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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School

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Philosophy,

#1951

Ruth Schönthal

#179984

Overall Influence

1924 - 2006 (82 years)

Ruth Esther Hadassah Schonthal was an acclaimed classical composer, pianist, and teacher. Born in Germany, she lived in the U.S. for most of her life. After she moved to the U.S. she dropped the umlaut from the name Schönthal. She came to study composition at Yale University in 1946. After her marriage in 1950 she lived first in New York City and then in New Rochelle.

#1952

Carey Pietsch

#98256

Overall Influence

1988 - Present (37 years)

Caroline Elizabeth Pietsch , known professionally as Carey Pietsch, is an American cartoonist, illustrator and artist. She is best known for her work on several webcomics and on The Adventure Zone series of graphic novels. Her father, Michael Pietsch, is the CEO of Hachette Book Group.

#1953

Lisa Ellis

#123028

Overall Influence

Elisabeth Ellis, known as Lisa Ellis, is an American-born New Zealand political theorist and professor in the Department of Politics and Department of Philosophy at the University of Otago. Ellis is director of the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics program at the University of Otago.

#1954

Ann Richardson

#189337

Overall Influence

Ann Kathleen Richardson is a New Zealand oncologist. She is professor of cancer epidemiology at the University of Canterbury. Academic career Richardson did a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery, a Postgraduate Diploma in Obstetrics and a PhD, all at the University of Otago. She is a Fellow of the New Zealand College of Public Health Medicine. She is on the council of the Health Research Council of New Zealand and a trustee of the Genesis Oncology Trust.

#1955

Thais Russomano

Thais Russomano

#57268

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Thais Russomano is a Brazilian doctor and scientific researcher specialising in space medicine, space physiology, biomedical engineering, telemedicine and telehealth. She founded the Microgravity Centre at PUCRS university, Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1999, coordinating it for 18 years until 2017. The MicroG is the first educational and research centre in Space Life Sciences in Latin America. She is a senior lecturer at King's College London, lecturing in Aviation and Space related courses; coordinator of the Space Network , University of Lisbon; guest lecturer at Aalto University, Finland in S...

#1956

Beverly McIver

#141623

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Beverly McIver is a contemporary artist, mostly known for her self-portraits, who was born and raised in Greensboro, NC. She is currently the Esbenshade Professor of the Practice of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University.

#1957

Lisa Welander

#48452

Overall Influence

1909 - 2001 (92 years)

Lisa Welander was a Swedish neurologist, and was Sweden's first professor of neurology, taking up her professorship at Umeå University from 1964–75. Career Welander graduated from Örebro University in 1928, and became a medical licentiate in Stockholm in 1937. She received her doctorate of medicine in 1952 from the Karolinska Institute and then became an associate professor of neurology there, and in 1953 at the Medical College of the University of Gothenburg. Welander became a professor of neurology at Umeå University from 1964–75.

#1958

Bisola Ojikutu

#164033

Overall Influence

Bisola Ojikutu is an American physician, infectious disease specialist, and health equity researcher. In July 2021, she was appointed as the Executive Director of the Boston Public Health Commission. Ojikutu is the fifth Commissioner of Public Health for the City of Boston and the first Black person to permanently hold this position. She currently serves on the Cabinet of Mayor Michelle Wu.

#1959

Jacqueline Wernimont

Jacqueline Wernimont

#137633

Overall Influence

Jacqueline D. Wernimont is an American academic who is the Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities and Social Engagement at Dartmouth College. Her first book, Numbered Lives Life and Death in Quantum Media, was released by MIT Press in January 2019. It is the first book to map connections in feminist media history. She is the founding Director of Human Security Collaborator , a collaboration of interdisciplinary academics working on digital civil rights and big data.

#1960

Lyndsey Stonebridge

#105759

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (60 years)

Lyndsey Stonebridge FBA FEA is an English scholar and professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham. Her work relates to refugee studies, human rights, and the effects of violence on the mind in the 20th and 21st centuries. She is also a regular radio and media commentator, writing for publications such as The New Statesman, Prospect Magazine, and New Humanist.

