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,

#901

Esmeralda Mallada

Esmeralda Mallada

#116018

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Esmeralda Herminia Mallada Invernizzi is a Uruguayan astronomer and professor who, for her contributions to that scientific discipline, has been honored with the designation of her name to an asteroid.

#902

Sabine Stanley

#125304

Overall Influence

Sabine Stanley is a Canadian physicist, currently at Johns Hopkins University in the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Morton K. Blaustein Department of Earth And Planetary Sciences and the Applied Physics Laboratory. She was awarded a Bloomberg Distinguished Professorship in 2017. She was previously a Canada Research Chair of Planetary Physics at University of Toronto. She was awarded the William Gilbert Award by the AGU in 2010 and was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2011.

#903

Galina Yershova

Galina Yershova

#35701

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Galina Gavrilovna Yershova, or Ershova is a Russian academic historian, linguist, and epigrapher, who specialises in the study of the ancient civilisations, cultures, and languages of the New World. As an Americanist scholar, her area of expertise is in the field of Mesoamerican studies, and in particular that of the pre-Columbian Maya civilisation, its historical literature, and its writing system. Yershova is a former student and protégé of the Russian linguist and epigrapher Yuri Knorozov, renowned for his central contributions towards the decipherment of the Maya script.

#904

Winifred Cameron

Winifred Cameron

#98814

Overall Influence

1918 - 2016 (98 years)

Winifred Sawtell Cameron was an American astronomer. She worked at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland for most of her career, and compiled the Lunar Transient Phenomena database. She was involved in the Gemini and Apollo programs.

#905

Julie Grollier

#104721

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Julie Grollier is a French physicist working in the field of spintronics. Education and career Grollier studied at the French engineering school Supélec, before doing an internship in the Laboratory of Cristallography and Materials Science at the University of Caen Normandy. She then conducted her doctoral research at École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay under the supervision of Nobel prize laureate Albert Fert, working on magnetization reversal by the injection of spin-current injection. She later joined the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and then the Centre for Nanosciences and Nanotechnologies , as a postdoctoral fellow working on the magnetization dynamics of nano-magnets.

#906

Teresa Montaruli

#159537

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Teresa Montaruli is an Italian astronomer specializing in neutrino astronomy, and in particular in the search for high-energy neutrinos from cosmic sources. She is a professor in the particle physics department at the University of Geneva.

#907

Julie S. Biteen

#89040

Overall Influence

Julie Biteen is a Canadian-born American chemist who is professor of chemistry and biophysics at the University of Michigan. Her research considers the development of imaging systems for biological systems. She was named the Stanford University Sessler Distinguished Alumni Lecturer in 2021.

#908

Christiane Koch

#79512

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Christiane P. Koch is a German physicist whose research involves quantum mechanical versions of control theory, including the use of lasers to achieve coherent control of chemical reactions. She has also performed research on efficiently testing the accuracy of quantum computing devices. She is a professor at the Free University of Berlin.

#909

Latha Venkataraman

#135515

Overall Influence

Latha Venkataraman is a physicist. She is a professor of applied physics and chemistry at Columbia University. Biography Venkataraman completed her BSc in Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1993, followed by Masters and PhD degrees at Harvard University. Her thesis was titled Electronic properties of one-dimensional conductors: A study of molybdenum selenide molecular wires and was completed under Charles Lieber.

#910

Guilaine Lagache

#168989

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

#911

Anna Marie Pyle

#60213

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Anna Marie Pyle is an American academic who is a Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology and a Professor of Chemistry at Yale University. and an Investigator for Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Pyle is the president of the RNA Society, the vice-chair of the Science and Technology Steering Committee at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and previously she served as chair of the Macromolecular Structure and Function A Study Section at the National Institutes of Health.

#912

Usha Kulshreshtha

#145193

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Usha Kulshreshtha is an Indian theoretical physicist, specializing in the Dirac's instant-form and light-front quantization of quantum field theory models, string theory models and D-brane actions using the Hamiltonian, path integral and BRST quantization methods, constrained dynamics, construction of gauge theories and their quantizaton under gauge-fixing as well as study of boson stars, and wormholes in general relativity and gravity theory.

#913

Rachel Aldred

#44688

Overall Influence

Rachel Aldred is British academic specialising in active mobility. She is a Professor in Transport at the University of Westminster and has published over 25 peer reviewed papers. She was awarded the Economic and Social Research Council's award for Outstanding Impact in Public Policy for her work on The Near Miss Project, the first UK study calculating a per-mile collision risk for cycling, and is one of the co-investigators of the Propensity to Cycle Tool, an online system for transport planners using census data to model the potential benefits of cycling infrastructure schemes in England, funded by the Department for Transport.

