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,
#301
Maryline Hélard
#60536
Overall Influence
Maryline Hélard is a French research engineer specializing in wireless networks. Her research interests include wired and wireless communications and multiple-input multiple-output techniques. Life and work Maryline Hélard received her engineering degree and her Ph.D. degree from the National Institute of Applied Sciences in Rennes, France, as well as her post-doc habilitation degree in 2004.
Go to Profile#302
Mien Ruys
#80831
Overall Influence
1904 - 1999 (95 years)
Wilhelmina Jacoba Moussault-Ruys , was a Dutch landscape and garden architect. Her gardening legacy is maintained in the Dutch town of Dedemsvaart, which is home to the Tuinen Mien Ruys. With people such as Piet Oudolf, she is considered a leader in the "New Perennial Movement."
Go to Profile#303
Gabriella Bosco
#102273
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Gabriella Bosco is an Italian engineer and professor at the Department of Electronics and Telecommunications of the Polytechnic University of Turin. She is the current editor-in-chief of the Journal of Lightwave Technology, and a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Go to Profile#304
Nanshu Lu
#91924
Overall Influence
Nanshu Lu is an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin where she leads the Lu Research Group in the department of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics. She also holds a courtesy appointment in the department of biomedical engineering. Lu is recognized for her work on the integration of electronics into stretchable materials compatible with human tissue, for which she was named one of the Top 35 innovators under the age of 35 by the MIT Technology Review in 2012.
Go to Profile#305
Sue Ion
#65160
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Dame Susan Elizabeth Ion is a British engineer and an expert advisor on the nuclear power industry. Ion was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2012 for contributions to nuclear fuel development.
Go to Profile#306
Sabeth Verpoorte
#31174
Overall Influence
Elisabeth MJ Verpoorte is a professor of microfluidics and miniaturized "lab-on-a-chip" systems in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. Education From 1990–1996, Verpoorte trained as an automation systems postdoctoral researcher in the Manz group at CIBA in Basel, Switzerland. She was then a Group Leader with Nico F. de Rooij at the Institute for Microtechnology in Neuchatel. Professor Verpoorte assumed her position in Groningen in 2003.
Go to Profile#307
Kate Orff
#50504
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Kate Orff is an American architect. She is the founding principal of SCAPE, a design-driven landscape architecture and urban design studio based in New York. She is also the director the Urban Design Program at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and co-director of the Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes. Orff is the first landscape architect to receive a MacArthur Fellowship.
Go to Profile#308
Farah Alibay
#82198
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (123 years)
Farah Alibay is a Canadian systems engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory who has worked on the InSight, Mars Cube One, and Mars 2020 missions. Early life and education The daughter of immigrants from Madagascar, Alibay was born in Montréal, Quebec. She grew up in nearby Joliette, Quebec, and moved with her family to Manchester, England for high school. French is her native language. The journey by the Canadian astronaut Julie Payette to space inspired Alibay in middle school; as Payette was from her province, she served as a role model. She went to the University of Cambridge, where s...
Go to Profile#309
Jin Zou
#104352
Overall Influence
#310
Manjusri Misra
#100417
Overall Influence
Manjusri Misra is an Indian engineer. She is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Biocomposites at the University of Guelph's School of Engineering. Misra is also the lead scientist at U of G's Bioproducts Discovery and Development Centre and a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Go to Profile#311
Paola Allavena
#104694
Overall Influence
#312
Julie Shah
#63854
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Julie Shah is an Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the Interactive Robotics Group at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Go to Profile#313
Lynne Cohen
#77420
Overall Influence
1944 - 2014 (70 years)
Lynne Cohen was an American-Canadian photographer. Life Born in Racine, Wisconsin, Cohen was educated in printmaking and sculpture at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, and in Ann Arbor and Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, Michigan. She studied for a year at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, England.
Go to Profile#314
Krystyn Van Vliet
#96827
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Krystyn J. Van Vliet is vice president for research and innovation at Cornell University and a faculty member in the Cornell University College of Engineering, where she has a joint appointment in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering. Her research lab specializes in material chemomechanics, the coupling between chemistry and mechanics at material interfaces.
Go to Profile#315
Naomi Stead
#82921
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Naomi Stead is an architectural academic, scholar and critic, based in Melbourne, Australia. She is currently the Director of the Design and Creative Practice Enabling Capability Platform at RMIT University, Australia.
Go to Profile#316
Esther Takeuchi
#53342
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Esther Sans Takeuchi is a materials scientist and chemical engineer, working on energy storage systems and power sources for biomedical devices. She is also a distinguished professor at Stony Brook University and a chief scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. She holds more than 150 U.S. patents. “The battery was invented once and reinvented over 100 times. I don’t own the patent. The company does. It was called Greatbatch. Now it’s called Integer Corp. When you join a company, you sign over your patent rights to the company.”
