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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List of the most influential female people in Psychology,

#401

Elena Lieven

#42966

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Elena Lieven is a British psychology and linguistics researcher and educator. She was a senior research scientist in the Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology in Leipzig, Germany. She is also a professor in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Manchester where she is director of its Child Study Centre and leads the ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development .

#402

Mary Florentine

#35803

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Mary Florentine is a Matthews Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University specialising in psychoacoustics with interests in models of hearing , non-native speech comprehension in background noise, cross-cultural attitudes towards noise, and hearing loss prevention. Her primary collaborator is Søren Buus.

#403

Rachel Barr

#60118

Overall Influence

Rachel Barr is a professor at Georgetown University. She is currently the co-director of graduate studies in the Department of Psychology at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on understanding the learning and memory mechanisms that develop during infancy. Because infants are preverbal, her techniques rely on imitation and learning methods to find out what infants have learned and how well and how long they remember it. Her previous research has focused on how infants pick up information from different media sources, television, siblings, adults, and different contexts. Most recently...

#404

Darcia Narvaez

#60222

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Darcia Narvaez is a Professor of Psychology Emerita at the University of Notre Dame who has written extensively on issues of character, moral development, and human flourishing. Biography Narvaez was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her father, Richard Narvaez, was a professor of Spanish linguistics at the University of Minnesota. Darcia Narvaez spent part of her childhood in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Colombia, and Spain. Her first job was with the local public television station in St. Paul, Minnesota, as a 8- and 9-year-old: she was the voice of the puppet, Maria, on the Spanish-language-teachi...

#405

Wendy M. Williams

#50830

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Wendy M. Williams is a psychologist and professor known for her research in the fields of intelligence with regards to training and development. Williams is a professor at Cornell University in their Department of Human Development. Williams is also the founder of the Cornell Institute for Women in Science , a center with the intended purpose for studying and promoting women in science. Working alongside the National Science Foundation, Williams leads the "Thinking Like a Scientist" program, which intends to diversify the science community by getting girls and other underrepresented groups in...

#406

Carol D. Goodheart

#71178

Overall Influence

Carol D. Goodheart is an American psychologist and a past president of the American Psychological Association . Goodheart worked as a nurse before entering psychology. She completed a doctorate in counseling psychology from Rutgers University. While serving as the 2010 APA president, Goodheart supported the Presidential Task Force on Advancing Practice and the Presidential Task Force on Caregivers. Goodheart is in private practice in Princeton, New Jersey.

#407

Linda Skitka

#64682

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Linda J. Skitka is a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Skitka's research bridges a number of areas of inquiry including social, political, and moral psychology. Publications She has authored or co-authored papers for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Social Justice Research, and Political Psychology. She is best known for her research into justice and fairness, moral conviction, and political reasoning.

#408

Jan Haaken

#82260

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Janice Kay "Jan" Haaken is an American clinical psychologist, documentarian, and professor emeritus of Community and Clinical Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Portland State University.

#409

Tina Malti

#62713

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Tina Malti is a Canadian-German child psychologist of Palestinian descent. She currently holds an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship for Early Child Development and Health as the first child psychologist and female psychologist in the award's history. She directs the Alexander von Humboldt Research Group for Child Development as research chair at Leipzig University. She is also a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and founding director of the Centre for Child Development, Mental Health, and Policy at the University of Toronto.

#410

Camille Wortman

#85950

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Camille B. Wortman is a clinical health psychologist and expert on grief and coping in response to traumatic events and loss. She is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Stony Brook University. Wortman received the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution in Social Psychology in 1980, in recognition of her research "providing stimulating and influential analyses of how people react to uncontrollable outcomes and cope with undesirable life events." She was the recipient of a joint award from the APA Science Directorate and the Nationa...

#411

Emily Simonoff

#45983

Overall Influence

Emily Simonoff is Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services Neuropsychiatry Service, head of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry department at the Institute of Psychiatry and lead for the CAMHS Clinical Academic Group at King's Health Partners, King's College London.

#412

Debra Pepler

#18234

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Debra Pepler is a Canadian psychologist known for her research and advocacy within the field of childhood aggression and bullying. She is currently a distinguished research professor at York University in Toronto, Ontario.

