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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List of the most influential female people in Physics,

#1301

Clare Yu

#187489

Overall Influence

Clare C. Yu is an American theoretical biophysicist and condensed matter physicist. She is Professor of Physics and Astronomy in the School of Physical Sciences at the University of California, Irvine . She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is also a former Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, and a current Trustee of the Aspen Center for Physics.

#1302

Shang-Fen Ren

#187871

Overall Influence

Shang-Fen Ren is a professor emerita at Illinois State University. She was appointed professor at Illinois in 1995, retiring to become professor emerita in 2011. She was awarded the status of Fellow in the American Physical Society, after she was nominated by their Forum on International Physics in 2001, "for her contributions to theoretical understanding of low-dimensional semiconductor systems, especially the vibrational properties in semiconductor superlattices, quantum wires, and quantum dots as well as for her many contributions promoting international physics."

#1303

Wang Ming-chen

#170864

Overall Influence

1906 - 2010 (104 years)

Wang Ming-chen was a Chinese theoretical physicist and a professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. As one of the first few Chinese female students studying science abroad, she was best known for her work on stochastic process and Brownian motion with George Uhlenbeck as well as the first female professor of Tsinghua University according to some source.

#1304

Anne Boutet de Monvel

#81627

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Anne-Marie Boutet de Monvel is a French applied mathematician and mathematical physicist, and a professor emerita in the University of Paris, affiliated with the Institut de mathématiques de Jussieu – Paris Rive Gauche.

#1305

Lee Kong-joo

#183550

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Lee Kong-joo is a South Korean emeritus professor of pharmacy at Ewha Womans University previously served as President Moon Jae-in's Advisor for Science and Technology. Lee is one of first generation female scientists who have been active in both pioneering research and representing scientists.

#1306

Irene Cruz-González

#144790

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Irene Cruz-González Espinosa is a Mexican astronomer whose research interests include the nuclear activity in galaxies, the observation of galaxies and their insterstellar medium, star formation, and optical and infrared telescope instrumentation. She is a researcher and professor in the Institute of Astronomy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico .

#1307

Martha Lux-Steiner

#167225

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Martha Christina Lux-Steiner, , is a Swiss physicist. From 1995 to 2016 she was the first female tenured professor in the department of physics at the FU Berlin. Lux-Steiner holds a Federal Cross of Merit, 1st class.

#1308

Helen J. Walker

#181223

Overall Influence

1953 - 2017 (64 years)

Helen Joan Walker was a UK space scientist. Personal life She was born in Warwick on 2 January 1953. She died in Wantage, Oxfordshire, on 19 September 2017, after a five-month illness, and her funeral was in Oxfordshire on 9 October.

#1309

Mary Bishai

#174144

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Mary R. M. Bishai is an American physicist who is a Distinguished Scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. In 2023, she was elected spokesperson of Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, and was made responsible for the 1,400 person collaboration. She was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2015.

#1310

Marivi Fernández-Serra

#67490

Overall Influence

Maria Victoria Fernández-Serra is a Spanish condensed matter physicist known for her research applying density functional theory to the structure and dynamics of water. Other topics in her research include supercomputer simulations of the quantum-mechanical behavior of liquid-metal interfaces, the design of semiconductor-based nanowires, and the development of sensors for detecting dark matter. She is a professor of physics and astronomy at Stony Brook University.

#1311

Elizabeth Rhoades

#188278

Overall Influence

Anna Elizabeth Rhoades is a molecular biophysicist at University of Pennsylvania. She is known for pioneering studies of protein folding using single-molecule techniques. Education Rhoades received her undergraduate education at Duke University, followed by Ph.D. studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in biophysics. Her dissertation supervisor was Ari Gafni.

#1312

Nicholeen Viall

#188306

Overall Influence

Nicholeen Viall is an American solar physicist who is the Chair of the American Astronomical Society's Solar Physics Division. Viall is known for her work on connecting dynamics of the solar corona to dynamics of the solar wind, based on observed variability of the corona-heliosphere system with both remote-sensing instruments and in-situ probes, and for her work on understanding evolution of the plasma in the inner heliosphere. She is the mission scientist for NASA's PUNCH mission, and a co-investigator on the ISS/CODEX and Parker Solar Probe/WISPR coronal imaging instruments.

#1313

Gordana Dukovic

#173592

Overall Influence

Gordana Dukovic is a physical chemist. She is currently a professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Colorado Boulder. Life and education Gordana Dukovic earned her B.A. at Rutgers University in 2001, majoring in chemistry and minoring in Italian. In her PhD studies, she did research at Columbia University on the spectroscopy of carbon nanotubes with Louis Brus as her advisor. She was awarded a PhD in chemistry with distinction in 2006 for her thesis entitled "Electronic spectra of carbon nanotubes: excitonic states, chemical doping, and chiral interactions." After her PhD, ...

