The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential female people in Engineering,
#251
Elaine Oran
#77081
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Elaine Surick Oran is an American physical scientist and is considered a world authority on numerical methods for large-scale simulation of physical systems. She has pioneered computational technology to solve complex reactive flow problems, unifying concepts from science, mathematics, engineering, and computer science in a new methodology. An incredibly diverse range of phenomena can be modeled and better understood using her techniques for numerical simulation of fluid flows, ranging from the tightly grouped movements of fish in Earth's oceans to the explosions of far-flung supernovae in space.
Go to Profile#252
Elisabeth Frink
#14560
Overall Influence
1930 - 1993 (63 years)
Dame Elisabeth Jean Frink was an English sculptor and printmaker. Her Times obituary noted the three essential themes in her work as "the nature of Man; the 'horseness' of horses; and the divine in human form".
Go to Profile#253
Aisha Bowe
#38974
Overall Influence
Aisha Bowe is a Bahamian-American aerospace engineer, founder, STEM advocate, and entrepreneur. She is the founder of CEO of STEMBoard, a technology company, and LINGO, an educational tech company. Bowe is the recipient of NASA Equal Employment Opportunity Medal, US Women's Chamber of Commerce Emerging Star Award and Virginia Business magazine’s Black Business Leaders Award.
Go to Profile#254
Anna Dubois
#48245
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Anna Dubois is a Swedish organizational theorist and professor of technology management and economics at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, and director of Chalmers Transport Area of Advance. She is best known for her work with Lars-Erik Gadde on case study research, boundaries of the firm, and managing suppliers interfaces.
Go to Profile#255
Pinar Karaca-Mandic
#40410
Overall Influence
Pinar Karaca-Mandic is an American economist who is C. Arthur Williams Jr. Professor in Healthcare Risk Management and Academic Director of the Medical Industry Leadership Institute at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research . She was previously on the faculty of the University of Minnesota School of Public Health and an economist for the RAND Corporation.
Go to Profile#256
Polina Bayvel
#44634
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Polina Leopoldovna Bayvel is a British engineer and academic. She is currently Professor of Optical Communications & Networks in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at University College London. She has made major contributions to the investigation and design of high-bandwidth multiwavelength optical networking.
Go to Profile#257
Treena Livingston Arinzeh
#79475
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Treena Livingston Arinzeh is professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia University in New York, New York, joining in 2022. She was formerly a Distinguished Professor in Biomedical Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, New Jersey. She is known for her research on adult stem-cell therapy. Arinzeh takes part in the American Chemical Society's Project Seeds program, opening up her lab for high school students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds for summer internships.
Go to Profile#258
Wendi Heinzelman
#68769
Overall Influence
Wendi Beth Rabiner Heinzelman is an American electrical engineer and computer scientist specializing in wireless networks, cloud computing, and multimedia. She is dean of the Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Rochester, and the former dean of graduate studies for arts, sciences, and engineering at Rochester.
Go to Profile#259
Idit Keidar
#59548
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Idit Keidar is a professor of electrical engineering and an author of more than 180 articles which gave her an h-index of 38 and were cited more than 5,000 times. Some of them were published in such journals as Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing and SIAM Journal on Computing.
Go to Profile#260
Eleanor Stride
#80896
Overall Influence
Eleanor Phoebe Jane Stride is a Professor of Biomaterials at St Catherine's College, Oxford. Stride engineers drug delivery systems using carefully designed microbubbles and studies how they can be used in diagnostics.
Go to Profile#261
Kate Darling
#46779
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Katherine 'Kate' Irene Maynard Darling is an American-Swiss academic. She works on the legal and ethical implications of technology. As of 2019, she is a Research Specialist at the MIT Media Lab. Academic career Darling was born in the US, but grew up in Basel, Switzerland. Darling received degrees in Economics and Law from the University of Basel. After completing her 2014 dissertation titled Copyright and new technologies: theoretical and empirical analysis of copyright transfers and content production incentives at ETH Zurich, Darling returned to the US, to teach a robot ethics course at Harvard Law School with Lawrence Lessig.
Go to Profile#262
Sri Sarma
#68776
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Sridevi Sarma is an American biomedical and electrical engineer known for her work in applying control theory to improve therapies for neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease and epilepsy. She is vice dean for graduate education of the Johns Hopkins University Whiting School of Engineering, associate director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Computational Medicine, and an associate professor in the Johns Hopkins Department of Biomedical Engineering.
