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.

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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Physics,

#551

Mary Almond

#79166

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (96 years)

Mary Almond, is an English physicist, radio astronomer, palaeomagnetist, mathematician, and computer scientist who completed an early PhD in radio astronomy at Jodrell Bank Observatory in 1952. Early life and education Almond was born in Manchester and studied for a degree in physics at the University of Manchester from 1946 to 1949, where she was taught by Patrick Blackett and Bernard Lovell.

#552

Olga Malinkiewicz

#58372

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (42 years)

Olga Malinkiewicz is a Polish physicist, inventor of a method of producing solar cells based on perovskitess using inkjet printing. She is a co-founder and the Chief Technology Officer at Saule Technologies.

#553

Jennifer Hoffman

#110183

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jennifer Hoffman is an American astrophysicist and associate professor at the University of Denver. She studies the circumstellar material around stars. Early life and education In 1994 Hoffman graduated from University of California, Berkeley, having spent a year at University of Göttingen. Hoffman earned her PhD in 2002. She worked with Kenneth Nordsieck on Locating Mass Loss: Numerical Modeling of Circumstellar Material in Binary Systems.

#554

Imke de Pater

#105971

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Imke de Pater is a Dutch astronomer working at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her research on the large planets and led the team using the Keck Telescope to image the 1994 impact of the comet Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 with Jupiter.

#555

Ginestra Bianconi

#60106

Overall Influence

Ginestra Bianconi is a network scientist and mathematical physicist, known for her work on statistical mechanics, network theory, multilayer and higher-order networks, and in particular for the Bianconi–Barabási model of growing of complex networks and for the Bose–Einstein condensation in complex networks. She is a professor of applied mathematics at Queen Mary University of London, and the editor-in-chief of Journal of Physics: Complexity.

#556

Aina Elvius

#105177

Overall Influence

1917 - 2019 (102 years)

Aina Margareta Elvius was a Swedish astronomer known for her work on polarized light from galaxies and the nuclei of active galaxies. She was professor of astronomy at Stockholm University, director of the Stockholm Observatory, and the second Swedish woman to be elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

#557

Thaisa Storchi Bergmann

#50498

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Thaisa Storchi Bergmann is a Brazilian astrophysicist working at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil. She won the Women in Science Award in 2015 for her work on supermassive black holes.

#558

Jarita Holbrook

#103871

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Jarita Charmian Holbrook is an American astronomer and associate professor of physics at the University of the Western Cape where they are principal investigator of the Astronomy & Society group. Holbrook's work examines the relationship between humans and the night sky, and they have produced scientific publications on cultural astronomy, starburst galaxies, and star formation regions.

#559

Deidre Hunter

#116818

Overall Influence

Deidre A. Hunter is an American astronomer at Lowell Observatory. Her primary research area is tiny irregular galaxies — their origins, evolution and star production, and the shapes that are formed. She uses many parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, and includes spectroscopy in her approach.

#560

Rama Bansil

#84099

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Rama Bansil serves as Professor of Physics at Boston University, a post she has held since 1997. Although trained as a physicist, her work and professional associations are multi-disciplined, with areas of expertise encompassing biopolymer engineering, polymer engineering, photonics, nanoscience, nanobiotechnology, biophysics and biochemistry.

#561

Antonia Ferrín Moreiras

#37692

Overall Influence

1914 - 2009 (95 years)

Antonia Ferrín Moreiras was a mathematician, professor and the first female Galician astronomer. Her main contributions to astronomy were works on stellar occultations by the moon, measures of double stars and astrometric measurements, as well as the determination of the passage of stars through two verticals. She accomplished all of this while she was working at the Observatory of the University of Santiago de Compostela .

#562

Anna Scaife

#94499

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Anna Margaret Mahala Scaife is a Professor of Radio Astronomy at the University of Manchester and Head of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics Interferometry Centre of Excellence. She is the co-director of Policy@Manchester. She was awarded the 2019 Royal Astronomical Society Jackson-Gwilt Medal in recognition of her contributions to astrophysical instrumentation.

#563

Lyudmila Zhuravleva

#41370

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Lyudmila Vasilyevna Zhuravleva is a Soviet, Russian and Ukrainian astronomer, who worked at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory in Nauchnij, where she discovered 213 minor planets. She also serves as president of the Crimean branch of the "Prince Clarissimus Aleksandr Danilovich Menshikov Foundation" .

#564

Cecilia Noguez

#68647

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Ana Cecilia Noguez Garrido is a Mexican physicist, professor, and science communicator; she is a researcher and was the first female director of the Institute of Physics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico from 2019 to 2023. Cecilia Noguez specializes in the interaction of light with matter on a nanometric scale. In 2016, she was awarded with the National Prize for Arts and Sciences.