#1314

Juliet Gopinath

#187722

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Juliet Tara Gopinath is an American optical engineer who studies the design and synchronization of lasers, diode laser arrays, liquid and variable-focus lenses, and other optical devices, and the properties of optical materials including optical fibers. She is Alfred T. and Betty E. Look Endowed Professor of Photonics and Quantum Engineering in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder.

#1315

Ruth Mottram

#187531

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Ruth Mottram is a British climate scientist who is a researcher at the Danish Meteorological Institute. Her research considers the development of climate models and the dynamics of glaciers and ice sheets in the climate system.

#1316

Katarina Cicak

#117753

Overall Influence

Katarina Cicak is a physicist. She is a researcher in the advanced microwave photonics group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Early life and education Cicak was born in 1974 in Derventa in former Yugoslavia. In 1992 during the war in Yugoslavia, she relocated to Croatia then to the United States as a refugee.

#1317

Ileana Chinnici

#188062

Overall Influence

Ileana Chinnici is an Italian historian of astronomy, book author, and biographer, whose biography of Angelo Secchi won the 2021 Osterbrock Book Prize of the American Astronomical Society. Education and career Chinnici earned a degree in physics in 1992 from the University of Palermo with a dissertation concerning Italian astronomer Pietro Tacchini, supervised by Giorgia Foderà. After working as a secondary school teacher, and a visiting position at the Paris Observatory, she joined the Palermo Astronomical Observatory as a research fellow in 1995, and became curator of the observatory's museum of astronomy in 1996.

#1318

Mildred Widgoff

#188659

Overall Influence

1924 - 2004 (80 years)

Mildred Widgoff was an American experimental particle physicist and astroparticle physicist who became the first female faculty member at the Brown University physics department. Life Mildred Widgoff was born in Buffalo, New York, on August 24, 1924, graduated from the University at Buffalo in 1944 with a bachelor's degree in physics, and came to work for the Manhattan Project in the SAM Laboratories at Columbia University. She earned a Ph.D. in 1952 studying cosmic rays at Cornell University with Giuseppe Cocconi and Kenneth Greisen; her dissertation was Neutrons from Interactions of Mu Meso...

#1319

J. Ritchie Patterson

#186969

Overall Influence

Ritchie Patterson is a physicist at Cornell University known for her research using the Large Hadron Collider to examine dark matter and the disappearance of antimatter. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society and an elected member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#1320

Chen-Yu Liu

#188719

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Chen-Yu Liu is a Taiwanese physicist. Chen earned a bachelor's degree from National Taiwan University in 1997, then a doctorate at Princeton University in 2002. After defending her dissertation, A superthermal ultra-cold neutron source, Chen completed a three-year postdoctoral research fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She began teaching at Indiana University Bloomington in 2005, and was appointed the James H. Rudy Professor of Physics. She received a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2007, and was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2018, for her research into experim...

#1321

Marta Bunster

#175494

Overall Influence

Marta Cecilia del Carmen Bunster Balocchi is a Chilean scientist, most noted for her work in the fields of biochemistry, biophysics and crystallography. She is also known as one of the main promoters of bioinformatics in her country.

#1322

Tatjana Piotrowski

#123449

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Tatjana Piotrowski is a German molecular geneticist who researches zebrafish as models of vertebrate development. She has worked at Stowers Institute for Medical Research since 2011 and is editor of the Annual Review of Genetics.

#1323

Suzanne Gray

#63254

Overall Influence

Suzanne Gray is a British expert in dynamical meteorology and professor of meteorology at the University of Reading, where she is currently academic head of the Department of Meteorology. She has made significant contributions to the understanding and prediction of extreme windstorms and tropical cyclones.

#1324

Rebecca Lingwood

#169033

Overall Influence

Rebecca Julie Lingwood is the Provost and Professor of Fluid Dynamics at Brunel University London. She holds an affiliate position at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Lingwood was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2019.

