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,
#1301
Margaret K. Knight
1903 - 1983 (80 years)
Margaret Kennedy Knight , , was a psychologist and humanist. Biography Born in Hertfordshire, England, Knight went to Girton College, Cambridge University, graduating in 1926. In 1948 she gained a master's degree.
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Kate Brousseau
1862 - 1938 (76 years)
Kate Brousseau was an American professor and researcher on mental hygiene, chair of the Psychology Department at Mills College. Early life Kate Brousseau was born on April 24, 1862, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, daughter of Judge Julius Brousseau , born in New York by French Canadian parents, and Caroline Yakeley , of English and German heritage. Brousseau was the older of four siblings.
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Grace Manson
1893 - 1967 (74 years)
Grace Eveyln Manson was an American psychologist known for her work as an occupational psychologist. Early life and education Manson was born on July 15, 1893, in Baltimore, Maryland. Educated at Goucher College, where she received her AB in 1915, and Columbia University, where she received her AM in 1919, she went on to earn a Ph.D. from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1923.
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Margaret Verrall
1857 - 1916 (59 years)
Margaret de Gaudrion Verrall was a classical scholar and lecturer at Newnham College, Cambridge. Much of her life and research was concerned with the study of parapsychology, mainly in order to examine how psychic abilities might demonstrate the abilities, breadth and power of the human mind. She began to exhibit and develop psychic abilities herself around 1901, and became both a recipient and analyst of many cross-correspondences produced by psychics, most notably the Palm Sunday scripts.
Go to Profile#1305
Naomi Norsworthy
1877 - 1916 (39 years)
Naomi Norsworthy was an American psychologist who served as the first female faculty member at Columbia University Teacher's College. Her parents had emigrated from England two years before her birth. Norsworthy was the eldest of four children with two younger brothers and a third who died soon after birth. She was educated in public school in Rutherford, New Jersey then enrolled in New Jersey State Normal School at the age of 15, and was among the youngest students there; she graduated from the school in three years.
Go to Profile#1306
Kate Hevner Mueller
1898 - 1984 (86 years)
Kate Hevner Mueller was an American psychologist and educator who served as dean of women at Indiana University during 1938–1949. Biography Born Kate Lucile Hevner in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, she was the second daughter and middle child to a minister father and a schoolteacher mother. She attended Williamsport High School then matriculated in 1916 to Wilson College, where she majored in English with a minor in French. She graduated in 1920 with a Bachelor of Arts with honors. During her junior year she took a course in psychology, where she developed an interest in the subject.
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Frieda Goldman-Eisler
1907 - 1982 (75 years)
Frieda Goldman-Eisler was a psychologist and pioneer in the field of psycholinguistics. She is known for her research on speech disfluencies; a volume dedicated in her honor calls her "the modern pioneer of the science of pausology".
Go to Profile#1308
Maria Ovsiankina
1898 - 1993 (95 years)
Maria Arsenjevna Rickers-Ovsiankina was a Russian-German-American psychologist. She studied what is now known as the Ovsiankina effect, a variation of the Zeigarnik effect. Ovsiankina worked in a variety of psychology jobs, including working with schizophrenia patients. She wrote books about psychological testing.
Go to Profile#1309
Mary Cover Jones
1897 - 1987 (90 years)
Mary Cover Jones was an American developmental psychologist and a pioneer of behavior therapy, despite the field being heavily dominated by males throughout much of the 20th century. Joseph Wolpe dubbed her "the mother of behavior therapy" due to her famous study of Peter and development of desensitization.
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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.
Go to Profile#1311
Barbara Rothbaum
1900 - Present (126 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.
Go to Profile#1312
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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Grace Fernald
1879 - 1950 (71 years)
Grace Maxwell Fernald was an educational psychologist and influential figure in early twentieth century literacy education. Fernald established "the first clinic for remedial instruction in 1921 at the University of California, Los Angeles". Tracing tactile learning tendencies back to Quintilian, Séguin, and Montessori, Fernald's kinesthetic spelling and reading method prompted struggling students to trace words. Years of research culminated in 1943 with her classic work, Remedial Techniques in Basic School Subjects. The popular kinesthetic method anchors modern instruction in the areas of special education and remedial reading.