#565

Kelle Cruz

#36666

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Kelle Cruz is an astrophysicist who specializes in studying brown dwarfs. She currently works as an associate professor at Hunter College in New York City. With her study of brown dwarfs, Cruz hopes to better understand planets outside the Solar System and map out the universe, saying, "I hope that what I’m doing in our little bit of the galaxy is similar to what the explorers did by discovering and mapping the New World and North America."

#566

Ellen D. Williams

#57195

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Ellen D. Williams is an American scientist, best known for her research in surface properties and nanotechnology, for her engagement with technical issues in national security, as chief scientist of BP, and for government service as director of ARPA-E.

#567

Laura Herz

#88074

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Laura Maria Herz is a professor of physics at the University of Oxford. She works on femtosecond spectroscopy for the analysis of semiconductor materials. Early life and education Herz studied physics at the University of Bonn and graduated in 1999, first of her class. She worked for two years as an exchange student at University of New South Wales. She joined the University of Cambridge for her doctoral studies, earning a PhD in 2002. Here she worked on exciton and polaron dynamics in organic semiconductors.

#568

Jie Shan

#118941

Overall Influence

Jie Shan is a Chinese-American scientist who is Professor of Physics and Head of Graduate Studies at Cornell University. Her research considers the advanced characterization of two dimensional materials. She was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2013.

#569

Sara Imari Walker

#78059

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Sara Imari Walker is an American theoretical physicist and astrobiologist with research interests in the origins of life, astrobiology, physics of life, emergence, complex and dynamical systems, and artificial life. Walker is deputy director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University , associate director of the ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems and an associate professor at ASU. She is a co-founder of the astrobiology social network SAGANet, and on the board of directors for Blue Marble Space, a nonprofit education and science organization. ...

#570

Joan T. Schmelz

Joan T. Schmelz

#105594

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (123 years)

Joan T. Schmelz is the Associate Director for Science and Public Outreach at the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy for the Universities Space Research Association . Previously, Schmelz was the Deputy Director of Arecibo Observatory and the Director of USRA Operations at Arecibo from 2015 through 2018. Before joining USRA, Schmelz was an NSF Program Director in the Astronomical Sciences Division, where she oversaw the Astronomy & Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship program, and a professor of physics at the University of Memphis from 1996 to 2017. Schmelz's research focus is he...

#571

Nadya Mason

#70800

Overall Influence

Nadya Mason is the Rosalyn Sussman Yalow Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As a condensed matter experimentalist, she works on the quantum limits of low-dimensional systems. Mason is the Director of the Illinois Materials Research Science and Engineering Center and, since September 2022, the Director of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. She is the first woman and woman of color to work as the director at the institute. In 2021, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

#572

Ingrid Stairs

#116494

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Ingrid Stairs is a Canadian astronomer currently based at the University of British Columbia. She studies pulsars and their companions as a way to study binary pulsar evolution, pulsar instrumentation and polarimetry, and Fast Radio Bursts . She was awarded the 2017 Rutherford Memorial Medal for physics of the Royal Society of Canada, and was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2018.

#573

Sakura Schafer-Nameki

#41752

Overall Influence

Sakura Schafer-Nameki is a German mathematical physicist working in string theory and supersymmetric gauge theory. She works at the University of Oxford as a Professor of Mathematical Physics in the Mathematical Institute and as a senior research fellow of Wadham College, Oxford.

#574

Minna Palmroth

#72267

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Minna Palmroth is a professor in computational space physics at the University of Helsinki; her particular area of interest is magnetospheric physics and solar wind - magnetosphere interactions. Life Palmroth is from Sahalahti, a small village in the former municipality by the same name near the city of Tampere, Finland. She studied physics at the University of Helsinki, graduating in 1999 with her first degree and in 2003 with a post-graduate degree. From 2013 to 2016 she was a researcher at the Earth Observation Programme of the Finnish Meteorological Institute. In January 2018 she was a...

#575

Lucy Ziurys

#118973

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Lucy Marie Ziurys is an American astrochemist known for her work on high-resolution molecular spectroscopy. She is Regent's Professor of Chemistry & Biology and of Astronomy at the University of Arizona.

#576

Joan Adler

#63504

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Joan Elisabeth Adler is a computational physicist at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Her research involves percolation theory, lattice models, and neural networks. Biography Adler graduated with a B.Sc. in mathematics and physics from the University of Sydney in 1974. She completed her doctorate in physics in 1980, at the University of New South Wales. She worked at the Technion from 1980 to 1984 as a postdoctoral fellow and research associate, returned as a senior research associate in 1988, and became a senior research fellow in 2000. She was president of the Israel Physical ...

