Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Psychology,

#151

Anke Ehlers

#27127

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Anke Ehlers is a German psychologist and expert in post-traumatic stress disorder . She is a Fellow of the major science academies of the UK and Germany. She currently works at the University of Oxford as Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow and Professor of Experimental Psychopathology.

#152

Marian Sigman

#38405

Overall Influence

1941 - 2012 (71 years)

Marian Diamond Sigman was a developmental and child clinical psychologist known for her research on autism spectrum disorder . At the time of her death, she was Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles .

#153

Linda Siegel

#19802

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Linda S. Siegel is an American-born psychologist and academic known for her research into the cognitive aspects of learning disabilities. She is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada where she held the Dorothy C. Lam Chair in Special Education.

#154

Cecilia Heyes

#27564

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Cecilia Heyes is a British psychologist who studies the evolution of the human mind. She is a Senior Research Fellow in Theoretical Life Sciences at All Souls College, and a Professor of Psychology at the University of Oxford. She is also a Fellow of the British Academy , and President of the Experimental Psychology Society.

#155

Anu Realo

#37972

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Anu Realo is an Estonian personality and cross-cultural psychologist. She is Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick, the United Kingdom, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Tartu, Estonia.

#156

Anne Roe

#21890

Overall Influence

1904 - 1991 (87 years)

Anne Roe was an American clinical psychologist and researcher who studied creativity and occupational psychology. Her publications included The Making of a Scientist and the Psychology of Occupations .

#157

Naomi Eisenberger

#30547

Overall Influence

Naomi I. Eisenberger is a social psychologist known for her research on the neural basis of social pain and social connection. She is professor of social psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles where she directs the Social and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory and co-directs the Social Cognitive Science laboratory.

#158

Lauren Resnick

#26827

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Lauren B. Resnick is an educational psychologist who has made notable contributions to the cognitive science of learning and instruction. She is a professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, and was previously director of the University's Learning Research and Development Center. In 1986-1987, Resnick was the president of the American Educational Research Association. She received the 1998 E. L. Thorndike Award from the American Psychological Association.

#159

Jennifer Skeem

#25425

Overall Influence

Jennifer Lynne Skeem is an American psychologist and the Mack Distinguished Professor in the UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare, where she is also the Associate Dean of Research. She is also a professor at the University of California, Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy. Her research focuses on criminal justice and behavioral science, including how to improve the ways that the criminal justice system treats people with mental illness. From 2013 to 2014, she was the president of the American Psychology-Law Society. Since 2013, she has been a fellow of the Association for Psychological...

#160

Marie Anaut

#39742

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Marie Anaut is a professor of clinical psychology and educational sciences at the Lumière University Lyon 2. She is a specialist in psychological resilience. Life and work In 1990, Marie Anaut defended her doctoral thesis entitled Child placement behaviors: analysis of intergenerational repetition at the University of Lyon 2 under the direction of Robert Martin. She was named a lecturer there and became director of the Institute of Psychology at that university from 1999 to 2004. She was a university vice-president from 2008 to 2012. After completing her post-doctoral habilitation in clinical...

#161

Edith Ackermann

Edith Ackermann

#19808

Overall Influence

1946 - 2016 (70 years)

Edith K. Ackermann was a Swiss-born American psychologist who explored the interactions between developmental psychology, play, learning and design. A graduate of the University of Geneva, and a protege to Jean Piaget, she held permanent and visiting positions at several institutions in the United States and Europe, including the MIT Media Lab.

#162

Lori White

#14634

Overall Influence

Lori White is an American academic and administrator. White currently serves as the President of DePauw University, a liberal arts college in Greencastle, Indiana. She was previously the vice chancellor of student affairs at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the first woman and first person of color to serve as president of the DePauw University, and the only person of color to serve as president of an Indiana university.

#163

Marta Kutas

#34930

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Marta Kutas is a Professor and Chair of cognitive science and an adjunct professor of neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego. She also directs the Center for Research in Language at UCSD. Kutas is known for discovering the N400, an event-related potential component typically elicited by unexpected linguistic stimuli, with her colleague Steven Hillyard in one of the first studies in what is now the field of neurolinguistics.

#164

Marcia K. Johnson

#43927

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Marcia K. Johnson is a Sterling Professor emeritus of psychology at Yale University. She was born in 1943 in Alameda, California. Johnson attended public schools in Oakland and Ventura. She attended the University of California, Berkeley where she received both her B.A. in psychology and Ph.D. in experimental psychology . In 1970 Johnson moved to Long Island, New York to take a faculty position at The State University of New York at Stony Brook, where she worked until 1985. She then accepted a position at Princeton University and was there from 1985 to 2000. Johnson is currently a Sterling ...

