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 people in Psychology,

#1301

Ritch Savin-Williams

#31284

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Ritch C. Savin-Williams is professor emeritus of developmental psychology at Cornell University who specializes in gay, lesbian, and bisexual research involving adolescents. Education Savin-Williams earned his Bachelor of Arts in psychology from the University of Missouri in 1971. He later earned an MA in religious studies in 1973 and a Ph.D. in human development in 1977 from the University of Chicago. Savin-Williams retrained in clinical psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1989 to 1993 before completing his residency at Children's Hospital of Michigan.

#1302

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.

#1303

James Townsend

#55150

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

James Tarlton Townsend is a Distinguished Rudy Professor of Psychology at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is known for his work in mathematical psychology, particularly in distinguishing parallel and serial processing and for models of perception.

#1304

Randy Buckner

#65470

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Randy L. Buckner is an American neuroscientist and psychologist whose research focuses on understanding how large-scale brain circuits support mental function and how dysfunction arises in illness. Buckner is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Harvard University. He is affiliated with the Center for Brain Science and is Director of the Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Division at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also faculty of the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging.

#1305

James F. Masterson

#22761

Overall Influence

1926 - 2010 (84 years)

James F. Masterson was a prominent American psychiatrist. He was an internationally recognized psychiatrist who helped inaugurate the study and treatment of personality disorder including borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder. He died April 12, 2010, of pneumonia at the age of eighty-four.

#1306

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.

#1307

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.

#1308

Rod A. Martin

#46901

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Rod A. Martin is a retired Canadian academic, specializing in clinical psychology and humor research. After obtaining a B.A in theology then an M.A and PhD in psychology from the University of Waterloo,in 1984 he became a Professor of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario specializing in clinical psychology. His research focused on the nature and functions of humor and laughter, as well as their relationship to psychological health and well-being.

#1309

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.

#1310

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.

#1311

Sheldon Bach

#49840

Overall Influence

1925 - 2021 (96 years)

Sheldon Bach was an American psychologist and psychoanalyst based in New York City. Life and career Bach was born in May 1925. He served in the European Theatre of Operations during World War II, then lived in Paris where he studied at the Sorbonne. He joined the Research Center for Mental Health at New York University in 1956, where he worked with George S. Klein and Leo Goldberger. He was Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychology at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and a Fellow of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Bach was born in Brooklyn in New York City.

#1312

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.

#1313

Sarnoff A. Mednick

#65508

Overall Influence

1928 - 2015 (87 years)

Sarnoff Andrei Mednick, was a psychologist who pioneered the prospective high-risk, longitudinal study to investigate the etiology of psychopathology, or mental disorders. His emphasis was on schizophrenia. He made significant contributions to the study of creativity, psychopathy, alcoholism and suicide in schizophrenia. He was a Professor Emeritus at The University of Southern California, where he had been a tenured professor since the early '70s and remained highly active in his eighties. Mednick was the first scientist to revisit the genetic basis of mental disorders, following the era of eugenics.

#1314

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.

#1315

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.

#1316

Justin Lehmiller

#55095

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Justin J. Lehmiller is an American social psychologist and author. He is a research fellow at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. Lehmiller has authored books such as Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life and The Psychology of Human Sexuality. He has appeared on several television programs to discuss his research and the science of sex. He maintains the Sex and Psychology blog and podcast.

#1317

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.

#1318

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.

#1319

David Fergusson

#76938

Overall Influence

1944 - 2018 (74 years)

David Murray Fergusson was a New Zealand psychologist. He was a professor of psychological medicine at the University of Otago, Christchurch, from 1999 until 2015. He is notable for work on the Christchurch Health and Development Study and for his research on abortion and mental health.

#1320

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.

#1321

Gordon D. Logan

#77276

Overall Influence

#1322

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.

#1323

Kevin Dutton

#27500

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Kevin Dutton is a British psychologist and writer, specialising in the study of psychopathy. Work He is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, and a member of the Oxford Centre for Emotions and Affective Neuroscience research group, and says "I divide my time between lab-based research and popular writing." Before this post he was a research fellow at the Faraday Institute, St Edmund's College, University of Cambridge, and Visiting Professor for the Public Engagement with Psychological Science at the University of Essex. He gained his Ph.D.

#1324

Claus-Christian Carbon

#65347

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Claus-Christian Carbon is a full professor of psychology at the Department of General Psychology and Methodology, Institute of Psychology of the University of Bamberg, Germany. He is currently head of the Department of General Psychology and Methodology and head of EPÆG—an international research group. Since 2021, he is Dean of the Faculty of Human Sciences and Education.