#577

Elly Dekker

#81069

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Elisabeth Dekker is a Dutch astronomer and science historian, specialising in the history of astronomy. She studied theoretical physics and astronomy at Utrecht University. In 1975 she obtained a PhD in astronomy at Leiden University with the thesis Spiral structure and the dynamics of flat stellar systems supervised by Hendrik C. van de Hulst. From 1978-1988 she was a curator of Museum Boerhaave in Leiden and afterwards an independent scholar. From 1993-1995 she was a Sackler fellow of the Royal Museums Greenwich. In 1998 she was awarded the Caird Medal for her work on the globe collection ...

#578

Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber

Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber

#75044

Overall Influence

1911 - 1998 (87 years)

Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber was a German-born Jewish-American nuclear physicist. She earned her PhD from the University of Munich, and though her family suffered during The Holocaust, Gertrude was able to escape to London and later to the United States. Her research during World War II was classified, and not published until 1946. She and her husband, Maurice Goldhaber, spent most of their post-war careers at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

#579

Elaine Sadler

#124265

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Elaine Margaret Sadler is an Australian astrophysicist. She is the Australia Telescope National Facility Chief Scientist and a Professor of Astrophysics in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney. She was elected as a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 2010 and commenced a 4-year term as Foreign Secretary of the AAS in 2018. She was previously director of the CAASTRO centre . Sadler is a member of the International Astronomical Union and served as the President Division VIII Galaxies & the Universe from 2009 to 2012. She has over 400 publications as of May 2020.

#580

Susan Marqusee

#92686

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Susan Marqusee is the Eveland Warren Endowed Chair Professor of Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Berkeley campus director of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences. Her research concerns the structure and dynamics of protein molecules. She received her A.B. in Physics and Chemistry from Cornell University in 1982, and her Ph.D. and M.D. degrees from Stanford University in 1990, where she trained with Robert Baldwin on the intrinsic helical properties of amino acids in model peptides.

#581

Beatriz Roldán Cuenya

#92516

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Beatriz Roldán Cuenya is a Spanish physicist working in surface science and catalysis. Since 2017 she has been director of the Department of Interface Science at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin, Germany.

#582

Michelle Wang

#105239

Overall Influence

Michelle Dong Wang is a Chinese-American physicist who is the James Gilbert White Distinguished Professor of the Physical Sciences at Cornell University. She is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her research considers biomolecular motors and single molecule optical trapping techniques. She was appointed Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2009.

#583

Julie Lutz

#70329

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Julie Haynes Lutz was an astronomer and mathematician who studies planetary nebulae and symbiotic binary stars. Lutz was the Boeing Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Science Education and director of the astronomy program at Washington State University. She moved to the University of Washington in 2000, where she held an position as professor emeritus. Lutz died on May 3, 2022.

#584

Roberta Sinatra

#16730

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Roberta Sinatra is an Italian scientist and associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. She is known for her work in network science and conducts research on quantifying success in science.

#585

Prineha Narang

#63033

Overall Influence

1989 - Present (35 years)

Prineha Narang is an American physicist and computational material scientist. She is a Professor of Physical Sciences and Howard Reiss Chair at the University of California, Los Angeles . Narang currently serves as a U.S. Science Envoy approved by the Secretary of State to identify opportunities for science and technology cooperation. Before moving to UCLA, she was first an Environmental Fellow at Harvard University Center for the Environment and then an Assistant Professor in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. Narang’s work has been recog...

#586

Sandra Savaglio

Sandra Savaglio

#84835

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Sandra Savaglio is an Italian astrophysicist whose research focuses on the "young universe: cosmic chemical evolution, distant galaxies, intergalactic and interstellar medium, and galaxies hosting the most energetic events in the universe: the gamma-ray bursts and the super luminous supernovae.

#587

Blakesley Burkhart

#123211

Overall Influence

Blakesley Burkhart is an astrophysicist. She is the winner of the 2017 Robert J. Trumpler Award awarded by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, which recognizes a Ph.D. thesis that is "particularly significant to astronomy." She also is the winner of the 2019 Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy and the 2022 winner of The American Physical Society's Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award. The awards both cited her work on magnetohydrodynamic turbulence, and for developing innovative techniques for comparing observable astronomical phenomena with theoretical models.

#588

Kerstin Perez

#117594

Overall Influence

Kerstin Perez is an Associate Professor of Particle Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is interested in physics beyond the standard model. She leads the silicon detector program for the General AntiParticle Spectrometer and the high-energy X-ray analysis community for the NuSTAR telescope array.