#165

Tania Singer

#16553

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Tania Singer is a German psychologist and social neuroscientist and the scientific director of the Max Planck Society's Social Neuroscience Lab in Berlin, Germany. Between 2007 and 2010, she became the inaugural chair of social neuroscience and neuroeconomics at the University of Zurich and was the co-director of the Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research in Zurich. Her research focuses on the developmental, neuronal, and hormonal mechanisms underlying human social behavior and social emotions such as compassion and empathy. She is founder and principal investigator of the ReSource...

#166

Sophie Scott

#27720

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Sophie Kerttu Scott is a British neuroscientist and Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow at University College London . Her research investigates the cognitive neuroscience of voices, speech and laughter particularly speech perception, speech production, vocal emotions and human communication. She also serves as director of UCL's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.

#167

Vicki Bruce

#34449

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Dame Victoria Geraldine Bruce, , known as Vicki Bruce, is an English psychologist, Professor of Psychology and former Head of the School of Psychology at Newcastle University. She is known for her work on human face perception and person memory, including face recognition and recall by eyewitnesses and gaze. and other aspects of social cognition. She is also interested in visual cognition more generally. She was made a Dame in the 2015 Birthday Honours list.

#168

Naomi Miyake

#35222

Overall Influence

1949 - 2015 (66 years)

was a Japanese cognitive psychologist. She was a professor at Chukyo University and the University of Tokyo. She is best known for her research on learning and collaboration, in the field of cognitive science.

#169

Anne Dufourmantelle

#25309

Overall Influence

1964 - 2017 (53 years)

Anne Dufourmantelle was a French philosopher and psychoanalyst. Education and career Dufourmantelle was educated at Brown University and at Paris-Sorbonne University, where she earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1994. She practised psychoanalysis and was a professor at the European Graduate School and a contributor to the French daily newspaper Libération.

#170

Nancy Eisenberg

#42210

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Nancy Eisenberg is a psychologist and professor at Arizona State University. She was the President of the Western Psychological Association in 2014-2015 and the Division 7 president of the American Psychological Association in 2010-2012. Her research focuses on areas of emotional and social development of children. She is also in charge of a research lab at Arizona State University where undergraduate researchers help in longitudinal studies of social and emotional development in children and young adolescents.

#171

Geraldine Dawson

#21920

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Geraldine Dawson is an American child clinical psychologist, specializing in autism. She has conducted research on early detection, brain development, and treatment of autism spectrum disorders and collaborated on studies of genetic risk factors in autism. Dawson is William Cleland Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and professor of psychology and neuroscience, former director, Duke Institute for Brain Sciences and director of the Duke Center for Autism and Brain Development at Duke University Medical Center. Dawson was president of the International Society for Aut...

#172

Nadeen L. Kaufman

#35243

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Nadeen L. Kaufman is an American psychology professor known for her work on learning disability. Biography Born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, she earned a Bachelor of Science in Education from Hofstra University in 1965; master's degree in Educational Psychology from Columbia University in 1972; Ed.M. in Learning and Reading Disabilities from Columbia University in 1975; and Ed.D. in Special Education—Neurosciences from Columbia University in 1978 . She completed a predoctoral internship and a postdoctoral fellowship in Psychology at Yale University.

#173

Adele Diamond

#19596

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Adele Dorothy Diamond is a professor of neuroscience at the University of British Columbia, where she is currently a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. One of the pioneers in the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience, Diamond researches how executive functions are affected by biological and environmental factors, especially in children. Her discoveries have improved treatment for disorders such as phenylketonuria and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and they have impacted early education.

#174

Patricia Alexander

#43823

Overall Influence

Patricia A. Alexander is an educational psychologist who has conducted notable research on the role of individual difference, strategic processing, and interest in students' learning. She is currently a university distinguished professor, Jean Mullan Professor of Literacy, and Distinguished Scholar/Teacher in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology in the College of Education at the University of Maryland and a visiting professor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

#175

Morton Ann Gernsbacher

#34342

Overall Influence

Morton Ann Gernsbacher is Vilas Research Professor and Sir Frederic Bartlett Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is a specialist in autism and psycholinguistics and has written and edited professional and lay books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on these subjects. She is currently on the advisory board of the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest and associate editor for Cognitive Psychology, and she has previously held editorial positions for Memory & Cognition and Language and Cognitive Processes. She was also president of...

#176

Lee A. Thompson

#36488

Overall Influence

Lee Anne Thompson is an American psychology professor known for her work in behavior genetics and the biological processes involved in intelligence. Career Thompson earned her B.A. from Case Western Reserve University in 1982, then attended University of Colorado at Boulder, earning an M.A. in 1985 and her Ph.D. in 1987. She currently teaches at Case Western and is on the editorial board of Intelligence.

#177

Felicia Pratto

#17396

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Felicia Pratto is a social psychologist known for her work on intergroup relations, dynamics of power, and social cognition. She is Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of Connecticut. Pratto is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.

#178

Dorret Boomsma

#21887

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Dorret I. Boomsma is a Dutch biological psychologist specializing in genetics and twin studies. Education Secondary education: Willem de Zwijgerlyceum, BussumBachelor's: Vrije Universiteit in Psychology, cum laude, 1979Master's: Vrije Universiteit in Psychophysiology, cum laude, 1983Master's: University of Colorado at Boulder in Biological Psychology/Behavior Genetics, 1983Ph.D.: Vrije Universiteit , cum laude, 1992

#179

Susan E. Jackson

#14177

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Susan E. Jackson is an American researcher in the fields of managing for environmental sustainability, strategic human resource management, occupational burnout, and work team diversity. She was the co-author of the Maslach Burnout Inventory in 1981, the primary diagnostic instrument for the condition of occupational burnout.

#180

Judith Dunn

#18249

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Judith Frances Dunn, is a British psychologist and academic, who specialises in social developmental psychology. Early life and education Dunn was the daughter of James Pace and Jean Stewart. She studied at New Hall, Cambridge, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1962; as per tradition, her BA was promoted to a Master of Arts degree in 1968. While a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, she undertook postgraduate research and she completed her Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1982.

#181

C. Sue Carter

#22290

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

C. Sue Carter is an American biologist and behavioral neurobiologist. She is an internationally recognized expert in behavioral neuroendocrinology. In 2014 she was appointed Director of The Kinsey Institute and Rudy Professor of Biology at Indiana University. Carter was the first person to identify the physiological mechanisms responsible for social monogamy.

#182

Leslie Ungerleider

Leslie Ungerleider

#36567

Overall Influence

1946 - 2020 (74 years)

Leslie G. Ungerleider was an experimental psychologist and neuroscientist, previously Chief of the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at the National Institute of Mental Health. Ungerleider was known for introducing the concepts of the dorsal and ventral streams, two pathways of information processing in the brain that specialize in visuospatial processing and object recognition, respectively.

#183

Mary K. Rothbart

#39378

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Mary Klevjord Rothbart is professor emerita of psychology at the University of Oregon. She is known for her research in the fields of temperament and social development, emotional development, and development of attention. She was a co-founder of Birth to Three, a parent support and education program. She has written over 159 articles related to educational psychology, developmental psychology, developmental cognitive neuroscience and biological psychology. Rothbart has also authored and co-authored many books, including Becoming Who We Are, for which she received the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award from the American Psychological Association.

#184

Ana Cristina Silva

#44859

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Ana Cristina Silva is a Portuguese psychologist and university lecturer, specialising in early childhood reading and writing development. She is also a prize-winning novelist. Early training Ana Cristina Conceição da Silva was born in 1964 in Vila Franca de Xira, just north of the Portuguese capital of Lisbon. She studied psychology at the University of Lisbon, where she obtained an undergraduate degree in psychotherapy and counselling in 1987. She then did a master's in educational psychology at the Instituto Universitário de Ciências Psicológicas, Sociais e da Vida in Alfama, Lisbon, now known as ISPA .

#185

Sandra Jovchelovitch

#50031

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Sandra Jovchelovitch, from Porto Alegre, Brazil, is a social psychologist, currently Professor of Social Psychology and Director of the MSc program in Social and Cultural Psychology at the Institute of Social Psychology at the London School of Economics , of which she serves as head since August 2007. Dr. Jovchelovitch is co-editor of the Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology and directs a book series on Contemporary Social Psychology for the Brazilian publishing house Vozes. She also serves on the editorial boards of the European Journal of Social Psychology and Psicologia e Sociedade.

#186

Deborah Prentice

#33915

Overall Influence

Deborah A. Prentice is an American scholar of psychology and university administrator. She serves as the vice-chancellor at Cambridge University. She previously served as provost at Princeton University and Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs.

#187

Nilli Lavie

#37741

Overall Influence

Nilli Lavie, FBA, is an academic, psychologist, and neuroscientist with British-Israeli dual nationality. A Professor of Psychology and Brain Sciences and Director of the Attention and Cognitive Control laboratory at the University College London Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, she is an elected Fellow of the British Academy, American Psychological Society, Royal Society of Biology, and British Psychological Society.

#188

Ramani Durvasula

#27027

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Ramani Suryakantham Durvasula is an American clinical psychologist, retired professor of psychology , media expert, and author. She has appeared on media outlets discussing narcissistic personality disorder and narcissistic abuse, including Red Table Talk, Bravo, the Lifetime Movie Network, National Geographic, and the History Channel, as well programs such as the TODAY show and Good Morning America.

#189

Malinda Carpenter

#21365

Overall Influence

Malinda Carpenter,Ph.D, FRSE is a professor of developmental psychology at the University of St Andrews, an international researcher specialising in infant and child communications, prosocial behaviour and group reactions, in how people learn to understand others, and building self esteem; her work includes research between ape and human social cognition, and more recently in considering human-robotic communication futures.

#190

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema

#32448

Overall Influence

1959 - 2013 (54 years)

Susan Kay Nolen-Hoeksema was an American professor of psychology at Yale University. Her research explored how mood regulation strategies could correlate to a person's vulnerability to depression, with special focus on a construct she called rumination as well as gender differences.

#191

Judith F. Kroll

#40314

Overall Influence

Judith F. Kroll is a Distinguished Professor of Language Science at University of California, Irvine. She specializes in psycholinguistics, focusing on second language acquisition and bilingual language processing. With Randi Martin and Suparna Rajaram, Kroll co-founded the organization Women in Cognitive Science in 2001. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science , the American Psychological Association , the Psychonomic Society, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Association for Psychological Science .

#192

Martha Farah

#20856

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Martha Julia Farah is a cognitive neuroscience researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. She has worked on an unusually wide range of topics; the citation for her lifetime achievement award from the Association for Psychological Science states that “Her studies on the topics of mental imagery, face recognition, semantic memory, reading, attention, and executive functioning have become classics in the field.”

#193

Catherine E. Snow

#22913

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Catherine Elizabeth Snow is an educational psychologist and applied linguist. In 2009 Snow was appointed to the Patricia Albjerg Graham Professorship in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, having previously held the Henry Lee Shattuck Professorship also in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Snow is past president of the American Educational Research Association . She chaired the RAND Corporation 'reading study group' from 1999.

#194

Eleanor Maguire

Eleanor Maguire

#12300

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Eleanor Anne Maguire is an Irish neuroscientist. Since 2007, she has been Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London where she is also a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow.

#195

Lisa Miller

#24687

Overall Influence

Lisa Jane Miller is an American professor, researcher and clinical psychologist, best known as a research scholar on spirituality in psychology. Miller is a tenured Full Professor at Columbia University, Teachers College in the Clinical Psychology Program and Founder of the Spirituality Mind Body Institute. Miller's published science on spirituality in renewal from addiction, depression and struggle has been reported in articles focusing on her research in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, as well as in television interviews and podcasts.

#196

Jennifer Crocker

#31548

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Dr. Jennifer Crocker is a professor and Ohio Eminent Scholar in Social Psychology at Ohio State University. She is also a former president of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Her publications are on the subject of self-esteem and the contingencies and interpersonal goals that individuals have that are a clear reflection of their level of self-esteem.

#197

Suniya S. Luthar

Suniya S. Luthar

#23870

Overall Influence

Suniya S. Luthar was Founder and executive director of AC Groups nonprofit, Professor Emerita at Teachers College-Columbia University, and Co-founder Emerita at Authentic Connections Co. She had previously served on the faculty at Yale University's Department of Psychiatry and the Yale Child Study Center and as Foundation Professor of Psychology at the Arizona State University.

#198

Gina Rippon

#23381

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Gina Rippon is a British neurobiologist and feminist. She is a professor emeritus of cognitive neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre, Aston University, Birmingham. Rippon has also sat on the editorial board of the International Journal of Psychophysiology. In 2019, Rippon published her book, Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience that Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain, which investigates the role of life experiences and biology in brain development.

#199

Karen Wynn

#33995

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Karen Wynn is an artist and a Canadian and American Yale University Professor Emerita of psychology and cognitive science. She was born in Austin, Texas, and grew up on the Canadian prairies in Regina, Saskatchewan. Her research explores the cognitive capacities of infants and young children. She directed for over 3 decades the Infant Cognition Laboratory, first in the Psychology Department at the University of Arizona, and then in the Psychology Department at Yale University.

#200

E. Mavis Hetherington

#38517

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (98 years)

E. Mavis Hetherington was a Canadian psychology professor at the University of Virginia. She was a leading researcher on the impacts of divorce, family as units, and child development. She published more than 200 articles and edited 13 books. Hetherington also introduced a new method of analyzing observational research.

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