Go to Profile#1314
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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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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Pat Dudgeon
Patricia Lynette Dudgeon , usually known as Pat Dudgeon, is an Aboriginal Australian psychologist, Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society and a research professor at the University of Western Australia's School of Indigenous Studies. Her area of research includes Indigenous social and emotional wellbeing and suicide prevention. She is actively involved with the Aboriginal community, having an ongoing commitment to social justice for Indigenous people. Dudgeon has participated in numerous state and national committees, councils, task groups and community service activities in both a v...
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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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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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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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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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Harriet Babcock
1877 - 1952 (75 years)
Harriet Babcock was an American psychologist who specialized in abnormal psychology research in addition to developing measures and theories of intelligence. After her doctoral work at Columbia University, she worked primarily in the Department of Psychology at New York University, and acted as a consultant to the New York City Guidance Bureau. Babcock developed multiple intelligence tests evaluating mental deterioration and efficiency.
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Caroline Beaumont Zachry
1894 - 1945 (51 years)
Caroline Beaumont Zachry was an educational psychologist born in New York City to James Greer Zachry and Elise Clarkson Thompson. Her maternal grandfather was Hugh Smith Thompson the Governor of South Carolina from 1882 to 1886.
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Kate Gordon Moore
1878 - 1963 (85 years)
Kate Gordon Moore was an American psychologist whose work focused on various aspects within cognitive psychology, and is noted for her work with color vision and perception, as well as aesthetics, memory, imagination, emotion, developmental tests for children, and attention span. Gordon's early work focused on color vision and how this interacted with memory. Her work shifted mid-career and then she started to research within the realm of education. Specifically, she published work that addressed women's education with regard to the notion that women must be educated differently from men. Her...
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Lillian Moller Gilbreth
1878 - 1972 (94 years)
Lillian Evelyn Gilbreth was an American psychologist, industrial engineer, consultant, and educator who was an early pioneer in applying psychology to time-and-motion studies. She was described in the 1940s as "a genius in the art of living." Gilbreth, one of the first female engineers to earn a Ph.D., is considered to be the first industrial/organizational psychologist. She and her husband, Frank Bunker Gilbreth, were efficiency experts who contributed to the study of industrial engineering, especially in the areas of motion study and human factors. Cheaper by the Dozen and Belles on Their ...
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Anny Rosenberg Katan
1898 - 1992 (94 years)
Anny Rosenberg Katan was a child psychologist born in Vienna, Austria, who pioneered the use of psychoanalysis to treat emotionally disturbed youth. She had close personal ties to the Sigmund Freud family and was one of the first child analysts in the city of Vienna.
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Katharine Banham
1897 - 1995 (98 years)
Katharine May Banham was an English psychologist who specialized in developmental psychology. She was the first woman to be awarded a Ph.D. from the Université de Montréal. Early life and education Katharine May Banham received a B.S. from the University of Manchester in 1919 and a M.S. from Cambridge University in 1921. In 1923, she earned a M.A. from the University of Toronto and graduated cum laude from the Université de Montréal in 1934, being the first woman to be awarded a Ph.D. from that university.
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Ruth Wendell Washburn
1890 - 1975 (85 years)
Ruth Wendell Washburn was an American educational psychologist. She received a B.A. from Vassar in 1913, an M.A. from Radcliffe in 1922, and a Ph.D. degree from Yale University in 1929. The Ruth Washburn Cooperative Nursery School in Colorado Springs, Colorado is named in her honor.
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Åse Gruda Skard
1905 - 1985 (80 years)
Åse Gruda Skard was a Norwegian university professor, child psychologist and author. She was a noted pioneer in the field of childhood development and psychology. Biography She was born at Kristiania , Norway. She was the daughter of Halvdan Koht and Karen Elisabeth Grude . Her father was a noted historian and professor and the University of Oslo. Her mother was an educator, author and feminist pioneer. Her brother Paul Koht was a diplomat and ambassador.
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Helga Eng
1875 - 1966 (91 years)
Helga Kristine Eng was a Norwegian psychologist and educationalist. She was the third woman to receive a doctor's degree in Norway, and the first to do so in psychology. Early life and education She was born in Rakkestad as a daughter of teacher and smallholder Hans Andersen Kirkeng and Johanne Marie Sæves . She had seven siblings. She graduated from Asker Seminary in 1895, and started a career as a primary school teacher. She started in Lier, continued in Moss from 1897 to 1900 when she was hired at Lakkegata School at Tøyen, Oslo.