#413

Molly Harrower

#50525

Overall Influence

1906 - 1999 (93 years)

Molly Harrower was an American clinical psychologist. During the Second World War she created a large-scale multiple choice Rorschach test. She was one of the first clinical psychologists to open a private practice. Specializing in diagnostics, Harrower developed a scale allowing practitioners to predict which patients would profit from psychotherapy.

#414

Lori L. Holt

#82773

Overall Influence

Lori L. Holt is a Professor of Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in speech perception, focusing on how general perceptual and cognitive mechanisms contribute to speech perception and how speech can be used to broadly understand auditory cognition. In pursuit of these research areas, she has employed human perceptual and learning paradigms as well as animal behavioral experiments and computational models. Holt received a B.S. in psychology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1995 and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology with a minor in neurophysiology from UW–Madison in 1999.

#415

Marian Bakermans-Kranenburg

#82985

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Marian Bakermans-Kranenburg is a Dutch psychologist focused attachment and emotion regulation in parents and their children, with special emphasis on the neurobiological processes involved in parenting and development. She is currently a Full Professor at Ispa-Instituto Universitário , a visiting Scholar & Research Associate in the Center for Attachment Research at The New School for Social Research , and a visiting Consultant at the National Institute of Education of the Nanyang Technological University .

#416

Elena Grigorenko

#79968

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Elena L. Grigorenko is an American clinical psychologist and the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Houston, where she has taught since September 2015. She is also a professor in the Department of Molecular and Human Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine.

#417

Jude Cassidy

#71048

Overall Influence

Jude Anne Cassidy is Professor of Psychology and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland. Cassidy was awarded the American Psychological Association Boyd McCandless Young Scientist Award in 1991 for her early career contributions to Developmental Psychology. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, Division 7 and the Association for Psychological Science.

#418

Barbara C. Wallace

#67126

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Barbara C. Wallace is a clinical psychologist and the first African-American woman tenured professor at Teachers College of Columbia University. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association within divisions 50 and 45 . She is also editor-in-chief of the Journal of Equity in Health.

#419

Elizabeth F. Churchill

Elizabeth F. Churchill

#43129

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Elizabeth Frances Churchill is a British American psychologist specializing in human-computer interaction and social computing. She is a Director of User Experience at Google. She has held a number of positions in the ACM including Secretary Treasurer from 2016 to 2018, and Executive Vice President from 2018 to 2020.

#420

Wendy Wood

#81977

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Wendy Wood is a UK-born psychologist who is the Provost Professor of Psychology and Business at University of Southern California, where she has been a faculty member since 2009. She previously served as vice dean of social sciences at the Dornsife College of the University of Southern California. Her primary research contributions are in habits and behavior change along with the psychology of gender.

#421

Evangelia Demerouti

#94240

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

#422

Dorothy Riddle

#30672

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Dorothy Riddle is an American-Canadian psychologist, feminist and economic development specialist. She is known as the author of the Riddle homophobia scale and published work on women's studies, homophobia, services and metaphysics.

#423

Christia Brown

#76922

Overall Influence

Christia Spears Brown is an American psychologist and author. She is a professor of psychology and associate chair of development and social psychology at the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences. Brown is the author of several books. Her research interests include gender stereotypes, children and adolescents perception of gender and ethnic discrimination, gender and ethnic identity development, and social inequality.

#424

Lynne Segal

#39113

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Lynne Segal is an Australian-born, British-based socialist feminist academic and activist, author of many books and articles, and participant in many campaigns, from local community to international. She has taught in higher education in London, England since 1970, at Middlesex Polytechnic from 1973. In 1999 she was appointed Anniversary Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, where she now works in the School of Psychosocial Studies.

#425

Jyotsna Vaid

#58791

Overall Influence

Jyotsna Vaid is a Professor of Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience and Women's and Gender Studies at Texas A&M University. Vaid's research examines the impact of multiple language experience by considering properties of specific languages and variability in when and how multiple languages were acquired by bilinguals. Her research has examined the processing of evidentiality in Turkish, the processing of the impersonal se construction in Spanish, and word recognition in biscriptal readers of Hindi and Urdu. She has published extensively on the cognitive and neural bases of bilingualism. Mos...

