Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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School

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Physics,

#1001

Rae Robertson-Anderson

#84264

Overall Influence

Rae Marie Robertson-Anderson is an American biophysicist who is Associate Professor at the University of San Diego. She works on soft matter physics and is particularly interested in the transport and molecular mechanics of biopolymer networks. Robertson-Anderson is a member of the Council on Undergraduate Research.

#1002

Raffaella Schneider

#172356

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Raffaella Schneider is an Italian astrophysicist whose research concerns the first generations of stars, galaxies, and black holes in the early universe. She is a professor of astrophysics at Sapienza University of Rome.

#1003

Tayyaba Zafar

#170484

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

Tayyaba Zafar is a Pakistani-born astronomer and science communicator. She is widely known to the public as the first woman from Pakistan who visited Antarctica under the Homeward Bound Program. She completed her PhD in astronomy from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark in 2011 and worked at the European Southern Observatory and Australian Astronomical Observatory. She researches how metals and dust form in distant galaxies and their effects are on star formation and other galaxy properties.

#1004

Afërdita Veveçka Priftaj

Afërdita Veveçka Priftaj

#107361

Overall Influence

1948 - 2017 (69 years)

Afërdita Veveçka Priftaj was an Albanian physicist, associate of the Academy of Sciences of Albania and a professor at the Polytechnic University of Tirana. Her research specialized on metals, evaluating their microstructure and mechanical properties, and the effects of severe plastic deformation on nanocrystalline materials.

#1005

Naoko Yamazaki

#12904

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

is a Japanese engineer and former astronaut at JAXA. She was the second Japanese woman to fly in space. The first was Chiaki Mukai. Early life Yamazaki was born Naoko Sumino in Matsudo City. She spent two years of her childhood in Sapporo. After graduating from Ochanomizu University Senior High School in 1989, Yamazaki earned a Bachelor of Science degree with a major in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1993 and a Master of Science degree with a major in Aerospace Engineering in 1996.

#1006

Lucy Fortson

#172471

Overall Influence

Lucy Frear Fortson is an American astronomer known for her work on gamma-ray astronomy and Galaxy morphological classification and for her leadership of citizen science projects including the Galaxy Zoo and Zooniverse. She is a professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota.

#1007

Sonia Bacca

#171371

Overall Influence

Sonia Bacca is an Italian physicist known for her calculations of the interaction forces of small systems of nucleic particles. She is University Professor in Theoretical Physics at the Institute for Nuclear Physics of the University of Mainz in Germany.

#1008

Bridgette Barry

#128385

Overall Influence

Bridgette Anne Barry was an American biophysicist and biochemist. She was a professor and researcher of molecular biophysics and biochemistry in the Georgia Tech chemistry and biochemistry department from 2003 until her death. Her research focused on protein electron and oxygen evolution mechanisms.

#1009

Mary O'Kane

#77984

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Mary Josephine O'Kane, AC an Australian scientist and engineer, is the Chair of the Independent Planning Commission of New South Wales . She is also a company director and Executive Chairman of O’Kane Associates, a Sydney-based consulting practice specialising in government reviews and research and innovation advice to governments in Europe, Asia and Australasia.

#1010

Wang Yening

#111684

Overall Influence

1926 - 2019 (93 years)

Wang Yening , also known as Ye-Ning Wang, was a Chinese physicist. She was an educator with a specialization in condensed matter physics. She spent her entire career at Nanjing University and was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1991. She was a recipient of the State Natural Science Award and the Ho Leung Ho Lee Prize in Physics.

#1011

Verena Meyer

#115496

Overall Influence

1929 - 2018 (89 years)

Verena Meyer was a Swiss nuclear physicist and former President of the University of Zurich. She was the first woman elected to serve as president of the Swiss Physical Society. Early life Meyer was born to academic parents in 1929. Her father, Karl Meyer, was a professor of history at the University of Zurich and her mother, Alice Meyer, was a lawyer. Her father died when she was 20 years old.

#1012

Angela R. Hight Walker

Angela R. Hight Walker

#167243

Overall Influence

Angela Renee Hight Walker is an American physicist. She is a project leader in the nanoscale spectroscopy group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Hight Walker's research includes advancing optical spectroscopic techniques and specifically their applicability to characterize quantum nanomaterials.

#1013

Heather Kulik

#91100

Overall Influence

Heather J. Kulik is an American computational materials scientist and engineer who is an associate professor of chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research considers the computational design of new materials and the use of artificial intelligence to predict material properties.

