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 Physics,

#501

Marie Edmonds

#20352

Overall Influence

Marie Edmonds is a professor of volcanology and geology in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge whose research focuses on the physics and chemistry of volcanic eruptions and magmatism and understanding volatile cycling in the solid Earth as mediated by plate tectonics. She is interested in the social and economic impacts of natural hazards; and the sustainable use of Earth's mineral and energy resources. Professor Edmonds is the Vice President and Ron Oxburgh Fellow in Earth Sciences at Queens' College, Cambridge; and the Deputy Head of Department and Director of R...

#502

Maha Ashour-Abdalla

#55785

Overall Influence

1943 - 2016 (73 years)

Maha Ashour-Abdalla was an Egyptian-born physics and astronomy professor. She was named a fellow of the American Physical Society in 1986 and of the American Geophysical Union in 1993. She was born Maha Ashour in Alexandria and completed a BSc degree at Alexandria University. She received a PhD from the Imperial College London in 1971. She was subsequently employed at the Centre national d'études des télécommunications in France. Ashour-Abdalla next moved to Los Angeles; from 1976 to 1985, she was a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of California, Los Angeles .

#503

Carol Hirschmugl

#102726

Overall Influence

Carol Hirschmugl, is professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, principal investigator at the Synchrotron Radiation Center, and director of the Laboratory for Dynamics and Structure at Surfaces. She received her B.Sc. in physics from State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1987 and her applied physics PhD from Yale University in 1994. She has received an Alexander von Humboldt grant, a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship, multiple National Science Foundation Grants, a Research Corporation Research Innovation Award, and a UWM Research Growth Initiative.

#504

Stephanie Reich

#54761

Overall Influence

Stephanie Reich is a German physicist and Professor at the Free University of Berlin. Her research considers the physics of nanostructures, which she studies using experimental characterisation techniques and computational simulations.

#505

Manuela Campanelli

#104709

Overall Influence

Manuela Campanelli is a distinguished professor of astrophysics and mathematical sciences of the Rochester Institute of Technology, and the director of its Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation and Astrophysics and Space Sciences Institute for Research Excellence. Her work focuses on the astrophysics of merging black holes and neutron stars, which are powerful sources of gravitational waves, electromagnetic radiation and relativistic jets. This research is central to the new field of multi-messenger astronomy.

#506

Michelle Thomsen

#116279

Overall Influence

Michelle F. Thomsen is space physicist known for her research on the magnetospheres of Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn. Education and career Thomsen received an undergraduate degree from Colorado College in 1971. She then earned an M.S. and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Iowa. Her doctoral advisor, James Van Allen, recruited her right from her entrance exam to work on the data from Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 on the radiation belts of Jupiter and Saturn. From 1977 until 1980 she remained at the University of Iowa as a postdoctoral scientist, and then left for the Max-Planck-Institut fur Aeronomie in Lindau, West Germany.

#507

Cohl Furey

#48780

Overall Influence

Cohl Furey, also known as Nichol Furey, is a Canadian mathematical physicist. Career Furey has a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from Simon Fraser University , Master's degree from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D in theoretical physics from the University of Waterloo . She was a research fellow at the University of Cambridge from 2016 to 2019 and spent a few months at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cape Town. Since 2020, she has been at the Humboldt University of Berlin on a Freigeist-Fellowship by the Volkswagen Foundation.

#508

Karolin Luger

#67852

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Karolin Luger is an Austrian-American biochemist and biophysicist known for her work with nucleosomes and discovery of the three-dimensional structure of chromatin. She is a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University in Fort Collins and works with the University of Colorado School of Medicine's Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics.

#509

Aleksandra Radenovic

#39582

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Aleksandra Radenovic is a Swiss and Croatian biophysicist. Her research focuses on the development of experimental tools to study single-molecule biophysics. She is a professor of biological engineering at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and head of the Laboratory of Nanoscale Biology.

#510

Laura Cadonati

#91109

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Laura Cadonati is an American physicist who specializes in gravitational waves. Career Cadonati completed her PhD at Princeton University in 2001 with her thesis The Borexino Solar Neutrino Experiment and its Scintillator Containment Vessel. She was an associate professor in the physics department at University of Massachusetts Amherst before moving to the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics at Georgia Institute of Technology in 2015.

#511

Lynn Cominsky

#90024

Overall Influence

Lynn Cominsky is an American astrophysicist and educator. She was the Chair of Astronomy and Physics at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California from August 2004 through August 2019. She is currently the Project Director for the NASA Education and Public Outreach Group.

