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,
#451
Nancy D. Erbe
#16412
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Nancy Diane Erbe is an American negotiation, conflict resolution and peacebuilding professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills . Over the course of her career, she has collaborated with a wide spectrum of individuals and groups representing more than 80 countries, from colleagues and associates to clients and students, on these issues. She is a Fulbright Scholar, Senior Specialist in Peace and Conflict Resolution, and a Fulbright Distinguished Chair . She has received four Fulbright Honors to date including two in the same year which is extremely rare. She is the recipient of the Presidential Outstanding Professor Award-2015.
Go to Profile#452
Carlijn Bouten
#114527
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Carlijn V.C. Bouten is a Dutch professor of Cell-Matrix Interactions at the department of Biomedical Engineering of Eindhoven University of Technology since 2010. She specializes in tissue engineering.
Go to Profile#453
Milica Radisic
#113951
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Milica Radisic is a Serbian Canadian tissue engineer, academic and researcher. She is a professor at the University of Toronto’s Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering, and the Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry. She co-founded TARA Biosystems and is a senior scientist at the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute.
Go to Profile#454
Aviva Gileadi
#89448
Overall Influence
1917 - 2001 (84 years)
Aviva E. Gileadi was an Israeli nuclear scientist, a professor at the Israel Institute of Technology in the department of Nuclear Engineering. She was a specialist in the use of Nuclear reactors for energy production and Desalination. She was the first woman in the Western Bloc to receive a license for the operation of a nuclear reactor and the only one with such a license in 1963.
Go to Profile#455
Sharon Johnston
#95206
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Sharon Johnston is an American architect and architecture critic. She is a founding partner of the firm Johnston Marklee & Associates based in Los Angeles. Johnston has taught at a number of universities including Harvard Graduate School of Design, Princeton University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and has held the Cullinan Chair at Rice University and the Frank Gehry International Chair at the University of Toronto. In 2015, Johnston was named a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects for her contributions to the field.
Go to Profile#456
Melba Crawford
#106003
Overall Influence
Melba M. Crawford is the Associate Dean of Engineering for Research and a professor of agronomy, Civil Engineering, and Electrical & Computer Engineering at Purdue University. As the Nancy Uridil and Francis Bossu Professor in Civil Engineering, her specialty is Geomatics Engineering.
Go to Profile#457
Jennifer Dionne
#89981
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Jennifer Dionne is an American scientist and pioneer of nanophotonics. She is currently senior associate vice provost of research platforms at Stanford University, a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator, and an associate professor of materials science and engineering and by courtesy, of radiology. She serves as director of the Department of Energy's "Photonics at Thermodynamic Limits" Energy Frontier Research Center , which strives to create thermodynamic engines driven by light, and she leads the "Extreme Scale Characterization" efforts of the DOE's Q-NEXT Quantum Science Center. She is also an associate editor of the ACS journal Nano Letters.
Go to Profile#458
Sarah Cartmell
#121108
Overall Influence
Sarah Harriet Cartmell is a British biomaterials scientist and Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Manchester. She specializes on the potential use of electrical regimes to influence cellular activity for orthopaedic tissue engineering applications.
Go to Profile#459
Beverley McKeon
#107021
Overall Influence
Beverley J. McKeon is a physicist and aerospace engineer specializing in fluid dynamics, and in particular in turbulent flows near walls. She was Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology. Currently she is a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#460
A. Catrina Coleman
#103599
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Ann Catrina Coleman FIEEE FOSA is a Scottish electrical engineer and professor at the University of Texas at Dallas specialising in semiconductor lasers. Currently she is an Associate Vice President of the Photonics Society. Other professional activities include Associate Editor IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics , Elected Member of the IEEE LEOS Board of Governors , General Co-chair of Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics : Science and Innovations , Program Co-chair of Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics : Science and Innovations .
Go to Profile#461
Tuija Pulkkinen
#115512
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Tuija I. Pulkkinen is a Finnish space physicist. Her primary research foci are studying the energy flow from the solar wind to the near-Earth space environment and the energy dissipation processes in the magnetosphere.
