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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Engineering,

#151

Mary Jackson

#18573

Overall Influence

1921 - 2005 (84 years)

Mary Jackson was an American mathematician and aerospace engineer at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics , which in 1958 was succeeded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration . She worked at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, for most of her career. She started as a computer at the segregated West Area Computing division in 1951. In 1958, after taking engineering classes, she became NASA's first black female engineer.

#152

Lee Bontecou

#19964

Overall Influence

1931 - 2022 (91 years)

Lee Bontecou was an American sculptor and printmaker and a pioneer figure in the New York art world. She kept her work consistently in a recognizable style, and received broad recognition in the 1960s. Bontecou made abstract sculptures in the 1960s and 1970s and created vacuum-formed plastic fish, plants, and flower forms in the 1970s. Rich, organic shapes and powerful energy appear in her drawings, prints, and sculptures. Her work has been shown and collected in many major museums in the United States and in Europe.

#153

Victoria Coleman

#29202

Overall Influence

Victoria Stavridou-Coleman is currently serving as the 37th chief scientist of the United States Air Force. She took her oath of office on April 6, 2021, administered by the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.

#154

Ann Marie Sastry

#64917

Overall Influence

Ann Marie Sastry is an American engineer, educator, and businessperson. She was President of Sakti3, a solid-state battery company based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Sastry was the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Mechanical, Biomedical and Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan from 1995 to 2012.

#155

Claire J. Tomlin

#48181

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Claire Jennifer Tomlin is a British researcher in hybrid systems, distributed and decentralized optimization and control theory and holds the Charles A. Desoer Chair at the University of California, at Berkeley.

#156

Karen Bausman

#54862

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

#157

Evi Nemeth

#10668

Overall Influence

1940 - 2013 (73 years)

Evi Nemeth was an engineer, author, and teacher known for her expertise in computer system administration and networks. She was the lead author of the "bibles" of system administration: UNIX System Administration Handbook , Linux Administration Handbook , and UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook . Evi Nemeth was known in technology circles as the matriarch of system administration.

#158

Lorrie Cranor

#25954

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Lorrie Faith Cranor, D.Sc. is the FORE Systems Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University and is the director of the Carnegie Mellon Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory. She has served as Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commission, and she was formerly a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation Board of Directors. Previously she was a researcher at AT&T Labs-Research and taught in the Stern School of Business at New York University. She has authored over 110 research papers on online privacy, phishing and semantic attacks, spam...

#159

Danica Kragic

#53601

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Danica Kragic is a professor of computer science from the Royal Institute of Technology , Stockholm, Sweden. She was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2016 for contributions to vision-based systems and robotic object manipulation.

#160

Nan Marie Jokerst

#38081

Overall Influence

Nan Marie Jokerst is an American professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University known for her work integrating optoelectronics with semiconductor substrates in order to create portable environmental and medical sensors. She is a Fellow of the Optical Society and Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

#161

Michelle A. Petri

#77977

Overall Influence

#162

Mary Blade

#61150

Overall Influence

1913 - 1994 (81 years)

Mary Plumb Blade was an American engineer, director of the Green Camp from 1955 to 1972, and full-time professor of mechanical engineering in the engineering school of The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art from 1946 to 1978.

#163

Jennifer A. Lewis

Jennifer A. Lewis

#43632

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Jennifer A. Lewis is an American materials scientist and engineer, best known for her research on colloidal assembly of ceramics and 3D printing of functional, structural, and biological materials. In 2017, Lewis was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering for the development of materials and processes for 3-dimensional direct fabrication of multifunctional structures.

#164

Françoise Choay

#49432

Overall Influence

1925 - Present (99 years)

Françoise Choay is a French architectural and urban historian and theorist. Since 1973, she has been a professor at the University of Paris. She has also been a visiting professor at numerous universities in the United States, Belgium and Italy.

#165

Aylin Yener

#41919

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Aylin Yener holds the Roy and Lois Chope Chair in engineering at Ohio State University, and she is currently the President of the IEEE Information Theory Society. Dr. Yener is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Professor of Integrated Systems Engineering, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Affiliated Faculty at the Sustainability Institute, and Affiliated Faculty at the Translational Data Analytics Institute, all at Ohio State University.