#512

Michelle Girvan

#75292

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Michelle Girvan is an American physicist and network scientist whose research combines methods from dynamical systems, graph theory, and statistical mechanics and applies them to problems including epidemiology, gene regulation, and the study of Information cascades. She is one of the namesakes of the Girvan–Newman algorithm, used to detect community structure in complex systems.

#513

Serena Viti

#110502

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Serena Viti is a professor at Leiden University and previously was a professor and the head of Astrophysics at University College London. In March 2019 she received an ERC Advanced Grant for her MOPPEX proposal .

#514

Christine Charles

#89525

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Christine Charles is a physicist at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, an inventor, researcher and science communicator. Her position at the Australian National University is director of the Space Plasma, Power and Propulsion Laboratory.

#515

Sharon K. Davis

Sharon K. Davis

#95191

Overall Influence

Sharon K. Davis is an American social epidemiologist. She is a senior scientist and head of the Social Epidemiology Research Unit at the National Human Genome Research Institute. Education Davis completed a B.A. from University of Arkansas in 1980. She earned a M.Ed. from Northeastern University in 1983. In 1987, she completed a M.P.A. from John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She earned a Ph.D. from the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University in 1991. Her dissertation was titled Assessing the effect of Medicare's Prospective Payment System ...

#516

Mahananda Dasgupta

#87518

Overall Influence

Mahananda Dasgupta FAA, FAIP, FAPS is an experimental physicist at the Heavy Ion Accelerator Facility in the Department of Nuclear Physics of the Australian National University, whose work focuses on accelerator-based nuclear fusion and fission.

#517

Bianca Dittrich

#88167

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Bianca Dittrich is a German theoretical physicist known for her contributions to loop quantum gravity and the spin foam approach to quantum gravity. She has been a faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada since 2012. She is also currently an adjunct professor at the University of Guelph and the University of Waterloo.

#518

Lydia Bieri

#88526

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Lydia Rosina Bieri is a Swiss-American applied mathematician, geometric analyst, mathematical physicist, cosmologist, and historian of science whose research concerns general relativity, gravity waves, and gravitational memory effects. She is a professor of mathematics and director of the Michigan Center for Applied and Interdisciplinary Mathematics at the University of Michigan.

#519

Lori Glaze

#94165

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Lori Glaze is an American scientist and the director of NASA's Science Mission Directorate's Planetary Science Division. She was a member of the Inner Planets Panel during the most recent Planetary Science Decadal Survey, and has had a role on the Executive Committee of NASA's Venus Exploration Analysis Group for several years, serving as the group's Chair since 2013.

#520

Barbara A. Williams

#75728

Overall Influence

Barbara Ann Williams is an American radio astronomer and the first African-American woman to earn a PhD in astronomy . Her research largely focused on compact galaxy groups, in particular observations of their emissions in the H I region in order to build up a larger scale picture of the structure and evolution of galaxies. Williams was named as the Outstanding Young Woman of America in 1986 and is currently a retired Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Delaware.

#521

Päivi Törmä

#51154

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Päivi Törmä is a Finnish physics professor at Aalto University. She works in the fields of quantum many-body physics, superconductivity, and nanophotonics. Biography Päivi Törmä graduated with a master's degree from the University of Oulu and the University of Cambridge. She earned a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Helsinki in 1996, under the supervision of Stig Stenholm. She worked as a postdoc at the University of Ulm in the group of Wolfgang Schleich, and as a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Innsbruck in the group of Peter Zoller. In 2001 she became a professor at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

#522

Anna Maria Nobili

#83324

Overall Influence

Anna Maria Nobili is an Italian physicist active in the field of gravitational physics. Her institution is Pisa University. She authored a number of papers on satellite dynamics and co-authored a book with Andrea Milani and Paolo Farinella on the orbital perturbations induced by non-gravitational forces. After having published several papers on celestial mechanics, also in collaboration with Clifford Will and E. Myles Standish, Nobili is now Principal Investigator of the Galileo Galilei experiment aimed to improve the accuracy of the equivalence principle lying at the foundation of general relativity and of other metric theories of gravity.

#523

Marsha I. Lester

Marsha I. Lester

#56195

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Marsha Isack Lester is an American physical chemist. She is currently the Edmund J. Kahn Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. Lester uses both theoretical and experimental methods to study the physical chemistry of volatile organic compounds present in the Earth's atmosphere. Her current work focuses on the hydroxyl radical and Criegee intermediates.

#524

Friedrich Grimminger

#118829

Overall Influence

#525

Marjolein Dijkstra

#87407

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Marjolein Dijkstra is a Dutch condensed matter physicist. She works as a professor in the Debye Institute for NanoMaterials Science at Utrecht University, and the Soft Condensed Matter group of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Utrecht.