#1014

Sarah T. Stewart-Mukhopadhyay

#85713

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Sarah T. Stewart-Mukhopadhyay is an American planetary scientist known for studying planet formation, planetary geology, and materials science. She is a professor at the University of California, Davis in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department. She was a professor at Harvard University Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences from 2003 to 2014.

#1015

Hanna Reisler

#121249

Overall Influence

Hanna Reisler is an Israeli-American Professor of Chemistry at the University of Southern California. She is interested in the reaction dynamics of molecules and free radicals, as well as the photodissociation in the gas phase. Reisler established the University of Southern California Women In Science and Engineering program.

#1016

Bibijana Čujec

#169962

Overall Influence

1926 - 2022 (96 years)

Bibijana Čujec was a Slovene physicist. She obtained her degree in 1950 at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics in Ljubljana, and in 1959 her PhD in physics at the Faculty of Natural Sciences of University of Ljubljana. From 1954 to 1961 she worked at the Jožef Stefan Institute, specialized later in Pittsburgh, United States, and in 1963 moved to Canada.

#1017

Georgia Tourassi

Georgia Tourassi

#112782

Overall Influence

Georgia "Gina" D. Tourassi is the Director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory health data sciences institute and adjunct Professor of radiology at Duke University. She works on biomedical informatics, computer-aided diagnosis and artificial intelligence in health care.

#1018

Gloria Platero

#173501

Overall Influence

Gloria Platero Coello is a Spanish physicist whose research involves the computational simulation of quantum dots and other quantum behavior on nanostructures. She works for the Spanish National Research Council as a research professor at the Materials Science Institute of Madrid .

#1019

Julia Mundy

#122531

Overall Influence

Julia Mundy is an American experimental condensed matter physicist. She was awarded the 2019 George E. Valley Jr. Prize by the American Physical Society for "the pico-engineering and synthesis of the first room-temperature magnetoelectric multi-ferroic material." This prize recognizes an "individual in the early stages of his or her career for an outstanding scientific contribution to physics that is deemed to have significant potential for a dramatic impact on the field." She is an assistant professor of physics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

#1020

Motrya Bratiychuk

#128600

Overall Influence

1927 - 2001 (74 years)

Matrona Vasylivna Bratiychuk was a Ukrainian astronomer, one of the first devoted to the observation of artificial satellites. Life Bratiychuk was born on 8 September 1927 in Verba, a village in the Dubno Raion of Ukraine, at the time part of the Soviet Union. After earning a degree in 1952 from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, she became a secondary school teacher for a year before continuing her graduate education.

#1021

Anette Hosoi

#59433

Overall Influence

Anette E. "Peko" Hosoi is an American mechanical engineer, biophysicist, and mathematician, currently the Neil and Jane Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering and associate dean of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#1022

Athena Sefat

#163582

Overall Influence

Athena Safa Sefat, born 1977 in Iran is a Canadian/American physicist, with research focus on quantum materials and correlated phenomena. She was a senior scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and led the DOE Basic Energy Science on "Probing Competing Chemical, Electronic, and Spin Correlations for Quantum Materials Functionality". She is currently a Program Manager at U.S. Department of Energy , Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, with Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering.

#1023

Kristine Spekkens

#159432

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Kristine Spekkens is a Canadian astronomer, and is a professor at the Royal Military College of Canada and Queen's University. She is the Canadian Science Director for the Square Kilometre Array. Early life Spekkens was born in Hamilton, Ontario and grew up in Burlington, Ontario, spending most of her summers in a small cottage community in Chelsea, Québec. She attended École primaire St-Phillippe and École secondaire Georges-P.-Vanier, and received her B.Sc. in Physics from Queen's University in 2000 and her PhD in astronomy from Cornell University in 2005.

#1024

Christine Joblin

#137861

Overall Influence

Christine Joblin is a French astrochemist who uses spectroscopy to study photodissociation and the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in cosmic dust. Beyond her experimental and observational work, she also contributed to the first clear finding of buckminsterfullerene in a meteorite, a ureilite that exploded over the Nubian Desert in late 2008. She is a director of research for the French National Centre for Scientific Research , affiliated with the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie in Toulouse.

#1025

Kelsi Singer

#168181

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (40 years)

Kelsi N. Singer is an American planetary scientist who is a senior research scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, CO. She is a co-investigator and deputy project scientist of NASA's New Horizons mission studying the geomorphology and geophysics of the Pluto system and of Arrokoth .

#1026

Élisabeth Charlaix

#168517

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Élisabeth Charlaix , is a French physicist. She is a professor at the Université Grenoble Alpes, where she researches fluid mechanics to the sub-nanometre level. She was a co-developer of a surface-forces measuring device for very small-scale interactions.

