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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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Physics,

#601

Shobhana Narasimhan

#63384

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Shobhana Narasimhan is an Indian academic who is Professor of Theoretical Sciences at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore, India. Her main area of interest is computational nanoscience. Her research examines how the lowering of dimensionality and reduction of size affect material properties. She is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences.

#602

Katelin Schutz

#85020

Overall Influence

Katelin Schutz is an American particle physicist known for using cosmological observations to study dark sectors, that is new particles and forces that interact weakly with the visible world. She is a NASA Einstein Fellow and Pappalardo Fellow in the MIT Department of Physics.

#603

Jutta Kunz

#111345

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Jutta Kunz is a German physicist, specializing in quantum field theory and general relativity. Her work focuses on the gravity in four and higher dimensions: models of gravity, black holes, wormholes, solitons, neutron stars, boson stars, boson shells, black rings and black branes.

#604

Angela Speck

#94497

Overall Influence

Angela Karen Speck is a Professor of Astrophysics and the Chair of the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She works on infrared astronomy and the study of space dust. She is a popular science communicator, and was co-chair of the National Total Solar Eclipse Task Force.

#605

Becky Parker

#93221

Overall Influence

Becky Parker is a British physicist and physics teacher based in Kent. She is a visiting professor at School of Physics and Astronomy, Queen Mary University of London. Early life and education Parker obtained a physics degree at the University of Sussex in 1980 before moving to Chicago to complete as Borg Warner Fellow for the MA in Conceptual Foundations of Science. She worked in the group of Bob Geroch, with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar attending one of her seminars.

#606

Sherry Yennello

#96493

Overall Influence

Sherry J. Yennello is an American nuclear chemist and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is a Regents Professor and the holder of the Cyclotron Institute Bright Chair in Nuclear Science, who currently serves as the Director of the Cyclotron Institute at Texas A&M University. She is also a Fellow of the American Chemical Society and the American Physical Society. She has authored as well as co-authored more than 530 peer reviewed journal articles and has conducted many invited talks, presentations and seminars at several prestigious academic confer...

#607

Marta Maria Perego

#130426

Overall Influence

#608

Heidi Schellman

Heidi Schellman

#69805

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Heidi Marie Schellman is an American particle physicist at Oregon State University , where she heads the Department of Physics. She is an expert in Quantum chromodynamics. Early life and education Schellman was born in 1957 in Hennepin, Minnesota, the daughter of two chemists. Her father, John Anthony Schellman, who trained at Princeton, was a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Oregon; he was an early member of the "groundbreaking Institute of Molecular Biology" and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Her mother, F. Charlotte Green, held a Ph.D. in chemistry from Stanford and had also worked at the California Institute of Technology.

#609

Tiziana Di Matteo

#108895

Overall Influence

Tiziana Di Matteo is a Professor of Econophysics at King's College London. She studies complex systems, such as financial markets, and complex materials . She serves on the council of the Complex Systems Society.

#610

Cathy Foley

#59815

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Catherine Patricia Foley is an Australian physicist. She is the Chief Scientist of Australia , before which she had been the chief scientist for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation since August 2018.

#611

Xie Chen

#120669

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (40 years)

Xie Chen is a Chinese physicist and a professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology. Her work covers both the field of condensed matter physics and quantum information, with a focus on many-body quantum mechanical systems with unconventional emergent phenomena. She won the 2020 New Horizons in Physics Prize for "incisive contributions to the understanding of topological states of matter and the relationships between them"

#612

Ayana Holloway Arce

Ayana Holloway Arce

#110460

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Ayana Holloway Arce is a professor of physics at Duke University. She works on particle physics, using data from the Large Hadron Collider to understand phenomena beyond the Standard Model. Early life and education Arce was born in Lansing, Michigan. She studied physics at Princeton University, graduating with honors and a bachelor's degree in 1998. She moved on to Harvard University for her PhD, working the Collider Detector at Fermilab detector at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. She completed her PhD in 2006.

#613

Wendy Flavell

#72742

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Wendy Ruth Flavell is Vice Dean for Research and a Professor of Surface Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester. Her research investigates the electronic structure of complex metal oxides, chalcogenides, photoemission and photovoltaics.

#614

Ann Merchant Boesgaard

#120513

Overall Influence

Ann Merchant Boesgaard is an astronomer and professor who received the American Astronomical Society's highest award, the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship in 2019. The minor planet 7804 Boesgaard is named after her, the name having been proposed by Dutch astronomers C.J. van Houten and Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld.