Go to Profile#263
Yang Shao-Horn
#92053
Overall Influence
Yang Shao-Horn is a Chinese American scholar, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering and a member of Research Laboratory of Electronics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is known for research on understanding and controlling of processes for storing electrons in chemical bonds towards zero-carbon energy and chemicals.
Go to Profile#264
Dörte Gatermann
#81805
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Dörte Gatermann is a German architect who is best known for designing the Triangle Tower in Cologne. Early life Dörte Gatermann's was born in 1956 in Hamburg, Germany. Gatermann's mother died when she was a little girl, and she was raised by her architect father. She went on to study at the Braunschweig University of Technology and at RWTH Aachen where she studied under Pritzker prize-winning architect Gottfried Böhm. After working successfully as leader for Böhm's Züblin House project in Stuttgart while still a student, she spent the next five years working for him as project leader after h...
Go to Profile#265
Mary C Boyce
#96868
Overall Influence
#266
Astra Zarina
#84888
Overall Influence
1929 - 2008 (79 years)
Astra Zarina was an architect and professor in the University of Washington Department of Architecture. She is best known for her creation of the University of Washington Italian Studies programs and her founding of the UW Rome Center.
Go to Profile#267
Anne Aaron
#61154
Overall Influence
Anne Aaron is a Filipina engineer and the director of video algorithms at Netflix. Her responsibilities include "hiring and managing software engineers and research scientists, strategic decision-making on software architecture and research, project management, and cross-team coordination"
Go to Profile#268
Teri W. Odom
#57876
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Teri W. Odom is an American chemist and materials scientist. She is the chair of the chemistry department, the Joan Husting Madden and William H. Madden, Jr. Professor of Chemistry, and a professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University. She is affiliated with the university's International Institute for Nanotechnology, Chemistry of Life Processes Institute, Northwestern Initiative for Manufacturing Science and Innovation, Interdisciplinary Biological Sciences Graduate Program, and department of applied physics.
Go to Profile#269
Margaret Bullock
#96073
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Margaret Irene Bullock AM FTSE is a former Professor in physiotherapy at the University of Queensland and pioneer in the field of ergonomics. Early life Margaret Irene Roberts was born on 24 March 1933 in Brisbane, Queensland. She attended Brisbane Girls Grammar School. Margaret enrolled in the University of Queensland in 1951, becoming one of the first two students to graduate with a B.App.Sc in physiotherapy and occupational therapy in 1955.
Go to Profile#270
Magdalena Jetelová
#68681
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Magdalena Jetelová is a Czech installation artist and land artist, who has achieved international acclaim. Known mainly for her environmental installation works, Jetelová combines light, architecture, photography, sculpture, and installation to explore the relationship between humans, objects, and space. Her work has been exhibited in various prominent galleries internationally such as Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Tate Gallery London, Museum of Modern Art, 21er Haus, and the Martin-Gropius-Bau. Her work is also in the collection of Hirschorn Museum, the Centre Pompidou, and the Muse...
Go to Profile#271
Linda Katehi
#35275
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Linda Pisti Basile Katehi-Tseregounis is a Greek-born American engineering professor and former university administrator. Katehi was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to three-dimensional integrated circuits and on-wafer packaging and to engineering education. Katehi worked as the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's provost from 2006 to 2009 and dean of engineering at Purdue University from 2002 to 2006. Beginning in 2009, she served as the sixth chancellor of the University of California, Davis.
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Peggy Deamer
#66870
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Peggy Deamer is an architect, architectural educator, and Emeritus Professor of Architecture at Yale University. Her research explores the nature of creative work, stretching from a psychoanalytic interpretation of art production and reception – initiated in the dissertation on Adrian Stokes, who was analyzed by Melanie Klein – to neo-Marxist examinations of creative labor. She is the founding member of the international advocacy group, The Architecture Lobby .
Go to Profile#273
Mary Zimmerman
#8879
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Mary Zimmerman is an American theatre and opera director and playwright from Nebraska. She is an ensemble member of the Lookingglass Theatre Company, the Manilow Resident Director at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Illinois, and also serves as the Jaharis Family Foundation Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University.