#589

Helen Lines

#106182

Overall Influence

1918 - 2001 (83 years)

Helen Chambliss Williams Lines was an American amateur astronomer. In her beginnings she was a deep-sky observer and astrophotographer. Astronomy In 1969, Lines was one of early members of the Phoenix Astronomical Society. Lines was a member of the American Association of Variable Star Observers. She and her husband, civil engineer Richard D. Lines, built a small observatory in Mayer, Arizona, and wrote about its construction for Sky & Telescope. In 1992 they won the Amateur Achievement Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for their work in the field of photoelectric photometry of variable stars.

#590

Ann Hornschemeier

#103626

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Ann Hornschemeier is an American astronomer specializing in X-ray emission from X-ray binary populations. She is the Chief Scientist for the Physics of the Cosmos program at NASA. Career and research She chairs the NuSTAR Starburst and Local Group science working group, which observes seven nearby galaxies and uses high-energy X-rays to search for and take pictures of the densest, hottest and most energetic regions in the universe. At NASA, Hornschemeier researches high energy astrophysics and cosmology. She is involved in future research missions, including the ESA Athena mission due to launch in 2028.

#591

Enid MacRobbie

#90949

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Enid Anne Campbell MacRobbie, is a Scottish plant scientist, Emeritus Professor of Plant Biophysics at the University of Cambridge and a Life Fellow of Girton College. Her specialty is biophysics, with particular interests in ion fluxes and stomata.

#592

Karen Jean Meech

#84750

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Karen J. Meech is an American planetary astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawaiʻi. Career Karen Meech specializes in planetary astronomy, in particular the study of distant comets and their relation to the early Solar System. She is also very active in professional-amateur collaboration and science teacher education and was the founder of the Towards Planetary Systems high-school teacher / student outreach program that helps educate science teachers in the Pacific islands. She received her PhD in Planetary Sciences in 1987 at the Massachusetts Institute of Techn...

#593

Rita M. Sambruna

#97637

Overall Influence

Rita M. Sambruna Commander OMRI is an Italian-American astrophysicist and is the Deputy Director of the Astrophysics Science Division at National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Space Flight Center. From September 2022 to May 2023, she was the Acting Deputy Director of the Science Exploration Directorate at Goddard. Rita held the Clare Boothe Luce Professorship in Physics and Astronomy at George Mason University in 2000-2005.

#594

Sigrid Close

#100620

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Sigrid Close is a professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University. Her primary research interest is the space environment with particular focus on meteoroids, meteors, and orbital debris, and their interaction with spacecraft and spacecraft operations.

#595

Sibylle Günter

#100198

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Sibylle Günter is a German theoretical physicist researching tokamak plasmas. Since February 2011, she has headed the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. In October 2015, she was elected a member of the Academia Europaea in recognition of her contribution to research.

#596

Anita Mehta

#110617

Overall Influence

Anita Mehta is an Indian physicist and Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford. Life After her B.Sc. in Physics from Presidency College, Calcutta, Mehta went to Oxford as the second Indian woman Rhodes Scholar to St Catherine's College, Oxford University, graduating with an MA and a DPhil in Theoretical Physics. She then did postdoctoral work at IBM, following this with a Research Associateship under the mentorship of Professor Sir Sam Edwards, when she pioneered the field of granular physics at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. Mehta was elected India's first Radcliffe Fellow to Harvard in 2006 and in 2007, awarded the Fellowship of the American Physical Society.

#597

Elisabeth Giacobino

#106407

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Elisabeth Giacobino is a French physicist specialized in laser physics, nonlinear optics, quantum optics and super-fluidity. She is one of the pioneers of quantum optics and quantum information. She graduated from Pierre and Marie Curie University and started working at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, where she has spent the majority of her professional career. She has been an invited professor at New York University and University of Auckland. She has over 230 publications and over 110 invited presentations in international conferences. She has been the coordinator of fo...

#598

Alessandra Lanzara

#111729

Overall Influence

Alessandra Lanzara is an Italian-American physicist and the distinguished Charles Kittel Professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley since 2002, where she leads an experimental materials physics group. She is the founding director of Center for Sustainable Innovation at UCB and the co-founder of Quantum Advanced Detection LLC.

#599

Ana Achúcarro

#93138

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Ana Achúcarro Jiménez is a Spanish researcher, academic, and professor of particle astrophysics and quantum field theory at the University of Leiden in Leiden, Netherlands. Her research considers the early universe, supergravity, black holes and solitons.

#600

Clare Burrage

#85224

Overall Influence

Clare Joanna Burrage is a British particle physicist at the University of Nottingham. She has made significant contributions to dark energy research, using astrophysical probes and interferometry. Early life and education Burrage attributes her love of cosmology to driving past the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank Observatory as a child. She attended Collingwood College, Surrey, achieving A-Levels in Mathematics, Further Mathematics and German. She studied Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, earning a Masters in 2004 and Part III of the Mathematical Tripos in 2005. Whilst a student, Burrage worked at Legoland Windsor Resort.

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