The Most Influential People Across History

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 Psychology,

#1251

Rosemary Waring

#66895
Overall Influence
Rosemary Waring, an honorary Reader in human toxicology at the School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham, was the first researcher to produce scientific evidence suggestive of abnormal sulfur metabolism affecting people with autism spectrum disorders. Her findings suggest that people with autism present with consistently lower levels of circulating plasma sulfate and higher than normal levels of urinary sulfate than non-symptomatic controls . Follow-up work has suggested that people with autism also present with higher than normal levels of other sulfur-related compounds, including sulfi...
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#1252

Jean Harvey

#143492
Overall Influence
Jean Harvey, PhD, RDN, is currently the Robert L. Bickford, Jr. Endowed Professor, the Associate Dean for Research, and the Chair of the Department of Nutrition and Food Science in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at the University of Vermont. Her specialty is behavioral weight management with a specific focus on technology-based programs.
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#1253

Susan Geertshuis

#172520
Overall Influence
Susan A. Geertshuis is an English-New Zealand academic. She is currently a full professor at the University of Auckland. Academic career After a PhD at the University of Nottingham, she worked at the University of Wales Bangor and the University of Northampton, before moving to the University of Auckland, rising to full professor.
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#1254

Chantell Evans

#180077
Overall Influence
Chantell Skye Evans is an American cell biologist who is a professor at Duke University. Her research looks to understand the dynamical processes of mitochondria and their role in neurodegenerative disease. In 2022, Popular Science named her as one of their "Brilliant 10" U.S. scientists and engineers.
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#1255

Catheleen Jordan

#104866
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Catheleen Jordan has been a Professor of Social Work at the University of Texas at Arlington School of Social Work since 1994. Achievements 2017 National Association of Social Workers, Pioneer Award.2013, National Association of Social Workers-Texas, Lifetime Achievement Award.2011-2016 Cheryl Milkes Moore Professorship in Mental Health.2007-2009, President of the Texas chapter of the National Association of Social Workers.1991-1996 Director, Community Service Clinic, University of Texas Arlington.
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#1256

Nirmala Rao

Nirmala Rao
#52919
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Nirmala Rao is a British academic and the current vice chancellor of Krea University. She also served as vice chancellor of the Asian University for Women, Chittagong, Bangladesh from 1 February 2017 to January 2022. and as Pro-Director of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London from 2008 to 2016.
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#1257

Pea Fröhlich

#176891
Overall Influence
1943 - 2022 (79 years)
Pea Fröhlich is a German screenwriter and psychologist, best known for co-writing all three films of the BRD Trilogy: The Marriage of Maria Braun, Veronika Voss and Lola. She also wrote for Bloch. Filmography 1979: The Marriage of Maria Braun 1981: 1981: Lola 1982: Veronika Voss 1985: 1987: The Cry of the Owl , TV film1989: Radiofieber , TV miniseries1991: The Indecent Woman 1992: Haus am See , TV series1994: , TV film1995: Deutschlandlied , TV miniseries1996: Tatort: Das Mädchen mit der Puppe , TV2002: , TV film2002–2005: Bloch, TV series, 7 episodes2006:
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#1258

Candice DeLong

#53694
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Candice DeLong is an American former FBI criminal profiler and bestselling author. DeLong was the lead profiler in San Francisco, California, and worked on the Unabomber case. Currently, she hosts the Investigation Discovery programs Deadly Women and Facing Evil with Candice DeLong, the Wondery podcast Killer Psyche, and the Discovery+ program The Deadly Type with Candice DeLong.
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#1259

Selina Kuruleca

#170496
Overall Influence
Selina Kuruleca is a Fijian psychotherapist and commentator. She has been regularly quoted by media outlets in Fiji on a wide variety of issues, such as the controversial Reconciliation, Tolerance, and Unity Bill promoted by the government of Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase . She expressed serious misgivings about the bill, especially with respect to its provisions for amnesty to be granted to persons convicted of offences related to the Fiji coup of 2000.
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#1260

Deboleena Roy

#173518
Overall Influence
Deboleena Roy is professor and chair of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology at Emory University, former resident research fellow at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, Stanford University , and a member of The NeuroGenderings Network. Previously, she was an assistant professor at San Diego State University. Starting in August 2020, she will be serving as the Senior Associate Dean of Faculty for Emory College of Arts and Sciences.
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#1261

