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,

#201

Julie Beckman

#60264

Overall Influence

Julie Beckman is an American architect who designed the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial with her husband Keith Kaseman. The $22 million memorial, which includes 184 benches with names of victims of the September 11 attacks in 2001 inscribed and illuminated by reflecting pools, opened on September 11, 2008.

#202

Galen Cranz

#34605

Overall Influence

Galen Cranz is a Professor of the Graduate School, Architecture at the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the social and cultural bases of architectural and urban design. She is a certified teacher of the Alexander Technique, a kinesthetic educational system, who founded the new field "Body Conscious Design."

#203

Elisa E. Konofagou

#73073

Overall Influence

Elisa Konofagou is a Greek biomedical engineer in the field of medical ultrasound. She is the Robert and Margaret Hariri Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Radiology at Columbia University in New York. Konofagou is a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and she received the NSF CAREER Award in 2007.

#204

Mahta Moghaddam

#75890

Overall Influence

Mahta Moghaddam is an Iranian-American electrical and computer engineer and William M. Hogue Professor of Electrical Engineering in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering. Moghaddam is also the president of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society and is known for developing sensor systems and algorithms for high-resolution characterization of the environment to quantify the effects of climate change. She also has developed innovative tools using microwave technology to visualize biological struct...

#205

Tracy Caldwell Dyson

Tracy Caldwell Dyson

#9731

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Tracy Caldwell Dyson is an American chemist and NASA astronaut. Caldwell Dyson was a mission specialist on Space Shuttle Endeavour flight STS-118 in August 2007 and part of the Expedition 23 and Expedition 24 crew on the International Space Station from April 2010 to September 2010. She has completed three spacewalks, logging more than 22 hours of extravehicular activity. She is scheduled to return to space on March 13th, 2024 for a third time on board Soyuz MS-25 for a 6 months mission onboard the ISS.

#206

Katharina Landfester

#74628

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Katharina Landfester is a German chemist who is a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research. Her research considers the physical properties of droplets, polymerisation in emulsion and the synthesis of nanoparticles.

#207

Diane McKnight

#43757

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Diane McKnight is a professor of civil, environmental, and architectural engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder and a fellow at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research . McKnight is a founding principal investigator of the National Science Foundation's Long-Term Ecological Research program in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica.

#208

Katherine Lee Schwennsen

#58317

Overall Influence

Katherine Lee Schwennsen is an American architect. She is a fellow with the American Institute of Architects and was the group's president from 2005 to 2006. In 2010 she was chosen to chair Clemson University’s School of Architecture

#209

Tereza Khristoforovna Margulova

#67842

Overall Influence

1912 - 1994 (82 years)

Teresa Christoforovna Margulova was a Soviet scientist, professor, and the founder of the Department of Nuclear Power Stations of the Moscow Power Engineering Institute. She was born on August 14, 1912, and grew up in Baku. After graduating from the Azerbaijan Industrial Institute, she continued her education in a PhD program at The Moscow Power Engineering Institute .

#210

Jean Zu

#48554

Overall Influence

Jean Zu is a Chinese-Canadian engineer, currently the dean of the Charles V. Schaefer, Jr. School of Engineering & Science at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. She is an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#211

Janet T. Powell

#88333

Overall Influence

#212

Jana Revedin

#74645

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Jana Revedin is a German scholar, researcher, architect and professor thereof. Born in Konstanz, Germany, Revedin has a degree from the Polytechnic University of Milan and a Doctor of Architecture from Università Iuav di Venezia. Having previously taught at Iuav, Umeå University, and the Blekinge Institute of Technology, , she was a professor at École Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris and a UNESCO delegate. She founded the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture in 2006, which has been awarded by UNESCO since 2011.

#213

Kara Kockelman

#80407

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Kara M. Kockelman, Ph.D., P.E. is an American civil and transportation engineer, who is currently the Dewitt Greer Centennial Professor of Transportation Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, previously the Clare Boothe Luce Professor of Civil Engineering, and a published author. Kockelman’s work focuses on transportation, and includes planning for future implementation of shared and autonomous vehicle systems, and policies like credit-based congestion pricing and urban growth boundaries.

