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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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Psychology,

#251

Linda Steg

#50391

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Linda Steg is a Dutch psychologist who is Professor of Environmental Psychology at the University of Groningen. She studies the interaction between people and their environment and how people influence their local ecosystems. She was awarded the 2020 Dutch Research Council Stevin Prize.

#252

Michele J. Gelfand

Michele J. Gelfand

#42916

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Michele J. Gelfand is an American cultural psychologist. She is both a professor of organizational behavior and the John H. Scully professor of cross-cultural management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and – by courtesy – a professor of psychology at the School of Humanities and Sciences of Stanford University. She has published research on tightness–looseness theory.

#253

Marianne Simmel

#35289

Overall Influence

1923 - 2010 (87 years)

Marianne Leonore Simmel was a German-American psychologist with a special interest in cognitive neuropsychology. The granddaughter of famed sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel, she was born into an assimilated Jewish family in Jena, Thuringia, Germany, to doctors Hans Eugen Simmel, a professor, and his wife, Else Rose, a pediatrician. She had younger siblings Eva Barbara, Arnold Georg and Gerhard Friedrich. She immigrated to the United States in March 1940 with her family as a stateless refugee and applied for citizenship later that year. The family was initially divided across New York City; the parents stayed at a lodging house while their children lived at various friends' homes.

#254

Erika Fromm

#55311

Overall Influence

1909 - 2003 (94 years)

Erika Fromm was a German-American psychologist and co-founder of hypnoanalysis. Life Erika Fromm was born Erika Oppenheimer in Frankfurt, the daughter of physician, Siegfried Oppenheimer, and Clementine Oppenheimer who died weeks after giving birth. She developed an early interest in psychoanalysis and the writings of Sigmund Freud. She decided on an academic career and graduated in 1933 with a PhD from the University of Frankfurt, where she studied with Max Wertheimer, the father of Gestalt theory.

#255

Dorothy Espelage

#62667

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Dorothy Espelage is an American psychologist. She is the William C. Friday Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of North Carolina , and an international expert in bullying, youth aggression, and teen dating violence. She has authored several books including Bullying in North American Schools, Bullying Prevention and Intervention: Realistic Strategies for Schools, and Handbook of Bullying in Schools: an International Perspective.

#256

Karen A. Matthews

#69822

Overall Influence

Karen A. Matthews is an American health psychologist known for her research on the epidemiology and risk factors associated with cardiovascular disease, early signs of coronary heart disease risk in children, women's health and menopause, and connections between socioeconomic status and health. She is Professor Emerita of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh.

#257

Lynn Hasher

#50864

Overall Influence

Lynn Hasher is a cognitive scientist known for research on attention, working memory, and inhibitory control. Hasher is Professor Emerita in the Psychology Department at the University of Toronto and Senior Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care.

#258

Jennifer Lerner

#21993

Overall Influence

Jennifer S. Lerner is an American experimental social psychologist known for her research in emotion and decision theory. She is the first psychologist at the Harvard Kennedy School to receive tenure. At Harvard, her titles include Professor of Public Policy and Management, Professor of Psychology , Faculty Director in the Graduate Commons Program, co-founder of the Harvard Decision Science Laboratory and co-director of the Harvard Faculty Group on Emotion, Decision Making, and Health. Her research interests include the effects of accountability on judgment and choice. She founded and directs...

#259

Virginia Braun

#52951

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Virginia Braun is a New Zealand psychology academic specialising in thematic analysis and gender studies. She is particularly known for her scholarship on the social construction of the vagina and designer vagina cosmetic surgery, body hair and heterosexuality. She is perhaps best known for her collaboration with British psychologist Victoria Clarke around thematic analysis and qualitative research methods. Together they have published numerous papers, chapters, commentaries and editorials on thematic analysis and qualitative research, and an award-winning and best selling qualitative textbook entitled Successful qualitative research.

#260

Isabel Gauthier

#48555

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Isabel Gauthier is a cognitive neuroscientist currently holding the position of David K. Wilson Professor of Psychology and head of the Object Perception Lab at Vanderbilt University’s Department of Psychology. In 2000, with the support of the James S. McDonnell Foundation, she founded the Perceptual Expertise Network , which now comprises over ten labs based across North America. In 2006 PEN became part of the NSF-funded Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center .

