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.

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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,

#401

Andrea Liu

#92893

Overall Influence

Andrea Jo-Wei Liu is the Hepburn Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania, where she holds a joint appointment in the Department of Chemistry. She is a theoretical physicist studying condensed matter physics and biophysics. She is particularly known for her study of jamming, a phenomenon in which disordered materials become rigid with increasing density and stress. She is a Simons Investigator and Simons Fellow in Theoretical Physics, fellow of the American Physical Society , the American Association for the Advancement of Science , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and ...

#402

Mariana Weissmann

#39362

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Mariana Weissmann is an Argentinian physicist, specializing in the computational physics of condensed matter. In 2003, Weissmann became the first Argentinian scientist to receive the L'Oréal-UNESCO Award to Women in Science. The same year she received the Prize Konex in Physics.

#403

Yvonne Elsworth

#70209

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Yvonne Elsworth FRS FInstP FRAS is an Irish physicist, Professor of Helioseismology and Poynting Professor of Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Birmingham. Elsworth was until 2015 also the Head of the Birmingham Solar Oscillations Network , the longest running helioseismology network with data covering well over three solar cycles.

#404

Teresa Rodrigo

#96807

Overall Influence

1956 - 2020 (64 years)

Teresa Rodrigo Anoro was a Spanish scientist who worked in particle physics. She worked at CERN, Fermilab and the and was professor at the University of Cantabria. Whilst at CERN, Rodrigo worked on the Compact Muon Solenoid and research for the Higgs boson.

#405

Amanda Barnard

#42331

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Amanda Susan Barnard is an Australian theoretical physicist working in predicting the real world behavior of nanoparticles using analytical models and supercomputer simulations and applied machine learning. Barnard is a pioneer in the thermodynamic cartography of nanomaterials, creating nanoscale phase diagrams relevant to different environmental conditions, and relating these to structure/property maps. Her current research involves developing and applying statistical methods and machine/deep learning in nanoscience and nanotechnology, and materials and molecular informatics. In 2014 she ...

#406

Faith Vilas

#95198

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Faith Vilas is an American planetary scientist and Director of the MMT Observatory in Arizona. Career Vilas earned her BA in Astronomy in 1973 at Wellesley College and her SM in Earth and Planetary Sciences in 1975 at MIT. She completed her Doctoral degree in Planetary Sciences in 1984 at the University of Arizona.

#407

Mayly Sánchez

#74505

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Mayly Sánchez is a Venezuelan-born particle physicist who researches at Iowa State University. In 2011, she was awarded the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers , the highest honor given by the United States to scientists who are in the early stages of their research careers, for her contributions to the study of neutrinos and her work in promoting STEM fields to women. In 2013, she was named by the BBC as one of the top ten women scientists in Latin America.

#408

Dora Altbir

#70113

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Dora Altbir is a Chilean physicist in the field of nanoscience and nanotechnology. She was awarded the National Prize for Exact Sciences in 2019 for her work in the theoretical study of magnetic nanostructures. She is currently a professor at the University of Santiago, Chile.

#409

Carolyne Van Vliet

#23906

Overall Influence

1929 - 2016 (87 years)

Carolyne Marina Van Vliet was a Dutch-American physicist notable for the theory of generation-recombination noise and for the theory of quantum transport in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, as well as for her many contributions to the foundations of Linear Response Theory. She was a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers .

#410

Chiaki Mukai

#4577

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

is a Japanese physician and JAXA astronaut. She was the first Japanese woman in space, the first Japanese citizen to have two spaceflights, and the first Asian woman in space. Both were Space Shuttle missions; her first was STS-65 aboard Space Shuttle Columbia in July 1994, which was a Spacelab mission. Her second spaceflight was STS-95 aboard Space Shuttle Discovery in 1998. In total she has spent 23 days in space.

#411

Nathalie Palanque-Delabrouille

#79668

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Nathalie Palanque-Delabrouille, , is a French cosmologist. During her career as a researcher in particle physics, she has taken part in several large-scale experiments. Her work has been recognized several times including the Irène Joliot-Curie Prize, the appointment as Knight of the Legion of Honor and her election to the French Academy of Sciences.

#412

Lesley Cohen

#71342

Overall Influence

Lesley Francis Cohen is a Professor of solid-state physics at Imperial College London. She works in magnetic materials for solid-state magnetic refrigeration and spintronic applications. Cohen has served as the editor-in-chief of Applied Physics Letters since 2019.

#413

Waltraut Seitter

#83512

Overall Influence

1930 - 2007 (77 years)

Waltraut Seitter was a German astronomer and became the first woman in Germany to hold an astronomy chair. Life and work Waltraut Carola Seitter was born in Zwickau in 1930, where her father worked as an engineer with the Horch automobile company. She went to school in Cologne, where she finished high school in 1949 , and entered the university to study physics, mathematics, chemistry and astronomy. She continued her studies at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts with a grant from the Fulbright Program, obtained her Master of Arts in physics in 1955, and became an astronomy instructor.