Go to Profile#462
Carolee Schneemann
#40540
Overall Influence
1939 - 2019 (80 years)
Carolee Schneemann was an American visual experimental artist, known for her multi-media works on the body, narrative, sexuality and gender. She received a B.A. in poetry and philosophy from Bard College and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois. Originally a painter in the Abstract Expressionist tradition, Schneeman was uninterested in the masculine heroism of New York painters of the time and turned to performance-based work, primarily characterized by research into visual traditions, taboos, and the body of the individual in relation to social bodies. Although renowned for ...
Go to Profile#463
Guotong Zhou
#114414
Overall Influence
Guotong Zhou is a Chinese engineer from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Shenzhen. She was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2012 for her contributions to the analysis of nonlinear systems and signals.
Go to Profile#464
Julie Bargmann
#113490
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
'Bold text' Julie Bargmann is an American landscape architect and educator. Bargmann is Professor Emerita of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, founding principal of D.I.R.T. Studio, a landscape architecture firm, and inaugural recipient of the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize, an initiative of Washington, D.C.-based The Cultural Landscape Foundation.
Go to Profile#465
Justine Kurland
#33174
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Justine Kurland is an American fine art photographer, based in New York City. Early life and education Kurland was born in Warsaw, New York. She earned her B.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts in 1996. She went on to study with Gregory Crewdson at Yale University where she received an M.F.A. in 1998.
Go to Profile#466
Katherine Ferrara
#85801
Overall Influence
Katherine Whittaker Ferrara is an American engineer who is a professor of radiology at Stanford University. Ferrara has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.
Go to Profile#467
Sarah E. Pinder
#127459
Overall Influence
#468
Kei May Lau
#116048
Overall Influence
Kei May Lau is a semiconductor engineer whose research topics have included high-electron-mobility transistors, light-emitting diodes, and laser diodes. She is Fang Professor of Engineering and Director of the Photonics Technology Center in the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering.
Go to Profile#469
Laura Wilson
#43692
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Laura Cunningham Wilson is an American photographer. She has completed five books of photography and text: Watt Matthews of Lambshead , Hutterites of Montana , Avedon at Work: In the American West , Grit and Glory: Six-Man Football , and That Day: Pictures in the American West . She is the mother of actors Owen Wilson, Andrew Wilson, and Luke Wilson.
Go to Profile#470
Vera Silva
#108987
Overall Influence
Vera Lucia Fernandes de Paiva da Silva is a Portuguese engineer and the chief technology officer at General Electric grid solutions part of GE Renewable Energy business. She is one of the few women to hold a chief technology officer position at General Electric. She works on electricity grids technology and renewable energy integration.
Go to Profile#471
Candice Breitz
#69292
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Candice Breitz is a South African white artist who works primarily in video and photography. She won a 2007 Prince Pierre de Monaco Prize. Her work is often characterized by multi-channel moving image installations, with a focus on the “attention economy” of contemporary media and culture, often represented in the parallelism of the identification with fictional characters and celebrity figures and widespread indifference to global issues. In 2017, she was selected to represent South Africa at the 57th Venice Biennale.
Go to Profile#472
Susan Margulies
#75327
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Susan Margulies is an American engineer and assistant director of the U.S. National Science Foundation, heading the Directorate for Engineering. She is also the Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Injury Biomechanics and Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, where she served as chair from 2017 to 2021. She is a world leader in the biomechanics of head injury in infants.
Go to Profile#473
Karen Messing
#87085
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Karen Messing is a Canadian geneticist and ergonomist. She is an emeritus professor in the biological sciences at the University of Quebec at Montreal. She is known for her work on gender, environmental health and ergonomics. She was given the Jacques Rousseau Award in 1993, the Governor General's Award in 2009, and was named an Officer of the Order of Canada on December 27, 2019.
Go to Profile#474
Susan Hagness
#110047
Overall Influence
Susan Carol Hagness is an American electrical engineer and applied electromagnetics researcher. She is the Philip Dunham Reed Professor and Department Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Go to Profile#475
Ellen Braae
#112067
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Ellen Marie Braae is a Danish landscape architect and, since April 2014, the first professor of landscape architecture at Copenhagen University. Biography Braae was brought up on a farm near Rønde in central Jutland. After matriculating from Aarhus Cathedral School, she followed the family tradition and attended Viborg Gymnastikskole. From there, she went on to study landscape architecture at the Aarhus School of Architecture, graduating in 1991 and earning a PhD in 2003. From 2003 to 2006, she taught urban design at Aarhus University, specializing in landscape architecture until 2009. In 2...
