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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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Psychology,

#1251

Stan Franklin

#11138

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Stan Franklin was an American scientist. He was the W. Harry Feinstone Interdisciplinary Research Professor at the University of Memphis in Memphis, Tennessee, and co-director of the Institute of Intelligent Systems. He is the author of Artificial Minds, and the developer of IDA and its successor LIDA, both computational implementations of Global Workspace Theory. He is founder of the Cognitive Computing Research Group at the University of Memphis.

#1252

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.

#1253

Arthur F. Kramer

#55464

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Arthur F. Kramer is an academic, research scientist, and administrator in cognitive and brain health. The majority of his career has been spent at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, which he helped to establish at the University of Illinois in 1989. As of May 2, 2016, Kramer became senior vice provost for research and graduate education at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.

#1254

Martin S. Bergmann

#45955

Overall Influence

1913 - 2014 (101 years)

Martin S. Bergmann was a clinical professor of psychology of the New York University post-doctoral program where he taught the course on the history of psychoanalysis. He was a major voice in the post-Freudian analysis and authored books on human conditions like the Holocaust, the phenomenology of love and child sacrifice. He was a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association and an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association. In the wake of 9/11 he wrote an article concerning its implications on psychoanalysis called "Psychoanalytical Reflections on September 11, 2001".

#1255

Arthur Alexandrovich Rean

#48572

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Arthur Alexandrovich Rean is a Russian psychologist, considered to be one of the founders of social pedagogical psychology, academician of the Russian Academy of Education , Dr. Sci. , professor. In 2016-2020 he was appointed Head of the Laboratory for Prevention of Antisocial Behaviour in the Institute of Education of HSE. Since 2020, he is Head of The Center for socialization, family and prevention of antisocial behavior research of the Institute of Pedagogy and Psychology, MPGU.

#1256

Bernard Bass

#36877

Overall Influence

1925 - 2007 (82 years)

Bernard Morris Bass was an American scholar in the fields of leadership studies and organizational behavior. He was distinguished professor emeritus in the School of Management at Binghamton University, where he was also the founding director of the Center for Leadership Studies. He was a founding editor-in-chief of Leadership Quarterly. He was also a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and the Academy of Management. He is well known for his research on transformational leadership, which was inspired by the work of James MacGregor Burns. His Bass Handbook of Leadership has been described as "the authoritative resource book in leadership".

#1257

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.

#1258

Brian Wansink

#10919

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Brian Wansink is a former American professor and researcher who worked in consumer behavior and marketing research. He is the former executive director of the USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion and held the John S. Dyson Endowed Chair in the Applied Economics and Management Department at Cornell University, where he directed the Cornell Food and Brand Lab.

#1259

Daniel Osherson

#57762

Overall Influence

1949 - 2022 (73 years)

Daniel Nathan Osherson is an American psychologist and the Henry R. Luce Professor of Psychology at Princeton University. External links Osherson's faculty pageOsherson's CV

#1260

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.

#1261

Michael Harris Bond

#74432

Overall Influence

#1262

Tom Griffiths

#35045

Overall Influence

Thomas L. Griffiths is an Australian academic who is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Information Technology, Consciousness, and Culture at Princeton University. He studies human decision-making and its connection to problem-solving methods in computation. His book with Brian Christian, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, was named one of the "Best Books of 2016" by MIT Technology Review.

#1263

Peretz Lavie

#11832

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Peretz Lavie was the 16th president of the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, having taken the position on 1 October 2009 through September 2019. Lavie, an expert in the psychophysiology of sleep and sleep disorders, heads the Technion Sleep Laboratory and holds the André Ballard Chair in Biological Psychiatry. Between 1993 and 1999 he served as dean of the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, and between 2001 and 2008, as the Technion’s vice president for resource development and external relations.

#1264

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.

#1265

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.

#1266

Willem J. M. Levelt

#74587

Overall Influence

#1267

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.

#1268

Del Thiessen

#37546

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Delbert Duane Thiessen is an American psychology professor emeritus whose research focused on evolutionary mechanisms of reproduction and social communication. Education Thiessen studied at University of Denver and San Jose State University, completing his Ph.D. in biopsychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He then did research at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla, California before taking a position at University of Texas at Austin. He is Professor of evolutionary psychology and member of the Institute of Neuroscience. He conducted research on the genetics of alcoholism at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla, California.

#1269

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.

#1270

Reinhard Pekrun

#59570

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Reinhard Pekrun is a psychological scientist and educational researcher best known for his research on achievement emotions. He is a professor at the University of Essex, United Kingdom, and a professorial fellow at the Institute for Positive Psychology and Education, Australian Catholic University, Sydney.

#1271

Irwin G. Sarason

#74751

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

#1272

Mark H. Ashcraft

#34040

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Mark Henry Ashcraft is an American academic and the chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. He received his PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of Kansas in 1975. He has published multiple books and articles on cognitive psychology, including:Human Memory and Cognition. Prentice Hall .Cognition. Prentice Hall; 4th ed. .

#1273

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.

#1274

Raymond S. Nickerson

#56969

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Raymond S. Nickerson is an American psychologist and author. He was a senior vice president at BBN Technologies, from which he is retired, He is now research professor at Tufts University in the Psychology Department. He has authored several books and is the founding editor of The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.

#1275

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.