#426

Grada Kilomba

#77756

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Grada Kilomba is a Portuguese interdisciplinary artist and writer whose works critically examine memory, trauma, gender, racism and post-colonialism. She uses various formats to express herself ranging from text to scenic reading and performance . Moreover, she combines academic and lyrical narrative. In 2012, she was guest professor for gender and postcolonial studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

#427

Amishi Jha

#38154

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Amishi Jha is a professor of psychology at the University of Miami. Jha's research on attention, working memory, and mindfulness has investigated the neural bases of executive functioning and mental training using various cognitive neuroscience techniques. Past studies have focused on the method by which attention selects information as relevant or irrelevant and how working memory then allows that information to be manipulated.

#428

Janette Atkinson

#64730

Overall Influence

Janette Atkinson, is a British psychologist and academic, specialising in the human development of vision and visual cognition. She was Professor of Psychology at University College London from 1993: she is now emeritus professor. She was also co-director of the Visual Development Unit at the Department of Psychology, University College London and the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford. She frequently collaborated with her husband Oliver Braddick.

#429

Orla Muldoon

#81053

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Orla Therese Muldoon is an Irish social and political psychologist and founding professor of psychology at the University of Limerick. Her research concerns how groups memberships and social identities affect health and well-being.

#430

Amy Halberstadt

#76946

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Amy Gene Halberstadt is an American psychologist specializing in the social development of emotion. She is currently Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Professor of Psychology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and is an editor of the journal Social Development.

#431

Yvonne Rogers

#44119

Overall Influence

Yvonne Rogers is a British psychologist and computer scientist. She serves as director of the Interaction Centre at University College London. She has authored or contributed to more than 250 publications. Her book Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction written with Jenny Preece and Helen Sharp has sold more than 200,000 copies worldwide and has been translated into six other languages. Her work is described in Encounters with HCI Pioneers: A Personal History and Photo Journal.

#432

Vonnie McLoyd

#42284

Overall Influence

Vonnie Cile McLoyd is an American developmental psychologist known for her research on how poverty, parental job loss, unemployment, and work characteristics affect children's social emotional development. She is the Ewart A. C. Thomas Collegiate Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan.

#433

Lisa M. Diamond

#56601

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Lisa M. Diamond is an American psychologist and feminist. She is a professor of developmental psychology, health psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah. Her research focuses on sexual orientation development, sexual identity, and bonding.

#434

Corinne McLaughlin

#37554

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Corinne McLaughlin was an American author and educator. She was executive director of The Center for Visionary Leadership and a Fellow of The World Business Academy and the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland. McLaughlin and her partner Gordon Davidson founded Sirius, an ecological village in Massachusetts. She coordinated a national task force for President Clinton's Council on Sustainable Development and has taught politics at American University. McLaughlin has lectured in the U.S., Europe and South America. She is co-author of The Practical Visionary: A New World Guide to Spiritual Growth and...

#435

Marika Tiggemann

#95668

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

#436

Megan Gunnar

#62592

Overall Influence

Megan R. Gunnar is an American child psychologist, currently Regents Professor and McKnight University Professor at University of Minnesota and an Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In 2021, she will receive the James McKeen Cattell Lifetime Achievement Award for Applied Research from the Association for Psychological Science . She is the main investigator for the International Adoption Project. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022. She was awarded the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award in 2021.

#437

Jennifer Richeson

Jennifer Richeson

#24948

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Jennifer A. Richeson is an American social psychologist who studies racial identity and interracial interactions. She is currently the Philip R. Allen Professor of Psychology at Yale University where she heads the Social Perception and Communication Lab. Prior to her appointment to the Yale faculty, Richeson was Professor of Psychology and African-American studies at Northwestern University. In 2015, she was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences. Richeson was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022. Since 2021, she has been a member of the President’s Counc...

#438

Karen Adolph

#84441

Overall Influence

Karen E. Adolph is a psychologist and professor known for her research in the field of infant motor development. She is the 2017 recipient of the Kurt-Koffka medal from the University of Giessen. Previous honors include the 1999 APA Boyd McCandless Award and 2002 American Psychological Foundation Robert L. Fantz Memorial Award. She has served as the President of the International Congress on Infant Studies. Adolph and her colleagues developed computerized video coding software, called Datavyu, and state-of-the-art recording technology to observe and code behavior. A related project, Databrary...