#261

Linda E. Carlson

#60763

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Linda E. Carlson is a Canadian clinical psychologist. She is a professor at the University of Calgary, where she holds the Enbridge Research Chair in Psychosocial Oncology. Education and career Carlson earned an undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Calgary in 1991, and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from McGill University in 1998.

#262

Diana Fosha

#28103

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Diana Foșha is a Romanian-American psychologist, known for developing accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy , and for her work on the psychotherapy of adults suffering the effects of childhood attachment trauma and abuse.

#263

Virginia Douglas

#38994

Overall Influence

1927 - 2017 (90 years)

Virginia I. Douglas was a Canadian psychologist. She was a professor at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, noted for her contributions to the study of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder . Biography Douglas was born in London, Ontario to a Scottish family. She completed a Bachelor of Arts degree at Queen's University in 1948. Douglas then attended the University of Michigan, where she completed two master's degrees: one in social work and the other in psychology . She earned her PhD in psychology from the University of Michigan in 1958.

#264

Mahzarin Banaji

Mahzarin Banaji

#52835

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

#265

Jarrod Haar

#57125

Overall Influence

Jarrod McKenzie Haar is a New Zealand organisational psychology academic, are Māori, of Ngati Maniapoto and Ngati Mahuta descent and as of 2019 is a full professor at the Auckland University of Technology. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi.

#266

Naomi Ellemers

#51637

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Naomi Ellemers is a distinguished professor of social psychology at Utrecht University since September 2015. In 2023, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. Career Ellemers studied social psychology at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen from 1981 to1987 and graduated in 1991 in Groningen with her thesis Identity management strategies, followed by a position as assistant professor and later as associate professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Between 1999 and 2015 she was a professor at Universiteit Leiden with the assignment sociale psychologie van de organisatie . Since September 2015 she is distinguished professor at Universiteit Utrecht.

#267

Renée Baillargeon

#55892

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Renée Baillargeon is a Canadian American research psychologist. An Alumni Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Baillargeon specializes in the development of cognition in infancy.

#268

Anne Castles

#60211

Overall Influence

Anne Castles is a cognitive scientist of reading and language, with a particular focus on reading development and developmental dyslexia. Early life Castles was born in Canberra, Australia and attended St Clare's College, Canberra finishing in 1982. She later moved to Sydney.

#269

Kathleen Merikangas

#56443

Overall Influence

Kathleen Ries Merikangas is the Chief of the Genetic Epidemiology Research Branch in the Intramural Research Program at the National Institute of Mental Health and an adjunct professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She has published more than 300 papers, and is best known for her work in adolescent mental disorders.

#270

Maryellen MacDonald

#63435

Overall Influence

Maryellen MacDonald is Donald P. Hayes Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She specializes in psycholinguistics, focusing specifically on the relationship between language comprehension and production and the role of working memory. MacDonald received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1986. She is a fellow of the Cognitive Science Society. She is married to fellow psychologist Mark Seidenberg and has two children.

#271

Nalini Ambady

#49382

Overall Influence

1959 - 2013 (54 years)

Nalini Ambady was an Indian-American social psychologist and a leading expert on nonverbal behavior and interpersonal perception. She was born in Calcutta, India and earned her bachelor’s degree at Lady Shri Ram College for women, Delhi University. She furthered her education by moving to the United States for her master’s degree in psychology, from the College of William and Mary, and later received her PhD in social psychology from Harvard. While completing her research at Harvard, she met her husband Raj Marphatia, who was studying at Harvard Law school.

#272

Jeanne Brooks-Gunn

#41209

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Jeanne Brooks-Gunn is an American developmental psychologist and professor. She is currently the Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Child Development at Teachers College, Columbia University. Education Brooks-Gunn received her B.A in psychology at Connecticut College in 1969. She went to graduate school at Harvard University where she obtained her Ed.M in Human Learning and Development in 1970. Brooks-Gunn continued her studies the University of Pennsylvania, receiving her Ph.D. in human learning and development under the supervision of Michael Lewis.

#273

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore

#34283

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore is Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge and co-director of the Wellcome Trust PhD Programme Neuroscience at University College London.

#274

Barbara Mellers

#36001

Overall Influence

Barbara Ann Mellers is I. George Heyman University Professor in the psychology department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on decision processes. Education Mellers earned her undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1974. She went on to do graduate work in psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, earning an M.A. in 1978 and a Ph.D. in 1981.

