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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Psychology,

#601

Monika Bullinger

#119050

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

#602

Faraneh Vargha-Khadem

#73688

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Faraneh Vargha-Khadem is a British cognitive neuroscientist specializing in developmental amnesia among children. Faraneh was a part of the team that identified the FOXP2 gene, the so-called 'speech gene', that may explain why humans talk and chimps do not.

#603

Julianne Holt-Lunstad

#54206

Overall Influence

Julianne Holt-Lunstad is a psychologist at Brigham Young University. She is a fellow of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology and Association for Psychological Science. Research Holt-Lunstad specializes in psychology and neuroscience. Her research focuses on the long-term health effects of social connections and includes a meta-analysis on the effects of loneliness and social isolation on mortality. That research has linked loneliness to deteriorating health.

#604

Katharina Scheiter

#115981

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Katharina Scheiter is a German psychologist. She is head of the Multiple Representations Lab at the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien and full professor for Empirical Research on Learning and Instruction at the University of Tübingen, Germany. In 2016, she was awarded honorary professor of the School of Education at the University of Nottingham.

#605

Clare Cooper Marcus

#67262

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Clare Cooper Marcus is a prominent educator in landscape architecture and architecture and a pioneer in the field of social issues in housing, open space design, and healing landscapes. Clare Cooper Marcus was born in 1934 and raised in a north London suburb. She received her undergraduate degree in historical geography from University College, London and a Masters in urban and cultural Geography from University of Nebraska at Lincoln. She returned to England to teach cartography at the University of Sheffield, and worked as urban planner at the Ministry of Housing and London County Council. S...

#606

Margaret Gatz

#117589

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Margaret Gatz is a professor of psychology, gerontology and preventive medicine at the University of Southern California's Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. She was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2012.

#607

Toni Antonucci

#108886

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Toni Claudette Antonucci is an American psychologist, currently the Elizabeth R. Douvan Collegiate Professor at University of Michigan and formerly President of Gerontological Society of America Her husband was James S. Jackson.

#608

Öget Öktem Tanör

#87339

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Öget Öktem Tanör is the first neuropsychologist from Turkey. In 2017, she was charged with "terrorism propaganda" by the Turkish government for signing a petition calling on the government to halt its military operations in the Kurdish-populated areas of the country.

#609

Michelle K. Ryan

#94982

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Michelle K. Ryan is a Professor of Social and Organisational Psychology at the University of Exeter and Professor of Diversity at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Education She completed her undergraduate and a Ph.D. study in psychology from Australian National University in 2004 for her thesis ‘A gendered self or a gendered context? A self-categorization appraisal of gender differences’.

#610

Kathryn Paige Harden

#36206

Overall Influence

1989 - Present (35 years)

Kathryn Paige Harden is an American psychologist and behavior geneticist. She is Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is also the leader of the Developmental Behavior Genetics lab and the co-director of the Texas Twin Project. She is also a Faculty Research Associate at the University of Texas at Austin's Population Research Center and a Jacobs Foundation research fellow.

#611

Essi Viding

#77903

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Essi Maria Viding FBA FMedSci is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at University College London in the Faculty of Brain Sciences, where she co-directs the Developmental Risk and Resilience Unit, and an associate of King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience. Viding's research focuses on development of disruptive behaviour disorders, as well as children and young people's mental health problems more broadly. She uses cognitive experimental measures, brain imaging and genetically informative study designs in her work.

#612

Laurie Helgoe

#91680

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Laurie Anne Helgoe is an American psychologist with an interest in the relationship between personality development and culture. In 2008, her writing revealed that scholarly and popular accounts regarding humans who display the personality traits of introversion and extraversion were flawed, and that instead of representing 25-30% of the population, introverts make up 57% of the population. The identified flaw was a dated reliance on the early work of Isabel Briggs Myers, and the failure to note results of the latest nationally representative surveys using the Myers Briggs Type Indicator , a questionnaire used by psychologists to classify human personality traits.

#613

Holly A. Taylor

#113571

Overall Influence

Holly A. Taylor is an American psychologist. Biography She is a professor of psychology at Tufts University School of Arts and Sciences. She joined the university in 1994. Her research focuses on the mental representation of information, She also researches spatial cognition and comprehension. She collaborates with Robin Kanarek on the nutritional impacts on cognitive behavior. She completed a B.A. in mathematics and a minor in psychology at Dartmouth College in 1987. Taylor earned a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Stanford University in 1992.