#615

Barbara Low

#40346

Overall Influence

1920 - 2019 (99 years)

Barbara Wharton Low was a biochemist, biophysicist, and a researcher involved in discovering the structure of penicillin and the characteristics of other antibiotics. Her early work at Oxford University with Dorothy Hodgkin used X-ray crystallography to confirm the molecular structure of penicillin, which at the time was the largest molecule whose structure has been determined using that method. Later graduate work saw her study with Linus Pauling and Edwin Cohn before becoming a professor in her own right. Low's laboratory would accomplish the discovery of the pi helix, investigate the struc...

#616

Véronique Buat

#112205

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Véronique Buat is a French astrophysicist and academic at the University of Provence. Her research interests include galaxy formation and evolution, star formation, infrared astronomy, and ultraviolet astronomy.

#617

Galina Kurlyandskaya

#49407

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Galina Vladimirovna Kurlyandskaya is a Russian physicist, known for her works on giant magnetoimpedance. Biography Galina Kurlyandskaya was born in Kirovgrad, Soviet Union, in 1961 in a Russian family.

#618

Mariangela Lisanti

#86692

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

Mariangela Lisanti is an American theoretical physicist and an associate professor of physics at Princeton University. Her work focuses on understanding dark matter and dark energy using tools developed through artificial intelligence.

#619

Marion Asche

#90804

Overall Influence

1935 - 2013 (78 years)

Marion Asche was a German physicist and professor of solid state physics. She is known for her pioneering work in semiconductor physics. Life Marion Asche was born in Berlin to Lisa Asche and Werner Asche. In 1941 she started school in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, but a year later, because of the bombing raids on Berlin, her mother took her daughter and son to Lauterbach near Putbus on the island of Rügen, where Asche went to school. In 1945, the family returned to their apartment in East Berlin.

#620

Ulla Mitzdorf

#60082

Overall Influence

1944 - 2013 (69 years)

Ulla Mitzdorf was a German scientist. She contributed to diverse areas including physics, chemistry, psychology, physiology, medicine and gender studies. Life and Scientific Work Mitzdorf gained her doctorate in 1974 at the Technical University Munich in theoretical chemistry. Subsequently she worked as scholar at the Max-Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich. In 1983 she habilitated in physiology, and in 1984 in medical psychology and neurobiology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

#621

Barbara Terhal

#65694

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Barbara M. Terhal is a theoretical physicist working in quantum information and quantum computing. She is a professor in the Delft Institute of Applied Mathematics at TU Delft, as well as leading the Terhal Group at QuTech, the Dutch institute for quantum computing and quantum internet, founded by TU Delft and the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research . Her research concerns many areas in quantum information theory, including entanglement detection, quantum error correction, fault-tolerant quantum computing and quantum memories.

#622

Laura Baudis

#107761

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Laura Baudis is a Romanian-born Swiss particle astrophysicist. She is employed as a full professor by the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Her research focuses on dark matter and neutrino physics. She is a member of the science strategy team for XENON as well as the CERN Scientific Policy Committee and the PSI Research Committee for Particle Physics.

#623

Francesca Ferlaino

#95709

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Francesca Ferlaino is an Italian-Austrian experimental physicist known for her research on quantum matter. She is a professor of physics at the University of Innsbruck. Biography Francesca Ferlaino was born in Naples, Italy. She studied physics at the University of Naples Federico II and was an undergraduate research fellow at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste . She did a PhD in physics at the University of Florence and the European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy . In 2007 she moved to the University of Innsbruck, Austria, where she was a research and teaching associate and started her own research group.

#624

Erika Böhm-Vitense

#106400

Overall Influence

1923 - 2017 (94 years)

Erika Helga Ruth Böhm-Vitense was a German-born American astrophysicist known for her work on Cepheid variables and convection in stellar atmospheres. Early life Böhm-Vitense was born Erika Helga Ruth Vitense on 3 June 1923 in Kurau, Germany. She was the second of three girls. Her parents, Wilma and Hans Vitense were both teachers. She, along with her sisters, was raised in Lübeck, Germany.

#625

Kathryn Zurek

#129234

Overall Influence

Kathryn M. Zurek is an American physicist and professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology. Her research interests primarily lie at the intersection of particle physics with cosmology and particle astrophysics. She is known for her theories on dark matter's "hidden valleys", also known as hidden sectors.

#626

Victoria Meadows

#128332

Overall Influence

Victoria Suzanne Meadows is a Professor with the Astronomy Department and Director of the Astrobiology Program at the University of Washington. She is also the Principal Investigator for the NASA Astrobiology Institute's Virtual Planetary Laboratory Lead Team and the chair of the NAI Focus Group on Habitability and Astronomical Biosignatures . The research direction of the team is to create computer models that can be used to understand planet formation, stability and orbital evolution, and to simulate the environment and spectra of planets that can potentially be habitable.