#166

Sarah Wigglesworth

#49841

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Sarah Wigglesworth MBE RDI is a British award-winning architect and was a Professor of Architecture at the University of Sheffield until 2016. Career Wigglesworth founded Sarah Wigglesworth Architects in 1994. Her practice has a reputation for sustainable architecture and an interest in using alternative, low energy materials. One of the practice's best known buildings is the Straw Bale House in Islington, London. The building was designed as a house for Wigglesworth and her partner Jeremy Till, and an office occupied by Sarah Wigglesworth Architects, using straw bales, cement-filled sandbags, silicon-faced fibreglass cloth and gabions filled with recycled concrete.

#167

Anita Berrizbeitia

#44605

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Anita de la Rosa Berrizbeitia is a landscape theorist, teacher, and author. She continues to play an integral role in the renewed visibility of landscape architecture as a cultural practice. She is currently professor of landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and previous chair of the department of landscape architecture. Appointed in 2015, she served as the 14th chair of the oldest landscape architecture department in the world and only the second female to hold the position. Prior to coming to Harvard University she was the associate chair of landscape architectur...

#168

Catherine Opie

#14302

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Catherine Sue Opie is an American fine-art photographer and educator. She lives and works in Los Angeles, as a professor of photography at University of California at Los Angeles. Opie studies the connections between mainstream and infrequent society. By specializing in portraiture, studio, and landscape photography, she is able to create pieces relating to sexual identity. Through photography, Opie, documents the relationship between the individual and the space inhabited, offering an exploration of the American identity, particularly probing the tensions between the constructed American dream and the diverse realities of its citizens.

#169

Pallavi Tiwari

#54157

Overall Influence

Pallavi Tiwari is an Indian American biomedical engineer who is a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research considers the development of computer algorithms to accelerate the diagnosis and treatment of disease. She was elected Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.

#170

Roma Agrawal

#29539

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

Roma Agrawal is an Indian-British-American chartered structural engineer based in London. She has worked on several major engineering projects, including the Shard. Agrawal is also an author and a diversity campaigner, championing women in engineering.

#171

Yoshino Ōishi

#41265

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Yoshino Ōishi is a Japanese photojournalist. Ōishi was born in Suginami-ku, Tokyo on 28 May 1944. Seeing Melanesian art while at Nihon University had a big effect on her, as did a visit to Vietnam and Cambodia in 1966. After graduating in photography, she became a freelance photojournalist, working in west Africa, southeast Asia, and Europe. In 1971 she held an exhibition in the Nikon Salon of photographs of a Ghanaian child growing up in Nagano; she then spent three years photographing New Guinea. She worked on portraiture, and documented the effects of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the effect...

#172

Elizabeth G. Loboa

#57577

Overall Influence

Elizabeth G. Loboa is an American biomedical engineer, inventor, researcher and academic administrator currently serving at Southern Methodist University as provost and vice president for academic affairs.

#173

Pınar Keskinocak

#40455

Overall Influence

Pınar Keskinocak is a Turkish-American systems engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she is William W. George Chair, Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems, and College of Engineering ADVANCE Professor. Her research involves the application of operations research and management science to health care and supply-chain management. She is the former president of INFORMS.

#174

Nancy J. Currie-Gregg

#58857

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Nancy Jane Currie-Gregg is an American engineer, United States Army officer and a NASA astronaut. Currie-Gregg has served in the United States Army for over 22 years and holds the rank of colonel. With NASA, she has participated in four space shuttle missions: STS-57, STS-70, STS-88, and STS-109, accruing 1,000 hours in space. She currently holds an appointment as a professor of practice in the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering at Texas A&M University.

#175

Monica Grady

#20740

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Monica Mary Grady, CBE , is a leading British space scientist, primarily known for her work on meteorites. She is currently Professor of Planetary and Space Science at the Open University and is also the Chancellor of Liverpool Hope University.