Peggy Fairbairn-Dunlop

#93188
Overall Influence
Margaret Ellen Fairbairn-Dunlop is a Samoan-New Zealand academic. She is the first person in New Zealand to hold a chair in Pacific studies. Education Fairbairn-Dunlop studied at Victoria University of Wellington, graduating with a Master of Arts degree. She completed <big>a PhD at Macquarie University in Australia.</big>
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#1262

Sallie Foley

#177811
Overall Influence
Sallie Foley is a social worker and social work academic specialising in sex therapy, sexual health and the consequences of genital surgery on children. Biography Foley is the director of the University of Michigan Sexual Health Certificate Program for the center for sexual health/University of Michigan Health System/Department of Social Work and the Graduate School of Social Work. She is also the former director of the center for sexual health at University of Michigan Health System/Department of Social Work. She is an AASECT certified sex therapist, educator, supervisor and diplomate of sex therapy.
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#1263

Charley Ferrer

#190121
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Charley Ferrer became the first Latina Doctor of Human Sexuality in the United States in 2000 after receiving her doctoral degree from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. She is a clinical sexologist and award-winning author of several books on sexual health, self-empowerment, and breast cancer. A pioneer in the field of sexual health and empowerment, Dr. Ferrer began her journey providing workshops on sexual health and empowerment to women in Evergreen State College and across the Pacific Northwest. Her first book, The W.I.S.E. Journal for the Sensual Woman became an interna...
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#1264

Anne Rasa

Anne Rasa
#74412
Overall Influence
1940 - 2020 (80 years)
Olwen Anne Elisabeth Rasa was a British ethologist, known for her long-duration study of the social behaviour of the dwarf mongoose in Kenya. She had studied aggression among coral reef fish under the pioneering ethologist Konrad Lorenz. Her fieldwork in Kenya's Taru Desert led to a book, Mongoose Watch: A Family Observed, and to a popular German television series, Expedition ins Tierreich. She later studied social behaviour in the yellow mongoose and the sub-social tenebrionid beetle Parastizopus armaticeps.
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#1265

Mari Fitzduff

#191878
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Mari Christine Fitzduff is an Irish policy maker, writer and academic. She began her work in peacebuilding and mediation working with universities during the Northern Ireland conflict before setting up a mediation organisation in 1989. In 1990 she was a founding director of the Community Relations Council, set up to help develop and fund peace initiatives in Northern Ireland.
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#1266

Celia B. Fisher

#189426
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Celia B. Fisher is an American psychologist. She is the Marie Ward Doty professor of ethics at Fordham University in New York City, and director of its Center for Ethics Education. Fisher is also the director of the HIV and Drug Abuse Prevention Research Ethics Training Institute . Fisher is the founding editor of the journal Applied Developmental Science and serves on the IOM Committee on Clinical Research Involving Children Dr. Fisher has over 300 publications and 8 edited volumes on children’s health research and services among diverse racial/ethnic, sexual and gender minority groups in the U.S.
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#1267

Alison Winter

#131801
Overall Influence
1965 - 2016 (51 years)
Alison Winter was an American academic. Biography Born on 19 November 1965 in New Haven, Connecticut, Winter spent her early childhood in Bonn, Germany, and attended high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where her father taught mathematics at the University of Michigan. His influence led her to study the history of science at the University of Chicago beginning in 1983. Winter moved to the United Kingdom for graduate study, where she met Adrian Johns in 1987. The two married in 1992. Winter completed her M. Phil at the University of Cambridge in 1991, followed by a PhD in 1993. She began teachi...
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#1268

Martha Manning

#192000
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
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#1269

Ann Katharine Mitchell

#73682
Overall Influence
1922 - 2020 (98 years)
Ann Katharine Mitchell was a British cryptanalyst and psychologist who worked on decrypting messages encoded in the German Enigma cypher at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. After the war she became a marriage guidance counsellor, then studied for a Master of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. She worked at the university's Department of Social Administration and wrote several academic books about the psychological effects of divorce on children, including Someone to Turn to: Experiences of Help Before Divorce and Children in the Middle: Living Through Divorce .
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#1270

