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.

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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,

#1401

Gwyneth Boodoo

#61765

Overall Influence

Gwyneth M. Boodoo is an American psychologist and expert on educational measurement. Boodoo received her doctorate in educational measurement from the University of Toronto in 1978. She has taught at Texas A&M University, where she was an associate professor in the department of educational psychology.

#1402

Patricia Marks Greenfield

#62454

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Patricia Marks Greenfield is an American psychologist and professor known for her research in the fields of culture and human development. She is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California in Los Angeles and served as president of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology from 2014–2016.

#1403

Ruth K. Chao

#68841

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Ruth K. Chao is an American psychologist. Her research interests center around the parenting styles and socialization of East Asian immigrant families, especially Chinese families, in the United States and Canada. She is an associate professor in the Psychology Department and the principal investigator for the Multicultural Families and Adolescents Study research project at the University of California, Riverside. She is a board member of the Global Parenting Education Group, a nonprofit organization that focuses on parent education in China and other countries.

#1404

Brian Butterworth

#18541

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Brian Lewis Butterworth FBA is emeritus professor of cognitive neuropsychology in the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, England. His research has ranged from speech errors and pauses, short-term memory deficits, reading and the dyslexias both in alphabetic scripts and Chinese, and mathematics and dyscalculia. He has also pioneered educational neuroscience, notably in the study of learners with special educational needs .

#1405

Anat Rafaeli

#14527

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Anat Rafaeli is an Israeli researcher, scholar of Organisational Behavior, a Professor Emerita at the Technion and the Yigal Alon Chair of Industrial Engineering and Mmanagement. She served as the Deputy Senior Vice President of International Academic Relations of the Technion and was the Executive Director of Technion International . Rafaeli is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, a member of the Academy of Management, with extensive experience as an author and a former member of the editorial boards of The Academy of Management Journal and The Academy of Management Review

#1406

Theresa Marteau

Theresa Marteau

#51868

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Dame Theresa Mary Marteau, is a British health psychologist, professor, and director of the Behaviour and Health Research Unit at the University of Cambridge, Fellow and director of studies for Psychological and Behavioural Sciences at Christ's College, Cambridge.

#1407

Milan Nakonečný

Milan Nakonečný

#79809

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Milan Nakonečný is Czech psychologist, professor of psychology and historian. During the normalization, Nakonečný was banned from teaching and publishing. Books Motivace lidského chování Psychologie osobnosti Encyklopedie obecné psychologie Lexikon magie Lexikon psychologie Novodobý český hermetismus Psychologie osobnosti Základy psychologie osobnosti Úvod do sociální psychologieMotivace pracovního jednání a její řízení Emoce a motivace Sociální psychologie Martinismus Základní otázky psychologie Sociální psychologie Základy psychologie Průvodce dějinami psychologie Lidské emoce...

#1408

Matthias Berking

#43191

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Matthias Berking is a professor of psychology and a psychotherapist at the University of Erlangen. Field of research Berking's field of research is the regulation of emotion. Selected works German publications Berking, M.: Training emotionaler Kompetenzen . Springer, Heidelberg 2014, Berking, M. & Rief, W. : Klinische Psychologie und Psychotherapie. Band I Grundlagen und Störungswissen. Springer, Heidelberg 2012, Berking, M. & Rief, W. : Klinische Psychologie und Psychotherapie. Band II: Therapieverfahren. Springer, Heidelberg 2012, Berking, M. & Heizer, K.: Förderung emotionaler Kompetenzen.

#1409

Leo Hurvich

#61102

Overall Influence

1910 - 2009 (99 years)

Leo Maurice Hurvich was an American psychologist who conducted research into human color vision. He was married to fellow cognitive psychologist Dorothea Jameson. The pair collaborated on much of their work, including an elaboration on the opponent process theory. Hurvich was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and he received the APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology from the American Psychological Association.

#1410

Michael Ndurumo

#44506

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Michael M. Ndurumo is a deaf educator from Kenya, who was the third deaf person from Africa to obtain a PhD, in 1980. He obtained his BSc, MSc, and PhD degrees from Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, in Tennessee. Ndurumo is currently an associate professor of psychology at the University of Nairobi, Kenya.

#1411

Preben Bo Mortensen

#81486

Overall Influence

#1412

Alice F. Healy

#21302

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Alice Fenvessy Healy is a psychologist and College Professor of Distinction Emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder where she founded and directed the Center for Research on Training. She is known for her research in the field of cognitive psychology, spanning diverse topics including short-term memory, long-term memory, psycholinguistics, reading, decision-making, and cognitive training.

#1413

Marian Breland Bailey

Marian Breland Bailey

#47349

Overall Influence

1920 - 2001 (81 years)

Marian "Mouse" Breland Bailey was an American psychologist, an applied behavior analyst who played a major role in developing empirically validated and humane animal training methods and in promoting their widespread implementation. She and her first husband, Keller Breland , studied at the University of Minnesota under behaviorist B. F. Skinner and became "the first applied animal psychologists." Together they wrote the book Animal Behavior which was first published in 1966, after Keller's death.

#1414

Steven C. Currall

Steven C. Currall

#13333

Overall Influence

Steve C. Currall is an American psychological scientist and academic administrator, and served as the seventh president of the University of South Florida. He previously served as provost and vice president for academic affairs at Southern Methodist University from January 1, 2016. From 2009 to 2014, Currall served as Dean of the UC Davis Graduate School of Management. He has also held leadership roles at University College London and Rice University. On March 22, 2019, Currall was named to succeed Judy Genshaft as president of the University of South Florida, and took office July 1, 2019. He ...