Go to Profile#317
Michaele Pride-Wells
#62416
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Michaele Pride-Wells , is an American architect and educator. She is a professor of architecture at the University of New Mexico. She was the first woman-owned and operated architecture firm in the state of California. Pride-Wells was the founder of the firm RE: Architecture in California. She was also the first African American woman to head an architecture program in a majority institution when she joined the University of Kentucky in 1996.
Go to Profile#318
Leonie Sandercock
#36628
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Leonie Sandercock is an urban planner and academic focusing on community planning and multiculturalism. Her work spans the interdisciplinary fields of urban studies, urban policy and planning and elucidates issues of difference, social justice and possibility. She has been teaching at the School of Community & Regional Planning at University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, since 2001.
Go to Profile#319
Hatice Altug
#88049
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Hatice Altug is a Turkish physicist and professor in the Bioengineering Department and head of the Bio-nanophotonic Systems laboratory at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne , in Switzerland. Her research focuses on nanophotonics for biosensing and surface enhanced spectroscopy, integration with microfluidics and nanofabrication, to obtain high sensitivity, label-free characterization of biological material. She has developed low-cost biosensor allowing the identification of viruses such as Ebola that can work in difficult settings and therefore particularly useful in case of pandemics.
Go to Profile#320
Zaida Muxí
#105478
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Zaida Muxí Martínez is an Argentine architect and city planner who graduated in the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urbanism at the University of Buenos Aires, Muxí earned her doctorate from the Upper Technical School of Architecture of Seville and later served as professor in the Upper Technical School of Architecture of Barcelona.
Go to Profile#321
Anna Stefanopoulou
#73310
Overall Influence
Anna G. Stefanopoulou is a Greek-American mechanical engineer known for her research on the control theory of fuel cells and on improving the fuel efficiency of automotive engines. She is William Clay Ford Professor of Technology in the department of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, director of the University of Michigan Energy Institute, and a member of the University of Michigan President's Commission on Carbon Neutrality.
Go to Profile#322
Carol Willis
#44887
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Carol Willis is the founder, director, and curator of the Skyscraper Museum. She is also adjunct associate professor of Urban Studies at Columbia University. Herbert Muschamp described Willis in The New York Times as the “woman who created the Skyscraper Museum in 1996 from nothing but her imagination, her passion for New York architecture, and her belief in the importance of history and the value of the public realm.”
Go to Profile#323
Jillian Buriak
#76099
Overall Influence
Jillian M. Buriak FRSC is a Canadian chemist, currently a Canada Research Chair in Nanomaterials at University of Alberta and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, American Association for the Advancement of Science and Royal Society of Chemistry. She is known for her work developing flexible, lightweight solar cells made from nanoparticles. By spraying a plastic surface with nanomaterials, she's able to fabricate a transparent layer of electrode that acts as solar cells. Due to the flexibility, they could be incorporated onto different surfaces.
Go to Profile#324
Anna Klingmann
#76900
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Anna Klingmann is a German born, American architect, author and academic who specializes in branding. She is the founder and principal architect of Klingmann Architects and Brand Consultants, and author of Brandscapes: Architecture in the Experience Economy. Klingmann coined the term "brandism" which describes how architecture can communicate a company's brand to the public. Her description of brandism can also be used not just to describe single structures; entire cities can have a unique brand or "expression of identity." She also has described the concept of a "brandscape" which describes corporate value systems embodied into the physical landscape.
Go to Profile#325
Gulchohra Mammadova
#98472
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Gulchohra Huseyn gizi Mammadova is an Azerbaijani architect, academician, Doctor of Architecture, and the current president of Azerbaijan University of Architecture and Construction. She was also a deputy in the Azerbaijani National Assembly from 2000 to 2005.
Go to Profile#326
Martha Salcudean
#71331
Overall Influence
1934 - 2019 (85 years)
Martha Sălcudean was an internationally recognised expert in computational fluid dynamics. She was Canada's first female head of a university engineering department. Salcudean was born in 1934 in Cluj, Romania, into a Jewish family. She survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and decades living under totalitarian regimes before she moved to Canada in 1976. Salcudean was a recipient of several provincial and national engineering awards in Canada.
Go to Profile#327
Musa Konsulova
#93036
Overall Influence
1921 - 2019 (98 years)
Musa Borysivna Konsulova was Ukrainian architect and researcher of architecture. Early life and education Musa Konsulova was born on 20 July 1921 in Romanivka village, now Kostiantynivsky district of Donetsk region, Ukraine. In her youth, Konsulova studied music professionally. In 1946, she graduated from Moscow Architectural Institute.