#414

Florentina Mosora

#75108

Overall Influence

1940 - 1996 (56 years)

Florentina Ioana Mosora or Florentina Stan-Mosora was a Romanian and Belgian biophysicist. In her earlier years, before 1964, she was a film actress in the Romanian film industry. Biography Mosora initially had a career in acting and was noted for her role in Dragoste la zero grade . She also starred in Sub cupola albastră , Post-restant , and Băieţii noştri . She was a graduate of the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Physics. Later she moved to Belgium, where she worked on the use of stable isotopes in medicine. She was awarded the 1979-1981 Prix Agathon de Potter for outstanding research work in physics by the Agathon de Potter Foundation and the Belgian Royal Academy.

#415

Ina Wagner

#42185

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Ina Wagner is an Austrian physicist, computer scientist and social scientist. She is an emeritus professor of computer science at TU Wien , where she was active from 1987 until 2011. Wagner completed a doctorate in nuclear physics at the University of Vienna in 1972. In 1979 she received her habilitation in education sciences from the University of Klagenfurt, and in 1998 completed a second habilitation in "multidisciplinary design and computer-supported cooperative work" in Vienna. In 1987 she became the TU Wien's second ever female professor and the first to be appointed from outside the un...

#416

Mary Brück

#75676

Overall Influence

1925 - 2008 (83 years)

Mary Teresa Brück was an Irish astronomer, astrophysicist and historian of science, whose career was spent at Dunsink Observatory in Dublin and the Royal Observatory Edinburgh in Scotland. Early life Mary Teresa Conway was born on 29 May 1925 in Ballivor, County Meath, Ireland, the eldest of eight children. She used the Irish form of her name, Máire Treasa Ní Chonmhidhe, while attending convent school, where she showed talents for mathematics, science and music, and at University College Dublin where she studied physics. She earned BSc and MSc degrees, in 1945 and 1946, respectively.

#417

Veronika Hubeny

#65425

Overall Influence

Veronika E. Hubeny is an American physicist and academic who specialises in string theory and quantum gravity. Since 2015, she has been a professor in the Department of Physics of University of California, Davis. Previously, Hubeny was Professor of Physics at Durham University, where she had worked from 2005 to 2015. From January to April 2014, she was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. In 2019, she was selected as a fellow of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation.

#418

Vera Lüth

#49125

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Vera G. Lüth is an experimental particle physicist and professor emerita at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center , Stanford University, in the United States. A senator of the Helmholtz Association, she has worked in particle physics at SLAC since 1974. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society.

#419

France A. Córdova

France A. Córdova

#83571

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

France Anne-Dominic Córdova is an American astrophysicist and administrator who was the fourteenth director of the National Science Foundation. Previously, she was the eleventh President of Purdue University from 2007 to 2012. She now serves as President of the Science Philanthropy Alliance.

#420

Antonella De Santo

Antonella De Santo

#48303

Overall Influence

Antonella De Santo is an Italian and British Professor of Experimental Physics and works on the ATLAS experiment. She was the first woman in the Department of Physics at the University of Sussex to be made a professor.

#421

Smadar Naoz

#104078

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Smadar Naoz is an Israeli-American astrophysicist, and was the 2015 winner of the Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy for her scientific contributions to the fields of cosmology and planetary dynamics.

#422

Tanya Zelevinsky

#78590

Overall Influence

Tanya Zelevinsky is a professor of physics at Columbia University. Her research focuses on high-precision spectroscopy of cold molecules for fundamental physics measurements, including molecular lattice clocks, ultracold molecule photodissociation, as well as cooling and quantum state manipulation techniques for diatomic molecules with the goal of testing the Standard Model of particle physics. Zelevinsky graduated from MIT in 1999 and received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2004 with Gerald Gabrielse as her thesis advisor. Subsequently, she worked as a post-doctoral research associate a...

#423

Ivette Fuentes

#80603

Overall Influence

Ivette Fuentes is a Professor of Quantum Physics at the University of Southampton and Professor of Theoretical Quantum Optics at the University of Vienna. Her work considers fundamental quantum mechanics, quantum optics and astrophysics. She is interested in how quantum information theory can make use of relativistic effects.

#424

Mercedes Richards

#52055

Overall Influence

1955 - 2016 (61 years)

Mercedes Tharam Richards , née Davis, was a Jamaican astronomy and astrophysics professor. Her investigation focused on computational astrophysics, stellar astrophysics and exoplanets and brown dwarfs, and the physical dynamics of interacting binary stars systems. However, her pioneering research in the tomography of interacting binary star systems and cataclysmic variable stars to predict magnetic activity and simulate gas flow is her most known work.