#1961

Dona Nelson

#106564

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Dona Nelson is an American painter, best known for immersive, gestural, primarily abstract works employing unorthodox materials, processes and formats to disrupt conventional notions of painting and viewership. A 2014 New Yorker review observed, "Nelson gives notice that she will do anything, short of burning down her house to bully painting into freshly spluttering eloquence." Since 2002, long before it became a more common practice, Nelson has produced free-standing, double-sided paintings that create a more complex, conscious viewing experience. According to New York Times critic Roberta S...

#1962

Nieca Goldberg

#102420

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Nieca Goldberg is an American physician and author. Her specialty is as a cardiologist. The American College of Cardiology describes Goldberg as a "clinical innovator" and "a nationally recognized pioneer in women’s heart health".

#1963

Anne Edwards

#83479

Overall Influence

Anne Edwards is a British plant scientist, based at the John Innes Centre and was the first person in the UK to identify Ash dieback disease in England, Ash dieback Edwards was the first person to identify Ash Dieback, caused by the fungus Hymenoscyphus fraxineus, discovering it in Ashwellthorpe Woods, Norfolk in 2012. Four years later she found a tree that was resistant to the disease and named it Betty which was used to help identify three genetic markers associated with resistance against the disease. Anne is heavily involved in the Nornex consortium, an open-access and crowdsourcing approach, which was established to respond to this outbreak.

#1964

Naila Zaman Khan

#177033

Overall Influence

Naila Zaman Khan is a Bangladeshi neurologist. She was the founder head of the Department of Pediatric Neuroscience, Dhaka Shishu Hospital, Bangladesh Institute of Child Health in 1992, till 2018. She is the founder chairperson of the "Shishu Bikash Network", General Secretary of the "Bangladesh Protibondhi Foundation" , Secretary General of the Bangladesh Society for Child Neurology, Development and Disability and Chairperson of the Bangladesh Society of Pediatric Neuro Electro- Physiologists , and National Delegate of the Asia Oceania Child Neurology Association . From 2008 to 2018 she was...

#1965

Wye Jamison Allanbrook

#183423

Overall Influence

1943 - 2010 (67 years)

Wye Jamison "Wendy" Allanbrook was an American musicologist whose writings demonstrated that much of the music of Mozart and his contemporaries was influenced by the social dances of the time. Allanbrook was born on March 15, 1943, in Hagerstown, Maryland. She attended Vassar College where she earned her undergraduate degree in classics. She earned a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1974, where her doctoral dissertation became the basis for her 1983 book Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: 'Le Nozze di Figaro' and 'Don Giovanni published by the University of Chicago Press, in which she demonstrated that Mozart's music integrated references to the social practices and dances of his period.

#1966

Nancy B. Olson

#137506

Overall Influence

1936 - 2018 (82 years)

Nancy Grace Butterfield Olson was an American librarian and educator, an expert on cataloging rules for non-print materials, and the founder of the Online Audiovisual Catalogers . Education and personal life Olson was born April 10, 1936, in Estherville, Iowa, to Stuart and Vivian Butterfield. She died December 24, 2018, in Austin, Minnesota. Nancy married Jean Engebrit Olson in 1956, and they had four children together.

#1967

Rangi Te Kanawa

#180242

Overall Influence

Rangituatahi Te Kanawa is a New Zealand textile conservator and weaver. She is affiliated with the Ngāti Maniapoto iwi. Biography Te Kanawa received a scholarship from the Department of Internal Affairs to train in conservation of textiles. The committee of the Aotearoa Moananui a Kiwa Weavers were keen for Māori to be involved in the conservation of Māori textile artefacts held by museums and other cultural institutions. Her introductory training on conservation of cultural material was in Canberra, after which she completed a year of pre-training at the conservation unit of the National Museum in Wellington.