#176

Susan Landau

#10708

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

#177

Dorit S. Hochbaum

#31129

Overall Influence

Dorit S. Hochbaum is a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her work on approximation algorithms, particularly for facility location, covering and packing problems, and scheduling, and on flow and cut algorithms, Markov random fields, image segmentation and clustering.

#178

Victoria Chibuogu Nneji

#34301

Overall Influence

Victoria Chibuogu Nneji is a Nigerian-born American computer scientist, design and innovation strategist, and a lecturing fellow, known for her research on robotics, automation, human-centered design, and autonomous transportation.

#179

Gisele Bennett

#60531

Overall Influence

Gisele Bennett was a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Director of the GTRI Electro-Optical Systems Laboratory at the Georgia Tech Research Institute . She also founded the Logistics and Maintenance Applied Research Center at GTRI.

#180

Ruby B. Lee

#49261

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Ruby Bei-Loh Lee is an American electrical engineer who is currently the Forrest G. Hamrick Professor in Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Princeton University. Her contributions to computer architecture include work in reduced instruction set computing, embedded systems, and hardware support for computer security and digital media. At Princeton, she is the director of the Princeton Architecture Laboratory for Multimedia and Security. Tech executive Joel S. Birnbaum has called her "one of the top instruction-set architects in the world".

#181

Naomi Ginsberg

#43574

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Naomi Shauna Ginsberg , is an electrical engineer, physicist, and scientist. She is currently an associate professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. Life and education Ginsberg earned her B.ASc. in engineering at the University of Toronto in 2000, and completed her PhD in physics at Harvard.

#182

Chiara Daraio

#73289

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Chiara Daraio is an Italian-American materials scientist and acoustical engineer. She is the G. Bradford Jones Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics at the California Institute of Technology.

#183

Rena Bizios

#66713

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Irene Rena Bizios is an American bioengineer. She is the Peter Flawn Professor at University of Texas at San Antonio and the Lutcher Brown Chair Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Bizios is an Elected Fellow of the National Academy of Medicine, National Academy of Inventors, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and American Institute of Chemical Engineers. Her current interests are cellular and tissue engineering, biocompability and tissue-biomaterial relationships.

#184

Alison Noble

#42026

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Julia Alison Noble is a British engineer. She has been Technikos Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Oxford and a fellow of St Hilda's College since 2011, and Associate Head of the Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division at the university. , she is the chief technology officer of Intelligent Ultrasound Limited, an Oxford spin-off in medical imaging that she cofounded. She was director of the Oxford Institute of Biomedical Engineering from 2012 to 2016.In 2023 she became the Foreign Secretary of The Royal Society .

#185

Fuensanta Nieto

Fuensanta Nieto

#77702

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Fuensanta Nieto de la Cierva is a Spanish architect. She is known for her work as a partner of Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos, a firm which she co-founded in 1984. Fuensanta Nieto studied at the Higher Technical School of Architecture of Madrid. From 1986 to 1991 she was co-director of the architectural journal ARQUITECTURA, published by the Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Madrid.

#186

Hagit Messer Yaron

Hagit Messer Yaron

#25513

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Hagit Messer Yaron is an Israeli electrical engineer and businesswoman. She is a professor of electrical engineering. She is the Kranzberg Chair Professor in Signal Processing at Tel Aviv University. She was the President of Open University of Israel from 2008 to 2013. Messer Yaron is the first woman in Israel to be appointed as a full professor of electrical engineering.

#187

Carin Boalt

#30596

Overall Influence

1912 - 1999 (87 years)

Carin Margareta Boalt was a Swedish professor of Building Function Analysis at Lund University, who at the time of her appointment was the first female professor in Lund. She was head of research at the Home Research Institute from 1944 until 1956.

#188

Linda Petzold

#43403

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Linda Ruth Petzold is a professor of computer science and mechanical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is also listed as affiliated faculty in the department of mathematics. Her research concerns differential algebraic equations and the computer simulation of large real-world social and biological networks.

#189

Pratiwi Sudarmono

Pratiwi Sudarmono

#17500

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Pratiwi Pujilestari Sudarmono is an Indonesian scientist. She is currently a professor of microbiology at the University of Indonesia, Jakarta. Early life and education Pratiwi Sudarmono received a master's degree from the University of Indonesia in 1977, and the Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Osaka, Japan, in 1984.