#614

Suzanne Bennett Johnson

#41977

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Suzanne Bennett Johnson is an American psychologist and a past president of the American Psychological Association . Biography Johnson earned an undergraduate psychology degree from Cornell University in 1970. She received a Ph.D. from Stony Brook University in 1974. Johnson was a fellow of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation from 2001 to 2002 along with Hillary Clinton.

#615

Tamara Sher

#39216

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Tamara Goldman Sher, Ph.D. is a licensed clinical psychologist and professor at The Family Institute at Northwestern University. She is a leading researcher in the fields of Behavioral Medicine and Couples Therapy. Sher was awarded a $2.4 million grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health which combined both of these fields in a study measuring the benefits of couples' involvement in cardiac treatment. This grant is part of Sher's work with the National Institute of Health's Behavior Change Consortium. Sher's research has been mentioned in t...

#616

Amanda Feilding

#19992

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Amanda Claire Marian Charteris, Countess of Wemyss and March , also known as Amanda Feilding, is an English drug policy reformer, lobbyist, and research coordinator. In 1998, she founded the Foundation to Further Consciousness, later renamed to the Beckley Foundation, a charitable trust which initiates, directs, and supports neuroscientific and clinical research into the effects of psychoactive substances on the brain and cognition. She has also co-authored over 50 papers published in peer-reviewed journals, according to the Foundation. The central aim of her research is to investigate new ave...

#617

Anne Marie Albano

#30030

Overall Influence

Anne Marie Albano is a clinical psychologist known for her clinical work and research on psychosocial treatments for anxiety and mood disorders, and the impact of these disorders on the developing youth. She is the CUCARD professor of medical psychology in psychiatry at Columbia University, the founding director of the Columbia University Clinic for Anxiety and Related Disorders , and the clinical site director at CUCARD of the New York Presbyterian Hospital's Youth Anxiety Center.

#618

Zoe Kourtzi

#80959

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Zoe Kourtzi is Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge. She is the Scientific Director of Early Detection of Neurodegenerative diseases , a project involving an international team supported by Alzheimer's Research UK, researching mechanisms for learning and plasticity in dementia patients.

#619

Anna Costanza Baldry

#32008

Overall Influence

1970 - 2019 (49 years)

Anna Costanza Baldry was an Italian social psychologist and criminologist. She was a professor at Università degli Studi della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli. An expert on issues related to violence against women and children, Baldry consulted with such organizations as the United Nations and NATO. For her contributions to society, she was awarded the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.

#620

Ester Cerin

#121044

Overall Influence

#621

Stephanie Fryberg

Stephanie Fryberg

#89887

Overall Influence

Stephanie Fryberg is a Tulalip psychologist who received her Master's and Doctorate degrees from Stanford University, where in 2011 she was inducted into the Multicultural Hall of Fame. In the same year, she testified before Senate on Stolen Identities: The impact of racist stereotypes on Indigenous people. She previously taught psychology at the University of Arizona, at the Tulalip Community at Marysville School, and at the University of Washington. She currently teaches American Indian Studies and Psychology at the University of Michigan, and is a member of the Tulalip Tribe. Her research focuses on race, class, and culture in relation to ones psychological development and mental health.

#622

Susan Pinker

#84573

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Susan Pinker is a psychologist, author and social science columnist for The Wall Street Journal. She is a former weekly columnist for The Globe and Mail, and has also written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Times of London. Her first book, The Sexual Paradox, was awarded the William James Book Award in 2010 and was published in 17 countries. Her recent book The Village Effect was a Canadian bestseller and an Apple 2014 nonfiction best pick. Her work has been featured in The Economist, The Financial Times, and Der Spiegel.

#623

Jean E. Fox Tree

#69989

Overall Influence

Jean E. Fox Tree is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Fox Tree studies collateral signals that people use in spontaneous speech, such as fillers , prosodic information , fillers , and speech disfluencies.

#624

Harlene Hayne

#83550

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Vada Harlene Hayne is an American-born academic administrator who was the vice-chancellor and a professor of psychology at the University of Otago in New Zealand, before moving to Western Australia to take up the position of vice-chancellor at Curtin University in April 2021.

#625

Patricia J. Brooks

#54120

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Patricia J. Brooks is an American developmental psychologist. She is the director of the Language Learning Laboratory at the College of Staten Island of City University of New York and Doctoral Faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center where she serves as the Deputy Executive Officer of the PhD program in Psychology. Brooks is also the faculty advisor of the Graduate Student Teaching Association of Division 2 of the American Psychological Association, the Society for the Teaching of Psychology .

