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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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Engineering,

#351

Karen M'Closkey

#93570

Overall Influence

Karen M'Closkey is a landscape architect and Associate Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Her artistic and academic focus is the relationship between digital media and landscape architecture design, and M'Closkey is considered one of the leaders in this subfield. She is also the co-founder of PEG Office of Landscape + Architecture, a Philadelphia design and research firm.

#352

Tatjana Schneider

#65570

Overall Influence

Tatjana Schneider is an architect and academic. She is currently head of the Institute for History and Theory of Architecture and the City at the Technical University Braunschweig in Germany. Before this, she was a Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture, University of Sheffield, England and, in 2014/15, Professor for History and Theory of the City at HafenCity University Hamburg, Germany. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Strathclyde , her thesis title being "Mechanisms of the themed environment".

#353

Mary Ellen Mark

Mary Ellen Mark

#12936

Overall Influence

1940 - 2015 (75 years)

Mary Ellen Mark was an American photographer known for her photojournalism, documentary photography, portraiture, and advertising photography. She photographed people who were "away from mainstream society and toward its more interesting, often troubled fringes".

#354

Diane Ghirardo

#85743

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Diane Ghirardo is a professor of architecture at the University of Southern California. She is also the author of several books and essays on architectural history and theory. Her translation of The Architecture of the City by Aldo Rossi into English was first published in 1982.

#355

Kendra Sharp

#101857

Overall Influence

Kendra Vail Sharp is an American engineer. She is a professor of mechanical engineering and the Richard and Gretchen Evans Professor in Humanitarian Engineering at Oregon State University College of Engineering.

#356

Marianne McKenna

#60918

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Marianne McKenna, OC, FRAIC, OAA, OAQ, AIA, RIBA is a Canadian architect and a founding partner of KPMB Architects, a Toronto-based practice established in 1987. She is an invested Officer of The Order of Canada "for her contributions as an architect, designing structures that enrich the public realm". Her projects include the renovation and expansion of The Royal Conservatory TELUS Centre for Performance and Learning and Koerner Hall. McKenna and KPMB were selected by The Brearley School, an independent all-girls school located in New York City, to lead the renovation of its building located on the Upper East Side.

#357

Christine Shoemaker

#85558

Overall Influence

Christine A. Shoemaker joined the Department of Industrial Systems Engineering & Management and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering as NUS Distinguished Professor on 31 August 2015. Prof Shoemaker obtained her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Southern California supervised by Richard Bellman in Dynamic Programming. Upon her graduation, she joined the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and later the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA. She was promoted to full Professor in 1985. From 1985 to 198...

#358

Helen H. Lu

#104375

Overall Influence

Helen Haiyan Lu is a Chinese American biomedical engineer and the Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson professor of biomedical engineering at the Columbia University Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. Her work focuses on understanding and developing therapies in complex tissue systems, especially the interface between soft tissue and bone.

#359

Clare Cooper Marcus

#67262

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Clare Cooper Marcus is a prominent educator in landscape architecture and architecture and a pioneer in the field of social issues in housing, open space design, and healing landscapes. Clare Cooper Marcus was born in 1934 and raised in a north London suburb. She received her undergraduate degree in historical geography from University College, London and a Masters in urban and cultural Geography from University of Nebraska at Lincoln. She returned to England to teach cartography at the University of Sheffield, and worked as urban planner at the Ministry of Housing and London County Council. S...

#360

Hazel Assender

#73952

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Hazel Elaine Assender , is the head of Department and Professor of Materials at the Department of Materials, University of Oxford. She is an expert in polymer chemistry, thin film electronics and nanomaterials. Assender is a fellow of Linacre College, Oxford.

#361

Judith Driscoll

Judith Driscoll

#100874

Overall Influence

Judith Louise MacManus-Driscoll is a Professor of Materials Science at the University of Cambridge. Driscoll is known for her interdisciplinary work on thin film engineering. She has a particular focus on functional oxide systems, demonstrating new ways to engineer thin films to meet the required applications performance. She has worked extensively in the fields of high temperature superconductors, ferroics and multiferroics, ionics, and semiconductors. She holds several licensed patents.

#362

Tricia Carmichael

#33620

Overall Influence

Tricia L. Carmichael is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Windsor. She develops new materials for stretchable electronics with a current focus on wearable electronic devices.

#363

Jenny P. Y. Ting

#103174

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Jenny Pan-Yun Ting is a Taiwanese-American immunologist and microbiologist at University of North Carolina. She is a highly cited researcher who studies the role of NLR genes in regulating inflammation and how nanoparticles and microparticles can be used as vaccine adjuvants. She was president of the American Association of Immunologists from 2020 to 2021.