#1968

Indira Hinduja

#34623

Overall Influence

Indira Hinduja is an Indian gynecologist, obstetrician and infertility specialist based in Mumbai. She pioneered the Gamete intrafallopian transfer technique resulting in the birth of India's first GIFT baby on 4 January 1988. Previously she delivered India's first test tube baby at KEM Hospital on 6 August 1986. She is also credited for developing an oocyte donation technique for menopausal and premature ovarian failure patients, giving the country's first baby out of this technique on 24 January 1991.

#1969

Mhoira Leng

#183398

Overall Influence

Mhoira E.H. Leng FRSE MBChB MRCP FRCP is one of the first Scottish specialists in palliative care, who has developed the palliative care services internationally, working in Eastern Europe, India and Africa and advises international institutions and agencies on palliative care in the developing world. In 2021, Leng was admitted as one of the new female Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

#1970

Linda Barwick

#85316

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Linda Mary Barwick is an Australian musicologist and professor emerita at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Barwick has focused on researching Australian Indigenous music and the music of immigrant communities. She also works in the field of digital humanities, archiving recordings.

#1971

Ardis B. Collins

#190258

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (89 years)

Ardis B. Collins is an American philosopher and Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. She is known for her works on Hegel's philosophy and is Editor-in-chief of the Owl of Minerva.

#1972

Claire Jowitt

#151685

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Claire Elaine Jowitt is an English academic who writes on race, cross-gender, piracy, identity, empire and performance. She is currently a Professor in English and History within the Schools of History and Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Previously, she held a personal chair in English at Southampton University , was Professor of Renaissance English Literature at Nottingham Trent University and Lecturer and Senior Lecturer at Aberystwyth University .

#1973

Judith A. Salerno

#47979

Overall Influence

Judith A. Salerno, MD, MS is a physician executive and the President of the New York Academy of Medicine. Career The New York Academy of Medicine Salerno became President of The New York Academy of Medicine in September 2017. During her tenure she honed the organizational focus on health equity and introduced progressive initiatives such as a Health Equity Action Agenda, taking a stand in support of the removal of the J. Marion Sims statue, and awarding posthumous fellowship to the eminent physician and abolitionist Dr. James McCune Smith, an 1847 candidate who was denied NYAM fellowship due ...

#1974

Yael Bar-Zeev

#189225

Overall Influence

Yael Bar-Zeev is an Israeli Public Health Physician, behavioral scientist, epidemiologist, and a tobacco treatment specialist. She has been a faculty member at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Braun School of Public Health and Community Medicine since 2019. She is also the Chair of the Israel Medical Association for Smoking Cessation and Prevention.

#1975

Candy Dawson Boyd

#79420

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Candy Dawson Boyd is an American writer, activist, and educator. She is an author of more than six children's books focused on African-American youth. Early life and education Boyd was born in 1946 in Chicago, Illinois. Her birth name is Marguerite Cecille Dawson. Her parents were Mary Ruth Ridley and Julian Dawson. Boyd had two siblings and she was the oldest of the three. Her mother and father divorced. Boyd was raised by her mother. They lived in South Chicago. Boyd attended racially segregated elementary and middle schools. The library she used was also segregated. The library books were used from white schools that no longer wanted them.

#1976

Jeannette Bastian

#178930

Overall Influence

Jeannette Bastian is an archival scholar, academic, author, and a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists. From 1987 to 1998, she was the Territorial Librarian of the U.S. Virgin Islands and has published widely on topics related to colonial archives and decolonial archival practices.

#1977

Jo Ivey Boufford

#95015

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Jo Ivey Boufford is an American physician and Dean of the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University, as well as a Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the NYU Medical School.

#1978

Nicola Curtin

#137789

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Nicola Curtin is an English academic. She is Professor of Experimental Cancer Therapeutics at Newcastle University. She is best known for being part of the Newcastle University team that developed Rubraca, a PARP inhibitor used as an anti-cancer agent addressing BRCA mutation, and for donating her share of the royalties to charity.