#214

AnnaLee Saxenian

AnnaLee Saxenian

#21679

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

AnnaLee Saxenian is a professor and the former Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Information, known widely for her work on technology clusters and social networks in Silicon Valley. She received her BA from Williams College in 1976 and her PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989.

#215

Barbara Bestor

#54161

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Barbara Bestor is an American architect based in Los Angeles, California. She is the principal of Bestor Architecture, founded in 1992. Examples of her work include the Beats Electronics Headquarters in Culver City, Blackbirds, small lot housing in Los Angeles, Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea in Los Angeles, the revitalization of Silvertop, originally designed by John Lautner and the Toro Canyon House in Santa Barbara. In 2017 she was elected to the AIA's College of Fellows.

#216

Allison Okamura

#81730

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Allison Mariko Okamura is an American mechanical engineer and roboticist whose research concerns haptic technology, teleoperation, remote surgery, and robot-assisted surgery. She is the Richard W. Weiland Professor in the School of Engineering and a professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University, where she directs the Collaborative Haptics and Robotics in Medicine laboratory and maintains a courtesy appointment as professor of computer science.

#217

Sabine Van Huffel

#60807

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Sabine J. A. Van Huffel is a Belgian computer scientist, applied mathematician, and electrical engineer, whose research concerns computational methods for medical diagnostics, and in particular methods based on total least squares.

#218

Nesreen Ghaddar

#70826

Overall Influence

Nesreen Ghaddar is a professor of mechanical engineering at the American University of Beirut. She is Qatar Chair of Energy Studies and the Director of the Munib and Angela Institute of Energy and Natural Resources at AUB. She obtained her Bachelor in Engineering in 1980 and her Master in 1982 from Kuwait University and her PhD in 1985 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#219

Yvonne Clark

#53324

Overall Influence

1929 - 2019 (90 years)

Yvonne Y. Clark was a pioneer for African-American and women engineers. Also known as Y.Y., she was the first woman to get a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering at Howard University, the first woman to earn a master's degree in Engineering Management from Vanderbilt University, and the first woman to serve as a faculty member in the College of Engineering and Technology at Tennessee State University, afterward becoming a professor emeritus.

#220

Nada Golmie

#36829

Overall Influence

Nada Taleb Golmie is an American computer scientist and engineer. She is chief of the wireless networks division in the Communications Technology Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

#221

Anna Menon

#44601

Overall Influence

Anna Menon is an American engineer scheduled to fly on Polaris Dawn, a private space mission. Menon worked for NASA for seven years before joining SpaceX, where she works as a lead engineer of space operations.

#222

Josephine Webb

#40125

Overall Influence

1918 - Present (106 years)

Josephine Webb is an American electrical engineer who obtained two patents for oil circuit breaker contact design, known colloquially as "switchgear". She designed an eighteen-inch, full newspaper size fax machine with superior resolution. She co-founded Webb Consulting Company with her husband, also an electrical engineer. She is one of the first female electrical engineers, and considered a pioneer by the Society of Women Engineers. At Purdue University, she was one out of a total of five women engineers. She turned 100 in June 2018.

#223

Kristine Bell

#67405

Overall Influence

Kristine Bell from Metron, Inc. of Reston, Virginia, is an electronics engineer. She was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for her contributions to statistical signal processing with radar and sonar applications. Bell earned her B.S. degree in electrical engineering in 1985 from Rice University in Houston, Texas. She continued on to receive her M.S. degree in electrical engineering in 1990 from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Bell stayed at GMU and earned her Ph.D. in information technology in 1995. She has currently authored or coaut...

#224

Marjolein van der Meulen

#68499

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Marjolein Christine Hermance van der Meulen is an American engineer who currently serves as James M. and Marsha McCormick Director of Biomedical Engineering and Swanson Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Cornell University and is a Senior Scientist in the Research Division of the Hospital for Special Surgery.

#225

Esra Akcan

#46210

Overall Influence

Esra Akcan is a Turkish-American architect, academic and author. Currently, she is the Michael A. McCarthy Professor in the Department of Architecture and the director of European Studies at Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University.