Go to Profile#476
Ilona J. Frieden
#129050
Overall Influence
#477
Julie Willis
#60522
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Julie Willis is an Australian architectural historian and academic. She is currently Professor of Architecture and Dean of the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne.
Go to Profile#478
Patricia J. Culligan
#117701
Overall Influence
Patricia J. Culligan is the Matthew H. McCloskey Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Notre Dame and a professor of Civil Engineering. She is a former Chair of the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at Columbia University, and also served on the faculty of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She specializes in Geo-environmental Engineering, with an emphasis on water management and resources. Her most recent work is focused on issues related to urban sustainability.
Go to Profile#479
Beth Pruitt
#126681
Overall Influence
Beth L. Pruitt is an American engineer. Upon completing her master's degree in manufacturing systems engineering from Stanford University, Pruitt served as an officer in the United States Navy. She is a full professor of mechanical engineering, biological engineering, and biomolecular science & engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a fellow of both ASME and AIMBE.
Go to Profile#480
Olivia Graeve
#93944
Overall Influence
Olivia Graeve is a mechanical and aerospace engineer and Professor at University of California San Diego. She is also the Director of the CaliBaja Center for Resilient Materials and Systems at UC San Diego — a binational research institute on both sides of the California-Mexico border.
Go to Profile#481
Joan L. Mitchell
#58455
Overall Influence
1947 - 2015 (68 years)
Joan Laverne Mitchell was an American computer scientist, data compression pioneer, and inventor who, as a researcher at IBM, co-invented the JPEG digital image format. Early life Mitchell was born on May 24, 1947, in Modesto, California. Mitchell's father was William Mitchell and her mother was Doris Mitchell.
Go to Profile#482
Ana P. Barros
#104441
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Ana Paula Barros is an African-born American civil and environmental engineer currently the Donald Biggar Willett Chair of Engineering and Department Head of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an Elected Fellow of the American Meteorological Society. In 2019 she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for "contributions to understanding and prediction of precipitation dynamics and flood hazards in mountainous terrains". Prior to joining the University of Illinois, Professor Barros was the James L.
Go to Profile#483
Sarah Bergbreiter
#107017
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Sarah Bergbreiter is a professor of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, previously a professor at the University of Maryland. Her research specifically has focused on microrobotics, with projects influencing the medicine and consumer electronic spheres. She has given TED Talks highlighting her micro robots that can jump over 80 times their height. One such micro robot is the 4 millimeter "flea". She has won multiple awards for her work including the DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2008, the NSF CAREER Award in 2011, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers Award in 2013.
Go to Profile#484
Irem Y. Tumer
#125170
Overall Influence
Irem Y. Tumer is a mechanical engineer. She is Oregon State University’s vice president for research. She has served as the associate dean for research and economic development at the College of Engineering at Oregon State University. Tumer worked at the Ames Research Center from 1998 to 2006 as a research scientist and group lead of programs including intelligent systems, engineering for complex systems, aviation safety, and constellation programs. She completed her college degrees at University of Texas at Austin. She obtained a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering in 1991. She earned a Master of Science in Engineering in mechanical engineering in 1995.
Go to Profile#485
Julie Cairney
#86084
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Julie M. Cairney is a professor in the School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering at the University of Sydney and Director of the Australian Centre for Microscopy and Microanalysis and CEO of Microscopy Australia, a national user facility funded by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy . She is an expert in microscopy, focusing on the understanding and characterization of materials used for structural applications, renewable energy, medical science and geosciences including the use and development of the atom probe microscope.
Go to Profile#486
Princess Imoukhuede
#116953
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Princess Imoukhuede is an American chemical engineer who is a Professor in Bioengineering at the University of Washington. Before 2022, she was an associate professor at the Washington University in St. Louis. She was awarded the 2018 Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy Distinguished Leadership Award and the 2018 Nano Research Young Innovators Award in Nanobiotechnology. Her first name is 'Princess' and she holds no royal title or position in any capacity.
Go to Profile#487
Elena Losina
#130493
Overall Influence
#488
Sophie D'Amours
#97080
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Sophie D’Amours is an engineer and a professor at Université Laval. On April 26, 2017, she was elected the 26th rector of Université Laval, the first woman to hold the position. Biography Sophie D’Amours has been a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Université Laval since 1995 and served as the University's vice rector of research and innovation from 2012 to 2015.