#526

Florence Pasquier

#119370

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

#527

Jingyu Lin

#41938

Overall Influence

Jingyu Lin is a Chinese-American physicist and engineer working in the field of wide bandgap semiconductors and photonic devices. She is a co-inventor of MicroLED. In 2000, the husband-wife research team led by Hongxing Jiang and Jingyu Lin proposed and realized the operation of the first MicroLED and passive driving MicroLEDmicrodisplay. In 2009, their team and colleagues at III-N Technology, Inc. and Texas Tech University realized and patented the first active driving MicroLED microdisplay in VGA format by heterogeneously integrating MicroLED array with Si CMOS active-matrix driver. MicroLE...

#528

Viola Vogel

#56192

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Viola Vogel, also known as Viola Vogel-Scheidemann, is a German biophysicist and bioengineer. She is a professor at ETH Zürich, where she is head of the Department of Health Sciences and Technology and leads the Applied Mechanobiology Laboratory.

#529

Monika Ritsch-Marte

#111201

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Monika Ritsch-Marte is an Austrian physicist in the fields of biomedical optics, theoretical quantum optics and non-linear optics. She is a professor at the Medical University of Innsbruck and director of the Institute of Biomedical Physics.

#530

Lila Gierasch

#70721

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Lila Mary Gierasch is an American biochemist and biophysicist. At present, she is a distinguished Professor working on "protein folding in the cell" in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the College of Natural Sciences, University of Massachusetts—Amherst.

#531

Christine Davies

#97214

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Christine Tullis Hunter Davies is a professor of physics at the University of Glasgow. Education Davies attended Colchester County High School for Girls, then the University of Cambridge, where she was an undergraduate student of Churchill College, Cambridge. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1981 in physics with theoretical physics, followed by a PhD in 1984 for research on quantum chromodynamics and the Drell–Yan process while working in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge.

#532

Renée Hložek

#108255

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

Renée Hložek is a South African cosmologist, Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, and an Azrieli Global Scholar within the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. She studies the cosmic microwave background, Type Ia supernova and baryon acoustic oscillations. She is a Senior TED Fellow and was made a Sloan Research Fellow in 2020. Hložek identifies as bisexual.

#533

Amanda Hendrix

#77308

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Amanda R. Hendrix is an American planetary scientist known for her pioneering studies of solar system bodies at ultraviolet wavelengths. She is a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. Her research interests include moon and asteroid surface composition, space weathering effects and radiation products. She is a co-investigator on the Cassini UVIS instrument, was a co-investigator on the Galileo UVS instrument, is a Participating Scientist on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter LAMP instrument and is a Principal Investigator on Hubble Space Telescope observing programs. As of 2019, ...

#534

Amy Simon

#74540

Overall Influence

Amy Simon is an American planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, involved in several missions of the Solar System Exploration Program. Education Simon is from Union Township, Union County, New Jersey, where she attended Union High School. She earned a bachelor's degree in Space Sciences from the Florida Institute of Technology in 1993 and was inducted into Sigma Pi Sigma. She completed her doctoral studies in astronomy at the New Mexico State University in 1998. Upon graduation, she became a postdoctoral research scientist at Cornell University.

#535

Philippa Browning

#114212

Overall Influence

Philippa K. Browning is a Professor of Astrophysics in the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester. She specialises in the mathematical modelling of fusion plasmas. Early life and education Browning was educated at Millfield and studied the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge, graduating in 1979. She completed Part III of the Mathematical Tripos in 1980. She was inspired by Yuri Gagarin to work in astrophysics. For her graduate studies Browning joined the University of St Andrews working with Eric Priest. She submitted her thesis on Inhomogeneous Ma...

#536

Pascale Garaud

#49701

Overall Influence

Pascale Garaud is a French astrophysicist and applied mathematician interested in fluid dynamics, magnetohydrodynamics, and their applications to astrophysics and geophysics. She is a professor of applied mathematics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and currently serves as the department chair.

#537

Thushara Pillai

#98645

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Thushara Pillai is an Indian astrophysicist and astronomer with a senior research scientist position at Boston University's Institute for Astrophysical Research. Her research interests have included molecular clouds, high-mass star formation, magnetic fields, astrochemistry, and the Galactic Center. She is known for her work that looked to understand star formation by observing magnetized interstellar clouds, and Pillai is the first astronomer to capture images of magnetic fields reorienting near areas of star formation.

#538

Heike Riel

#70665

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Heike E. Riel is a nanotechnologist known for developing OLED displays. She works for IBM Research – Zurich, where she is Director of IoT Technology and AI Solutions, and Director of the Physical Sciences Department. Beyond her work on display technology, she is an expert in molecular electronics and nanoscale semiconductors.