#627

Belita Koiller

#65259

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Belita Koiller is a Brazilian Professor of Physics at the Instituto de Física, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro , Brazil. She is a Condensed Matter Theorist, and has contributed to the understanding of the properties of disordered solids, particularly disordered chains and semiconductor alloys. More recently, she has been interested in quantum control of individual electron spin and charge in semiconductors, aiming at applications in quantum information and quantum computing.

#628

Jean P. Brodie

#88008

Overall Influence

Jean P. Brodie is a British astrophysicist. She is professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz and an astronomer at the Lick Observatory. Education Brodie has a B.Sc. from the University of London and a Ph.D. from Emmanuel College, Cambridge and the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge.

#629

Kim Venn

#52644

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Kim A. Venn is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Victoria, Canada, and director of the university's Astronomy Research Centre. She researches the chemo-dynamical analysis of stars in the galaxy and its nearby dwarf satellites.

#630

Jeanette Epps

#35266

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Jeanette Jo Epps is an American aerospace engineer and NASA astronaut. Epps received both her M. S. and Ph.D. degrees in aerospace engineering from the University of Maryland, where she was part of the rotor-craft research group and was a NASA GSRP Fellow. She was chosen for the 20th class of NASA astronauts in 2009, graduating in 2011. Epps currently serves as a member of the ISS Operations Branch and has completed analog astronaut missions, including NEEMO 18 and CAVES 19. She is the second woman and first African-American woman to have participated in CAVES. She has been selected to fly to...

#631

Phiala E. Shanahan

#111932

Overall Influence

Phiala Elisabeth Shanahan is an Australian theoretical physicist who lives and works in the United States. She is known for her work on the structure and interactions of hadrons and nuclei and her innovative use of machine learning techniques in lattice quantum field theory calculations.

#632

Milla Baldo-Ceolin

#106062

Overall Influence

1924 - 2011 (87 years)

Massimilla "Milla" Baldo-Ceolin was an Italian particle physicist. She was the daughter to the owner of a small mechanical workshop. Biography Baldo-Ceolin graduated from the University of Padua in 1952 and six years later became a professor in physics in the same university. In 1963, she was the first female to have a professorship in the university.

#633

Sangeeta Malhotra

#49961

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Sangeeta Malhotra is an astrophysicist who studies galaxies, their contents, and their effects on the universe around them. The objects she studies range from our own Milky Way galaxy to some of the earliest and most distant known galaxies in the epoch of cosmic dawn.

#634

Fran Bagenal

#103440

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Frances "Fran" Bagenal is a Professor Emerita of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder and a Senior Research Scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in the fields of space plasmas and planetary magnetospheres.

#635

Valeria Pettorino

#104919

Overall Influence

Valeria Pettorino is an Italian physicist working in cosmology, astrophysics and data analysis. She is a CDI Researcher at CosmoStat, CEA Saclay, and she is part of Planck and Euclid ESA/NASA international space missions.

#636

Karen Kavanagh

#57404

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Karen L. Kavanagh is a professor of physics at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, where she heads the Kavanagh Lab, a research lab working on semiconductor nanoscience. Education Kavanagh obtained a BSc in Chemical-Physics from Queen's University in 1978, followed by 3 years at Bell Northern Research in Ottawa in their Advanced Technology Laboratory. She received her PhD in Materials Science and Engineering in 1987 at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

#637

Céline Bœhm

#128663

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Céline Bœhm is a Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Sydney. She works on astroparticle physics and dark matter. Early life and education Bœhm studied fundamental physics at the Pierre and Marie Curie University, graduating in 1997. She joined École Polytechnique, where she obtained a Master in Engineering in 1998. She earned the highest distinction for a postgraduate diploma in theoretical physics. She completed her PhD at the École normale supérieure in Paris in 2001, working with Pierre Fayet. She worked on supersymmetry, in the 4-body decay of the stop particle. She studied...

#638

Pauline Barmby

#122784

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Pauline Barmby is a Canadian astronomer currently based at the University of Western Ontario. She studies galaxies, their formation and evolution from an observational standpoint. She studies both nearby galaxies and those at high redshift using telescopes like the Spitzer Space Telescope. She is the co-chair, with Bryan Gaensler, of the Canadian Astronomy 2020 Long Range Plan.

#639

Elena Long

#91605

Overall Influence

Elena Amanda Long is assistant professor of physics at the University of New Hampshire and is an activist for LGBT people in science. The journal Nature called her a "diversity trailblazer" in their Nature's 10: Ten people who mattered this year in 2016. Long's research on the internal structure of nucleons earned her a 2015 Jefferson Science Associates Promising Young Scientist award. Long has made significant contributions to improve the inclusion of under-represented researchers and students by founding the LGBT+ Physics organisation and serving as a member of the American Physical Societ...