Go to Profile#489
Dawn Tilbury
#82608
Overall Influence
Dawn Marie Tilbury is an American control theorist whose research topics include logic control, networked control systems, robotics, human–machine systems, and autonomous vehicles. She is a professor of mechanical engineering and of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan, and the head of the directorate for engineering at the National Science Foundation.
Go to Profile#490
Muyinatu Bell
#102064
Overall Influence
Muyinatu "Bisi" A. Lediju Bell is a researcher and faculty member. She is the John C. Malone Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University. She is also the director of the Photoacoustic and Ultrasonic Systems Engineering Laboratory.
Go to Profile#491
Rachel Neeson
#109587
Overall Influence
Rachel Neeson is an Australian architect and lecturer in architecture. Her architecture practice Neeson Murcutt Architects, formed with her late partner Nick Murcutt in 2004, was awarded the Australian Institute of Architects Robin Boyd Award for Residential Architecture – Houses in 2011.
Go to Profile#492
Elizabeth Chesterton
#114200
Overall Influence
1915 - 2002 (87 years)
Dame Elizabeth Ursula Chesterton, DBE was a British architect and town planner. Biography Chesterton was born on 12 October 1915 in Hampstead Garden Suburb, London. Her father, Maurice Chesterton, was an architect, while her mother Dorothy Deck had connections with writers and artists in Bloomsbury. Her father would regularly live at sites where the buildings were being erected, including running the company that designed Royal Shakespeare Theatre under Elisabeth Scott.
Go to Profile#493
Jannick Rolland
#124325
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Jannick Rolland is the Brian J. Thompson Professor of Optical Engineering at the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester. She is also the co-founder and CTO of LighTopTech, a women-owner business founded in 2013 to create medical imaging technologies with biomimetic noninvasive imaging technology. At the University of Rochester, she is the Director of the NSF I/UCRC Center for Freeform Optics . She is also the Director of the R.E. Hopkins Center for Optical Design and Engineering that engages undergraduates in optical design, fabrication, and metrology.
Go to Profile#494
Mariam Kamara
#75707
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Mariam Issoufou Kamara is a Nigerien architect. Her designs focus on open living spaces and make use of locally produced materials available to African communities: cement, recycled metal and raw earth.
Go to Profile#495
Konstantina Nikita
#120719
Overall Influence
Konstantina "Nantia" Nikita is a Greek electrical and computer engineer and a professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens , Greece. She is director of the Mobile Radiocommunications Lab and founder and director of the Biomedical Simulations and Imaging Lab, NTUA. Since 2015, she has been an Irene McCulloch Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Medicine at Keck School of Medicine and Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California.
Go to Profile#496
Alison Marsden
#98653
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Alison Lesley Marsden is an American pediatric cardiologist and bioengineer. She is the Douglass M. and Nola Leishman Professor of cardiovascular disease in the departments of Pediatrics , Bioengineering, and, by courtesy, Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. She is the daughter of Canadian-American mathematician Jerrold E. Marsden.
Go to Profile#497
Linda Brubaker
#131149
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
#498
Belkis Valdman
#40881
Overall Influence
1942 - 2011 (69 years)
Belkis Valdman was a Turkish born naturalised Brazilian researcher, teacher and academic chemical engineer, who worked in the field of instrumentation and process control in chemical engineering. Early life and education Belkis Valdman was born in Turkey on 5 May 1942, the daughter of Moise Dwek and Esterina Duek , one of three children, and became a naturalised Brazilian citizen in 1967.
Go to Profile#499
Myrna Báez
#64885
Overall Influence
1931 - 2018 (87 years)
Myrna Báez was a Puerto Rican painter and printmaker, considered one of the most important visual artists in Puerto Rico. She has been instrumental in promoting art and art education in her country. Her work has been shown and collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her work has been characterized as confident and complex. She lived and worked in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Go to Profile#500
Joan Redwing
#64528
Overall Influence
Joan M. Redwing is an American materials scientist known for research on electronic and optoelectronic materials, including the processing of semiconductor thin films and nanomaterials by metalorganic chemical vapor deposition . Redwing is a distinguished professor of materials science and engineering and electrical engineering at Pennsylvania State University and director of the university's 2D Crystal Consortium research facility. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, and the Materials Research Society.
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