#275

Beatrice de Gelder

#51038

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Beatrice M. L. de Gelder is a cognitive neuroscientist and neuropsychologist. She is professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and director of the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at the Tilburg University , and was senior scientist at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Harvard Medical School, Boston . She joined the Department of Cognitive Neuroscince at Maastricht University in 2012. Her research interests include behavioral and neural emotion processing from facial and bodily expressions, multisensory perception and interaction between auditory and visual processes, and nonconscious perception in neurological patients.

#276

Martha Stout

#33898

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Martha Stout is an American psychologist and author. Education, training, and career Stout completed her professional training in psychology at the McLean Psychiatric Hospital and obtained her Ph.D. at Stony Brook University. She served on the clinical faculty of the Harvard Medical School for over 25 years and also served on the academic faculties of The New School for Social Research, the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, and Wellesley College. She writes on the subjects of conscience, character, and integrated awareness. Her work in psychology and cultural commentary has appeared in The Boston Globe and HuffPost, and she is a contributing writer for The New Republic.

#277

Jennifer Freyd

#29831

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Jennifer Joy Freyd is an American psychologist, researcher, author, educator, and speaker. Freyd is an extensively published scholar who is best known for her theories of betrayal trauma, DARVO, institutional betrayal, and institutional courage.

#278

Susan Lederman

#48590

Overall Influence

Susan J. Lederman is a Canadian experimental psychologist. She is a professor emerita in the Department of Psychology at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She is recognized for her contributions to the field of haptics.

#279

Susan Goldin-Meadow

Susan Goldin-Meadow

#45875

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Comparative Human Development, the college, and the Committee on Education at the University of Chicago. She is the principal investigator of a 10-year program project grant, funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, designed to explore the impact of environmental and biological variation on language growth. She is also a co-PI of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center , one of six Science of Learning Centers funded by the National Science Foundation to explore learning in an interdisciplinary framework with an eye toward theory and application.

#280

Helen Tager-Flusberg

#55212

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Helen Tager-Flusberg is an American psychology who is professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Science at Boston University and the Departments of Anatomy and Neurobiology and Pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine . She is the Director of the Center for Autism Research Excellence at Boston University.

#281

Shirley Pearce

#22461

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Dame Shirley Anne Pearce is a British academic and psychologist. She is Chair of Court and Council at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a member of the Higher Education Quality Assurance Panel for the Ministry of Education .

#282

Jane Fernandes

#11094

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Jane Fernandes is a Deaf American educator and social justice advocate. As of August 2021, Fernandes is the President of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. She previously served as president of Guilford College from 2014 to 2021.

#283

Yasmin Kafai

#20015

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Yasmin B. Kafai is a German American academic who is Professor of Learning Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, with a secondary appointment in Computer and Information Sciences at University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science. She is a past president of the International Society of the Learning Sciences , and an executive editor of the Journal of the Learning Sciences.

#284

Marigold Linton

#45514

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Marigold Linton is a cognitive psychologist and member of the Morongo Band of Cahuilla Mission Indians. In 1964, she became the first Native American to earn a doctorate in psychology. In 1974, she co–founded the National Indian Education Association. Her research in long-term memory is widely cited in psychology. She is director for mathematics and science initiatives in the University of Texas system, where she is responsible for bringing minority students into those two fields. She has been president of the Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science.

#285

Elizabeth Gershoff

Elizabeth Gershoff

#8040

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Elizabeth Thompson Gershoff is Professor of Human Development and Family Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. She is known for her research on the impact of corporal punishment in the home and at school on children and their mental health.

#286

Bonnie E. John

#32952

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Bonnie E. John is an American cognitive psychologist who studies human–computer interaction, predictive human performance modeling, and the relationship between usability and software architecture. She was a founding member of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, a research staff member at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and the director of computation and innovation at The Cooper Union. She is currently a UX designer at Bloomberg L.P.

#287

Jenny Saffran

#34558

Overall Influence

Jenny Saffran is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She specializes in language acquisition and early cognitive development, and she also conducts research on music cognition. Saffran views language acquisition as based on general cognitive processes such as statistical learning, and has conducted numerous empirical studies that support this view. She received a B.A. from Brown University and a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. Saffran is married to fellow psychologist Seth Pollak, and she is the daughter of cognitive neuropsychologist Eleanor Saffran.