#914

Sarah Veatch

#155464

Overall Influence

Sarah Louise Veatch is an American biophysicist, associate professor of biophysics at University of Michigan. Early life Veatch was raised in Brookline, Massachusetts by her mother, a medical doctor, and her father, William R. Veatch, a membrane biophysicist.

#915

Melanie Johnston-Hollitt

#137849

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Melanie Johnston-Hollitt is an Australian astrophysicist and professor. She has worked on the design, construction, and international governance of several radio telescopes including the Low Frequency Array , the Murchison Widefield Array and the upcoming Square Kilometre Array . She was the director of the Murchison Widefield Array until December 2020 and is a professor at the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy at Curtin University and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research. Since August 2020, Melanie Johnston-Hollitt is the director of the Curtin Institute for Data Science...

#916

Amaelle Landais-Israël

#64280

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Amaelle Landais-Israël is a French glaciologist and climatologist. She is research director of the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences at the French National Centre for Scientific Research .

#917

Ágnes Mócsy

#61026

Overall Influence

Ágnes Mócsy is a Professor of Physics at the Pratt Institute who works on theoretical nuclear physics. She is also a filmmaker, science communicator and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Education and early career Mócsy grew up in the Transylvania region of Romania, where she was a part of the Hungarian minority in the region. She completed her bachelor's degree at Babeș-Bolyai University in 1989. She went on to earn a master's degree physics at the University of Bergen. She then moved to the University of Minnesota, culminating in a PhD in physics. Her thesis focused on the phase diagram of quantum chromodynamics.

#918

Jean L. Turner

#109007

Overall Influence

Jean L. Turner is an astrophysicist and distinguished professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She was lead author on research and discovery of a particular star cluster in the dwarf galaxy NGC 5253, considered 'remarkable' for being an extremely dusty gas cloud and having highly efficient star formation.

#919

Ora Entin-Wohlman

#157647

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Ora Entin-Wohlman is an Israeli condensed matter physicist. She is a professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University and at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Education and career Entin-Wohlman studied mathematics and physics at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, earning a bachelor's degree in both in 1965 and a master's degree in physics in 1967. She completed her Ph.D. at Bar-Ilan University in 1973.

#920

Nathalie Picqué

#129029

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Nathalie Picqué is a French physicist working at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in the field Frequency Combs, where she studies ultra-high resolution spectroscopy using ultrashort pulses of light combined with Fourier-transform spectroscopy to reveal the fine chemistry of samples, in particular in the mid-infrared, demonstrating resolving power in excess of 1,000,000,000,000.

#921

Jane MacArthur

#131193

Overall Influence

1986 - Present (38 years)

Jane MacArthur FRAS is a British planetary scientist and science writer based in Leicester. Early life and education Jane MacArthur went to City of Norwich School, Norfolk, before studying Mathematics at the University of Nottingham. She completed an MSc in Planetary Sciences at University College London after taking distance learning courses in Planetary Geology, Exoplanets and Galaxies at Liverpool John Moores University. She completed several workshops and summer schools relating to geology and exoplanets, developing a considerable public profile through science festivals and media appeara...

#922

Yasmine Amhis

#123696

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (42 years)

Yasmine Amhis is a French-Algerian particle physicist. In 2016, she was awarded the Jacques Herbrand Prize. She is the granddaughter of the Algerian poet and writer Djoher Amhis-Ouksel. Early life and education In 1999, after high school in Algeria, Yasmine Amhis pursued undergraduate studies in France. She obtained her master's degree at the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay, then earned a thesis grant in 2006 and started her work at IJCLab Orsay under the supervision of Marie -Hélène Schune and Jacques Lefrançois. Work on her thesis introduced her to the LHCb experiment at CERN. After she o...

#923

Bei Zeng

#117048

Overall Influence

Bei Zeng is a quantum information theorist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where she is a professor of physics, and director of the IAS Center for Quantum Technologies. As well as quantum information, her research interests include quantum computing and quantum error correction.

#924

Eva-Maria Graefe

#58852

Overall Influence

Eva-Maria Graefe is a German mathematical physicist who works as a reader in mathematical physics at Imperial College London and as a University Research Fellow of the Royal Society. Her research involves ultracold atoms and non-Hermitian quantum mechanics, an area she describes informally as the study of "holes in quantum systems" by which dissipation degrades their quantum behavior.