#226

Martha E. Sloan

#54836

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Martha Ann Evans Sloan is an American electrical engineer. She taught engineering for many years at Michigan Technological University, and became the first female president of the IEEE. Her service to the profession has been honored by several society fellowships and awards.

#227

Gilda Barabino

#62990

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Gilda A. Barabino is the president of the Olin College of Engineering, where she is also a professor of biomedical and chemical engineering. Previously, she served as the dean of The Grove School of Engineering at the City College of New York, and as a professor in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Chemical Engineering and the CUNY School of Medicine. On March 4, 2021, she became the President-Elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#228

Karen M. Kensek

Karen M. Kensek

#72443

Overall Influence

Karen M. Kensek is on the faculty of the USC School of Architecture at the University of Southern California. She is a leading figure in architectural computing, focusing on analytical building information modeling and building science.

#229

Lorna Simpson

#16261

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Lorna Simpson is an American photographer and multimedia artist whose works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally. In 1990, she became the first African-American woman to exhibit at the Venice Biennale. She came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with photo-text installations such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal that questioned the nature of identity, gender, race, history and representation. Simpson continues to explore these themes in relation to memory and history using photography, film, video, painting, drawing, audio, and sculpture.

#230

Burcin Becerik-Gerber

#53554

Overall Influence

Burcin Becerik-Gerber is a Turkish American engineering educator and Professor in the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Southern California. She is known for her work in human-building interaction, a new field she pioneered, which researches the design and use of technology that focuses on the interfaces between buildings and their users. She is the founding director of the Innovation in Integrated Informatics LAB and the director of USC’s Center for Intelligent Environments . She puts a specific focus on human-building communication to change both user behavior and building behavior through trust in automation.

#231

Constance J. Chang-Hasnain

Constance J. Chang-Hasnain

#69225

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Constance J. Chang-Hasnain is chairperson and founder of Berxel Photonics Co. Ltd. and Whinnery Professor Emerita of the University of California, Berkeley. She was President of Optica in 2021. She obtained a B.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering from University of California, Davis in 1982, an M.S. and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984 and 1987, respectively. She was a member of technical staff at Bellcore from 1987 to 1992 and assistant professor at Stanford University between 1992 and 1995. She joined the ...

#232

Karen Willcox

#51026

Overall Influence

Karen Elizabeth Willcox is an aerospace engineer and computational scientist best known for her work on reduced-order modeling and the study of multi-fidelity methods. She is currently the director of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas.

#233

Mónica Ponce de León

#67132

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Mónica Ponce de León is a Latina architect, educator, and dean of the Princeton University School of Architecture. A National Design Award winner, Ponce de León has focused on the application of robotic technology to building fabrication and architecture education. Her interdisciplinary practice, MPdL Studio, has offices in New York City, Boston, Princeton, New Jersey, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ponce de León previously served as Dean of the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan and as Professor at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University .

#234

Adèle Naudé Santos

Adèle Naudé Santos

#67521

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Adèle Naudé Santos is a South African born American architect and urban designer focused on low-income housing, campus architecture, and socially conscious design. She is principal architect of Santos Prescott and Associates, based in San Francisco and Somerville, Massachusetts. She served as the Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2003 to 2014. She became a Fellow of American Institute of Architects in 1996.

#235

Han Schröder

#68771

Overall Influence

1918 - 1992 (74 years)

Johanna Erna Else Schröder was a Dutch architect and educator. After becoming one of the first women to practice architecture in the Netherlands, she opened her own architecture and interior design firm in Amsterdam. In the 1963, she immigrated to the United States where she went on to teach interior design at Adelphi University, Parsons School of Design, New York Institute of Technology and Virginia Commonwealth University.

#236

Noemí Goytia

#39444

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Noemí Goytia is an Argentine architect and professor specialized in history, criticism, heritage and project processes. She has received the CICOP Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Center for Heritage Conservation in 2014. She is the author of numerous books and magazine articles on her specialty.

#237

Serena Best

#81075

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Serena Michelle Best , is a British academic, and the Professor of Materials Science at the University of Cambridge. Best has a BSc from the University of Surrey, and a PhD from the University of London. She was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2012.