#1027

Edith Jones Woodward

Edith Jones Woodward

#155389

Overall Influence

1914 - 2002 (88 years)

Edith Jones Woodward was an American astronomer and college professor. She did research on binary stars, and taught at William Paterson College in New Jersey for over twenty years. Early life Edith Jones was born in Waldron, Indiana, the daughter of James Raymond Jones and Mary "Madge" Yeager Jones. She attended Purdue University, earning a bachelor's of science in 1935. She won the Flora Roberts Medal as "outstanding senior woman" in her class at Purdue. She earned a PhD in astronomy from Harvard University in 1941, where she held a Pickering Fellowship in 1936 and worked with Harlow Shapley...

#1028

Carmen Menoni

#136195

Overall Influence

Carmen S. Menoni is an Argentine-American physicist who is the University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University. Her research considers oxide materials for interference coatings and spectrometry imaging. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, American Physical Society, The Optical Society and SPIE. Menoni served as the President of the IEEE Photonics Society from 2020 to 2021.

#1029

Ilse Cleeves

#166087

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Lauren Ilsedore Cleeves is an American astrophysicist and an assistant professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Virginia. She is specialized in the study of protoplanetary disks.

#1030

Béatrice Chatel

#93434

Overall Influence

Béatrice Chatel is a French physicist and researcher specializing in femtosecond lasers. She was awarded an Irène Joliot-Curie Prize in 2005 for her work. Life and work In 1993, Chatel graduated from the Institut d'optique Graduate School, sometimes called "SupOptique." She completed her thesis at the Kastler Brossel laboratory and then became a lecturer at the University Toulouse-III-Paul-Sabatier. After a short period at the Applied Optics Laboratory, she began full time research at the Collisions, Aggregates, Reactivity laboratory as a research fellow. Between 2013 and 2014, she was direct...

#1031

Cecilia Lunardini

#173231

Overall Influence

Cecilia Lunardini is an Italian nuclear astrophysicist known for her research on neutrinos from the sun, from the cosmic neutrino background, from supernovae and failed supernovae, and from collisions of stars with black holes. She is a professor of physics at Arizona State University.

#1032

Beate Paulus

#154705

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Beate Paulus is a German chemist and professor of theoretical chemistry at the Free University of Berlin . Career Paulus studied physics at the University of Regensburg from 1987 to 1993, She graduated with a thesis under J. Keller entitled "Electrical conductivity in fullerides" From 1993 to 1995 she was a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Stuttgart and later Dresden. The title of her dissertation was "Electronic correlations in semiconductors". From 1996 she was also a postdoctoral fellow there. In December 2005 she completed her habilitation in Regensburg.

#1033

Christiane Bonnelle

#94101

Overall Influence

1930 - 2016 (86 years)

Christiane Bonnelle was a French physicist and pioneering spectroscopist, who served as professor emeritus at Pierre and Marie Curie University. Career and education Bonnelle studied at the Sorbonne, from which she received Bachelor of Science and Doctor of Science degrees. After completing her degree, Bonnelle worked at CNRS in 1955, where she worked as an intern and then researcher. In 1960 she started working as an assistant professor at the Sorbonne, becoming a professor in 1967. She moved to Pierre and Marie Curie University in 1974, where she became director of the Laboratory of Physical Chemistry in 1979.

#1034

Sinead Farrington

#97841

Overall Influence

Sinéad Farrington is a British particle physicist who works on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. Farrington is interested in B physics, Higgs physics, tau physics, and long-lived particles. She is a Professor of Physics at the University of Edinburgh. In December 2020 Farrington was named the physical sciences and engineering laureate for the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists in the United Kingdom 2021.

#1035

Wendy Adams

#168975

Overall Influence

Wendy K. Adams is an American physics educator. She is known for her work on interactive educational simulations of physics including the PhET Interactive Simulations project, on the effectiveness of peer discussions on conceptual understanding of physics, on measurement of student beliefs about physical concepts, on public beliefs about what it is like to be a physics teacher, and on other aspects of physics education. She is a research professor of physics in the Colorado School of Mines. and the Executive Director of Get the Facts Out a national multi-society effort to repair the reputatio...

#1036

Marianne Walck

#44126

Overall Influence

Marianne C. Walck is the Chief Research Officer at the Idaho National Laboratory. She previously served as Vice President of the Sandia National Laboratories, where she led nuclear weapons stewardship.