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Louisa E. Rhine
1891 - 1983 (92 years)
Louisa Ella Rhine was an American doctor of botany and is known for her work in parapsychology. At the time of her death, she was recognized as the foremost researcher of spontaneous psychic experiences, and has been referred to as the "first lady of parapsychology."
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Bernice Cronkhite
1893 - 1983 (90 years)
Bernice Brown Cronkhite was an educator and former dean of Radcliffe College, working there for thirty-six years. She was the first woman at Radcliffe College to earn a doctorate in political science.
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Minnie Steckel
1890 - 1952 (62 years)
Minnie Steckel was an American teacher, psychologist, clubwoman, and an activist involved in the women's poll tax repeal movement. Steckel began her career as a school teacher and worked her way up to school principal, superintendent and school psychologist, earning her bachelor's, master's and PhD degrees. From 1932 until her death in 1952, she was the dean of women and counselor at Alabama College. She served as president of the local Montevallo chapter of the American Association of University Women from 1937 to 1939, as president of the state chapter of the Business and Professional Wome...
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Clare Winnicott
1906 - 1984 (78 years)
Clare Winnicott OBE was an English social worker, civil servant, psychoanalyst and teacher. She played a pivotal role in the passing of The Children's Act of 1948. Alongside her husband, D. W. Winnicott, Clare would go on to become a prolific writer and prominent social worker and children's advocate in 20th century England.
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Jessie P. Guzman
1898 - 1996 (98 years)
Jessie Parkhurst Guzman was a writer, archivist, historian, educator, and college administrator, primarily at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. In her work at the Tuskegee Institute, particularly in the Department of Research and Records, she documented the lives of African Americans and maintained the Institute's lynching records.
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Agnes L. Rogers
1884 - 1943 (59 years)
Agnes Low Rogers was a Scottish educator and educational psychologist. Early life Agnes Low Rogers was born in Dundee, the daughter of William Thomson Rogers and Janet Low Rogers. She earned a master's degree at the University of St. Andrews in 1908. She passed the Moral Sciences Tripos at Cambridge in 1911, and completed doctoral studies at Teachers College, Columbia University in 1917. Her dissertation, published the following year, was titled Experimental Tests of Mathematical Ability and their Prognostic Value .
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Minnie Abercrombie
1909 - 1984 (75 years)
Minnie Abercrombie , also known as M. L. J. Abercrombie, was a British zoologist, educationalist and psychologist. She was known for her work on invertebrates and her work in the publishing industry, conducted with her husband, Michael Abercrombie. She also contributed to the theory and practice of education through her teaching, research, lecturing and writing. In particular, she carried out pioneer psychological research into the use of groups in learning with medical, architectural and education students, and she shared with diverse audiences in many countries her extensive knowledge and ex...
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Ethel Dench Puffer Howes
1872 - 1950 (78 years)
Ethel Dench Puffer Howes was an American psychologist, suffragist, and college professor. She taught at Wellesley College, Smith College, and Simmons College. She was Executive Secretary of the National College Equal Suffrage League, and founder of the Institute for the Coordination of Women's Interests at Smith College.
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Clara Louise Thompson
1884 - Present (142 years)
Clara Louise Thompson was an American educator, Latinist, activist, feminist, and suffragette. She is the only woman to be awarded the American Fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies in Rome .
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Mimí Langer
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Marie "Mimí" Lisbeth Langer was an Austrian-born Latin American psychoanalyst and human rights activist. She was a cofounder of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association. Biography The daughter of Rudolf Glas and Margarethe Glas, Langer was born in Vienna in 1910. She had a sister, Gusti Eva Glas. Langer attended a private girls' school started by educator Eugenie Schwarzwald. After finishing medical school , she attended Freud's Psychoanalytic Institute.
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Selma Fraiberg
1918 - 1981 (63 years)
Selma Fraiberg was an American child psychoanalyst, author and social worker. At the time of her death, Selma Fraiberg was a professor of child psychoanalysis at the University of California, San Francisco and a clinician who devoted her career to helping troubled children. She was also professor emeritus of child psychoanalysis at the University of Michigan Medical School, where she had taught from 1963 to 1979, and had also been director of the Child Developmental Project in Washtenaw County, Mich., for children with emotional problems.