#238

Madhu Bhaskaran

#41515

Overall Influence

Madhu Bhaskaran is an engineer and Professor at RMIT University. She co-leads the Functional Materials and Microsystems Research Group at RMIT University She won the APEC Aspire prize in 2018 for her development of "electronic skin".

#239

Cheryl B. Schrader

#27744

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Cheryl B. Schrader is an American educator and former academic administrator. She began her presidency of Wright State University on July 1, 2017, and stepped down from the position December 31, 2019, midway through her five-year appointment. She was previously the chancellor of Missouri University of Science and Technology.

#240

Mikyoung Kim

#58643

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Mikyoung Kim, FASLA is an American landscape architect, urban designer, and founding principal of Mikyoung Kim Design. Kim has received the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Award and the American Society of Landscape Architects National Design Medal. Her studio was named by Fast Company as one of the world's most innovative architecture firms.

#241

Linda Abriola

#62828

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Linda Marie Abriola is an American environmental and civil engineer who specializes in the study of organic chemical liquid contaminants in porous media. She is currently the Joan Wernig and E. Paul Sorensen Professor of Engineering at the Brown University School of Engineering.

#242

Kjersti Engan

#37962

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Kjersti Engan is a Norwegian researcher in signal and image processing who works as a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Stavanger. Engan was born in 1971 in Bergen. She earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1994 from Bergen University College. She then moved to the University of Stavanger for graduate study, completing her doctorate in 2000. At Stavanger, she was promoted to full professor in 2008.

#243

Christine Dalnoky

#52172

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Christine Dalnoky is a French landscape architect and educator. She was born in Paris and studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts there and at the National School of Landscape Architecture in Versailles. Dalnoky worked with and Alexandre Chemetoff in Paris and with Renzo Piano in Geneva. She studied in Rome for two years after winning a competition sponsored by the French Academy in Rome. Dalnoky held a residency at the Villa Medici from 1987 to 1988;

#244

Thais Russomano

Thais Russomano

#57268

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Thais Russomano is a Brazilian doctor and scientific researcher specialising in space medicine, space physiology, biomedical engineering, telemedicine and telehealth. She founded the Microgravity Centre at PUCRS university, Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1999, coordinating it for 18 years until 2017. The MicroG is the first educational and research centre in Space Life Sciences in Latin America. She is a senior lecturer at King's College London, lecturing in Aviation and Space related courses; coordinator of the Space Network , University of Lisbon; guest lecturer at Aalto University, Finland in S...

#245

Jennifer L. West

#83790

Overall Influence

Jennifer L. West is an American bioengineer. She is the current Dean of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Virginia. She was the Fitzpatrick University Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University from 2012-2021. In 2000, West cofounded Nanospectra Biosciences in Houston to develop a cancer therapy based on gold nanoparticles that destroy tumor cells and has been listed by MIT Technology Review as one of the 100 most innovative young scientists and engineers world wide.

#246

Emilia Fridman

#85037

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Emilia Fridman is an Israeli professor of Electrical Engineering in the Engineering Faculty at Tel Aviv University, specializing in control theory, time-delay and distributed parameter systems. She is an IEEE fellow for “contributions to time-delay systems and sampled-data control”.

#247

Xie Quan

#94215

Overall Influence

#248

Suad Amiry

#57856

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Suad Amiry is a Palestinian author and architect living in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Education Her parents went from Palestine to Amman, Jordan. She was brought up there and went to Lebanon's capital of Beirut to study architecture. She studied architecture at the American University of Beirut, the University of Michigan, and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

#249

Julie Taymor

#2096

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Julie Taymor is an American director and writer of theater, opera, and film. Her stage adaptation of The Lion King debuted in 1997 and received eleven Tony Award nominations, with Taymor receiving Tony Awards for her direction and costume design. Her film Frida, about Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, was nominated for five Academy Awards, including a Best Original Song nomination for Taymor's composition "Burn It Blue". She also directed the 2007 jukebox musical film Across the Universe, based on the music of the Beatles.

#250

Cheryl Cohen

#40266

Overall Influence

Cheryl Cohen is a South African public health researcher who is a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand. She looks to develop evidence-based policy to reduce the burdens of respiratory diseases. During the COVID-19 pandemic. Cohen investigated the rates of COVID-19 in South Africa.

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