#925

Hannah Elfner

#70018

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (42 years)

Hannah Elfner is a German physicist who is Head of Simulations at the Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research and Professor of Physics at the Goethe University Frankfurt. She was named the 2021 Alfons and Gertrud Kassel Foundation Scientist of the Year.

#926

Jackie Faherty

#148977

Overall Influence

Jacqueline K. Faherty is an American astronomer specializing in infrared astronomy and the observation of nearby stars and brown dwarfs, and known for her public outreach in space science. She works at the American Museum of Natural History as a senior scientist in the museum's Department of Astrophysics and a senior education manager in the Department of Education.

#927

Na Ji

#127520

Overall Influence

Na Ji is an American biophysicist and the Luis Alvarez Memorial Chair in Experimental Physics at UC Berkeley, where her work focuses on optical microscopy techniques for in vivo imaging and biophotonics. She has a joint appointment as faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

#928

Deblina Sarkar

#96327

Overall Influence

Deblina Sarkar is an electrical engineer, and inventor. She is an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the AT&T Career Development Chair Professor of the MIT Media Lab. Sarkar has been internationally recognized for her invention of an ultra thin quantum mechanical transistor that can be scaled to nano-sizes and used in nanoelectronic biosensors. As the principal investigator of the Nano Cybernetic Biotrek Lab at MIT, Sarkar leads a multidisciplinary team of researchers towards bridging the gap between nanotechnology and synthetic biology to build new nano-devi...

#929

Louise Edwards

#149478

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Louise Olivia Violet Edwards is a Canadian astronomer and associate professor of physics at California Polytechnic State University , and is one of the first Black Canadians to receive a PhD in astronomy. In 2002, she was pictured on a Canadian stamp.

#930

Nynke Dekker

#126687

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Nynke Hester Dekker is a Dutch biophysicist who is Professor of Molecular Biophysics at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University of Technology. Dekker studies individual DNA and RNA molecules and how they interact with proteins in bacteria, viruses and eukaryotes. She described how virus proteins build errors into the virus RNA of viruses. In 2020, she was awarded the Spinoza Prize.

#931

Hope Ishii

#68538

Overall Influence

Hope A. Ishii is an American scientist and the Director of the Advanced Electron Microscopy Center at the Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology at the University of Hawaiʻi. Her work focuses on analysis and characterization of small solar system objects such as comet and asteroid dust, primarily by means of electron microscopy and x-ray spectroscopy, sometime from samples collected in space using aerogel. She is a research faculty member at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and an affiliate researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

#932

Karina Morgenstern

#113041

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Karina Morgenstern is a German physicist. She is a professor of physical chemistry at the Ruhr University Bochum. Education She studied physics and computer science at the universities of Bonn and Knoxville. She was awarded a diploma in physics in 1993 , and a diploma in computer science in 1994 . She then obtained a doctoral degree in surface physics in 1996 and completed her habilitation in experimental physics in 2002 .

#933

Sarah L. Keller

#129092

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Sarah L. Keller is an American biophysicist, studying problems at the intersection between biology and chemistry. She investigates self-assembling soft matter systems. Her current main research focus is understanding how simple lipid mixtures within bilayer membranes give rise to membrane's complex phase behavior.

#934

Canan Dağdeviren

Canan Dağdeviren

#31066

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (39 years)

Canan Dağdeviren is a Turkish academic, physicist, material scientist, and Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where she currently holds the LG Career Development Professorship in Media Arts and Sciences. Dagdeviren is the first Turkish scientist in the history of the Harvard Society to become a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. As a faculty member, she directs her own Conformable Decoders research group at the MIT Media Lab. The group works at the intersection of materials science, engineering and biomedical engineering. They create...

#935

Bridget Shield

#57897

Overall Influence

Bridget Mary Shield is a leading researcher on acoustics. Shield graduated from Birmingham University with a BSc in Pure Mathematics in 1968, an MSc in mathematics in 1969 and a PhD in Engineering Production in 1979.

#936

Eva Andrei

#131297

Overall Influence

Eva Yocheved Andrei is an American condensed matter physicist, currently a Distinguished Professor and Board of Governors Professor at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on emergent properties of matter arising from collective behavior of many particles, especially low-dimensional phenomena under low temperatures and high magnetic fields.