#364

Maggie Aderin-Pocock

Maggie Aderin-Pocock

#36625

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Margaret Ebunoluwa Aderin-Pocock is a British space scientist and science educator. She is an honorary research associate of University College London's Department of Physics and Astronomy, and has been the chancellor of the University of Leicester since February 2023. Since February 2014, she has co-presented the long-running astronomy television programme The Sky at Night with Chris Lintott. In 2020 she was awarded the Institute of Physics William Thomson, Lord Kelvin Medal and Prize for her public engagement in physics. She is the first black woman to win a gold medal in the Physics News ...

#365

Anne C. Steinemann

#98196

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Anne C. Steinemann is an American civil and environmental engineering academic who has specialized chiefly in the fields of "healthy built environments, indoor air quality, consumer product emissions and exposures, drought management, and climate-related hazards", with a focus on engineering and sustainability. Currently professor of civil engineering at the University of Melbourne and professor of engineering at James Cook University, she has also advised numerous government and industry bodies in the United States and Australia and appeared widely in press, radio, television and website segm...

#366

Duy-Loan Le

#55970

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Duy-Loan T. Le is an engineer and the first woman and Asian elected as a Texas Instruments Senior Fellow. Early life Born in Nha Trang, South Vietnam, in 1962 to a labor-class family, Duy-Loan Le fled to the U.S. without her father and a family of nine in 1975, eventually settling in Houston. Her family joined her in the U.S. few years later.

#367

Róisín Owens

#69774

Overall Influence

2000 - 2017 (17 years)

Róisín Owens is a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge. Her research investigates new engineering technology for biological applications with a focus on organic bioelectronics, developing electroactive materials that can be used between physical transducers and soft biological tissues.

#368

Naira Hovakimyan

Naira Hovakimyan

#62900

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Naira Hovakimyan is an Armenian control theorist who holds the W. Grafton and Lillian B. Wilkins professorship of the Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the director of AVIATE Center of flying cars at UIUC, funded through a NASA University Leadership Initiative. She was the inaugural director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory during 2015–2017, associated with the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

#369

Derya Akkaynak

#55268

Overall Influence

Derya Akkaynak is a Turkish mechanical engineer and oceanographer at the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute. She was a 2019 finalist for the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists. Early life and education Akkaynak is from the Aegean coast of Turkey. After completing her primary and secondary education at TED Ankara College and graduating in 1998, she studied aerospace engineering at the Middle East Technical University, where she graduated top of her class in 2003. She moved to the United States after graduating, where she earned a master's degree in Aeronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005.

#370

Ellen Kuhl

#101481

Overall Influence

Ellen Kuhl is the Walter B. Reinhold Professor in the School of Engineering and Robert Bosch Chair of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. She is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and, by courtesy, Bioengineering. Kuhl is known for her research on Living Matter Physics, the design of theoretical and computational models to simulate and predict the behavior of living systems including the human brain and the living heart.

#371

Karen Reynolds

#83456

Overall Influence

Karen Reynolds is an Australian biomedical engineer. She is currently the Deputy Dean of Computer Science, Engineering and Mathematics at Flinders University and a Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor. Reynolds is the director of the Medical Device Research Institute and founding director of the Medical Device Partnering Program in South Australia, an organisation that facilitates collaboration between researchers, end-users and industry.

#372

Tara Ruttley

#63024

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Tara Melaine Ruttley is Associate Chief Scientist for Microgravity Research at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. Prior to this, she was Associate Program Scientist for the International Space Station at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Until 2007, she was lead hardware engineer for the ISS Health Maintenance System, leading a team of engineers whose job was to provide reliable medical equipment that kept astronauts healthy in orbit. She subsequently served as the lead hardware engineer for the ISS Human Research Facility. She served as an aquanaut on the NASA Extreme Envi...

#373

Bodil Kjær

#95519

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Bodil Kjær is a Danish architect, furniture designer, professor and researcher, who has specialized in interior design and city planning. Today she is recognized above all for the flexible series of office furniture she designed in the 1960s.

#374

Peggy Cyphers

#81040

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Peggy Cyphers is an American painter, printmaker, professor and art writer, who has shown her work in the U.S. and internationally since 1984. Since Cyphers’ move to New York City over 30 years ago, her inventive and combinatory approaches to the materials of paint, silkscreen and sand have developed into canvases that explore the “Politics of Progress” as it impacts culture and the natural world.