#425

Ma Chung-pei

#72089

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Ma Chung-pei is an astrophysicist and cosmologist. She is the Judy Chandler Webb Professor of Astronomy and Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. She led the teams that discovered several of largest known black holes from 2011 to 2016.

#426

Catherine Heymans

Catherine Heymans

#67106

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (123 years)

Catherine Heymans is a British astrophysicist, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, and a professor at the University of Edinburgh based at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh. Early life Heymans was born and grew up in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, and educated at Hitchin Girls' School.

#427

Anne Barbara Underhill

#86425

Overall Influence

1920 - 2003 (83 years)

Anne Barbara Underhill was a Canadian astrophysicist. She is most widely known for her work on early-type stars and was considered one of the world's leading experts in the field. During her lifetime she received many awards for her contributions to astronomy and astrophysics.

#428

Viola Priesemann

#41590

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (42 years)

Viola Priesemann is a German physicist and computational neuroscientist. One of her research priorities is to explore how the human brain organizes its neuronal capacities, to enable meaningful information processing.

#429

Jennifer Anne Thomas

#35158

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jennifer Anne Thomas, , is a British experimental particle physicist and professor at University College London. She has been a pioneer in the development of particle detectors, and the recipient of the Michael Faraday medal and prize in 2018 for her "outstanding investigations into the physics of neutrino oscillations".

#430

Aruna Dhathathreyan

#67034

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Aruna dhathathreyanis a Professor and Emeritus scientist at CSIR-Central Leather Research Institute, Chennai, India. Her fields of work and research include biophysics, biophysical chemistry, and surface sciences.

#431

Gretchen Kalonji

#33043

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Gretchen Lynn Kalonji is an American materials scientist and academic administrator. She is dean of Sichuan University-Hong Kong Polytechnic University Institute for Disaster Management and Reconstruction. Kalonji was previously the assistant director-general for natural sciences at UNESCO. She was the Kyocera Professor of Materials Science at University of Washington and an associate professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#432

Renu Malhotra

#86682

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Renu Malhotra is an American planetary scientist from India, known for using the orbital resonance between Pluto and Neptune to infer large-scale orbital migration of the giant planets and to predict the existence of Plutinos in resonance with Neptune. The asteroid 6698 Malhotra was named for her on 14 December 1997 . She is credited by the Minor Planet Center with the co-discovery of , a trans-Neptunian object in the Kuiper belt.

#433

Sarah Ballard

#95109

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (40 years)

Sarah Ballard is an American astronomer who is a professor at the University of Florida. She has been a Torres Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a L'Oreal Fellow, and a NASA Carl Sagan Fellow.

#434

Edith Alice Müller

#68011

Overall Influence

1918 - 1995 (77 years)

Edith Alice Müller was a Spanish-Swiss mathematician and astronomer. In 2018, the Swiss Society for Astronomy and Astrophysics launched the annual Edith Alice Müller Award for outstanding astronomy PhD theses in Switzerland.

#435

Jelena Vučković

#60948

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Jelena Vučković is a Serbian-born American professor and Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, and a courtesy faculty member in the Department of Applied Physics at Stanford University. Vučković leads the Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics Lab, and is a faculty member of the Ginzton Lab, PULSE Institute, SIMES Institute, and Bio-X at Stanford. She was the inaugural director of the Q-FARM initiative . She is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of The Optical Society, the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electr...

#436

Linda A. Morabito

Linda A. Morabito

#83023

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Linda A. Morabito , also known as Linda Kelly, Linda Hyder, and Linda Morabito-Meyer, is the astronomer who discovered volcanic activity on Io, a moon of Jupiter. She made this finding on March 9, 1979, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. At the time of her discovery, she was serving as Cognizant Engineer over the Optical Navigation Image Processing System on the Voyager deep space mission Navigation Team. While performing image processing analysis of a Voyager 1 picture taken for spacecraft navigation, she detected a tall cloud off the limb of Io. The cloud was of volcanic origin. This was the first time in history that active volcanism was detected off of Earth.

#437

Xiaoyi Bao

#42962

Overall Influence

Xiaoyi Bao is a Chinese Canadian physicist, recognized for her contributions to the field of fiber optics. She is a professor at the University of Ottawa, where she holds the Canada Research Chair in Fiber Optics and Photonics. Bao was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Lethbridge; the citation for the honour called her "a world-renowned scholar in her field."

#438

Roberta Sessoli

#76668

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Roberta Sessoli is Professor of General and Inorganic Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry "Ugo Schiff" at the University of Florence. Renowned as a pioneer in the field of magnetic bistability and quantum effects in mesoscopic materials, her research centers around investigating the magnetic properties of molecular clusters and chains, with a focus on designing and characterizing molecular magnetic materials.