Clara Wing-chung Ho

#186218
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Clara Wing-chung Ho is a history professor at Hong Kong Baptist University. Ho is a Fulbright Scholar and a Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities. Career Ho has been Professor of History at the Hong Kong Baptist University for over 20 years. Her writings cover a variety of subjects, but Ho mainly focuses on women and gender in Imperial China. She has collaborated with international scholars on the history of women and gender, with those collaborations including a 2007 conference about the history of Chinese women and a 2010 workshop about gender in the history of China. Ho is the author of multiple books about women and the history of China.
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#1271

Magdalena Smoczyńska

#100403
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Magdalena Smoczyńska, born 25 April 1947 in Kraków, is a Polish psycholinguist and expert in the development of language in children. She is an emeritus reader in the department of linguistics at Jagiellonian University where she was once head of the Child Language Laboratory and now studies specific language impairment at the Institute for Educational Research.
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#1272

Anne M. McKim

#180158
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Anne M. McKim is a Scottish-New Zealand academic. She is currently Professor of English at the University of Waikato, with specialities including Medieval Studies and Eighteenth-Century Literature. Selected works Cowie, Bronwen, Rosemary Hipkins, Sally Boyd, Ally Bull, Paul Ashley Keown, Clive McGee, Beverley Cooper et al. "Curriculum implementation exploratory studies." .Petrie, Kirsten Culhane, Alister Jones, and Anne M. McKim. "Effective professional learning in physical activity." .
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#1273

Marion Blank

#145780
Overall Influence
Dr. Marion Blank is the creator of the Reading Kingdom program, the creator and former director of the A Light on Literacy program at Columbia University in New York, and most recently the creator of Comprendi, a first-of-its-kind reading system designed specifically to improve reading comprehension. She is a developmental psychologist with a specialization in language and learning.
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#1274

Debora Meijers

#173373
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Debora Meijers is an art historian and professor of museum studies at the University of Amsterdam, an educational elective program that she developed herself. Meijers was born in Amsterdam. In 1990 she obtained her doctorate under Rob Scheller. She teaches and writes about the history of art collecting and curation as a science and as a facet of cultural heritage.
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#1275

Charlotte Kohler

#167879
Overall Influence
1908 - 2008 (100 years)
Charlotte Kohler was a literary magazine editor and a university professor. She was born in Richmond, Virginia, attended the city's John Marshall High School, graduated from Vassar College, and obtained both a master's and a PhD from the University of Virginia. As a woman, she was not able to gain employment as an English professor in Virginia, so she taught for two years at Woman's College of the University of North Carolina.
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#1276

Susan MacLaury

#113933
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (124 years)
Susan MacLaury is the co-founder and executive director of the non-profit media company Shine Global, a licensed social worker, and a retired educator. She is also an Emmy-winning and Academy Award-nominated producer.
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#1277

Natascha McNamara

#89212
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Natascha Duschene McNamara is an Ngarrindjeri Australian academic, activist, and researcher. She co-founded the Aboriginal Training and Cultural Institute in Balmain, New South Wales and served as President of the Aboriginal Children's Advancement Society Ltd. Her affiliations include: Fellowship, Centre of Indigenous Development Education and Research, University of Wollongong ; member, Australian Press Council; and Member, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Council.
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#1278

Deborah Akers

#91965
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Deborah S. Akers is an assistant professor of Cultural Applied Anthropology at Miami University, Ohio. She is both an author and researcher and currently has a segment with Talk Radio News, DC where she discusses her research findings on posttraumatic stress disorder and meditation and the benefits of Asian meditation techniques and holistic stress-free living.
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#1279

Josephine Kane

#184656
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Josephine Kane is a British academic and historian of architecture and the built environment. Publications The architecture of pleasure: British amusement parks 1900-1939 . Ashgate Press.
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#1280

Elizabeth Blanchard

1834 - 1891 (57 years)
Elizabeth Blanchard was an American educator who was the seventh president of Mount Holyoke College . Blanchard graduated from Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1858, and taught there for twelve years before becoming the Associate Principal from 1872-1883. She served as Principal from 1883-1888. When Mount Holyoke Female Seminary received its collegiate charter and became Mount Holyoke College, she served as Acting President from 1888-1889.
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#1281