#1979

Grace Y. Kao

#184122

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (51 years)

Grace Yia-Hei Kao is an Asian American professor of ethics, who specializes in animal and human rights, ecofeminism, and Asian American Christianity. Kao earned her Bachelor of Arts and Masters of Arts degrees from Stanford University, and her PhD. at Harvard University. She is Professor of Ethics at Claremont School of Theology, and was the first Asian American woman to receive tenure there. She has been appointed as the interim Bishop Roy I. Sano and Kathleen A. Thomas-Sano Endowed Chair in Pacific and Asian Theology. Kao is also the co-director of the Center for Sexuality, Gender, and ...

#1980

Gertrude Hunter

#115831

Overall Influence

1926 - 2006 (80 years)

Gertrude Teixeira Hunter was an American doctor and professor of medicine. She served as the national director of health services for Head Start, and later became health administrator for the New England region of the United States Public Health Service. Over her career, she worked in several roles at Howard University College of Medicine. She was also an activist for AIDS healthcare in minority communities.

#1981

Ellen Umansky

#99053

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Dr. Ellen M. Umansky is the Carl and Dorothy Bennett Professor of Judaic Studies and Director of the Bennett Center for Judaic Studies at Fairfield University located in Fairfield, Connecticut, positions that she has held since 1994.

#1982

Gwen W. Collman

#157270

Overall Influence

Gwen W. Collman is an American environmental epidemiologist. Collman is acting deputy director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and works as director of the division of extramural research and training.

#1983

Sara Harris

#107749

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Sara E Harris is a Canadian scientist, and professor in the department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, and the associate dean academic in the Faculty of Science at the University of British Columbia. In 2015, she was named a 3M National Teaching Fellow for her MOOC on climate change.

#1984

Judith A. Cooper

#146627

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Judith Ann Cooper is an American speech pathologist serving as the deputy director of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders . She was the acting director of the NIDCD from June 2018 to August 2019. Cooper is an elected fellow of the American Speech–Language–Hearing Association.

#1985

Jean Emily Henley

#126591

Overall Influence

1910 - 1994 (84 years)

Jean Emily Henley from was an anesthesiologist. She was the only child of Eugene Henry and Helen Esther Heller , who emigrated from Hungary and Germany respectively into the United States. She was fluent in German, due to that being her parents native language. The father changed the family surname to Henley while she was still a child. Both parents practiced lay psychotherapy and later obtained PhDs. As both a sculptor and linguist, she had many accomplishments.

#1986

Nicole Hassoun

#189782

Overall Influence

Nicole Hassoun is a professor of philosophy at Binghamton University and head of the Global Health Impact project, a research organization focused on promoting access to essential medicines. She is the author of Globalization and Global Justice: Shrinking Distance, Expanding Obligations and Global Health Impact: Extending Access on Essential Medicines for the Poor.

#1987

Helen Haines

#104224

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Helen Mary Haines is an Australian politician who has served as the independent MP for the Victorian seat of Indi since the 2019 federal election. Early life and education Haines grew up on a dairy farm in Colac in southwestern Victoria with four brothers, and attended a public school in Eurack. She trained as a registered nurse at St Vincent's Hospital and later as a midwife at Mercy Hospital for Women in Melbourne. In 1986, she moved to northeastern Victoria and began working as a midwife at Wangaratta Base Hospital before being appointed matron and Director of Nursing at the Chiltern Bush Nursing Hospital.

#1988

Mary Ann Smart

#74323

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Mary Ann Smart is a Canadian-born musicologist. Smart earned a doctorate from Cornell University and is the Terrill Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in the study of nineteenth century opera.

#1989

Bluma Tischler

#181650

Overall Influence

1924 - 2015 (91 years)

Bluma Gorfinkel Tischler was a Canadian pediatrician known for her work in treating phenylketonuria, including her role in the widespread implementation of the Guthrie test for detecting that illness.

#1990

Anita Coleman

#44928

Overall Influence

Anita Coleman is an Indian American academic librarian, faculty and researcher in digital libraries. Anita Coleman is also the founder of an interdisciplinary open access repository, dLIST - Digital Library of Information Science and Technology.