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Ruth Winifred Howard
1900 - 1997 (97 years)
Ruth Winifred Howard was an American psychologist. She is best known for her psychological work concerning students with special needs at Children's Provident Hospital School. She is one of the first African American women to earn a Ph.D. in Psychology. Howard was an active participant in the American Psychological Association, the International Council of Women Psychologists, the American Association of University Women, the National Association of College Women , and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. She also received instruction from Florence Goodenough.
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Margaret McFarland
1905 - 1988 (83 years)
Margaret Beall McFarland was an American child psychologist and a consultant to the television show Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. She was the co-founder and director of the Arsenal Family and Children's Center in Pittsburgh, and much of her work focused on the meaning of the interactions between mothers and children. Fred Rogers referred to McFarland as his major professional influence.
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Christine Ladd-Franklin
1847 - 1930 (83 years)
Christine Ladd-Franklin was an American psychologist, logician, and mathematician. Early life and education Christine Ladd, sometimes known by the nickname "Kitty", was born on December 1, 1847, in Windsor, Connecticut, to Eliphalet, a merchant, and Augusta Ladd. During her early childhood, she lived with her parents and younger brother Henry in New York City. In 1853 the family moved back to Windsor, Connecticut, where her sister Jane Augusta Ladd McCordia was born the following year. Family correspondence shows that Augusta and one of her sisters were both staunch supporters of women's rights.
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Isoko Hatano
1905 - 1978 (73 years)
Isoko Hatano was a Japanese developmental psychologist and writer. Her 1951 book, Shōnenki, was a national bestseller that was adapted into a feature film. She was awarded the Order of the Precious Crown in 1976.
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Susan Sutherland Isaacs
1885 - 1948 (63 years)
Susan Sutherland Isaacs, CBE was a Lancashire-born educational psychologist and psychoanalyst. She published studies on the intellectual and social development of children and promoted the nursery school movement. For Isaacs, the best way for children to learn was by developing their independence. She believed that the most effective way to achieve this was through play, and that the role of adults and early educators was to guide children's play.
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Jean Macfarlane
1894 - 1989 (95 years)
Jean Walker Macfarlane was an American psychologist. She was born in Selma, California. In 1922 she earned a doctoral degree in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley; she was the second person ever to do so, the first being Olga Bridgman in 1915. In 1927 Macfarlane founded the University of California, Berkeley's Institute of Human Development, originally called the Institute of Child Welfare.
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Beatrice Edgell
1871 - 1948 (77 years)
Beatrice Edgell was a British psychologist, researcher and university teacher. She taught at Bedford College in the University of London from 1897 to 1933. She was the first British woman to earn a PhD in psychology and the first British woman to be named a professor of psychology. She was also the first female president of the British Psychological Society, the Aristotelian Society, the Mind Association and the Psychological Division of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Karin Stephen
1889 - 1953 (64 years)
Karin Stephen was a British psychoanalyst and psychologist. Early life and education Karin Stephen was born Catherine Elizabeth Costelloe. Her mother, Mary Costelloe had been a Philadelphia Quaker, and her father, Benjamin Francis Conn Costelloe a Northern Irish convert to Roman Catholicism. The relationship between her parents was difficult, and her mother left her husband when Karin and her sister Rachel were very young. Her father died in 1899 when she was ten years old, so the sisters were then looked after by their grandmother. While at boarding school she won a scholarship for Newnh...
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Alice Hamlin Hinman
1869 - 1934 (65 years)
Alice Hamlin Hinman was a psychologist who changed the public school education system from backwards to progressive from 1907 to 1919 through her influence and membership on the Lincoln Board of Education.
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Constance Davey
1882 - 1963 (81 years)
Constance Muriel Davey was an Australian psychologist who worked in the South Australian Department of Education, where she introduced the state's first special education classes. Biography Davey was born in 1882 in Nuriootpa, South Australia, to Emily Mary and Stephen Henry Davey. She began teaching at a Port Adelaide private school in 1908 and at St Peter's Collegiate Girls' School in 1909. She attended the University of Adelaide as a part-time student, completing a B.A. in philosophy in 1915 and an M.A. in 1918. In 1921 she won a Catherine Helen Spence Memorial Scholarship which allowed ...
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