#1325

Heidi N. Becker

#188924

Overall Influence

Heidi N. Becker is an American planetary scientist who studies Jupiter as radiation monitoring investigation lead for NASA Juno space mission. She works at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Becker came to science late; she was a dance and theater student at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts and the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, and graduated from NYU with a bachelor of fine arts in 1990. After working in theater in New York, she became interested in science through hospital volunteer work, and returned to college in her mid-20s, initially in New York and then transferring to California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

#1326

Deborah Jackson

#180870

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Deborah J. Jackson is an American physicist and Program Manager at the National Science Foundation, and a Fellow of the National Society of Black Physicists. She was the first African American woman to receive a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University. She is an expert on "electromagnetic phenomena" with a research and development career that spans the full range of the electromagnetic spectrum from materials studies using hard x-ray wavelengths, to nonlinear optics and spectroscopy in the near-infrared, to the fielding of radio frequency instrumentation on deep space missions such as Cass...

#1327

Jennifer Glass

#146467

Overall Influence

Jennifer L. Glass is Centennial Commission Professor of Liberal Arts in Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. She was previously Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California, University of Iowa and the University of Notre Dame.

#1328

Moira Steyn-Ross

#189093

Overall Influence

Moira L. Steyn-Ross is a New Zealand physics academic. She is currently a full professor at the University of Waikato. Academic career After a 1981 PhD titled 'The quantum theory of optical bistability in nonlinear systems' at the University of Waikato, she joined staff, rising to full professor. Much of Steyn-Ross's research has been into the effect of anaesthesia.

#1329

Kerreen Reiger

#171390

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Kerreen M. Reiger is an Australian academic, sociologist and author. She lives in Melbourne and teaches sociology at La Trobe University. She has a special interest in family, motherhood and childbirth and was one of the founders of the activist group Maternity Coalition.

#1330

Sandrine Lévêque-Fort

#182222

Overall Influence

1990 - Present (34 years)

Sandrine Lévêque-Fort is a French optical physicist working in the field of Super-resolution imaging at Paris-Saclay University. She was the recipient of the French Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation Irène Joliot-Curie Prize in 2020.

#1331

Caroline Chick Jarrold

#153414

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Caroline Chick Jarrold is a physical chemist who was named the Class of 1948 Herman B Wells Endowed Professor ats at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, in 2018. The research done by her group aims to alleviate issues with energy and the environment.

#1332

Patience Mthunzi-Kufa

#174343

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Patience Mthunzi-Kufa is a South African physicist and head of biophotonics research at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. She received the Order of Mapungubwe in Bronze. Early life and education Patience Mthunzi-Kufa was born on May 2, 1976, in Orlando, Soweto. She attended Reasöma Secondary School and enrolled for bachelor's degree in Psychology. She became interested in biological science, and switched majors, graduating from Rand Afrikaans University in 1999. At the same institution, she completed postgraduate degrees in Biochemistry. She cites her aunt as inspiration: a...

#1333

Lisa L. Cunningham

Lisa L. Cunningham

#136377

Overall Influence

Lisa Lynn Cunningham is an American scientist. She is Scientific Director and a senior investigator of sensory cell biology at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders . Education Cunningham received a B.A. and M.A. in Audiology from the University of Tennessee. She was first introduced to the field of audiology by Samuel B. Burchfield. Her 1991 thesis was titled: Effects of click polarity on auditory brainstem responses in man using high-pass noise masking. She completed her thesis under the guidance of her major advisor, James W. Thelin and she credits Ravi Krishnan for his part in its conception.

#1334

Tiziana Di Matteo

#189400

Overall Influence

#1335

Céline d'Orgeville

#188090

Overall Influence

Céline d'Orgeville is a Professor and instrument scientist at the Australian National University Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. She leads teams designing laser and optical systems for ground based astronomical telescopes. She is a Fellow of SPIE and the Astronomical Society of Australia.

#1336

Maebh Long

#131203

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Maebh Long is an Irish academic with expertise on the modernist novelist and playwright Flann O'Brien. She is currently Senior Lecturer in the English Programme in the School of Arts at The University of Waikato in New Zealand, having been a Senior Lecturer and Deputy Head of School at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji.

#1337

Maria Calbi

#188738

Overall Influence

María de las Mercedes Calbi is an Argentine American physicist whose research concerns surface science, and particularly adsorption of gases by carbon nanotubes and other nanostructures. She is a professor of physics at the University of Denver.

#1338

Patricia Ann Straat

#105903

Overall Influence

1936 - 2020 (84 years)

Patricia Ann Straat was an American space scientist. She was part of the labeled release experiment of Viking program and part of the infrared interferometer spectrometer and radiometer on the Mariner 9 mission. In 2019 Straat wrote the book To Mars With Love, which documented the 1976 Viking Mission to Mars.

#1339

Carol Lynn Alpert

#97782

Overall Influence

Carol Lynn Alpert is an American science communication and public engagement expert and the Director of Strategic Projects at the Museum of Science . She is also an Associate in Applied Physics in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University and Co-Director of the NSF Center for Integrated Quantum Materials.