#375

Susie Wee

#87388

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Susie J. Wee is an American technology expert. In 2011, she became the Vice President and Chief Technology and Experience Officer of Collaboration at Cisco Systems. In 2018, she became the Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Cisco DevNet, which she founded in 2014. Wee is a WITI Hall of Fame inductee.

#376

Veena Misra

#94607

Overall Influence

Veena Misra is an academic electrical engineer whose research has spanned a range of scales from forming individual circuit components out of semiconductors to wearable technology. She is MC Dean Distinguished University Professor at North Carolina State University, and interim head of the university's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

#377

Danielle Wood

#43251

Overall Influence

Danielle Wood is an assistant professor in the MIT Media Lab, where she directs the research group Space Enabled. Prior to joining MIT, Wood worked as special assistant to Dava Newman at NASA. Wood looks to advance justice using technology created in space.

#378

Jenny Sabin

#102861

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Jenny E. Sabin is an American architect, designer and artist who draws upon biology and mathematics to design material structures. Sabin is the Arthur L. and Isabel B. Wiesenberger Professor of Architecture in the Department of Architecture at Cornell University. She focuses on design and emerging technologies, with particular emphasis on the areas of computational design, data visualization and digital fabrication.

#379

Olgica Milenkovic

#73077

Overall Influence

Olgica Milenkovic is a coding theorist from the former Yugoslavia, known for her work in compressed sensing, low-density parity-check codes, and DNA digital data storage. She is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

#380

Ruxandra Botez

#115213

Overall Influence

Ruxandra Mihaela Botez is an aerospace design engineer, specializing in aircraft modeling and simulation. She holds a Canada Research Chair in the Systems Engineering Department of the École de technologie supérieure [ETS] in Quebec.

#381

Orly Yadid-Pecht

#73611

Overall Influence

Orly Yadid-Pecht is a Professor of Electrical and Software Engineering and Alberta Innovates Technology Futures Strategic Chair of Integrated Intelligent Sensors at the University of Calgary. She develops CMOS based imaging devices for biomedical sensing. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, SPIE and American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. She is an ASTech Award Winner for Technology. Yadid-Pecht holds several patents for new technologies, including sensors, health monitoring devices and drug delivery systems.

#382

Haitao Zheng

#36210

Overall Influence

Haitao "Heather" Zheng is Chinese-American computer scientist and electrical engineer. She is the Neubauer Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. She was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for "contributions to dynamic spectrum access and cognitive radio networks". She was named to the 2022 class of ACM Fellows, "for contributions to wireless networking and mobile computing".

#383

Margaret Henderson Floyd

#73226

Overall Influence

1932 - 1997 (65 years)

Margaret Henderson Floyd was Professor of Architectural History at Tufts University. She was an expert on Boston architecture. Her writing includes several titles on the work of late 19th-century American architects including Henry Hobson Richardson, and Longfellow, Alden and Harlow.

#384

Young Jean Lee

#20453

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Young Jean Lee is an American playwright, director, and filmmaker. She was the Artistic Director of Young Jean Lee's Theater Company, a not-for-profit theater company dedicated to producing her work. She has written and directed ten shows for Young Jean Lee's Theater Company and toured her work to over thirty cities around the world. Lee was called "the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation" by Charles Isherwood in The New York Times and "one of the best experimental playwrights in America" by David Cote in Time Out New York. With the 2018 production of Straight White Men at ...

#385

Heidi Nepf

#112892

Overall Influence

Heidi Nepf is an American engineer known for her research on fluid flows around aquatic vegetation. Education and career Nepf has a B.S. from Bucknell University and an M.S. from Stanford University . Nepf earned a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Stanford University in 1992 with a dissertation titled "The production and mixing effects of Langmuir circulations". Following her Ph.D., Nepf was a postdoctoral scholar at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and then joined the faculty of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1993. As of 2021, she is the Donald and Martha Harleman Professor at ...

#386

Elizabeth Tanner

#111188

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Kathleen Elizabeth Tanner is the Bonfield Professor of Biomedical Materials at Queen Mary University of London. Her research focusses on developing materials with particular biological and mechanical properties for use medicine, particularly those used for bone replacement. Tanner developed HAPEX, a bone mineral composite biomaterial, which was used in over half a million middle ear transplants in the 1990s.

#387

Mary Bouxsein

#116211

Overall Influence

Mary Larsen Bouxsein is an American biomechanical engineer and an orthopedic researcher. She is the president of the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research, director of the Centre of Advanced Orthopaedic Studies at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, professor at the department of Orthopedic Surgery at Harvard Medical School. She is known for her work on bone density and the use of imaging to define the factors leading to bone fractures.