#937

Jocelyn Monroe

#134684

Overall Influence

Jocelyn Monroe is an American British experimental particle physicist who is a professor at the University of Oxford. Her research considers the development of novel detectors as part of the search for dark matter. In 2016 she was honoured with the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for her work on the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory.

#938

Dagmar Sternad

#117853

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Dagmar Sternad is a German-American scientist and engineer. Sternad is University Distinguished Professor of Biology, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Physics at Northeastern University. She is also a core member of the Institute of Experiential Robotics at Northeastern University.

#939

Saraswathi Vishveshwara

#106378

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Saraswathi Vishveshwara is an Indian biophysicist with specialization in the area of Molecular Biophysics. She is a professor in the Molecular Biophysics Unit at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. She works on computational biology and her research is primarily focused on elucidating structure-function relationships in biological systems. Using computational-mathematical techniques to understand the functioning of macromolecules such as proteins is a key aspect of her research.

#940

Olwyn Byron

#162192

Overall Influence

Olwyn Byron is a British physicist who is Professor of Biophysics at the University of Glasgow and Chair of the British Biophysical Society. She is a member of the Physics of Life UK Network steering group who were awarded the 2020 Institute of Physics Rosalind Franklin Medal and Prize.

#941

Ingrid J. Pickering

#159542

Overall Influence

Ingrid Jane Pickering is a geoscientist. She is a professor and Canada Research Chair in Molecular Environmental Science at the University of Saskatchewan. In 2018, Pickering was the first woman appointed Chair of the Canada Foundation for Innovation Board of Directors.

#942

Karen Fleming

#24323

Overall Influence

Karen Renee Gibson Fleming is a Professor of Biophysics at Johns Hopkins University. She investigates the energetics of transmembrane helix-helix interactions. Fleming was awarded the 2020 Protein Society Carl Brändén Award.

#943

Juliet Lee-Franzini

#128721

Overall Influence

1933 - 2014 (81 years)

Juliet Lee-Franzini was Chinese-born physics who was the founding faculty member of the high energy physics experimental group at Stony Brook University. Early life and education Juliet Lee-Franzini was born of Chinese parents in Paris, France in 1933 and educated in the United States. She earned her BA at Hunter College in 1953, her MA and PhD from Columbia University in 1957 and 1960.

#944

Baerbel Lucchitta

#170990

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Baerbel Kösters Lucchitta is a scientist emeritus at the Astrogeology Science Center at the USGS and one of the first women in the field of Astrogeology. She was one of the people responsible of making lunar maps for the Apollo 11 mission. During her career, she was dedicated to mapping the Moon, Mars, Europa and the Galilean Satellites, and Antarctica. The Lucchitta Glacier is named after her work in Antarctica, and the Asteroid 4569 Baerbel is named after her work in planetary geology.

#945

Aba Andam

#47360

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Professor Aba A. Bentil Andam is a Ghanaian particle physicist who was President of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences from 2017–2019. She is the first Ghanaian female physicist. Early life and education Aba A. Bentil Andam was born in Ghana in 1948 in Ajumako Kokoben. She had her secondary education at Mfantsiman Senior High School. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Cape Coast in Ghana ,⁣ where she majored in physics and minored in mathematics. She sought further education in Britain where she earned a master's degree from the University of Birmingham and a Ph.D.

#946

Odile Macchi

#61171

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Odile Macchi is a French physicist and mathematician. She has been a member of the French Academy of Sciences since 2004. Life Odile Danjou was born in Aurillac during the German occupation. She is one of the six recorded children of Bernard Danjou and his wife, born Geneviève Féat.

#947

Deirdre Shoemaker

#168695

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Deirdre Marie Shoemaker is an American astrophysicist whose research studies the mergers of binary black holes through both simulation and observation. She is a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin, where she directs the Center for Gravitational Physics and is affiliated with the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences.

#948

Simone Techert

#77780

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Simone Techert is an X-ray physicist and physicochemist. She develops methods for time-resolved X-ray experiments to illuminate chemical molecular processes for example 'filming' chemical reactions in real time.

#949

Ilona Riipinen

#136451

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (42 years)

Ilona Riipinen is a Finnish physicist, working as a professor of atmospheric sciences at Stockholm University. She has received funding for her research from many funds as well as the European Research Council.

#950

Cynthia Cattell

#165431

Overall Influence

Cynthia Cattell is space plasma physicist known her research on solar flares and radiation belts. Education and career Cattell has a B.A. from Hampshire College and earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1980.

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