#1037

Sarah Bohndiek

#117423

Overall Influence

Sarah Elizabeth Bohndiek is a physicist whose research involves developing novel imaging approaches for early cancer detection. She is a Professor in Biomedical Physics at the University of Cambridge and a Group Leader at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute.

#1038

Aneta Stefanovska

#132476

Overall Influence

Aneta Stefanovska is a Macedonian-born, Slovenian-British biophysicist. She is a professor of physics at Lancaster University. Research Stefanovska's research concerns biological oscillations, particularly in the blood circulatory system, and their analysis using wavelets, nonlinear systems, and the Kuramoto model for systems of coupled oscillators. With Peter V. E. McClintock, she is co-editor of the book Physics of Biological Oscillators: New Insights into Non-Equilibrium and Non-Autonomous Systems .

#1039

Kimberly Strong

#120969

Overall Influence

Kimberly "Kim" E. Strong is an atmospheric physicist and the first woman to serve as chair of the Department of Physics at the University of Toronto. Her research involves studying stratospheric ozone chemistry, climate, and air quality using ground-based, balloon-borne and satellite instruments.

#1040

Suliana Manley

#162867

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Suliana Manley is an American biophysicist. Her research focuses on the development of high-resolution optical instruments, and their application in studying the organization and dynamics of proteins. She is a professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and heads the Laboratory of Experimental Biophysics.

#1041

Eva Cassirer

#136265

Overall Influence

1920 - 2009 (89 years)

Eva Cassirer was a German philosopher, astronomer and art collector. She was an honorary professor at the Technical University of Berlin. She was awarded the honorary title Righteous Among the Nations in 2011.

#1042

Alessandra Corsi

#173324

Overall Influence

Alessandra Corsi is an Italian astronomer known for her work as part of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration on gravitational-wave astronomy, and on multi-messenger astronomy combining gravitational and electromagnetic signals. She is an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Texas Tech University.

#1043

Merryn Tawhai

#128298

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (123 years)

Merryn Tawhai is a New Zealand engineering scientist. She is a professor at the University of Auckland, director of the Auckland Bioengineering Institute, where she was a fellow from 2002, and a former director of MedTech CoRE. She is known for the development of mathematical models of the lungs that will help scientists understand differences between physiologically normal lungs and the pathological changes that might occur in a disease. She was inducted into the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering in June 2018. In November 2018, Tawhai was elected a Fellow of the Roy...

#1044

Abigail Vieregg

#163097

Overall Influence

Abigail Goodhue Vieregg is a professor of physics at the Enrico Fermi Institute and Kavli Institute of Cosmology, University of Chicago, specializing in neutrino astrophysics and cosmology. Her work focuses on cosmic high-energy neutrinos and mapping the cosmic microwave background.

#1045

Sindee Simon

#74340

Overall Influence

Sindee Lou Simon is an American chemical engineer and polymer physicist who studies the glass transition, thermosetting polymers, and nanoconfinement. Her research has included studies of ancient amber, showing that unlike liquids glass does not flow. She is the head of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at North Carolina State University.

#1046

Luisa María Lara

#95808

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Luisa María Lara López is a Spanish astrophysicist. Since 2010, she has been a Spanish National Research Council Researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in the Solar System Department.

#1047

Gloria Suzanne Koenigsberger Horowitz

Gloria Suzanne Koenigsberger Horowitz

#175545

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Gloria Suzanne Koenigsberger Horowitz is a Mexican astrophysicist and professor working at the National Autonomous University of Mexico . Her areas of expertise are in stellar spectroscopy, massive stars and binary interaction effects. She was director of UNAM's Instituto de Astronomía and a leading member of the team that succeeded in establishing the first connection to the Internet in Mexico in 1989.

#1048

Karen E. Daniels

#171933

Overall Influence

Karen E. Daniels is an American physicist who is a professor of physics at North Carolina State University. Her research considers the deformation and failure of materials. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and serves on their Committee on the Status of Women in Physics. She is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#1049

Janina Maultzsch

#172502

Overall Influence

Janina Maultzsch is a German physicist who is the Chair of Experimental Physics at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Her research considers the electronic and optical properties of carbon nanomaterials.

#1050

Suzanne Amador Kane

#95262

Overall Influence

Suzanne Amador Kane is a physicist and Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Haverford College. She is well known for her work utilizing video to understand the behavior of various species of birds. Education and early career Kane received her Bachelor of Science degree in physics in 1982 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She then attended Harvard University for her Master of Science degree and her PhD. There she worked in the laboratory of applied physicist Peter Pershan. Her thesis, entitled Optical and X-Ray Studies of Critical Phenomena in Thin Liquid Crystal Films and published ...

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