#1991

Judith Lodge

#129449

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Judith Lodge is an American Canadian painter and photographer who often explores how the two mediums play off of and inform one another. Her abstract portraits of memories, situations, events, and people are inspired by the unconscious, dreams, journals, and nature. She has worked in Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto, Banff, Minnesota, and New York, where she has lived for more than thirty years.

#1992

Joan Reede

#115912

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Joan Y. Reede is an American physician. She is Harvard Medical School's inaugural dean for diversity and community partnership in the Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Community Partnership. She is also a member of the National Academy of Medicine. She is known for creating programs that mentor and support minority physicians and female physicians. Alumni of her programs have created a 501 organization called The Reede Scholars in her honor.

#1993

Tatiana Prowell

Tatiana Prowell

#163266

Overall Influence

Tatiana Michelle Prowell is an American medical oncologist specializing in breast cancer. She is an Associate Professor of Oncology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Breast Cancer Scientific Liaison at the U.S. Food & Drug Administration.

#1994

Adrienne Evans

#171138

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (41 years)

Adrienne Evans is a British senior lecturer in Media and Communication for the Department of Media at Coventry University, and sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Gender Studies. Education Adrienne Evans gained her Ph.D. from the University of Bath.

#1995

Susan T. Sommer

#179510

Overall Influence

1935 - 2008 (73 years)

Susan Thiemann Sommer was a music librarian with a 40-year career at the New York Public Library, teacher, editor, and noted music critic for the magazine High Fidelity. Life and career Thiemann was born in New York City and grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. After graduating with a magna Cum laude from Smith College in 1956, she attended Columbia University. Assisted by a grant from the Fulbright Program she spent time studying in Florence, receiving her Master's degree in musicology in 1958. Also from Columbia, she later received a Master of Library Science and an MPhil .

#1996

Joia Mukherjee

#20836

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Joia Stapleton Mukherjee is an associate professor with the Division of Global Health Equity at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Since 2000, she has served as the Chief Medical Officer of Partners In Health, an international medical non-profit founded by Paul Farmer, Ophelia Dahl, and Jim Kim. She trained in Infectious Disease, Internal Medicine, and Pediatrics at the Massachusetts General Hospital and has an MPH from Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Mukherjee has been involved in health care access and ...

#1997

Lynne M. Thomas

Lynne M. Thomas

#132518

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (51 years)

Lynne M. Thomas is an American librarian, podcaster and editor. She has won eleven Hugo Awards for editing and podcasting in the science fiction genre. She is perhaps best known as the co-publisher and co-editor-in-chief of the Hugo Award-winning Uncanny Magazine with her husband, Michael Damian Thomas. With her eleven Hugo Award wins , Thomas is tied with Connie Willis for most wins among women, and sixth all time for most wins amongst all Hugo Award winners.

#1998

Margaret Pomeranz

Margaret Pomeranz

#84186

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Margaret Pomeranz is an Australian film critic, writer, producer and television personality. Early life Pomeranz was born Margeret Anne Jones-Owen on 14 July 1944 in Waverley, a suburb of Sydney. She was educated at the Presbyterian Ladies' College, Sydney in Croydon, the then newly-opened Macquarie University, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in German and social psychology, and the Playwright's Studio at the National Institute of Dramatic Art . In her early twenties, she left Sydney to escape the "banality" and travelled around Europe, before returning to Australia and se...

#1999

Debra Haffner

#110300

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Debra W. Haffner is co-founder and president emerita of the Religious Institute, Inc. A sexologist and ordained Unitarian Universalist minister, she was the endorsed community minister with the Unitarian Church in Westport, Connecticut. Haffner retired from the Religious Institute on April 30, 2016. She has been the settled minister at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Reston, Virginia since August 2016.

#2000

Kirsten Shepherd-Barr

#181505

Overall Influence

Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr is an academic specialising in Victorian and modern English literature, the interaction between science and literature, and theatre studies, especially science in theatre. In 2015, she was appointed a Professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Oxford.

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