Go to Profile#274
Hilde Heynen
#71913
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Hilde Heynen is professor of architectural theory at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. She researches modernism, modernity, and gender in architecture. Heynen is the author of several books and publishes regularly in architectural journals such as the Harvard Design Magazine, The Journal of Architecture, and The Architectural Review of which she is a member of the editorial board. She is also a board member of the European Association of Architectural Education and the Society of Architectural Historians .
Go to Profile#275
Zaiping Guo
#94584
Overall Influence
Zaiping Guo is an Australian engineer and academic. She specializes in nanomaterials for lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles and portable equipment. She headed the Institute of Superconducting and Electronic Materials at the University of Wollongong before winning an Australian Research Council grant for a five-year project in the same field at the University of Adelaide, where she is currently a professor. In 2023 she was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering .
Go to Profile#276
Mari Ostendorf
#39061
Overall Influence
Mari Ostendorf is a professor of electrical engineering in the area of speech and language technology and the vice provost for research at the University of Washington. Biography She received her doctorate degree from Stanford University in 1984 under Robert Gray and afterwards worked at BBN and as a professor at Boston University before coming to University of Washington in 1999.
Go to Profile#277
Carolina Cruz-Neira
#28105
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Carolina Cruz-Neira is a Spanish-Venezuelan-American computer engineer, researcher, designer, educator, and a pioneer of virtual reality . She is known for inventing the cave automatic virtual environment . She previously worked at Iowa State University , University of Louisiana at Lafayette , University of Arkansas at Little Rock , and she is currently an Agere Chair Professor at University of Central Florida .
Go to Profile#278
Alexandra Boltasseva
#66682
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Alexandra Boltasseva is Ron And Dotty Garvin Tonjes Distinguished Professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University, and editor-in-chief for The Optical Society's Optical Materials Express journal. Her research focuses on plasmonic metamaterials, manmade composites of metals that use surface plasmons to achieve optical properties not seen in nature.
Go to Profile#279
Ruth Conroy Dalton
#78644
Overall Influence
Ruth Conroy Dalton is a British architect, author and Professor of Architecture at Northumbria University. She has authored or contributed to more than 200 publications. She is an expert in space syntax analysis, pedestrian movement and wayfinding and a world-leading authority on the overlap between architecture and spatial cognition .
Go to Profile#280
Ingrid Verbauwhede
#88376
Overall Influence
Ingrid Verbauwhede is a professor at the COSIC Research Group of the Electrical Engineering Department, KU Leuven, where she leads the embedded systems team. She is a pioneer in the field of secure embedded circuits and systems, with several awards recognising her contributions to the field. She is member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts since 2011. She is a fellow of IEEE.
Go to Profile#281
Azita Emami
#71324
Overall Influence
Azita Emami-Neyestanak is the Andrew and Peggy Cherng Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering at Caltech. Emami works on low-power mixed-mode circuits in scalable technologies. She is Executive Officer of the Department of Electrical Engineering and an investigator in the Heritage Medical Research Institute.
Go to Profile#282
Kathryn Huff
#58687
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (38 years)
Kathryn D. Huff is an American engineer serving as the assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy. In January 2022, she was nominated to the position. She was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on May 5, 2022 by a 80–11 vote and sworn in on May 11, 2022.
Go to Profile#283
Marianne Cusato
#57514
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Marianne Cusato is a designer, educator, author, and urban designer based in Miami, Florida. She was the designer of the "Katrina Cottage," conceived in 2005 as an alternative to the FEMA emergency trailers supplied to some of the newly homeless survivors of Hurricane Katrina along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. In 2006, Cusato entered into a licensing agreement with the Lowe's Home Centers to make the cottages available in kit form in all Lowe's stores nationwide or the plans alone online.
Go to Profile#284
Sarah Hainsworth
#38344
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Sarah Victoria Hainsworth is Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Bath. Previously she was Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Executive Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Aston University, Professor of Materials and Forensic Engineering, and Head of the Department of Engineering, at the University of Leicester.
Go to Profile#285
Branka Vucetic
#89975
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Professor Branka Vucetic is an Australian-based expert in coding theory and its applications in wireless technology. She works at the University of Sydney where she holds the positions of ARC Laureate Fellow, Peter Nicol Russell Chair in Telecommunications, and Director of the Centre of Excellence in Telecommunications.