#1325

Georgi Lozanov

#26833

Overall Influence

1926 - 2012 (86 years)

Georgi Lozanov , known as 'the father of accelerated learning', was a Bulgarian scientist, neurologist, psychiatrist, psychologist and educator, creator of suggestology, suggestopedia , and integrated psychotherapy.

#1326

Eugene Webb

#18952

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Eugene Webb is Professor Emeritus in the University of Washington Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. Webb holds a Ph.D., in Comparative Literature from Columbia University , an M.A. in English Literature from Columbia University and also a B.A., in Philosophy from the University of California, Los Angeles . Webb was a member of the faculties of both the Comparative Literature Department and the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, where he served as Associate Director and chaired programs in both Comparative Religion and European Studies . Webb was also the founder of those two programs: Comparative Religion in 1974, and European Studies in 1994.

#1327

Oliver Braddick

#53602

Overall Influence

1944 - 2022 (78 years)

Oliver John Braddick, was a British developmental psychologist who researched infant visual perception. He frequently collaborated with his wife Janette Atkinson. Biography Braddick was Emeritus Professor of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University from 2011 to 2022. Prior to that, from 2001 to 2011 he was professor and head of the Department of Experimental Psychology.

#1328

Benjamin Lahey

#57487

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Benjamin Bernard Lahey is an American psychologist and developmental epidemiologist. He is the Irving B. Harris Professor in the Departments of Health Studies and Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Chicago. He has conducted research on psychological problems in children, adolescents, and adults such as ADHD and antisocial behavior, and he was a member of a scientific panel that constructed the current definition of ADHD in the 1990s. He was one of the authors of the papers that first hypothesized a hierarchical organization of dimensions of psychological problems, with a general factor at the top of the hierarchy.

#1329

Donald Carroll Hambrick

#77706

Overall Influence

#1330

Richard Bryant

#71398

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Richard Allan Bryant is an Australian medical scientist. He is Scientia Professor of Psychology at the University of New South Wales and director of the UNSW Traumatic Stress Clinic, based at UNSW and Westmead Institute for Medical Research. His main areas of research are posttraumatic stress disorder and prolonged grief disorder. On 13 June 2016 he was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia , for eminent service to medical research in the field of psychotraumatology, as a psychologist and author, to the study of Indigenous mental health, as an advisor to a range of government an...

#1331

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...

#1332

Jean Twenge

#23509

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Jean Marie Twenge is an American psychologist researching generational differences, including work values, life goals, and speed of development. She is a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, author, consultant, and public speaker. She has examined generational differences in work attitudes, life goals, developmental speed, sexual behavior, and religious commitment.

#1333

Wilbert J. McKeachie

#51543

Overall Influence

1921 - 2019 (98 years)

Wilbert James "Bill" McKeachie was an American psychologist. He served as president of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Foundation and the American Association of Higher Education. He was a longtime faculty member at the University of Michigan and the initial author of McKeachie's Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers, a widely read book on college teaching that was first published in 1951 and more recently in its 14th edition in 2013.

#1334

Barry Schwartz

#18498

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Barry Schwartz is an American psychologist. Schwartz is the Dorwin Cartwright Emeritus Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College and since 2016 has been visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His work focuses on the intersection of psychology and economics. He frequently publishes editorials in The New York Times, applying his research in psychology to current events. Schwartz's research addresses morality, decision-making and the inter-relationships between behavioral science and society. His books criticize certain philosophical roots of Western societies and expose underlying myths common in both lay and academic psychological theories.

#1335

Ian Q. Whishaw

#73366

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Ian Quentin Whishaw is a Canadian neuropsychologist who has contributed extensively to the understanding of cortical organization and its relation to stroke, Parkinson’s, spatial navigation, and behavior. Whishaw is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of Lethbridge and has authored over 460 scientific papers and five books on neuroscience subjects that include a wide range of mammalian species... His interests include varsity football, rugby, basketball, creative writing, and dog and horse training.

#1336

Michael D. Newcomb

#59179

Overall Influence

1952 - 2010 (58 years)

Michael Donald Newcomb was an American psychologist. His research focused on drug etiology, as well as nuclear anxiety and other topics. Early life and education Michael D. Newcomb was born on December 20, 1952, in Laguna Beach, California. In 1974, he earned a bachelor's degree in social ecology from University of California, Irvine. He completed joint studies in developmental psychology and mathematics. In 1976, he earned a master's degree in psychology from University of California, Los Angeles where he later completed a doctorate in clinical psychology in 1979. His doctoral advisor was Peter M.