Hilde Himmelweit

Hilde Himmelweit
1918 - 1989 (71 years)
Hildegard Therese Himmelweit was a German social psychologist who had a major influence on the development of the discipline in Britain. Biography Hilde was born in Berlin in 1918. Her father, Dr Siegfried Litthauer, was a chemist and industrialist. She went to Newnham College, Cambridge . She married Freddy Himmelweit. She received her PhD under Hans Eysenck at the Institute of Psychiatry.
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#1282

Isabelle Liberman

1918 - 1990 (72 years)
Isabelle Yoffe Liberman was an American psychologist, born in Latvia, who was an expert on reading disabilities, including dyslexia. Isabelle Liberman received her bachelor's degree from Vassar College and her doctorate from Yale University. She was a professor at the University of Connecticut from 1966 through 1987 and a research associate at the Haskins Laboratories.
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#1283

Deborah L. Best

1900 - Present (125 years)
Deborah L. Best is the William L. Poteat Professor of Psychology at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Education Best earned a bachelor's degree in psychology and an MA in General Experimental Psychology at Wake Forest University, and a PhD in developmental psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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#1284

Ruth Morris Bakwin

1898 - 1985 (87 years)
Ruth Morris Bakwin was a noted pediatrician and child psychologist and the first woman intern at the Fifth Avenue Hospital in New York City . Bakwin and her husband, also a pediatrician, were long associated with New York University School of Medicine.
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#1285

Barbara Rothbaum

1900 - Present (125 years)
Barbara Rothbaum is a psychologist at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. She is a professor in the Psychiatry department and a pioneer in the treatment of anxiety-related disorders. Rothbaum is head of the Trauma and Anxiety Recovery Program at Emory as well as the Emory Healthcare Veterans Program. In the mid-1990s she founded a virtual exposure therapy company called Virtually Better, Inc. This company treats patients with anxiety disorders, addictions, pain, and the like using virtual reality instead of the actual place or scenario. It also allows the therapist to control the environment.
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#1286

Margaret Kennard

1899 - 1975 (76 years)
Margaret Alice Kennard was a neurologist who principally studied the effects of neurological damage on primates. Her work led to the creation of the Kennard Principle, which posits a negative linear relationship between age of a brain lesion and the outcome expectancy: in other words, that the earlier in life a brain lesion occurs, the more likely it is for some compensation mechanism to reverse at least some of the lesion's bad effects.
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#1287

Louise Arseneault

Louise Arseneault is a Canadian psychologist and Professor of Developmental Psychology in the Social, Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry Centre in the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's College London, where she has taught since 2001.
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#1288

Nancy Bayley

1899 - 1994 (95 years)
Nancy Bayley was an American psychologist best known for her work on the Berkeley Growth Study and the subsequent Bayley Scales of Infant Development. Originally interested in teaching, she eventually gained interest in psychology, for which she went on to obtain her Ph.D. in from the University of Iowa in 1926. Within two years, Bayley had accepted a position at the Institute for Child Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. There she began the longitudinal Berkeley Growth Study, which worked to create a guide of physical and behavioral growth across development. Bayley also exam...
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#1289

Hilde Bruch

Hilde Bruch
1904 - 1984 (80 years)
Hilde Bruch was a German-born American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, known foremost for her work on eating disorders and obesity. Bruch emigrated to the United States in 1934. She worked and studied at various medical facilities in New York City and Baltimore before becoming a professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston in 1964.
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#1290

Florence Goodenough

Florence Goodenough
1886 - 1959 (73 years)
Florence Laura Goodenough was an American psychologist and professor at the University of Minnesota who studied child intelligence and various problems in the field of child development. She was president of the Society for Research in Child Development from 1946-1947. She is best known for published book The Measurement of Intelligence, where she introduced the Goodenough Draw-A-Man test to assess intelligence in young children through nonverbal measurement. She is noted for developing the Minnesota Preschool Scale. In 1931 she published two notable books titled Experimental Child Study and Anger in Young Children which analyzed the methods used in evaluating children.
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#1291