#439

Nancy Makri

#67653

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Nancy Makri is the Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Endowed Professor of Chemistry and Physics at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, where she is the principal investigator of the Makri Research Group for the theoretical understanding of condensed phase quantum dynamics. She studies theoretical quantum dynamics of polyatomic systems, and has developed methods for long-time numerical path integral simulations of quantum dissipative systems.

#440

Karen Masters

#95758

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Karen Masters is an Astrophysicist and Associate Professor of Astrophysics in Haverford College, Pennsylvania exploring galaxy formation. She is also the project scientist for the citizen science project Galaxy Zoo, and uses the classifications to study the evolution of galaxies.

#441

Manuella Vincter

#85957

Overall Influence

Manuella Vincter is a professor in the Department of Physics at Carleton University. She is the deputy spokesperson for the ATLAS experiment, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Career Vincter earned her B.Sc. in 1990 from McGill University, her M.Sc. in 1993 and her PhD in 1996, both at the University of Victoria. Her PhD thesis was on the precision measurement of the ratio of vector to axial-vector coupling of the weak force, which she conducted at the LEP collider at CERN as a member of the OPAL Experiment. She then joined the faculty at the University of Alberta, where she worked on the HERMES experiment at the DESY laboratory and also joined the ATLAS collaboration.

#442

Mayda Velasco

#79784

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Mayda Velasco is a physicist and professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern University. She works in experimental particle physics and is a leading member of the CMS Collaboration at the CERN LHC. She founded COFI and is its first director. She is a pioneer in the physics potential of photon colliders.

#443

Suzie Sheehy

#88818

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (40 years)

Suzanne Lyn Sheehy is an Australian accelerator physicist who runs research groups at the universities of Oxford and Melbourne, where she is developing new particle accelerators for applications in medicine.

#444

Jennifer Lotz

#93226

Overall Influence

Jennifer Mae Lotz is an American astronomer who studies the shape and evolution of galaxies, including galaxy mergers. She works at the NOIRLab, a project of the National Science Foundation, as director of the Gemini Observatory.

#445

Carol Christian

#103058

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Carol Ann Christian is an American astronomer and science communicator, who works for the Space Telescope Science Institute as a scientist on the institute's outreach program. Christian was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and studied astronomy and physics at Boston University, from which she graduated with a PhD in 1979 with a thesis on Investigations of distant field stars and clusters in the galactic anticenter. She then worked as an astronomer for University of California, Berkeley. In 1992, Christian and her colleagues decided to establish Eureka Scientific as a conduit for grant applications ...

#446

Constance M. Rockosi

#71002

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (123 years)

Constance "Connie" Mary Rockosi is a professor and former department chair in the Astronomy and Astrophysics Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She earned her PhD in 2001 and helped design the camera for the telescope that was used as part of the initial Sloan Digital Sky Survey . She also was in charge of the SDSS-III domain for the Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration project and is the primary investigator on SEGUE-2. Her focuses involve the study of the Milky Way galaxy, with a focus on the evolution that it took to reach its current state.

#447

Susan Cooper

#98296

Overall Influence

Susan C. Cooper was professor of experimental physics at Oxford University from 1995 to 2015, and a professorial fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford. Education Cooper was originally a theatre major. Cooper received her undergraduate degree from Colby College in 1971. She received her PhD from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1980, where her doctoral advisor was William Chinowsky and her thesis was titled Jets in e+e− Annihilation. In her thesis, Cooper studied the properties of jets created by electron-positron annihilation using data collected by the Mark I detector at SLAC Natio...

#448

Helen Caines

#88145

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Helen Louise Caines is a Professor of Physics at Yale University. She studies the quark–gluon plasma and is the co-spokesperson for the STAR experiment. Education Caines studied physics at the University of Birmingham and graduated in 1992. She earned her PhD at the University of Birmingham in 1996.

#449

Jacqueline Bloch

#83699

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Jacqueline Bloch is a French physicist, born in 1967, specialist in nanosciences, member of the French Academy of sciences. Biography Jacqueline Bloch is an ESPCI engineer, graduated in 1991 , with a DEA in condensed matter physics . She holds a doctorate from the Pierre and Marie Curie University on the study of the optical properties of quantum wires. In 1994, she joined the CNRS and carried out her research at the L2M in Bagneux, which moved and became the LPN in Marcoussis in 2001. In 1998, she spent a year there and carried out research at the Bell Laboratories. She is interested in the ultimate coupling between light and matter in close connection with semiconductor nanotechnologies.

#450

Astrid Beckmann

Astrid Beckmann

#47049

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Astrid Beckmann is a German physicist, a professor of mathematics and mathematics education, and was a long-serving university president. Beckmann served as president of the Pädagogische Hochschule Schwäbisch Gmünd from 2010 to 2018. She also taught at the University of Ulm.

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