#1340

Sandrine Heutz

#171248

Overall Influence

Sandrine Elizabeth Monique Heutz is a Professor of Functional Molecular Materials at Imperial College London. She works on organic and magnetically coupled molecular materials for spintronic applications. In 2008 Heutz was awarded the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining Silver Medal.

#1341

Elisabeth Bouchaud

#177570

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Elisabeth Bouchaud is a French physicist, playwright and actress born 1 March 1961. She is a member of Commissariat à l'énergie atomique , and works at Ecole Superieure de Chimie et Physique de la Ville de Paris. Since 2015, she is also the Director of the Théâtre de la Reine Blanche in Paris.

#1342

Amy Graves

#140326

Overall Influence

Amy Lisa Graves is a retired American physicist and physics educator, the Walter Kemp Professor Emerita in the Natural Sciences and Professor of Physics at Swarthmore College. Her publications include works on gender bias in physics, physics education, and computational simulations of phenomena in condensed matter physics, including jamming.

#1343

Nicole Lloyd-Ronning

#189641

Overall Influence

Nicole Marie Lloyd-Ronning is an American computational astrophysicist specializing in gamma-ray bursts and the deaths of massive stars as a researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and lecturer at University of New Mexico–Los Alamos. She is also known for her work in science popularization, as the author of the book Great Mysteries in Astrophysics, as a scientist ambassador for the Bradbury Science Museum, and in youth outreach programs, especially for young people from indigenous groups in the American

#1344

Gladys Patricia Abdel Rahim Garzón

#188497

Overall Influence

Gladys Patricia Abdel Rahim Garzón is a Colombian physicist. She is Researcher-Associate Professor of the Francisco José de Caldas District University. Her research is in materials physics. Education She studied physics at the Universidad Distrital Fracisco José de Caldas, specializing in diffraction in crystals. She completed a master's degree in Physics in 2006 and a PhD in engineering in 2017 at the National University of Colombia and graduated with meritorious mention .

#1345

Elizabeth B. Dussan V.

#104212

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Elizabeth B. Dussan V. is an American applied mathematician, condensed matter physicist, and chemical engineer. Her research involves fluid dynamics, and she is known for her work on wetting, porous media, and fluid-fluid interfaces.

#1346

Jenifer Haselgrove

#52038

Overall Influence

1930 - 2015 (85 years)

Jenifer Leech was a British physicist and computer scientist. She is most noted for her formulation of ray tracing equations in a cold magneto-plasma, now widely known in the radio science community as Haselgrove's Equations.

#1347

Jennifer Bartlett

#189994

Overall Influence

Jennifer Lynn Bartlett is an American astronomer, the Kinnear Chair of Physics at the United States Naval Academy, and former Chief of the Software Products Division in the Astronomical Applications Department of the United States Naval Observatory. Her interests include the development of software for astrometry, the accurate measurements of distances to nearby stars, celestial navigation, the effects of the atmosphere on the brightness of the sky and celestial objects, the history of astronomy, and the preservation of historical astronomical data.

#1348

Paula Casal

#182343

Overall Influence

Paula Casal is an ICREA Professor in the Law Department of Pompeu Fabra University. She was previously a Reader in Moral and Political Philosophy at Reading University and a Lecturer at Keele University . She was also a Fellow in Ethics at Harvard University , a Keele Junior Research Fellow, also at Harvard , a Hoover Fellow at Université Catholique de Louvain , and a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Oxford . Her work has appeared in journals such as Ethics, Economics and Philosophy, Journal of Medical Ethics, Journal of Political Philosophy, Hypatia, Political Studies, and Utilitas.

#1349

Sabina Nowak

#86627

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Sabina Nowak is a Polish scientist and wolf expert. She is president of the Association for Nature Wolf and a member of the Large Carnivore Initiative for Europe. Life In 1983, Nowak graduated from the University of Silesia in Katowice with a Master of Science degree in biology. In her doctoral thesis she described the "Ecology of Wolves". She has been taking care of the wolf in Poland since the mid-1990s. From 1993 to 1998 she coordinated the campaign "For the full protection of the large predators, wolf and lynx" in Poland and a campaign for the protection of the entire Polish part of the primeval forest Białowieża as a national park .

#1350

Marie-Claire Schanne-Klein

#111954

Overall Influence

Marie-Claire Schanne-Klein is a French physicist who is a professor at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. She is based in the Laboratory for Optics and Biosciences, where she studies the nonlinear optics of chiral molecules.

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