards; a Fulbright fellowship; awards from National Endowment for the Arts, Arts Midwest, and Florida Arts Council; as well as a 1997 Civil Liberties Educational Fund research grant.

#1287

An-My Lê

#38968

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

An-My Lê is a Vietnamese American photographer, and professor at Bard College. She is a 2012 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and has received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship , the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program Award , and the Tiffany Comfort Foundation Fellowship . Her work was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial.

#1288

Andrea Modica

#129437

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Andrea Modica is an American photographer and professor of photography at Drexel University. She is known for portrait photography and for her use of platinum printing, created using an 8"x10" large format camera. Modica is the author of many monographs, including Treadwell and Barbara .

#1289

Celia Brackenridge

#172511

Overall Influence

1950 - 2018 (68 years)

Celia Brackenridge OBE was a British sportswoman, campaigner and academic. In the mid-1980s, Brackenridge was recognised as the most capped Great Britain lacrosse player. She founded the Women's Sports Foundation UK and also conducted research into the physical and sexual abuse of young sportspeople by coaches.

#1290

Mandy Haberman

#184554

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Mandy Nicola Haberman is an English inventor and entrepreneur. She is founding member and Freeman of the Guild of Entrepreneurs, Director of the Intellectual Property Awareness Network and a visiting Fellow at Bournemouth University, from where she has an honorary doctorate. She is best known for her successfully upheld patent enforcement battles and inventing the Haberman Feeder, the Anywayup Cup and the Suckle Feeder.

#1291

Margareta Niculescu

Margareta Niculescu

#88288

Overall Influence

1926 - 2018 (92 years)

Margareta Niculescu was a Romanian artist, puppeteer, director, teacher and theater director. She contributed to the renewal, since 1950s, of the art of puppetry in Europe and the rest of the world. She was director of Tandarica Theatre of Bucharest. From 2000 until 2004 she was president of the International Puppetry Association in Charleville-Mezieres, in Ardennes, and co-founded with Jacques Felix, the National School of Puppetry Arts in that city. In 1978 she won the Erasmus Prize together with other noted puppeteers Yves Joly, Peter Schumann and the Napoli brothers.

#1292

Judy Irola

#181079

Overall Influence

1943 - 2021 (78 years)

Judith Carol Irola was an American cinematographer, film producer, and director. The third woman accepted into the American Society of Cinematographers, she was head of the cinematography department at USC School of Cinematic Arts for 15 years and held the Conrad Hall Chair in Cinematography there. Irola co-founded a National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians branch in San Francisco in 1969, and was a founding member of the short-lived Cine Manifest film collective in 1972.

#1293

Amy Stein

#168709

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Amy Stein is an American photographer. Some of her photo series include Stranded and Domesticated. Her work has been shown at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.. In 2007 she was one of fifteen "emerging artists" selected by American Photo magazine.

#1294

Leza Lowitz

#82836

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Leza Lowitz is an American expatriate writer residing in Tokyo, Japan and in the American Southwest. She has written, edited and co-translated over twenty books, many about Japan, its relationship with the US, on the changing role of Japanese women in literature, art and society, and about the lasting effect of the Second World War and the desire for reconciliation in contemporary Japanese society. She is also an internationally renown yoga and mindfulness teacher recognized for her work bridging poetry and the spiritual path through disciplines like yoga and mindfulness.

#1295

Sheila Pinkel

#172828

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Sheila Pinkel is an American visual artist, activist and educator whose practice includes experimental light studies, photography, conceptual and graphic works, and public art. She first gained notice for cameraless photography begun in the 1970s that used light-sensitive emulsions and technologies to explore form; her later, socially conscious art combines research, data visualization, and documentary photography, making critical and ethical inquiries into the military-industrial complex and nuclear industry, consumption and incarceration patterns, and the effects of war on survivors, among other subjects.

#1296

Rebecca Cummins

#161200

Overall Influence

Rebecca Cummins is a photographer and multi-media artist living in Seattle, Washington. She was awarded the Chancellor's Award from the University of Technology, Sydney and the outstanding University 2003 PhD dissertation titled Necro-Techno: Examples from an Archeology of Media. She is a professor of art at the University of Washington.

#1297

Carlotta de Bevilacqua

#191061

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Carlotta de Bevilacqua is an Italian architect, designer and entrepreneur. She is currently President and CEO of Artemide and President of Danese Milano. Biography Graduated in 1983 in Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano, she is mainly known for her research in contemporary lighting design.

#1298

Robin Witt

#105996

Overall Influence

Robin Witt is an American theater director. She is an ensemble member at both the Griffin Theatre and Steep Theatre Company in Chicago. Witt's notable productions include Enda Walsh's The New Electric Ballroom at A Red Orchid Theatre, Dennis Kelly's Love and Money, Simon Stephens' Wastwater, Motortown, Pornography, and Harper Regan at Steep Theatre, as well as Ena Lamont Stewart's Men Should Weep , Terence Rattigan's Flare Path and Edna Ferber and George Kaufman's Stage Door with the Griffin Theatre.

#1299

Samantha Womack

Samantha Womack

#170836

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Samantha Zoe Womack is an English actress, singer, model and director who has worked in film, television and stage. Womack initially planned a career in singing and she represented the United Kingdom in the 1991 Eurovision Song Contest. Her song for the contest, "A Message to Your Heart", was released as her first single in April 1991 and reached number 30 in the UK Singles Chart.

#1300

Shruti Naik

#126730

Overall Influence

Shruti Naik is an Indian American scientist who is an associate professor of biological sciences at the NYU Langone Medical Center. In 2020 Naik was named a Packard Fellow for her research into the molecular mechanisms that underpin the function of tissue stem cells. She was awarded the 2018 regional Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists and the International Takeda Innovator in Regeneration Award. She has also received the NIH Directors Innovator Award and been named a Pew Stewart Scholar in 2020.

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