#388

Annmarie Adams

#80696

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Annmarie Adams is an architectural historian and university professor. She is the former Chair of the Department of Social Studies of Medicine and is the former Director of the School of Architecture at McGill University. Adams specializes in healthcare architecture and gendered space. At McGill she teaches courses in architectural history and research methods. She is the inaugural holder of the Stevenson Chair in the History and Philosophy of Science, including Medicine. She is a board member of the Society of Architectural Historians and former board member of the Vernacular Architecture Fo...

#389

Milka Bliznakov

Milka Bliznakov

#79538

Overall Influence

1927 - 2010 (83 years)

Milka Tcherneva Bliznakov was a Bulgarian architect and architectural historian. She was regarded as an authority on the avant-garde and Russian Constructivism. Her work focused on the often overlooked role of women in architecture and she founded the International Archive of Women in Architecture. She was Professor Emerita of Architecture at Virginia Tech from 1974 to 1998.

#390

Irith Pomeranz

#101608

Overall Influence

Irith Pomeranz is an Israeli electrical engineer known for her research in circuit testing and fault tolerance. She is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University and a Fellow of the IEEE.

#391

Miwa Yanagi

#70032

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Miwa Yanagi is a Japanese photographic artist who examines self-image and stereotypes of women in contemporary Japanese society. Yanagi was discovered by conceptual photographer Yasumasa Morimura, who noticed some of her work while borrowing her house as a set for a separate project.

#392

Rabab Ward

#113199

Overall Influence

Rabab Kreidieh Ward is an Lebanese-Canadian electrical engineer specializing in signal processing. She is a professor emerita of electrical and computer engineering at the University of British Columbia.

#393

Sarah Spurgeon

#92697

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Sarah Katherine Spurgeon is the Head of Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at University College London. She served as President of the Engineering Professors' Council from 2017 to 2019. She has previously served as Head of the Department of Engineering at both the University of Leicester and University of Kent.

#394

Silvana Cardoso

#59279

Overall Influence

Silvana Cardoso is a Portuguese fluid dynamicist working in Britain. She is professor of Fluid Mechanics and the Environment at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. She leads the Fluids and the Environment research group at the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology.

#395

Sally Mann

#6096

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Sally Mann HonFRPS is an American photographer known for making large format black and white photographs of her immediate surroundings—her children, husband, rural landscapes, and self-portraits. Early life and education Born in Lexington, Virginia, Mann was the third of three children. Her father, Robert S. Munger, was a general practitioner, and her mother, Elizabeth Evans Munger, ran the bookstore at Washington and Lee University in Lexington. Mann was introduced to photography by her father, who encouraged her interest in photography; his 5x7 camera became the basis of her use of large format cameras today.

#396

Flora Ruchat-Roncati

Flora Ruchat-Roncati

#83427

Overall Influence

1937 - 2012 (75 years)

Flora Ruchat-Roncati was a Swiss architect and professor. She was from Ticino, and became a pioneering figure in the Ticinese School of architecture, which was influential in the mid-1970s, mixing the sensitivity to the traditional with modernism.

#397

Caroline Baillie

#78287

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Caroline Baillie is a materials scientist and specialist in engineering education, since 2017 the inaugural Professor of Praxis in the School of Engineering at the University of San Diego, USA. Background Baillie was born and educated in south-east UK. She has a Bachelors in Materials Technology, University of Surrey . Her first job after undergraduate study was in public relations, and she resigned when asked to promote asbestos despite its carcinogenic properties. She returned to Surrey for a PhD in materials science and engineering . She has one son born in 2012.

#398

Ananya Roy

#38043

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Ananya Roy is a scholar of international development and global urbanism. Born in Calcutta, India , Roy is Professor and Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. She has been a professor of City and Regional Planning and Distinguished Chair in Global Poverty and Practice at the University of California, Berkeley. She holds a Bachelor of Comparative Urban Studies degree from Mills College, and Master of City Planning and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California a...

#399

Tara Javidi

#72487

Overall Influence

Tara Javidi is an Iranian electrical engineer and computer scientist who studies networked information, stochastic control, machine learning, hypothesis testing, network optimization, and network routing, among other topics. She is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, San Diego, where she co-directs the Center for Machine-Integrated Computing and Security with Farinaz Koushanfar.

#400

Frances Ligler

#103023

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Frances S. Ligler is a biochemist and bioengineer who was a 2017 inductee of the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Ligler's research dramatically improved the effectiveness of biosensors while at the same time reducing their size and increasing automation. Her work on biosensors made it easier to detect toxins and pathogens in food, water, or when airborne.

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