#288

Julia Heiman

#34673

Overall Influence

Dr Julia R. Heiman is an American sexologist and psychologist. The sixth Director of The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University, she began on June 1, 2004. Dr. Heiman is also a professor in the Psychology Department at Indiana University with a joint appointment in the Psychiatry Department at the IU School of Medicine in Indianapolis.

#289

Patricia Deegan

#28266

Overall Influence

Patricia E. Deegan is an American disability-rights advocate, psychologist and researcher. She has been described as a "national spokesperson for the mental health consumer/survivor movement in the United States." Deegan is known as an advocate of the mental health recovery movement and is an international speaker and trainer in the field of mental health.

#290

Evelyn Torton Beck

#36710

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Evelyn Torton Beck has been described as "a scholar, a teacher, a feminist, and an outspoken Jew and lesbian". Until her retirement in 2002 she specialized in women's studies, Jewish women's studies and lesbian studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.

#291

Francine Patterson

#10740

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Francine "Penny" Patterson is an American animal psychologist. From 1972 onwards, she taught a modified form of American Sign Language, which she called "Gorilla Sign Language" to a gorilla named Koko. The scientific validity of Patterson's claims about the extent of Koko's language mastery has been debated.

#292

Dorothea Jameson

#36237

Overall Influence

1920 - 1998 (78 years)

Dorothea Jameson was an American cognitive psychologist who greatly contributed to the field of color and vision. Biography Jameson was born in Newton, Massachusetts. She went to Wellesley College. She elected psychology as her major in her first year because she was "intrigued that freshmen required special permission to enroll". She graduated in 1942. While at Welleseley she volunteered as a research assistant at Harvard, where she met her future husband, Leo Hurvich. They married in 1948.

#293

Vera King

#59772

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Vera King is a German sociologist and social psychologist. She has been Professor of Sociology and Social Psychology at Goethe University Frankfurt and Director of the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt am Main since 2016.

#294

Ellyn Kaschak

#50383

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Ellyn Kaschak , is an American clinical psychologist, Professor of Psychology at San Jose State University. She is one of the founders of the field of feminist psychology, which she has practiced and taught since 1972. Her many publications, including Engendered Lives: A New Psychology of Women's Experience , and Sight Unseen: Gender and Race through Blind Eyes , have helped define the field. She was the editor of the academic journal, Women & Therapy. for twenty years.

#295

Mary C. Potter

#51539

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Mary Crawford Potter is an American psychologist and emerita professor of cognitive science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Cognitive Science Society, and the Society of Experimental Psychologists.

#296

Rosalind Barnett

#55410

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Rosalind C. Barnett is an American research psychologist and author. She has hosted the annual Ann Richards Roundtable on Gender and the Media at Brandeis University. Barnett has been identified as one of the top 25 work-family researchers in the world.

#297

Lily McNair

#41628

Overall Influence

Lily McNair is an American academic administrator who served as the president of Tuskegee University, a historically black university in Tuskegee, Alabama, from 2018 to 2020. Biography Early life and education McNair is from New Jersey. She earned a bachelor's degree in psychology at Princeton University, graduating in 1979. She then earned her Master's and doctoral degrees from Stony Brook University. Her thesis examined alcohol consumption among female college students.

#298

Emily Bushnell

#66155

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Emily W. Bushnell is an American psychologist and emeritus professor of psychology at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, USA. Her areas of professional interest include child development, infant perception, haptic perception and acquisition of perceptual-motor skills. Professor Bushnell received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Minnesota in 1979 and a BA in psychology from Swarthmore College in 1972. She served as chair of the Tufts Psychology Department from 1993 to 1996 and sat on the editorial board of the journal Child Development.

#299

Daphne Bavelier

#55151

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Daphné Bavelier is a French cognitive neuroscientist specialized in brain plasticity and learning. She is full Professor at the University of Geneva in the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences. She heads the Brain and Learning lab at Campus Biotech in Geneva, Switzerland.

#300

Asifa Majid

#35324

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Asifa Majid is a psychologist, linguist and cognitive scientist who is professor of language, communication and cultural cognition at the University of Oxford, UK. Biography Majid's academic career began at the University of Glasgow, where she took first an undergraduate degree and then a PhD in psychology; she also worked there as a lecturer in 2000-2001. From 2001 to 2012 she was based at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, initially as a Marie Curie fellow and later as a scientific staff member and senior researcher. In 2012 she took up a position as professor of lan...

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