#640

M. Lisa Manning

#98468

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Mary Lisa Manning is an American physicist and the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Physics at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York, United States. Manning's research focuses on the behavior of glassy materials, using simulations and theory to model the emergent properties of biological tissues.

#641

Cecilia Clementi

#80591

Overall Influence

Cecilia Clementi is an Italian-American scientist who specialises in the simulation of biomolecules. She is a Professor of Computational Biophysics at the Free University of Berlin. She was previously a Professor of Chemistry at the Rice University and co-director of the National Science Foundation Molecular Sciences Software Institute. From 2017 to 2019 she held an Einstein Foundation fellowship.

#642

Nadia Zakamska

#115016

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Nadia Zakamska is a Russian-American astronomer who is a professor at Johns Hopkins University. Early life and education Zakamska graduated from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology with a master's degree in theoretical physics in 2001. Zakamska then attended Princeton University for her PhD, which she received in 2005.

#643

Cristiane de Morais Smith

#116150

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Cristiane de Morais Smith Lehner is a Brazilian theoretical physicist and professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Utrecht, where she leads a research group studying condensed matter physics, cold atoms and strongly-correlated systems. In 2019, the European Physical Society awarded Morais Smith its Emmy Noether Distinction.

#644

Laurel L. Wilkening

#34545

Overall Influence

1944 - 2019 (75 years)

Laurel L. Wilkening was an American planetary scientist and college professor. She was chancellor of the University of California, Irvine from 1993 to 1998. Early life Wilkening was born in Richland, Washington, and raised in Socorro, New Mexico. Her mother, Ruby Alma Barks Wilkening, was a teacher; her father, Marvin H. Wilkening, was an atomic scientist during World War II, and a physics professor at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. She earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry at Reed College in 1966. She completed doctoral studies in chemistry at the University of California, San Diego in 1970, under advisor Hans Suess.

#645

Nikole Lewis

#107399

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (123 years)

Nikole Lewis is an astrophysicist and an assistant professor of Astronomy at Cornell University. Career Her major research interests include observational and theoretical techniques for probing exoplanet atmospheres. She co-led a spectroscopic survey of the TRAPPIST-1 system in 2018 using the Hubble Space Telescope, which was the first such survey for Earth-sized exoplanets. She also took part in the original announcement of the TRAPPIST-1 system in 2017 by helping describe the system and the importance of detecting atmospheres to search for biosignatures.

#646

Maitree Bhattacharyya

#78444

Overall Influence

Maitree Bhattacharyya is an Indian physicist who is Professor and the Director of Jagadis Bose National Science Talent Search , Kolkata. Education Bhattacharyya graduated from Presidency College, Kolkata with Honours in Physics and obtained M.Sc. degree from the Science College campus of University of Calcutta. She started her research career in the Department of Biophysics and Molecular Biology, University of Calcutta with a PhD degree in 1991. She worked as a research associate at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and in 1994 joined University of Calcutta as an assistant professor.

#647

Ruth Grützbauch

#119205

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Ruth Grützbauch is an Austrian astronomer, planetarium director and science communicator. After earning her doctoral degree in 2007, she conducted extragalactic research until 2013, and worked as an educator and science communicator afterwards. Since 2017, she runs the Public Space pop-up planetarium.

#648

Sarah Gallagher

#110782

Overall Influence

Sarah Connoran Gallagher is a professor of astronomy at the University of Western Ontario, where her research focuses on active galaxies, black holes and compact galaxy groups. From 2018 to 2022, she also served as Science Advisor to the Canadian Space Agency.

#649

Barbara Ercolano

#119169

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Barbara Ercolano is an Italian astrophysicist known for her work on interstellar dust, star formation, and protoplanetary disks. She is the Professor for Theoretical Astrophysics in the at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

#650

J. Virginia Lincoln

#81618

Overall Influence

1915 - 2003 (88 years)

Jeannette Virginia Lincoln was an American physicist. Early life Lincoln was born on September 7, 1915, in Ames, Iowa. He parents were Rush B. Lincoln and Jeannette Bartholomew Lincoln. Her father was a major general in the US Army Air Forces. Lincoln's mother taught chemistry at Iowa State University. Her brother, Rush B. Lincoln Jr. became a Major General in the US Army. Their grandfather Lincoln fought in the Civil War as a Confederate captain. Lincoln was unsurprisingly deep into her family's military life and continued with this throughout her life.

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