Go to Profile#286
Anette Kolmos
#47836
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Anette Kolmos is a Danish professor in engineering education and problem-based learning at the Department of Planning at Aalborg University. Education In 1984, Anette Kolmos got her MA in social science and psychology at Aalborg University. By 1989, she had completed her Ph.D. in technology and gender studies.
Go to Profile#287
Susan Wu
#85606
Overall Influence
Ying Chu Lin Wu was a Chinese-born American businesswoman and engineer in magnetohydrodynamics, aeronautics, and aerospace engineering. Education and career Wu was born in Peking, China studied mechanical engineering at National Taiwan University, and earned a B.S. in 1955. She moved to the United States in 1957 and earned an M.S. from Ohio State University in 1959 before moving to the California Institute of Technology , where she became the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in aeronautics in 1963. Wu worked at Electro-Optics Corporation for two years. In 1965 she joined the faculty at the University of Tennessee Space Institute where she was promoted to professor in 1973.
Go to Profile#288
Michelle Kaufmann
#69897
Overall Influence
Michelle Kaufmann is an American architect and designer. In 2002, Kaufmann founded Michelle Kaufmann Designs, which designed and built single-family and multi-family green homes using prefabricated modular technology. The firm was closed in May 2009 and Kaufmann started a new design firm, Michelle Kaufmann Studio. Kaufmann is also a co-founder of Flux.io, a company developing collaborative design software for the building design and construction industry.
Go to Profile#289
Amale Andraos
#81688
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Amale Andraos is a New York-based designer. She was dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and serves as advisor to the Columbia Climate School. She is the co-founder of the New York City architecture firm WORKac with her husband, Dan Wood. Her impact on architectural practice around the world was recognized when she was named Honorary Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada in 2021.
Go to Profile#290
Ruth A. David
#37877
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Ruth A. David is an American engineer. While at the CIA, David was responsible for encouraging the agency to pursue partnerships with the private sector and designed a proposal to procure technology at the stage of development from the private sector. She has been awarded the CIA Director's Award, the Defense Intelligence Agency Director's Award, the CIA Distinguished Intelligence Medal, the National Reconnaissance Officer's Award for Distinguished Service, and the National Security Agency Distinguished Service Medal.
Go to Profile#291
Keren Bergman
#96199
Overall Influence
Keren Bergman is an American electrical engineer who is the Charles Batchelor Professor at Columbia University. She also serves as the director of the Lightwave Research Laboratory, a silicon photonics research group at Columbia University. Her research focuses on nano-photonics and particularly optical interconnects for low power, high bandwidth computing applications.
Go to Profile#292
Sarah Lucas
#6369
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Sarah Lucas is an English artist. She is part of the generation of Young British Artists who emerged in 1988. Her works frequently employ visual puns and bawdy humour by incorporating photography, sculpture, collage and found objects.
Go to Profile#293
Carol M. Highsmith
#26077
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Carol McKinney Highsmith is an American photographer, author, and publisher who has photographed in all the states of the United States as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. She photographs the entire American vista in all fifty U.S. states as a record of the early 21st century.
Go to Profile#294
Anke Kaysser-Pyzalla
#48690
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Anke Kaysser-Pyzella is a German materials scientist and mechanical engineer who has been the CEO of the German Aerospace Center since October 2020. She had previously served as the President of the Technical University of Braunschweig from 2017 until 2020.
Go to Profile#295
Nele De Belie
#102102
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
#296
Nancy Allbritton
#60553
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Nancy Allbritton is a Professor of Bioengineering and the Frank & Julie Jungers Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Washington. She was previously a Kenan Professor and Chair in the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University.
Go to Profile#297
Tülay Adalı
#74823
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Tülay Adalı is a Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, whose research interests include signal processing, machine learning, and data fusion.
Go to Profile#298
Mary Elizabeth Ramsay
#102870
Overall Influence
#299
Kathy K. Griendling
#103391
Overall Influence
#300
Momoyo Kaijima
#64543
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Momoyo Kaijima Is a Japanese architect known for her work at Atelier Bow-wow, a studio that was founded by herself and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto. Her work has focused mainly on urban residential buildings in Japan. In 2021, was appointed a as Full Professor of Affective Architectures in the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich.
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