Go to Profile#328
Ursula Franklin
#24032
Overall Influence
1921 - 2016 (95 years)
Ursula Martius Franklin was a Canadian metallurgist, research physicist, author, and educator who taught at the University of Toronto for more than 40 years. Franklin is best known for her writings on the political and social effects of technology. She was the author of The Real World of Technology, which is based on her 1989 Massey Lectures; The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as a Map, a collection of her papers, interviews, and talks; and Ursula Franklin Speaks: Thoughts and Afterthoughts, containing 22 of her speeches and five interviews between 1986 and 2012. Franklin was a practising Quaker and actively worked on behalf of pacifist and feminist causes.
Go to Profile#329
Katharina Sieverding
#28012
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Katharina Sieverding is a German photographer known for her self-portraiture. Sieverding lives and works in Berlin and Düsseldorf. She is a professor emeritus at the University of the Arts, Berlin.
Go to Profile#330
Catherine Cooke
#66202
Overall Influence
1942 - 2004 (62 years)
Catherine Anne Chichester-Cooke , known as Catherine Cooke, was a British architect and a Russian scholar of international renown. She was lecturer in design at the Open University and also lectured and taught at the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#331
Joyce Wong
#100342
Overall Influence
Joyce Y. Wong is an American engineer who is Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering at Boston University. Her research develops novel biomaterials for the early detection treatment of disease. Wong is the Inaugural Director of the Provost's Initiative to promote gender equality and inclusion in STEM at all levels: Advance, Recruit, Retain and Organize Women in STEM. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and Biomedical Engineering Society.
Go to Profile#332
Ngalula Mubenga
#87623
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Ngalula Sandrine Mubenga is a Congolese engineer, a professor of electrical engineering technology, an entrepreneur, a philanthropist, and a government official leading electrification initiatives in the Democratic Republic of the Congo . Her accomplishments as a professor at the University of Toledo are detailed at www.DrMubenga.com. Research interests include renewable energy, solar power, electric vehicles, and battery management. Entrepreneurial credits include founding the SMIN Power Group LLC. The company specializes in the design and installation of renewable energy devices, with a pr...
Go to Profile#333
Laura Gagliardi
#66649
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Laura Gagliardi is an Italian theoretical and computational chemist and Richard and Kathy Leventhal Professor of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. She is known for her work on the development of electronic structure methods and their use for understanding complex chemical systems.
Go to Profile#334
Dimitra Simeonidou
#58418
Overall Influence
Dimitra E. Simeonidou is a Professor of High Performance Networks at the University of Bristol. She works on the development of telecommunications networks, including 5G, and is a specialist in smart city infrastructures.
Go to Profile#335
Flora Samuel
#70457
Overall Influence
Flora Samuel is a British architect, author and academic. In 2009 she became the Head of the School of Architecture at Sheffield University, the first woman to hold the post. Prior to this, she worked for ten years at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff. She was educated at Cambridge University.
Go to Profile#336
Jamie Paik
#96067
Overall Influence
Jamie Paik is a Canadian engineer who is a professor and director of the Reconfigurable Robotics Lab at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Early life and education Paik was born in Canada. Her father is a scientist and her mother is a painter. She completed her bachelor's degree at University of British Columbia. She majored in mechanical engineering. She earned her PhD at Seoul National University, sponsored by Samsung Electronics. Her PhD considered the limbs of anthropomorphic robots.
Go to Profile#337
Annette Gigon
#91635
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Annette Gigon is a Swiss architect born in Herisau, Switzerland. She is a founding partner of the office Gigon/Guyer and held a Chair of Architecture at ETH Zurich. Life Annette Gigon graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in 1984. After graduating, she worked for Marbach & Rüegg architects in Zurich from 1984 to 1985. Then, from 1985 to 1988, she worked for Herzog & de Meuron architects in Basel. She also worked as an independent architect from 1987 to 1989.
Go to Profile#338
Marina Waisman
#91801
Overall Influence
1920 - 1997 (77 years)
Marina Kitroser de Waisman was an Argentine architect, critic, and writer. She was awarded the Premio América in 1987. Biography Waisman was born in Buenos Aires. She graduated as an architect from the National University of Córdoba in 1944. She was a professor at the same university from 1948, when the first Chair of Contemporary Architecture was created, until 1971. Between 1956 and 1959, she taught at National University of Tucumán with Enrico Tedeschi and Francisco Bullrich, creating Instituto Interuniversitario de Historia de Arquitectura .