#626

Patricia S. Cowings

Patricia S. Cowings

#27719

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Patricia S. Cowings is an aerospace psychophysiologist. She was the first American woman to be trained as a scientist astronaut by NASA; though she was an alternate for a space flight in 1979, she did not travel to space. She is most known for her studies in the physiology of astronauts in outer space, as well as helping find cures for astronaut's motion sickness.

#627

Roz Shafran

#122151

Overall Influence

#628

Stephanie M. Carlson

#96687

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Stephanie M. Carlson is an American developmental psychologist whose research has contributed to scientific understanding of the development of children's executive function skills, including psychometrics and the key roles of imagination and distancing. Carlson is Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota, and co-founder of Reflection Sciences, Inc.

#629

Barbara Hayes-Roth

#74327

Overall Influence

Barbara Hayes-Roth is an American computer scientist and psychologist whose research in artificial intelligence includes work on knowledge acquisition, automated planning and scheduling, spatial cognition, the blackboard system, adaptation, and intelligent behavior in interactive storytelling. She is a senior research scientist and lecturer in computer science at Stanford University.

#630

Dianne Chambless

#116955

Overall Influence

1948 - 2023 (75 years)

Dianne Lynn Chambless was an American clinical psychologist. Early life and education Dianne Lynn Chambless was born in Montgomery, Alabama, on February 26, 1948. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Tulane University and her PhD in Clinical Psychology from Temple University. While earning her PhD, she joined the Feminist Therapy Collective, Inc. in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania part-time until 1976.

#631

Lotte Bailyn

#44127

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Lotte Franziska Bailyn is an American social psychologist. She is the T Wilson Professor of Management, Emerita at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She was the first woman faculty member at MIT Sloan.

#632

Ann M. Clarke

#114709

Overall Influence

1928 - 2015 (87 years)

Ann Margaret Clarke was a developmental psychologist who conducted research into children with learning disability. Career Clarke was born in Madras, India. She studied psychology at the University of Reading where she met Alan D.B. Clarke who would become her life-long partner. She obtained her PhD from the Institute of Psychiatry, London . She moved with Alan Clarke to Manor Hospital, Epsom where they worked with children with intellectual disability.

#633

Rebecca Zwick

#43148

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Rebecca Zwick is an American statistician and researcher in educational assessment and psychometrics. She is a professor emeritus in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the author of a book on university and college admission, Who Gets In? Strategies for Fair and Effective College Admissions .

#634

Rosine Perelberg

#111138

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Rosine Jozef Perelberg is a Brazilian-born British psychoanalyst. She served as president of the British Psychoanalytical Society between 2019 and 2022. Career Perelberg completed her master's degree in 1980 at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, and received her PhD in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics, University of London in 1983. Towards the end of her PhD, Perelberg worked with anorexia nervosa patients at Maudsley Hospital, before moving into a role as Senior Psychotherapist and Family Therapist at the Marlborough Family Service, where she worked between 1981 and 1991.

#635

María Elena Medina-Mora Icaza

#75285

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

María Elena Medina-Mora Icaza is a Mexican researcher and psychologist. Medina-Mora Icaza was inducted into El Colegio Nacional on 6 March 2006. Early life and education Medina-Mora Icaza was born on 3 October 1951, in Mexico City. She obtained her primary education at the Colegio Francés del Pedregal from 1955-1961. She attended Palos Verdes & Margate School for junior high school from 1962-1963. She then returned to the French College of Pedregal for high school . Following high school, she obtained licensure to practice social and clinical psychology . Once licensed, she obtained her Bachelor of Psychology and her Masters in Psychology at the Ibero-American University.

#636

Muireann Irish

#68160

Overall Influence

Muireann Irish is a cognitive neuropsychologist at the Brain and Mind Centre at the University of Sydney. She has won international and national awards, including an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship and L’Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science Fellowship.

#637

Maria Concetta Morrone

#123525

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

#638

Pamela Trotman Reid

#81347

Overall Influence

Pamela Trotman Reid is an American developmental psychologist, former professor, and president emerita of the University of Saint Joseph. Biography Pamela Trotman Reid grew up in Brooklyn and Queens, New York. She has said what she loved most when she was a child was reading and science. She is married to her college boyfriend, Irvin Reid, whom she met at Howard University when they were taking psychology classes together during her freshman year and his first year of graduate school. The couple later set up an endowment for the school's psychology department.