#1337

Catherine Lord

#75352

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Catherine Lord is an American psychologist and researcher. She is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading experts in autism. She currently serves as a member of the International Advisory Board for the The Lancet Psychiatry, as co-chair of the Scientific Research Council of the Child Mind Institute, and as the George Tarjan Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Education at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA.

#1338

Susan Iversen

#65238

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Susan Diana Iversen is a British experimental psychologist. She is a former Professor of Psychology at the University of Oxford Early life and education She attended Girton College, Cambridge. At Cambridge she did a BA in Zoology followed by a PhD in Experimental Psychology.

#1339

Roberta Klatzky

#40557

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Roberta "Bobby Lou" Klatzky is a Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University . She specializes in human perception and cognition, particularly relating to visual and non-visual perception and representation of space and geometric shapes. Klatzky received a B.A. in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1968 and a Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University in 1972. She has done extensive research on human haptic and visual object recognition, navigation under visual and nonvisual guidance, and perceptually guided action.

#1340

Seymour Levine,

#78188

Overall Influence

#1341

James A. Anderson

#31090

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

James A. Anderson is a Professor of Cognitive Science and Brain Science at Brown University. His multi-disciplinary background includes expertise in psychology, biology, physics, neuroscience and computer science. Anderson received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1967.

#1342

Mooli Lahad

#65278

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Professor Mooli Lahad is an Israeli psychologist and psychotrauma specialist, known for his creative methods of intervention and treatment of stress. He is the founder and former director of the Institute of Dramatherapy, and founding president of the CSPC - The International Stress Prevention Centre, at Tel Hai College in Kiryat Shmona, Israel. He is also Professor of Psychology at Tel Hai College and was a visiting Professor of Dramatherapy at Surrey University, England.

#1343

Randy Borum

#41637

Overall Influence

Randy Borum is a professor and coordinator of strategy and intelligence studies in the school of information at the University of South Florida and has taught at USF since 1999. He is author/coauthor of approximately 160 professional publications, has worked with three Directors of National Intelligence on the Intelligence Science Board , served on the Defense Science Board Task Force on Understanding Human Dynamics, and is an instructor with the Bureau of Justice Assistance State and Local Anti-Terrorism Training Programs for Investigations and Intelligence.

#1344

Julian Hochberg

#63541

Overall Influence

1923 - 2022 (99 years)

Julian Edward Hochberg was an American psychology researcher and the Centennial Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Columbia University. Much of Hochberg's research involved visual perception. Before coming to Columbia, Hochberg taught at Cornell University and New York University. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

#1345

Anton Formann

#28832

Overall Influence

1949 - 2010 (61 years)

Anton K. Formann was an Austrian research psychologist, statistician, and psychometrician. He is renowned for his contributions to item response theory , latent class analysis, the measurement of change, mixture models, categorical data analysis, and quantitative methods for research synthesis .

#1346

Richard Held

#55684

Overall Influence

1922 - 2016 (94 years)

Richard Marx Held was an American professor emeritus of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work in vision development contributed to the early years of vision research. He held a Civil Engineering degree from Columbia University, and earned a PhD in Experimental psychology with a specialization in space perception from Harvard University. In 1973, Held was named to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of his achievements in psychology. He was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

#1347

Emmy Werner

#9745

Overall Influence

1929 - 2017 (88 years)

Emmy E. Werner was an American developmental psychologist known for her research on risk and resilience in children. Early life She received her Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska and was a professor emerita in the Department of Human and Community Development at the University of California, Davis.

#1348

Everett Worthington

#60281

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Everett L. Worthington Jr. is a licensed clinical psychologist and Professor of Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University . His research interests include forgiveness and other virtues, religion and spirituality in clinical practice, and the hope-focused approach to counseling couples. He has written over 30 books on topics including forgiveness of others, self-forgiveness, character strength, religion and psychology, and couples' therapy, and he has published over 350 scholarly articles and chapters. Worthington has been frequently cited as an expert on his topics of interest in the sc...

#1349

Jane Close Conoley

#47410

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Jane Close Conoley is an American academic administrator who serves as the president of California State University, Long Beach. Education Conoley was awarded a New York State Regents full scholarship and graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology, with minors in biology and philosophy, from the College of New Rochelle. She subsequently obtained a Ph.D. in school psychology from the University of Texas at Austin.

#1350

Christopher Sonn

#62316

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Christopher Conrad Sonn is an Australian social psychologist whose work in the area of community and liberation psychology focuses on intergroup relations, racism, White privilege, and non-dominant group responses to oppression. Sonn is Professor of Psychology at the College of Health and Biomedicine of the Victoria University, Melbourne .

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