Go to Profile#339
Elizabeth Gerber
#85008
Overall Influence
Elizabeth Gerber is an associate professor in the Segal Design Institute, Mechanical Engineering, and Technology and Social Behavior departments at Northwestern University. Early life and education Gerber earned her B.A. at Dartmouth College in Studio Art and Engineering in 1998, and her M.S. at Stanford University in the Joint Program in Product Design in 2003. She earned her Ph.D. in Management Science & Engineering at Stanford University in 2007 working with Robert I. Sutton, Chip Heath, and Pamela Hinds.
Go to Profile#340
Jennifer Taylor
#67470
Overall Influence
1935 - 2015 (80 years)
Jennifer Evelyn Taylor was an Australian architect, professor, critic and author who made a significant contribution to writing on contemporary Australian, Japanese and South Pacific architecture. Biography Australian by birth, Taylor began studying architecture at the School of Architecture, Oxford Brookes University after taking a course in nursing. She then completed a B.Arch and M.Arch at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her Master of Architecture was in part by thesis entitled, An Inquiry into Some Aspects of Recent Unorthodox Trends in Architecture.
Go to Profile#341
Aziza Chaouni
#104848
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Aziza Chaouni is a Moroccan architect who teaches at the University of Toronto. Detail She is the founder of Aziza Chaouni Projects and associate professor at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design in Toronto. She leads Designing Ecological Tourism , "a collaborative research platform that investigates the challenges faced by ecotourism in the developing world."
Go to Profile#342
Alexandria Boehm
#86015
Overall Influence
Alexandria Boehm is an American scientist whose field of study is civil and environmental engineering. She studies sources, fate and transport of pathogens outside the human body, and coastal water quality. Boehm is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Woods Institute for the Environment, faculty fellow at Stanford University's Center for Innovation in Global Health, and an associate professor in Stanford University's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Go to Profile#343
Nicole Eisenman
#30943
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Nicole Eisenman is a French-born American artist known for her oil paintings and sculptures. She has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship , the Carnegie Prize , and has thrice been included in the Whitney Biennial . On September 29, 2015, she won a MacArthur Fellowship award for "restoring the representation of the human form a cultural significance that had waned during the ascendancy of abstraction in the 20th century."
Go to Profile#344
Sally Benson
#61243
Overall Influence
Sally M. Benson is a professor of energy engineering at Stanford University. In 2014, she was appointed as director of the Precourt Institute for Energy, the university's hub of energy research and education. Benson will continue on as director of Stanford's Global Climate and Energy Project , a position she has had since 2007.
Go to Profile#345
Gladys Ngetich
#84273
Overall Influence
1991 - Present (33 years)
Gladys Chepkirui Ngetich is a Kenyan engineer, and a Rhodes scholar, pursuing a doctorate degree in aerospace engineering at the University of Oxford, in the United Kingdom. She is the recipient of the Tanenbaum Fellowship and the Babaroa Excellence Award.
Go to Profile#346
Birgit Cold
#98089
Overall Influence
1936 - 2022 (86 years)
Birgit Cold was a Danish-born Norwegian architect and educator. She established her own practice in Trondheim together with Tore Brantenberg and Edvard Hiorthøy in 1964 and became a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in 1985. Her main areas of interest included the school environment and concern for well-being and health. Cold is also known for her sketching which she often used to express her understanding of architecture.
Go to Profile#347
Margherita Spiluttini
#92131
Overall Influence
1947 - 2023 (76 years)
Margherita Spiluttini was an Austrian photographer specializing in architecture. Spiluttini’s photo archive is one of the most important collections of photographs of architecture in Austria from 1980 to 2005.
Go to Profile#348
Antonella Ferrara
#97377
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Antonella Ferrara is an Italian control theorist and engineer, known for her work on sliding mode control. Education and career Ferrara is originally from Genoa, and studied electrical engineering at the University of Genoa, earning a laurea in 1987 and completing a Ph.D. in 1992. She became an assistant professor at the University of Genoa in 1992, and moved to the University of Pavia in 1998 as an associate professor. She was named professor of automatic control in 2005. At Pavia, she was originally affiliated with the department of computer engineering and systems science, and in 2011 beca...
Go to Profile#349
Anuradha Mathur
#76405
Overall Influence
1960 - 2022 (62 years)
Anuradha Mathur was a practicing architect, landscape architect and a professor in the Landscape Architecture department at the University of Pennsylvania. She was based in Philadelphia and Bangalore but has worked all over the world. Her professional focus was water, particularly how its utilization can lead to its excess or scarcity and its opportunities for resilience-based design.
Go to Profile#350
Sennur Ulukus
#110822
Overall Influence
Sennur Ulukus from the University of Maryland, College Park, MD was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2016 for contributions to characterizing performance limits of wireless networks.
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