#639

Shelly Grabe

#43629

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Shelly Grabe is a professor in Social Psychology at the University of California Santa Cruz, where she has affiliations with Feminist Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies. Her research involves women's human rights and globalization and the international attention given to women's empowerment.

#640

Kate Nation

#118269

Overall Influence

Kate Nation is an experimental psychologist and expert on language and literacy development in school age children. She is Professor of Experimental Psychology and Fellow of St. John's College of the University of Oxford, where she directs the ReadOxford project and the Language and Cognitive Development Research Group.

#641

Loretta Bradley

#78162

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Loretta Bradley born in 1943 is a professor and coordinator of education advisers to Texas Tech University. She was previously an associate professor at Vanderbilt University and vice-dean of Temple University. She earned her doctorate at Purdue University. Bradley is the former president of the American Counseling Association and the Association for Counselor Education and Supervision .

#642

Jill Becker

#89735

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Jill B. Becker is an American psychological researcher, studying sex differences in addiction using preclinical models. Becker is the Biopsychology Area Chair and the Patricia Y. Gurin Professor of Psychology at University of Michigan..She has advocated for greater research into sex/gender differences, particularly in the area of Substance Use Disorder.

#643

Susan H. Spence

#118316

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Susan Hilary Spence AO is an Australian scientist whose work in clinical psychology is focussed on the causes, assessment, prevention and treatment of depression and anxiety in young people. Throughout the course of her career she has remained consistently at the forefront of this research area, has published widely and has been a regular recipient of national competitive grant funding.

#644

J. Kathryn Bock

#100136

Overall Influence

J. Kathryn Bock is currently professor of psychology and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Champaign, Illinois, where she conducts research in the Language Production Laboratory at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology in Urbana, Illinois.

#645

Margie E. Lachman

#120537

Overall Influence

Margie E. Lachman is an American psychologist. She is the Minnie and Harold Fierman Professor of Psychology at Brandeis University, director of the Lifespan Developmental Psychology Lab and the director of the Boston Roybal Center for Active Lifestyle Interventions. She was editor of the Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences , and has edited two volumes on midlife development. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, Division 20 and the Gerontological Society of America. Lachman's research is in the area of lifespan development with a focus on midlife and later life.

#646

Dolores Albarracín

Dolores Albarracín

#96450

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Dolores Albarracín is a psychologist, author and professor of psychology and business based in Pennsylvania. She is Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is known for her work in the fields of behavior, communication and persuasion. Her contributions have had implications for the scientific understanding of basic social psychological processes and communication policy, especially in the area of health.

#647

Maria Cristina Richaud

#124365

Overall Influence

Maria Cristina Richaud is an Argentinian psychologist. She was born and raised up in Buenos Aires, and in 1970 received her bachelor's degree in psychology from University of Buenos Aires, and her doctorate in cognitive psychology from the same university 4 years later. Then she became a researcher at National Council of Scientific and Technological Research. Her work are mainly about parenting, stress, coping, attachment, and social cognitive variables in children and adolescents. Later she devoted herself to the study of children at risk from poverty.

#648

Marilyn Charles

#98347

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Marilyn Charles is a psychoanalyst, writer, lecturer and 2014–2015 President of the American Psychological Association's Division 39 . Marilyn Charles has published articles and books on numerous topics, including trauma, Jacques Lacan, Wilfred Bion, creativity, and madness. She is on the staff at Austen Riggs Center, a co-chair of the Division 39 Early Career Committee, and a co-chair of the Association for Psychoanalysis, Society and Culture. She is a contributing editor of APCS's journal, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, which is published quarterly by Palgrave Macmillan. Marilyn is aff...

#649

Laura Justice

#101791

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Laura M. Justice is a language scientist and expert on interventions to promote children's literacy. She is the EHE Distinguished Professor of Educational Psychology at Ohio State University, where she also serves as the Executive Director of the A. Sophie Rogers School for Early Learning.

#650

Mary Dozier

#103307

Overall Influence

Mary Dozier, an American psychologist, holds the Amy E. du Pont Chair of Child Development at the University of Delaware. Dozier studied at Duke University where she received her degree in psychology in 1976, and her PhD in clinical psychology in 1983. She joined the faculty at Delaware in 1994.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions