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).
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.
List of the most influential female people in Psychology,
#201
Beatrice Wright
#32880
Overall Influence
1917 - 2018 (101 years)
Beatrice Ann Wright was an American psychologist known for her work in Rehabilitation psychology. She was the author of a seminal work on disability and psychology, Physical Disability—A Psychological Approach and its second edition, retitled Physical Disability—A Psychosocial Approach .
Go to Profile#202
Ana Mari Cauce
#20180
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Ana Mari Cauce is an American psychologist and academic administrator, currently serving as the 33rd president of the University of Washington since October 2015. Joining the University of Washington in 1986, Cauce previously served as the university's provost and executive vice president from 2011 to 2015, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 2008 to 2011, executive vice provost from 2005 to 2008, chair of the department of psychology from 2002 to 2005, and director of the honor program from 2000 to 2002.
Go to Profile#203
Janet Dean Fodor
#25525
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Janet Dean Fodor was distinguished professor emerita of linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her primary field was psycholinguistics, and her research interests included human sentence processing, prosody, learnability theory and L1 acquisition.
Go to Profile#204
Phyllis Chesler
#7798
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Phyllis Chesler is an American writer, psychotherapist, and professor emerita of psychology and women's studies at the College of Staten Island . She is a renowned second-wave feminist psychologist and the author of 18 books, including the best-sellers Women and Madness , With Child: A Diary of Motherhood , and An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir . Chesler has written extensively about topics such as gender, mental illness, divorce and child custody, surrogacy, second-wave feminism, pornography, prostitution, incest, and violence against women.
Go to Profile#205
Tali Sharot
#17512
Overall Influence
Tali Sharot is an Israeli/British/American neuroscientist and professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and MIT. Sharot began studying at Tel Aviv University, receiving a B.A. in economics in 1999, and an M.A. in psychology from New York University in 2002. She received her Ph.D in psychology and neuroscience from New York University. Sharot is known for her research on the neural basis of emotion, decision making and optimism. Sharot hopes to better understand these processes to enhance overall well-being.
Go to Profile#206
Usha Goswami
#34035
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Usha Claire Goswami is a researcher and professor of Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, and the director of the Centre for Neuroscience in Education, Downing Site. She obtained her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of Oxford before becoming a professor of cognitive developmental psychology at the University College London. Goswami's work is primarily in educational neuroscience with major focuses on reading development and developmental dyslexia.
Go to Profile#207
Elissa L. Newport
#17945
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Elissa Lee Newport is a professor of neurology and director of the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery at Georgetown University. She specializes in language acquisition and developmental psycholinguistics, focusing on the relationship between language development and language structure, and most recently on the effects of pediatric stroke on the organization and recovery of language.
Go to Profile#208
Mary Henle
#38875
Overall Influence
1913 - 2007 (94 years)
Mary Henle was an American psychologist who's known most notably for her contributions to Gestalt Psychology and for her involvement in the American Psychological Association. Henle also taught at the New School of Social Research in New York; she was involved in the writing of eight book publications and also helped develop the first psychology laboratory manual in 1948 based on the famous works of Kurt Lewin.
Go to Profile#209
Susie Orbach
#11020
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Susie Orbach is a British psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, writer and social critic. Her first book, Fat is a Feminist Issue, analysed the psychology of dieting and over-eating in women, and she has campaigned against media pressure on girls to feel dissatisfied with their physical appearance. She was married to the author Jeanette Winterson. She is honoured in BBC'S 100 Women in 2013 and 2014. She was the therapist to Diana, Princess of Wales during the 1990s.
Go to Profile#210
Florence Denmark
#43057
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Florence Harriet Levin Denmark is an American psychologist and a past president of the American Psychological Association . She is a pioneering female psychologist who has influenced the psychological sciences through her scholarly and academic accomplishments in both psychology and feminist movements. She has contributed to psychology in several ways, specifically in the field of psychology of women and human rights, both nationally and internationally.
Go to Profile#211
Dana Amir
#32753
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Dana Amir is a full professor at Haifa University, clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, poet and literature researcher. Biography Dana Amir was born and raised in Haifa and attended the Hebrew Reali School. She has B.A. in psychology and philosophy, M.A. in clinical psychology and Ph.D in the philosophy of psychoanalysis. She wrote her PhD thesis on The Lyrical Dimension of Mental Space. All degrees were obtained from Haifa University.
Go to Profile#212
Tamara Dembo
#41719
Overall Influence
1902 - 1993 (91 years)
Tamara Dembo , was a Russian Empire-born American psychologist. She was one of the pioneers of psychological field theory and rehabilitation psychology. Life Tamara Dembo was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, Russian Empire on 28 May 1902 to Russian Jewish parents. She worked with Kurt Lewin where she earned her Ph.D at the University of Berlin in 1930. That same year she came to the United States to study with Kurt Koffka at Smith College as a research assistant in experimental psychology and decided to remain in the United States as the political situation in Germany deteriorated with the rise of the Nazi Party.
Go to Profile#213
Judith V. Jordan
#39779
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Judith V. Jordan is the co-director and a founding scholar of the Jean Baker Miller Institute and co-director of the institute's Working Connections Project. She is an attending psychologist at McLean Hospital and assistant professor of psychology at the Harvard Medical School. She works as a psychotherapist, supervisor, teacher and consultant. Jordan's development of relational-cultural therapy has served as a foundation for other scholars who have used this theory to explore the workplace, education. leadership and entrepreneurship.
Go to Profile#214
Kristina Olson
#28846
Overall Influence
Kristina Reiss Olson is a psychologist and a professor at Princeton University. She is known for her research on the development of social categories, transgender youth, and variation in human gender development. Olson was recipient of the 2016 Janet Taylor Spence Award from the Association for Psychological Science for transformative early career contributions, and the 2014 SAGE Young Scholars Award. Olson received the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation in 2018, and was the first psychological scientist to receive this prestigious award honoring early-career scientists.
Go to Profile#215
Anne Cutler
#29824
Overall Influence
1945 - 2022 (77 years)
Elizabeth Anne Cutler FRS FBA FASSA was an Australian psycholinguist, who served as director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. A pioneer in her field, Cutler's work focused on human listeners' recognition and decoding of spoken language. Following her retirement from the Max Planck Institute in 2012, she took a professorship at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University.
Go to Profile#216
Amélie Mummendey
#57955
Overall Influence
1944 - 2018 (74 years)
Amélie Mummendey was a German social psychologist. From 2007 until her death, she was a Vice-Rector for the Graduate Academy at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. Biography Amélie Mummendey completed her M.Sc. in Psychology at the University of Bonn, followed by her PhD at the University of Mainz in 1970, and her Habilitation at the University of Münster in 1974. She held a chair in social psychology at the University of Münster before taking up a chair in social psychology at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena in 1997. In 2007, Mummendey was elected as the first Vice-Rector for th...
Go to Profile#217
Susan M. Ervin-Tripp
#26528
Overall Influence
1927 - 2018 (91 years)
Susan Moore Ervin-Tripp was an American linguist whose psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research focused on the relation between language use and the development of linguistic forms, especially the developmental changes and structure of interpersonal talk among children.
Go to Profile#218
Ann Masten
#31897
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Ann S. Masten is a professor at the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota known for her research on the development of resilience and for advancing theory on the positive outcomes of children and families facing adversity. Masten received the American Psychological Association Urie Bronfenbrenner Award for Lifetime Contributions to the Service of Science and Society in 2014. She has served as president of the Society for Research in Child Development and of Division 7 of the American Psychological Association.
Go to Profile#219
Wendy Berry Mendes
#52622
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Wendy Berry Mendes is the Sarlo/Ekman Professor of Emotion at University of California, San Francisco, United States. She was previously the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard University. Her expertise is in the area of emotion, intergroup relationships, stigma and psychophysiology. At UCSF she is the founder and director of the Emotion, Health, and Psychophysiology Lab in the Department of Psychiatry.
Go to Profile#220
Denise Rousseau
#28798
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Denise Rousseau is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. She holds an H.J. Heinz III Chair in Organizational Behavior and Public Policy, Heinz College and jointly Tepper School of Business. In 2007, she founded the Evidence-Based Management Collaborative to promote the development and dissemination of Evidence-based Management teaching and practice. Operating as the Center for Evidence-Based Management , this Collaborative helps educators and practitioners make better use of evidence from science, data, stakeholders and experience in organizational decisions. Rousseau serves as CEBMa's Academic Chair.
Go to Profile#221
Dorothy Rowe
#25104
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Dorothy Rowe was an Australian-British psychologist and author, whose area of interest was depression. Biography Dorothy Conn was born on 17 December 1930 in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia. Rowe came to England in her forties, working at Sheffield University and was the head of Lincolnshire Department of Clinical Psychology. In addition to her published works on depression, she was a regular columnist in the UK.
Go to Profile#222
Yuliya Gippenreyter
#55438
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Julia Gippenreiter is a modern Russian psychologist, a specialist in experimental psychology, psychophysiology, family therapy and neuro-linguistic programming. Gippenreiter is one of the founders of psychotherapy in Russia. Her doctoral thesis studied psychophysiology of eye movement in the context of various performances.
Go to Profile#223
Susan Saegert
#33793
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Susan Camille Saegert , Guadalupe, Texas is Professor of Environmental Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She was previously Professor of Human and Organizational Development at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN.
Go to Profile#224
Angela O'Donnell
#49799
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Angela M. O'Donnell is an educational psychologist at Rutgers University who has made substantial contributions to the understanding of collaborative learning , and is the co-author of a widely used introductory textbook . She is a member of the editorial review boards of Contemporary Educational Psychology, Educational Psychologist, Educational Psychology Review, the Journal of Experimental Education, and the Journal of Educational Psychology.
Go to Profile#225
Emily A. Holmes
#37733
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Emily A. Holmes is a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist known for her research on mental imagery in relation to psychological treatments for post traumatic stress disorder , bipolar disorder, and depression. Holmes is Professor of Clinical Neuroscience at Karolinska Institute in Sweden. She also holds an appointment as Honorary Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#226
Carol Fowler
#31255
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Carol Ann Fowler is an American experimental psychologist. She was president and director of research at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut from 1992 to 2008. She is also a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut and adjunct professor of linguistics and psychology at Yale University. She received her undergraduate degree from Brown University in 1971, her M.A University of Connecticut in 1973 and her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Connecticut in 1977.
Go to Profile#227
Sara Shettleworth
#45535
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Sara J. Shettleworth is an American-born, Canadian experimental psychologist and zoologist. Her research focuses on animal cognition. She is professor emerita of psychology and ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto.
Go to Profile#228
Sonia Livingstone
#33351
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Sonia Livingstone is a leading British scholar on the subjects of children, media and the Internet. She is Professor of Social Psychology and former head of the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. While Livingstone’s research has evolved since the start of her career in the 1980s, her recent work explores media and communication in relation to society, children and technology. Livingstone has authored or edited twenty-four books and hundreds of academic articles and chapters. She is known for her continued public engagement about her...
Go to Profile#229
Nancy J. Nersessian
#34064
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Nancy J. Nersessian is the Regents' Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her work tends to be in the areas of the philosophy of science, the history of science, and the psychology of science.
Go to Profile#230
Nancy Cantor
#15460
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Nancy Ellen Cantor is an American academic administrator and the chancellor of Rutgers University-Newark, in Newark, New Jersey. A social psychologist, Cantor is recognized for her scholarly contributions to the understanding of how individuals perceive and think about their social worlds, pursue personal goals, and how they regulate their behavior to adapt to life's most challenging social environments. Previously, Cantor was the first woman chancellor at Syracuse University. Prior to that she was the first woman chancellor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Earlier, she had ...
Go to Profile#231
Camilla Benbow
#33553
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Camilla Persson Benbow is a Swedish-born American educational psychologist and a university professor. She studies the education of intellectually gifted students. Biography Camilla Benbow is the Patricia and Rodes Hart Dean of Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College. She is an educational psychologist who has focused on education of intellectually gifted young people. Benbow is co-director of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth , a longitudinal study that examines the development of over 5,000 individuals over their life-spans. Her interests focu...
Go to Profile#232
Molly J. Crockett
#51506
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Molly J. Crockett is an American neuroscientist who studies human morality, altruism and decision making. She received the 2019 Janet Taylor Spence Award from the Association for Psychological Science.
Go to Profile#233
Randi Martin
#60580
Overall Influence
Randi Martin is the Elma Schneider Professor of Psychology at Rice University and Director of the T. L. L. Temple Foundation Neuroplasticity Research Laboratory. With Suparna Rajaram and Judith Kroll, Martin co-founded Women in Cognitive Science in 2001, an organization supported in part through the National Science Foundation's ADVANCE Leadership program. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Society of Experimental Psychologists .
Go to Profile#234
Leona S. Aiken
#48504
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Leona Ruth Silver Aiken is an American President's Professor of psychology at Arizona State University. She is the co-author of two widely used statistics textbooks, Applied Multiple Regression/Correlation Analysis for the Behavior Sciences and Multiple Regression: Testing and interpreting interactions.
Go to Profile#235
Roberta Michnick Golinkoff
#30784
Overall Influence
Roberta Michnick Golinkoff holds the Unidel H. Rodney Sharp Chair in the School of Education at the University of Delaware and is also a member of the Departments of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Linguistics and Cognitive Science.
Go to Profile#236
Linda Argote
#12274
Overall Influence
Linda Argote is an American academic specializing in industrial and organizational psychology. She is Thomas Lord Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory in the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, where she directs the Center of Organizational Learning, Innovation and Knowledge.
Go to Profile#237
Cynthia M. Bulik
#38644
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Cynthia Marie Bulik is an American psychologist and author. Bulik is perhaps best known for her clinical work and research on eating disorders in the United States. She is the Founding Director of the University of North Carolina Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders, the founder and director of the Centre for Eating Disorders Innovation at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, a Distinguished Professor of Eating Disorders in the Department of Psychiatry of the School of Medicine at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a professor of Nutrition in the Gillings School of Global Public Health.
Go to Profile#238
Marlene Scardamalia
#15032
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Marlene Scardamalia is an education researcher, professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Contributions She is considered one of the pioneers in computer-supported collaborative learning. Other areas of research where Scardamalia made contributions are:Cognitive developmentEducational uses of computersIntentional learningThe nature of expertisePsychology of writingResearch-based innovation in learning and knowledge workKnowledge innovation.Since the 1980s she supervised the design, development and research of Computer Supported Intentional Learning Environments .
Go to Profile#239
Barbara Sahakian
#26557
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Barbara Jacquelyn Sahakian, is professor of clinical neuropsychology at the department of psychiatry and Medical Research Council /Wellcome Trust Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, University of Cambridge. She is also an honorary clinical psychologist at Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge. She has an international reputation in the fields of cognitive psychopharmacology, neuroethics, neuropsychology, neuropsychiatry and neuroimaging.
Go to Profile#240
Marcia Linn
#44135
Overall Influence
Marcia C. Linn is a professor of development and cognition. Linn, specializes in education in mathematics, science, and technology in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 1970, Linn has made contributions to the understanding of the use of computers and technology to support learning and teaching in mathematics and science.
Go to Profile#241
Linda Mealey
#40894
Overall Influence
1955 - 2002 (47 years)
Linda Jeanne Mealey was an American evolutionary psychologist and professor at the College of Saint Benedict. Biography Mealey was born in San Diego, California on December 17, 1955, and grew up mainly in Cincinnati, Ohio. She received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in December 1984. She joined the faculty of the College of Saint Benedict in 1985 as an assistant professor, and became an associate professor there in 1991. She was affiliated with the University of Queensland's School of Psychology from 1996 to 1998, and remained an adjunct professor there until her death from ca...
Go to Profile#242
Deanna Barch
#64054
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Deanna Marie Barch is an American psychologist. She is a chair and professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and the Gregory B. Couch Professor of Psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research includes disorders such as schizophrenia, depression, cognitive and language deficits. She also focuses on behavioral, pharmacological, and neuroimaging studies with normal and clinical populations. Barch is a deputy editor at Biological Psychiatry. She previously served as editor-in-chief of Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience.
Go to Profile#243
Phoebe C. Ellsworth
#37530
Overall Influence
Phoebe C. Ellsworth is an American social psychologist and professor at the University of Michigan, holding dual appointments at the Psychology Department and in the Law School. Biography Ellsworth received her B.A. from Radcliffe College in 1966 and her Ph.D. in social psychology from Stanford University in 1970.
Go to Profile#244
Deanna Kuhn
#46807
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Deanna Zipse Kuhn is an American psychologist. She is Professor of Psychology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is known for contributions to the psychology of science – the scientific study of scientific thought and behavior. Her research program has focused on the development of scientific reasoning skills, critical thinking, metacognition, informal reasoning, and constructivist teaching methods, such as problem-based learning and collaborative learning.
Go to Profile#245
Nancy Cole
#43776
Overall Influence
Nancy Cole is an educational psychologist and expert on educational assessment. Cole is past president of the American Educational Research Association and the Educational Testing Service , and former Dean of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of North Carolina. Her undergraduate education in psychology was at Rice University .
Go to Profile#246
Mary P. Koss
#36378
Overall Influence
Mary P. Koss is an American Regents' Professor at the University of Arizona, Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health in Tucson, Arizona. Her best known works have been in the areas of gender-based violence and restorative justice.
Go to Profile#247
Cordelia Fine
#11358
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Cordelia Fine is a Canadian-born British philosopher of science, psychologist, and writer. She is a full professor in the History and Philosophy of Science programme at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Fine has written three popular science books on the topics of social cognition, neuroscience, and the popular myths of sex differences. Her latest book, Testosterone Rex, won the Royal Society Science Book Prize, 2017. She has authored several academic book chapters and numerous academic publications. Fine is also noted for coining the term 'neurosexism'.
Go to Profile#248
Matina Horner
#26838
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Matina Souretis Horner is an American psychologist who was the sixth president of Radcliffe College. Her research interests included intelligence, motivation, and achievement of women. She is known for pioneering the concept of "fear of success".
Go to Profile#249
Isabelle Peretz
#51373
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Isabelle Peretz is a professor of psychology at the University of Montreal, holding a Canada Research Chair and Casavant Chair in neurocognition of music. She specializes in music cognition, focusing on congenital and acquired musical disorders and on the cognitive and biological foundations of music processing in general.
Go to Profile#250
Susan Gelman
#31230
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Susan A. Gelman is currently Heinz Werner Distinguished University Professor of psychology and linguistics and the director of the Conceptual Development Laboratory at the University of Michigan. Gelman studies language and concept development in young children. Gelman subscribes to the domain specificity view of cognition, which asserts that the mind is composed of specialized modules supervising specific functions in the human and other animals. Her book The Essential Child is an influential work on cognitive development.
Go to Profile