#190

Monique Frize

#39768

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Monique Frize, , née Aubry is a Canadian biomedical engineer and professor, knowledgeable in medical instruments and decision support systems. Notably, her scientific research and outreach efforts led her to receive the prestigious distinction of Officer of the Order of Canada.

#191

Ada Poon

#66540

Overall Influence

Ada Poon is a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. She is the principal investigator of Stanford Integrated Biomedical Systems Lab. Education, Career and Research Ada Poon completed her undergraduate study in electrical and electronic engineering from the University of Hong Kong. She completed her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the EECS department at the University of California, Berkeley.

#192

Anna Balazs

#77532

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Anna Christina Balazs is an American materials scientist and engineer. She currently is Distinguished Professor at the University of Pittsburgh and holds the John A. Swanson Chair at the Swanson School of Engineering.

#193

Marita Cheng

#59944

Overall Influence

1989 - Present (35 years)

Marita Cheng is the founder of Robogals. She was named the 2012 Young Australian of the Year. She is the founder and current CEO of Aubot, a start-up robotics company. She co-founded Aipoly, an app to assist blind people to recognise objects using their mobile phones. She was named as one of the World's Top 50 women in Technology by Forbes in 2018 and was recognized on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2016. On 9 June 2019, Cheng was appointed a member of the Order of Australia for significant service to science and technology, particularly to robotics.

#194

Brigitte Shim

#56419

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Brigitte Shim, FRAIC, OC, RCA, Hon. FAIA, OAA is a Canadian architect known for her small house designs in Canada and other works in architecture of different scales. Shim is a founding partner of Shim-Sutcliffe Architects, along with her husband, Howard Sutcliffe. Before the establishment of Shim-Sutcliffe Architects in 1994, she was a practicing architect who also taught at the University of Toronto's John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. She continues to guide young designers as a tenured professor at University of Toronto and as a visiting professor to many other institutions until today.

#195

Lisa C. Klein

#72233

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Lisa C. Klein is an American engineer. She is a distinguished professor of engineering at Rutgers University in New Jersey. In 1977, she became the first female faculty member in the Rutgers School of Engineering. She is the director of the graduate program in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

#196

Hilary Sample

#74943

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Hilary Sample is an American architect, principal, and co-founder of the award-winning architecture firm MOS Architects in New York City. Education Sample received a Master of Architecture with distinction from Princeton University and a Bachelor of Architecture from Syracuse University .

#197

Maja Pantić

#67587

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Maja Pantić is a Professor of Affective and Behavioural Computing at Imperial College London and an AI Scientific Research Lead in Facebook London. She was previously Professor of Affective and Behavioural Computing University of Twente and Research Director of the Samsung AI lab in Cambridge, UK. She is an expert in machine understanding of human behaviour including vision-based detection and tracking of human behavioural cues like facial expressions and body gestures, and multimodal analysis of human behaviours like laughter, social signals and affective states.

#198

Brit Andresen

#66960

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Brit Andresen is a Norwegian-born Australian architect and was the first female recipient of the RAIA Gold Medal, awarded in 2002, for her sustained contribution to architecture through teaching, scholarship and practice.

#199

Sheri D. Sheppard

#79220

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Sheri D. Sheppard is the Burton J. and Deedee McMurtry University Fellow in Undergraduate Education; Associate Vice Provost of Graduate Education; and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Curriculum, Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University. She focuses her teaching on engineering design for undergraduate and graduate students. In November 2014, the Carnegie Foundation bestowed on her the U.S. Professor of the Year award.

#200

Karen Holford

#49380

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Karen Margaret Holford is a Welsh engineer, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Vice-Chancellor and Chief Executive of Cranfield University. She was formerly Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Cardiff University. She is also a former Pro Vice-Chancellor of the College of Physical Sciences and Engineering and Head of the School of Engineering. She is an active researcher of acoustic emission and her work has been applied to damage assessment inspections on industrial components.

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