#539

Kathy Vivas

#57293

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Anna Katherina Vivas is a Venezuelan astrophysicist recognized for her investigations of and finding up to 100 new and very distant RR Lyrae stars. They are between 13,000 and 220,000 light years from the Sun, and are considered some of the oldest in the Milky Way. Her research has enabled some of the first studies of the structure and properties of the whole halo of the Milky Way and not only its innermost parts. The observation was made possible by combining a telescope with a large format camera, allowing astronomers to cover large portions of the sky in a short amount of time.

#540

Shikma Bressler

#68484

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Shikma Schwartzman-Bressler is an Israeli physicist. A researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science, she is among those taking part in research at the CERN particle accelerator in Switzerland as a member of the ATLAS collaboration. She is also a social activist and leading figure in the "Black Flags" protests against Benjamin Netanyahu.

#541

Necia H. Apfel

#101235

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Necia H. Apfel is an American astronomer, author and educator. Personal life She graduated magna cum laude from Tufts University and did graduate work at Radcliffe College and Northwestern University. Apfel has lectured about astronomy to children in the Chicago area and taught courses on the teaching of astronomy at National-Louis University in Evanston, Illinois. She is author of two college textbooks on astronomy and ten books for children. Apfel lives in Highland Park, Illinois. She is currently retired and is a volunteer and past President of the Friends of the Highland Park Public Libra...

#542

Janet Brown Guernsey

#80639

Overall Influence

1913 - 2001 (88 years)

Janet Brown Guernsey, born Janet Brown , was a professor of physics at Wellesley College. She was active in the American Association of Physics Teachers and served as President from 1975 to 1976. Early life and education Janet Brown Guernsey was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1913. She attended the coeducational Germantown Friends School from kindergarten through high school. She fell in love with physics after reading a science article in 8th grade about how the telephone worked. Guernsey decided to go to Wellesley College, inspired by her sister who had attended the same school.

#543

Natalia Toro

#111282

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (39 years)

Natalia Toro is an American particle physicist known for her pioneering work in the study of dark matter. Based at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Toro was the youngest winner of the Intel Science Talent Search and was awarded the 2015 New Horizons in Physics Prize.

#544

Nashwa Eassa

#65897

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Nashwa Abo Alhassan Eassa is a nano-particle physicist from Sudan. She is an assistant professor of physics at Al-Neelain University in Khartoum. Education Eassa received her BSc in physics from the University of Khartoum in 2004. She earned her Master of Science in nanotechnology and materials physics from Sweden's Linköping University in 2007.

#545

Naama Barkai

#66388

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Naama Barkai is an Israeli systems biologist and professor for Molecular Genetics and Physics of Complex Systems at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization .

#546

Alexandra Olaya-Castro

#59437

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Alexandra Olaya-Castro is a Colombian-born theoretical physicist, currently a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London. She is also the Vice-Dean for the Mathematical and Physical science Faculty.

#547

Eleonora Troja

#118004

Overall Influence

Eleonora Troja is an Italian astrophysicist. In 2017 she led the discovery of X-ray emission from the gravitational wave source GW170817. Education Troja completed a B.A. in physics and astronomy at University of Palermo in 2002. She completed a thesis, X-ray spectroscopy of He-like ions in optically thin astrophysical plasmas, under supervisor Giovanni Peres. Troja earned a M.Phil. in physics and astronomy at Palermo in 2005 under Fabio Reale. Her graduate thesis was titled XMM-Newton observations of the supernova remnant IC 443: analysis of the thermal X-ray emission. She completed a Ph.D. in physics and astronomy in 2009 under advisor Giancarlo Cusumano.

#548

Nora Berrah

#122463

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Nora Berrah is an Algerian physicist who studies how light and matter interact. She is a professor at the University of Connecticut, where she previously was chair of the physics department. Berrah earned a diploma in physics in 1979 from the University of Algiers. She completed her PhD in 1987 from the University of Virginia. She worked from Argonne National Laboratory from 1987 to 1992, and became a professor at Western Michigan University in 1999. She moved to the University of Connecticut in 2014.

#549

Nora Brambilla

#102881

Overall Influence

Nora Brambilla is an Italian and German theoretical particle physicist known for her research on quarkonium, particles composed of two quarks instead of the more usual three. She is a professor of theoretical particle and nuclear physics at the Technical University of Munich.

#550

Katie Mack

#97843

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Katherine J. Mack is a theoretical cosmologist who holds the Hawking Chair in Cosmology and Science Communication at Perimeter Institute. Her academic research investigates dark matter, vacuum decay and the epoch of reionisation. Mack is also a popular science communicator who participates in social media and regularly writes for Scientific American, Slate, Sky & Telescope, Time, and Cosmos.

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