#1276

Abraham Tesser

#67950

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Abraham Tesser' is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Georgia. His research has made significant contributions to several areas in the field of Social Psychology. He created the self-evaluation maintenance model, a theory in social psychology that focuses on the motives for self-enhancement.

#1277

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.

#1278

Peter Saville

#41598

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Peter Francis Saville was a British chartered occupational psychologist specialising in psychometrics, personality and talent management. He co-founded Saville and Holdsworth Ltd in 1977. He was founder and chairman of the Saville Consulting Group from 2006 to 2015 when it was sold to Towers Watson .

#1279

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 .

#1280

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.

#1281

David F. Duncan

#9375

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

David F. Duncan is president of Duncan & Associates, a firm providing consultation on research design and data collection for behavioral and policy studies. He is also Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Community Health at Brown University School of Medicine.

#1282

Alan I. Leshner

#8824

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Alan Leshner is an American scientist and academic. Education Leshner received an undergraduate degree with Honors in psychology from Franklin and Marshall College in 1965. He earned an M.S. in physiological psychology from Rutgers University in 1967, and a Ph.D. degree in physiological psychology from Rutgers in 1969.

#1283

Saadi Lahlou

#65546

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Saadi Lahlou is Professor in Social Psychology, in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics. He conducts and publishes research in the areas of social psychology, consumer behaviour, survey and forecast methods, lexical analysis, cognition and design. He is the Director of the Paris Institute for Advanced Study

#1284

Fathali M. Moghaddam

#59845

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Fathali M. Moghaddam is an Iranian-born psychologist, author, professor of psychology at Georgetown University and director of the Interdisciplinary Program in Cognitive Science , Department of Government, Georgetown University.

#1285

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.

#1286

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.

#1287

Mark A. Gluck

#54983

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Mark A. Gluck is a professor of neuroscience at Rutgers–Newark in New Jersey, director of the Rutgers Memory Disorders Project, and publisher of the public health newsletter, Memory Loss and the Brain. He works at the interface between neuroscience, psychology, and computer science, studying the neural bases of learning and memory. He is the co-author of Gateway to Memory: An Introduction to Neural Network Models of the Hippocampus and an undergraduate textbook Learning and Memory: From Brain to Behavior .

#1288

Stephen P. Hinshaw

Stephen P. Hinshaw

#68661

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Stephen P. Hinshaw is an American psychologist whose contributions lie in the areas of developmental psychopathology and combating the stigma that surrounds mental illness. He has authored more than 325 scientific articles and chapters as well as 14 authored and edited books. Currently, he is Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor In Residence and Vice Chair for Child and Adolescent Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. His work focuses on child and adolescent mental disorders, cl...

#1289

Stephen Raudenbush

#17846

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Stephen Webb Raudenbush is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Sociology and Chairman of the Committee on Education at the University of Chicago. He is best known for his development and application of hierarchical linear models in the field of education but he has also published on other subjects such as health and crime. Hierarchical linear models, which go by many other names, are used to study many natural processes. To use an example from education, a three level hierarchical model might account for the fact that students are nested in classrooms which are nested in schools. With the rig...

#1290

Robert E. Ornstein

#15845

Overall Influence

1942 - 2018 (76 years)

Robert Evan Ornstein was an American psychologist, researcher and author. He taught at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute, based at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco, and was professor at Stanford University and founder and chairman of the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge .

#1291

Richard Passingham

#64698

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Richard Edward Passingham is a British neuroscientist. He is an international authority on the frontal lobe mechanisms for decision making and executive control. He is amongst the most highly cited neuroscientists.

#1292

José Luis Pinillos Díaz

#47178

Overall Influence

1919 - 2013 (94 years)

José Luis Pinillos Díaz was a Spanish psychologist. He spent 20 years as the psychology chair at the Complutense University of Madrid. Considered the father of contemporary Spanish psychology, Pinillos wrote a textbook, Principios de Psicología, that was once used by most introductory psychology courses in Spain.

#1293

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.

#1294

Daniel Wolpert

#22118

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Daniel Mark Wolpert FRS FMedSci is a British medical doctor, neuroscientist and engineer, who has made important contributions in computational biology. He was Professor of Engineering at the University of Cambridge from 2005, and also became the Royal Society Noreen Murray Research Professorship in Neurobiology from 2013. He is now Professor of Neurobiology at Columbia University.

#1295

Richard Heimberg

#32500

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Richard Heimberg is a researcher, psychotherapist, and current professor at Temple University. Early life Heimberg graduated magna cum laude from the University of Tennessee in 1972, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in psychology. He earned a Master of Science in 1974 and Doctor of Philosophy in 1977, both from Florida State University.

#1296

Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky

#75938

Overall Influence

#1297

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.

#1298

Peter Loewenberg

#52011

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Peter J. Loewenberg is an American historian and psychoanalyst, professor of “European cultural, intellectual, German, Austrian and Swiss history, political Psychology, integrating the identities of an historian and political psychologist with the clinical practice of psychoanalysis” at UCLA.

#1299

Imants Barušs

#34962

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Imants Barušs is Professor of Psychology at King's University College at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. Background He started out in engineering science on a scholarship at the University of Toronto, but then became preoccupied with existential questions, leading him into unconventional areas of study, with the result that he graduated in 1974 with an interdisciplinary BSc. After some years working as a roofer, he enrolled at the University of Calgary and, in 1983, completed an MSc in mathematics with specialization in mathematical foundations, writing his thesis about forcing in topoi.

#1300

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.

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