Dana R. Carney

Dana R. Carney is an American psychologist. She is associate professor of business at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a Barbara and Gerson Bakar Faculty Fellow, an affiliate of the Department of Psychology and the director of the Institute of Personality and Social Research at the University of California, Berkeley.
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#1292

Jeanne Block

1923 - 1981 (58 years)
Jeanne Lavonne Humphrey Block was an American psychologist and expert on child development. She conducted research into sex-role socialization and, with her husband Jack Block, created a person-centered personality framework. Block was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and conducted her research with the National Institute of Mental Health and the University of California, Berkeley. She was an active researcher when she was diagnosed with cancer in 1981.
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#1293

Louise L. Sloan

1898 - 1982 (84 years)
Louise Littig Sloan was an American ophthalmologist and vision scientist. She is credited for being a pioneer of the sub-division of clinical vision research, contributing more than 100 scientific articles in which she either authored or co-authored. Her most notable work was in the area of visual acuity testing where she developed and improved equipment. Sloan received her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College in experimental psychology. She spent a short period of time in both Bryn Mawr's experimental psychology program as well as the Department of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School. The majori...
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#1294

Carolyn Sherif

1922 - 1982 (60 years)
Carolyn Wood Sherif was an American social psychologist who helped to develop social judgment theory and contributed pioneering research in the areas of the self-system, group conflict, cooperation, and gender identity. She also assumed a leading role in psychology both nationally as well as internationally. In addition to performing seminal social psychology research, Wood Sherif devoted herself to teaching her students and was recognized for her efforts with an American Psychological Association award named in her honor that is presented annually.
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#1295

Gertrude Rand

1886 - 1970 (84 years)
Marie Gertrude Rand Ferree was an American research scientist who is known for her extensive body of work about color perception. Her work included "mapping the retina for its perceptional abilities", "developing new instruments and lamps for ophthalmologists", and "detection and measurement of color blindness". Rand, with LeGrand H. Hardy and M. Catherine Rittler, developed the HRR pseudoisochromatic color test.
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#1296

Leta Stetter Hollingworth

1886 - 1939 (53 years)
Leta Stetter Hollingworth was an American psychologist, educator, and feminist. Hollingworth also made contributions in psychology of women, clinical psychology, and educational psychology. She is best known for her work with gifted children.
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#1297

Myrtle Byram McGraw

1899 - 1988 (89 years)
Myrtle Byram McGraw was an American psychologist, neurobiologist, and child development researcher. Education Myrtle was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the fifth of seven children of the farmer Riley McGraw and his seamstress wife Mary Byram. She grew up in an area that was still recovering from the aftermath of the American Civil War. After completing a sixth grade level of education, she took a course in a local business school to learn shorthand and typing. Afterward, she was hired by a law office, where she worked for the next two years at a salary of $3 per hour. While there, the lawyer for whom she worked had the foresight to encourage her to continue her education.
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#1298

Suzi Gage

Suzi Gage
Suzanne H. Gage is a British psychologist and epidemiologist who is interested in the nature of associations between lifestyle behaviours and mental health. She is a senior lecturer at the University of Liverpool and has a popular science podcast and accompanying book, Say Why to Drugs, which explores substance use.
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#1299

Helen L. Koch

Helen L. Koch
1895 - 1977 (82 years)
Helen Lois Koch was an American developmental psychologist and a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Chicago. Koch developed nursery school teacher training programs during World War II and she researched the differences between sets of fraternal twins, identical twins and non-twin siblings.
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#1300

Grete L. Bibring

Grete L. Bibring
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Grete Lehner Bibring was an Austrian-American psychoanalyst who became the first female full professor at Harvard Medical School in 1961. Life Life in Vienna Grete Bibring was born as Margarethe Lehner on January 11, 1899, in Vienna, Austria. She was the youngest child of factory owner Moriz Lehner and his wife Victoria Josefine Lehner, née Stengel. Her siblings were two older brothers, Ernst and Fritz, and a sister, Rosi. Her upbringing was amongst a wealthy Jewish family that often hosted dinner parties and imparted to her an appreciation for music, science, and art. She attended Akademisches Gymnasium until 1918, when she graduated.
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