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).

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Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Mathematics,

#1701

Linda J. Young

#131252

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Linda Jean Young is the Chief Mathematical Statistician and Director of Research and Development at the National Agricultural Statistics Service. Her research interests include integrating diverse data especially that involving spatial data, agricultural data, and statistical ecology.

#1702

Natalie Dean

#127483

Overall Influence

1987 - Present (37 years)

Natalie E. Dean is an American biostatistician specializing in infectious disease epidemiology. Dean is currently an assistant professor of Biostatistics at the University of Florida. Her research involves epidemiological modeling of outbreaks, including Ebola, Zika and COVID-19.

#1703

Sündüz Keleş

#141883

Overall Influence

Sündüz Keleş is a Turkish statistician specializing in statistical methods in genomics. She is a professor of statistics and of biostatistics and medical informatics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research has included the development of the FreeHi-C system for generating synthetic Hi-C data.

#1704

Dominique Haughton

#115681

Overall Influence

Dominique Marie-Annick Haughton is a French statistician whose research interests include business analytics, standards of living, and applications of statistics to music. She is a professor of mathematical sciences at Bentley University. She is also an associated researcher with the research center on Statistique, Analyse et Modélisation Multidisciplinaire at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne.

#1705

Ruth Rice Puffer

#83557

Overall Influence

1907 - 2002 (95 years)

Ruth Rice Puffer was an American biostatistician who headed the Department of Health Statistics of the Pan American Health Organization, where she led the Inter-American Investigation of Childhood Mortality.

#1706

Kimberly Sellers

#102718

Overall Influence

Kimberly Flagg Sellers is an American statistician. She has been the head of the statistics department at North Carolina State University since 2023, where she is the first Black woman in the university's history to lead a science department. Previously, Dr. Sellers was a full professor of statistics at Georgetown University and a principal researcher in the Center for Statistical Research and Methodology of the United States Census Bureau, the former chair of the Committee on Women in Statistics of the American Statistical Association, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.

#1707

Alyson Wilson

#169278

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Alyson Gabbard Wilson is an American statistician known for her work on Bayesian methods for reliability estimation and on military applications of statistics. She is a professor of statistics at North Carolina State University, where she is also Associate Vice Chancellor for National Security and Special Research Initiatives.

#1708

Alison Motsinger-Reif

#158151

Overall Influence

Alison Anne Motsinger-Reif is an American biostatistician and human geneticist specialized in association analyses, big data, and genomic analyses. In December 2018, she became the chief of the biostatistics and computational biology branch at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Montsinger-Reif was previously a professor of statistics at the North Carolina State University.

#1709

Brisa Sánchez

#156041

Overall Influence

Brisa N. Sánchez is a Mexican-American biostatistician and environmental epidemiologist, whose research has included work on the spatial analysis of fast food restaurants, on nutrition in schools, on the relation between the characteristics of neighborhoods and the health of their residents, on the water infrastructure in Mexico City, and on latent variable models in environmental statistics. She is the Dornsife Professor of Biostatistics at Drexel University.

#1710

June Morita

#150705

Overall Influence

June Gloria Morita is an American statistician and statistics educator. She is a principal lecturer emerita in statistics at the University of Washington, and is known for her innovative lessons in statistics based on examples from real life. For instance, one of her classes tested whether helium-filled footballs travel farther than air-filled footballs, with the assistance of her son, Washington Huskies football place-kicker Eric Guttorp. Another lesson, for local elementary school students, tested the mark and recapture method by catching fish at the school's fish pond.

#1711

Margarete Seeler

Margarete Seeler

#80280

Overall Influence

1909 - 1996 (87 years)

Margarete Seeler was a German-born American artist, designer, educator, and author. She was known for work as a goldsmith, her enamelwork, graphic design, and her paintings. She was one of the best known enamelers in the United States, specifically for her cloisonné work. She published two books on enameling, The Art of Enameling and Enamel Medium for Fine Art . Seeler was elected as a Fellow of the American Craft Council in 1993.

#1712

Cynthia Bathurst

#75609

Overall Influence

Cynthia Bathurst is an animal welfare advocate, winner of a national veterinary award, and founder and director of Safe Humane Chicago, a nonprofit which includes the first of its kind Court Case Dog Program.

#1713

Rosemary Roberts

#102542

Overall Influence

Rosemary A. Roberts is a statistics educator who led the creation of the AP Statistics course and exam for US secondary school students, and who later chaired the Statistical Education Section of the American Statistical Association. Educated in England and Canada, she spent many years working in the US before her 2013 retirement.

#1714

Raquel Prado

#131060

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Raquel Prado is a Venezuelan Bayesian statistician. She is a professor of statistics in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and has been elected president of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis for the 2019 term.

#1715

Ho Weang Kee

#145433

Overall Influence

Ho Weang Kee is a Malaysian statistician whose research focuses on the application of statistical methods to genetic data analysis. She is an associate professor of statistics at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus in the Department of Applied Mathematics. In 2018, Ho received the L'Oréal-UNESCO International Rising Talent Award in recognition of her work toward developing a predictive model estimating the risk of breast cancer for Southeast Asian women.

#1716

Lori Thombs

#136408

Overall Influence

Lori A. Thombs is an American statistician whose interests include social statistics, time series, and resampling. She is an associate professor of statistics at the University of Missouri, where she directs the Social Science Statistics Center, and president of the Southern Regional Council On Statistics.

#1717

Deborah Donnell

#117651

Overall Influence

Deborah J. Donnell is a New Zealand and American biostatistician known for her research on the prevention of HIV infection. She is a professor in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division and Public Health Sciences Division of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and an affiliate professor of global health and health services at the University of Washington.

#1718

Mary Hardy

#167781

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Mary Rosalyn Hardy is a professor of actuarial science at the University of Waterloo . She pioneered, together with Julia Wirch, the development and application of the conditional tail expectation . Biography Hardy studied mathematics at the University of London and holds a PhD from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. She has served as editor of the North American Actuarial Journal and she was previously editor of Annals of Actuarial Science.

#1719

Cathy Woan-Shu Chen

#134138

Overall Influence

Cathy Woan-Shu Chen is a Taiwanese statistician, who works as a distinguished professor of statistics at Feng Chia University and was editor-in-chief of the Journal of Economics and Management. In 2016, she was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. Her research interests include Bayesian methods and economic statistics. In 2020, she was elected as a Fellow of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis.

#1720

Ellen Datlow

#9293

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Ellen Datlow is an American science fiction, fantasy, and horror editor and anthologist. She is a winner of the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award . Career Datlow began her career working for Holt, Rinehart and Winston for three years, as well as doing a stint at Crown Publishing Group. She went on to be fiction editor at Omni magazine and Omni Online from 1981 through 1998, and edited the ten associated Omni anthologies. She co-edited the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror series from 1988 to 2008 . She was also editor of the webzine Event Horizon: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror...

#1721

Shelley Hurwitz

#92366

Overall Influence

Shelley Hurwitz is an American biostatistician. She is the Director of Biostatistics in the Center for Clinical Investigation at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and an associate professor in the Harvard Medical School.

#1722

Snezhana Abarzhi

#169050

Overall Influence

Snezhana I. Abarzhi is an applied mathematician and mathematical physicist from the former Soviet Union specializing in the dynamics of fluids and plasmas and their applications in nature and technology. Her research has indicated that supernovas explode more slowly and less turbulently than previously thought, changing the understanding of the mechanisms by which heavy atomic nuclei are formed in these explosions. She is Professor and Chair of Applied Mathematics at the University of Western Australia.

#1723

Katharine Elizabeth O'Brien

#171196

Overall Influence

1901 - 1998 (97 years)

Katharine Elizabeth O'Brien was an American mathematician, musician and poet. Early life Born in Amesbury, Massachusetts to parents who had emigrated from Ireland, O'Brien's family moved to Maine while at the age of three. She was class valedictorian when she graduated from Deering High School in Portland, Maine in 1917. She then attended nearby Bates College from which she graduated in 1922 with honors in both mathematics and science. Despite her science-focused majors, she also was drawn to and pursued both poetry and music.

#1724

Lee-Ann C. Hayek

#146695

Overall Influence

Lee-Ann Collins Hayek is the chief mathematical statistician at the National Museum of Natural History. Her work has included studying the proportions of metals in Renaissance bronze, and the response of Pandas to vaccines. With Martin Buzas, she is the author of Surveying Natural Populations: Quantitative Tools for Assessing Biodiversity .

#1725

Angela Dale

#105676

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Angela Dale is a British social scientist and statistician whose research has involved the secondary analysis of government survey data, and the study of women in the workforce. Formerly Deputy Director of the Social Statistics Research Unit of City, University of London, and Professor of Quantitative Research and Director of the Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research at the University of Manchester, she is now a professor emerita at Manchester.

#1726

Ulrike Grömping

#156873

Overall Influence

Ulrike Grömping is a German statistician known for her work on regression analysis with variable importance, and for her R package relaimpo for performing linear regression with relative importance. She is Professor for Applied Statistics and Business Mathematics at the Berliner Hochschule für Technik.

#1727

Rebecca Andridge

#145737

Overall Influence

Rebecca Roberts Andridge is an American statistician. Her statistical research concerns the imputation of missing data and the statistics of group-randomized trials; she has also performed highly-cited applied statistical work on omega-3 nutritional supplements and on the health benefits of using yoga to lower stress. Andridge is an associate professor of biostatistics at the Ohio State University.

#1728

Mei-Ling Ting Lee

#124690

Overall Influence

Mei-Ling Ting Lee is a Taiwanese-American biostatistician known for her research on microarrays. She is a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Lifetime Data Analysis. She was president of the International Chinese Statistical Association for 2016.

#1729

Jennifer Brown

#149672

Overall Influence

Jennifer Ann Brown is a New Zealand statistician, currently a professor at the University of Canterbury and the former president of the New Zealand Statistical Association. Brown is interested in problems of environmental statistics such as monitoring endangered or invasive species, and in the statistical problems such as experimental design and change detection needed to accomplish those tasks. She is a Professor of Statistics at the University of Canterbury, head of the School of Mathematics and Statistics at Canterbury, and associate director of the Biomathematics Research Centre.

#1730

Mary Mulry

#155002

Overall Influence

Mary Helen Mulry is an American demographic statistician who works for the United States Census Bureau and has published scholarly works about census accuracy. Education and career Mulry majored in mathematics at Texas Christian University, graduating in 1972 as the university's top mathematics student. She went to Indiana University Bloomington for graduate study in mathematics, earning a master's degree in mathematics in 1975, a second master's degree in statistics in 1977, and a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1978. Her dissertation, -Extension Properties, concerned equivariant topology and was su...

#1731

Allison Milner

#128665

Overall Influence

1983 - 2019 (36 years)

Allison Joy Milner was a social epidemiologist specializing in workplace mental health. Milner was Deputy Head of the Disability and Health Unit at the Centre for Health Equity, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne. She earned a doctor of philosophy from the Griffith University's Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention in Brisbane and a masters of epidemiology from the University of Melbourne.

#1732

Kimiko O. Bowman

#145811

Overall Influence

1927 - 2019 (92 years)

Kimiko Osada Bowman was a Japanese-American statistician known for her work on approximating the probability distribution of maximum likelihood estimators and for her advocacy for people with disabilities.

#1733

Aleksandra Slavković

#137331

Overall Influence

Aleksandra B. Slavković is an American statistician, a professor of statistics at Pennsylvania State University, and Associate Dean for Graduate Education in the Eberly College of Science at Pennsylvania State. She also chairs the Committee on Privacy and Confidentiality in Statistics of the American Statistical Association. Her research interests include statistical disclosure control, algebraic statistics, and the applications of statistics in the social sciences.

#1734

Rajeshwari Sundaram

#161160

Overall Influence

Rajeshwari Sundaram is an Indian biostatistician specializing in survival analysis and reproductive health who works in the National Institutes of Health as a senior investigator in the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Topics in her research have included the effects of obesity on fertility, infant and early childhood screen time, and the long-term persistence of postpartum depression.

#1735

Shonda Kuiper

#172756

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Shonda Roelfs Kuiper is a professor of statistics and statistics educator at Grinnell College and a former statistician for Hallmark Cards. She chairs the Joint Committee on Statistics Education of the American Statistical Association and Mathematical Association of America, and is the author of a statistics textbook with J. Sklar, Practicing Statistics: Guided Investigations for the Second Course .

#1736

Shih-Jen Hwang

#173473

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Shih-Jen Hwang is a Taiwanese-American biostatistician and epidemiologist. She is a staff scientist in the Laboratory for Cardiovascular Epidemiology and Genomics at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. She is an investigator on the Framingham Heart Study.

#1737

Betty Flehinger

#160908

Overall Influence

Betty Jeanne Flehinger-Schultz was a biostatistician known for her research on clinical decision support systems and cancer screening. She worked for many years for IBM Research. Education and career Betty Jeanne Isaacs is a 1941 graduate of Barnard College, where she was founder and president of the college's physics club. She earned a master's degree in physics from Cornell University in 1942 with a thesis titled A Revision of the Isotopic Mass Scale. As Betty Flehinger, she completed a Ph.D. in 1961 from Columbia University. Her dissertation, A General Model for the Reliability Analysis of...

#1738

Maria Pia Fanti

#116348

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Maria Pia Fanti is an Italian control theorist known for her research on topics that include discrete event dynamic systems, Petri nets, consensus, fault detection and isolation, agile manufacturing, and road traffic control. She is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Bari, where she heads the Laboratory for Control and Automation.

#1739

Rongwei Fu

#131636

Overall Influence

Rongwei F. Fu is a biostatistician who uses meta-analysis to understand disease incidence, detection, and treatment. She is a professor of biostatistics, medical informatics and clinical epidemiology at the Oregon Health & Science University , and the director of biostatistics education at OHSU. She has also worked as lead biostatistician for the OHSU Center for Policy and Research in Emergency Medicine , at the Pacific Northwest Evidence-based Practice Center , and at the OHSU Research Center for Gender-Based Medicine.

#1740

Haiyan Huang

#130437

Overall Influence

Haiyan Huang is a Chinese-American biostatistician. She works as a professor of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where she directs the Center for Computational Biology. She is the coauthor of highly cited work on the human genome, published as part of the ENCODE research consortium, and has also published foundational work on the statistical modeling of experimental reproducibility.

#1741

Janet Myhre

#104778

Overall Influence

Janet M. Myhre is an American statistician, the Dengler-Dykema Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Mathematical Economics at Claremont McKenna College. Myhre did her undergraduate studies at Pacific Lutheran University, earned a master's degree at the University of Washington, and completed her doctorate at Stockholm University. She joined the Claremont McKenna faculty in 1962. There, in 1975, she was the founding director of the Reed Institute for Decision Science, later to become the Reed Institute for Applied Statistics.

#1742

Feng Chu

#137136

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Feng Chu is a Chinese-French computer scientist and operations researcher whose research applies Petri nets to combinatorial optimization problems arising in inventory control, manufacturing, and transportation. She is a distinguished professor at the University of Évry Val d'Essonne, where she is director of the AROBAS team within the IBISC laboratory, and head of the Chinese mission in the office of the president of the university.

#1743

Sofia Olhede

#145861

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Sofia Charlotta Olhede is a British-Swedish mathematical statistician known for her research on wavelets, graphons, and high-dimensional statistics and for her columns on algorithmic bias. She is a professor of statistical science at the EPFL .

#1744

Susan M. Sanchez

#124571

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Susan Marie Malila Sanchez is an American applied statistician and an expert in military applications of operations research, in agent-based simulation, and in data farming of simulation results. She is a professor of operations research at the Naval Postgraduate School.

#1745

Elena Erosheva

#158653

Overall Influence

Elena Aleksandrovna Erosheva is a Russian-American statistician and social scientist whose research applies Bayesian hierarchical modeling and latent variable models to problems in the social, behavioral, and health sciences. She is a professor at the University of Washington, appointed jointly in the Department of Statistics and the School of Social Work, and the director of the university's Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences.

#1746

Hannah Ritchie

#117670

Overall Influence

1993 - Present (31 years)

Hannah Ritchie is a Scottish data scientist, senior researcher at the University of Oxford in the Oxford Martin School and head of research at Our World in Data. Her research investigates the assessment of global food systems and visualising data from the COVID-19 pandemic. Her first book, The First Generation, is due to be published by Chatto & Windus.

#1747

Olga Vitek

#136035

Overall Influence

Olga Vitek is a biostatistician and computer scientist specializing in bioinformatics, proteomics, mass spectrometry, causal inference of biological function, and the development of open-source software for statistical analysis in these areas. She is a professor in the College of Science and Khoury College of Computer Sciences of Northeastern University.

#1748

Martha Aliaga

#133629

Overall Influence

1937 - 2011 (74 years)

Martha Beatriz Bilotti-Aliaga was an Argentine statistics educator, who served as the president of the Caucus for Women in Statistics. Early life and education Martha Beatriz Bilotti was born in Mendoza, Argentina, and did her undergraduate studies at the University of Buenos Aires. She earned a master's degree in Santiago, Chile, at the Inter-American Center for the Teaching of Statistics.

#1749

Tamsin Edwards

#25517

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Tamsin Edwards is a British climate scientist and Professor at King's College London. She is a popular science communicator and writes for the Public Library of Science . Early life and education Edwards became interested in physics after reading A Brief History of Time. The daughter of Michael Edwards, she completed A-Levels in Physics, Chemistry and Maths at St Margaret's School, in Exeter. She studied physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester. She completed a PhD in Particle Physics at the University of Manchester under the supervision of Brian Cox. Her ...

#1750

Marie Diener-West

#130763

Overall Influence

Marie Diener-West is the Helen Abbey and Margaret Merrell Professor of Biostatistics and the chair of the Master of Public Health Program at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Diener-West is an editor for the Cochrane Eyes and Vision Group and a member of the American Public Health Association, American Statistical Association, Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology, and the Society for Clinical Studies.

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