#439

Deborah Stipek

#74262

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Deborah Stipek is the Judy Koch Professor of Education at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education and a professor by courtesy of psychology. She also serves as the Peter E. Haas Faculty Director of the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford. From 2001 to 2012 and then again from 2014 to 2015 she served as the I James Quillen Dean of the GSE at Stanford. Prior to Stanford she was a faculty member at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Education, where she served for 10 of her 23 years as the director of the Corinne Seeds University Elementary School and the Urban Education Studies Center.

#440

Sharon K. Parker

#75092

Overall Influence

Sharon Kaye Parker is an Australian academic and John Curtin Distinguished Professor in organisational behaviour at Curtin University. Parker is best known for her research in the field of work design, as well as other topics such as proactivity, mental health and job performance. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Organisational Psychology, and in 2016 received the Kathleen Fitzpatrick Australian Laureate Fellowship. Parker's research has been cited over 28,000 times internationally and she has been recognised as one...

#441

Lauren B Alloy

#97254

Overall Influence

#442

Paulina Kernberg

#68156

Overall Influence

1935 - 2006 (71 years)

Paulina F. Kernberg was a Chilean American child psychiatrist, an authority on personality disorders, and a professor at Cornell University. Early life Kernberg was born in Santiago, Chile. She was married to Otto F. Kernberg, a professor of psychiatry at Cornell University. She earned a Bachelor of Science and Doctor of Medicine from the University of Chile.

#443

Diane M. Mackie

#42286

Overall Influence

Diane M. Mackie is a social psychologist known for her research in the fields of intergroup relations and social influence. She is Professor Emerita of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

#444

Deborah Beidel

#86002

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Deborah C. Beidel is a psychologist affiliated with the University of Central Florida. She received a PhD in clinical psychology in 1986 from the University of Pittsburgh. She subsequently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in clinical research at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Pittsburgh. Beidel holds Diplomates in Clinical Psychology and Behavioral Psychology from the American Board of Professional Psychology. She is also a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science.

#445

Ágnes Szokolszky

Ágnes Szokolszky

#64859

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Ágnes Szokolszky is a Hungarian educator and psychologist, a habilitated associate professor and director of the Institute of Psychology, Szeged. Her fields of research are ecological psychology , cognitive science , history of psychology and its methods of research. Empirical research interests: symbolic play and metaphor production of childhood.

#446

Til Wykes

#59913

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Professor Dame Til Wykes, Lady Davies is an English academic, author and editor. Born as Hilary Margaret Wykes, she is Professor of Clinical Psychology and Rehabilitation and Head of the School of Mental Health and Psychological Sciences at King's College London, Senior Mental Health spokesperson for the National Institute for Health and Care Research , and President of the Schizophrenia International Research Society.

#447

Cynthia Baum

#42870

Overall Influence

Cynthia Gail Baum is an American clinical psychologist and academic administrator serving as provost and vice president for academic affairs at Thomas Edison State University. She was the president of Walden University and the chancellor of Argosy University.

#448

Barbara Landau

#71659

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Dr. Barbara Landau is the Dick and Lydia Todd Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University. Landau specializes in language learning, spatial representation and relationships between these foundational systems of human knowledge. She examines questions about how the two systems work together to enhance human cognition and whether one is actually foundational to the other. She is known for her research on unusual cases of development and is a leading authority on language and spatial information in people with Williams syndrome.

#449

Janet L. Kolodner

#8612

Overall Influence

Janet Lynne Kolodner is an American cognitive scientist and learning scientist. She is a Professor of the Practice at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College and co-lead of the MA Program in Learning Engineering. She is also Regents' Professor Emerita in the School of Interactive Computing, College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She was Founding Editor in Chief of The Journal of the Learning Sciences and served in that role for 19 years. She was Founding Executive Officer of the International Society of the Learning Sciences . From August, 2010 through July, 2014...

#450

Kay Deaux

#94587

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Kay Deaux is an American social psychologist known for her pioneering research on immigration and feminist identity. Deaux is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the Department of Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York . According to Brenda Major, Deaux's work centers on the question of how social categories affect one's psychological makeup, social behavior, and life outcomes, while emphasizing the subjectivity of people's identities and experiences and the larger social context.

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