#1415

Mark Rosenzweig

Mark Rosenzweig

#40805

Overall Influence

1922 - 2009 (87 years)

Mark Richard Rosenzweig was an American research psychologist whose research on neuroplasticity in animals indicated that the adult brain remains capable of anatomical remodelling and reorganization based on life experiences, overturning the conventional wisdom that the brain reached full maturity in childhood.

#1416

Leonid Burlachuk

#69958

Overall Influence

1947 - 2022 (75 years)

Leonid Fokich Burlachuk was a Soviet and Ukrainian psychologist. Among his academic achievements belong: the Doctor of Sciences in Psychological Sciences , professor , academician of the National Academy of Educational Sciences of Ukraine .

#1417

Leslie Rescorla

#64591

Overall Influence

1945 - 2020 (75 years)

Leslie Altman Rescorla was a developmental psychologist and expert on language delay in toddlers. Rescorla was Professor of Psychology on the Class of 1897 Professorship of Science and Director of the Child Study Institute at Bryn Mawr College. She was a licensed and school certified psychologist known for her longitudinal research on late talkers. In the 1980s, she created the Language Development Survey, a widely used tool for screening toddlers for possible language delays. Rescorla worked with Thomas M. Achenbach in developing the manual for the Achenbach System of Empirically Based Asse...

#1418

Ellen Bialystok

#81921

Overall Influence

#1419

Thomas Ollendick

#78948

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Thomas Hubert Ollendick is an American psychologist known for his work in clinical child and adolescent psychology and cognitive behavior therapy with children. From 1999 to the present, he has been a University Distinguished Professor of psychology at Virginia Tech, and the Director of their Child Study Center.

#1420

Sara Kiesler

#52353

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Sara Beth Kiesler is the Hillman Professor Emerita of Computer Science and Human Computer Interaction in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. She is also a program director in the Directorate for Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences at the US National Science Foundation, where her responsibilities include programs on Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace, The Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier, Smart and Connected Communities, and Securing American Infrastructure. She received an M.A. degree in psychology from Stanford in 1963, and a Ph.D., also ...

#1421

Ursula Acosta

#48291

Overall Influence

1933 - 2018 (85 years)

Ursula Acosta was one of the founding members of the Puerto Rican Genealogical Society, who studied and written many works on the subject. She was also a psychologist and retired professor of the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez.

#1422

Vaughan Bell

#46090

Overall Influence

Vaughan Bell is a British clinical psychologist, currently at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust specialising in psychological interventions for psychotic outpatients and in training other professionals to deal with such patients. He is a clinical senior lecturer in the Division of Psychiatry at the Faculty of Brain Sciences at University College London and a visiting researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London. His research focus includes neuropsychology, social cognition, psychosis and brain damage.

#1423

William Yule

#74721

Overall Influence

William Yule was a British psychologist and professor emeritus of applied child psychology at King's College London. Life William Yule was born on 20 June 1940. He graduated with an MA in psychology from the University of Aberdeen in 1962. He then moved to London where he completed his Dip. Psychol. at the Institute of Psychiatry followed by his PhD at the University of London.

#1424

Richard Lucas

#66664

Overall Influence

Richard E. Lucas is an American psychologist specializing in personality psychology. Lucas is an MSU Foundation Professor in the Department of Psychology at Michigan State University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. He was president of the Association for Research in Personality from 2020 to 2021. He was awarded the ARP service award in 2019. Lucas is the editor of the Personality Processes and Individual Differences section of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

#1425

Richard Abidin

#71799

Overall Influence

Richard R. Abidin is a noted psychologist who has devoted much of his career to studying the relationships between parents and children. He served as founder and director of School/Clinical Child Psychology Ph.D. Program from 1967 to 1979, served as director of the Institute of Clinical Psychology between 1979 and 1988 and served as director of the Curry Programs in Clinical and School Psychology between the years 1988–1995 at the University of Virginia. Abidin retired in 2003; he is now emeritus professor, lecturer and consultant to Curry Programs in Clinical and School Psychology at the s...

#1426

Nadine Lambert

#58809

Overall Influence

1926 - 2006 (80 years)

Nadine Murphy Lambert was an American psychology and education professor. She founded the school psychology program at the University of California, Berkeley, created new instruments for school psychology use, and studied the course of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder . Lambert was a member of the board of directors of the American Psychological Association from 1984 to 1987.

#1427

Ronald M. Rapee

#82365

Overall Influence

#1428

David Klahr

#57362

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

David Klahr is an American psychologist whose research ranges across the fields of cognitive development, psychology of science, and educational psychology and has been a professor at Carnegie Mellon University since 1969. He is the Walter van Dyke Bingham Professor of Cognitive Development and Education Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University and a member of the National Academy of Education, a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, a Charter Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, on the Governing Board of the Cognitive Development Society, a member of the Society for Research in Child Development, and the Cognitive Science Society.

#1429

Adrian Owen

#33924

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Adrian Mark Owen is a British neuroscientist and best-selling author. He is best known for his 2006 discovery, published in the journal Science, showing that some patients thought to be in a persistent vegetative state are in fact fully aware and able to communicate with the outside world using functional magnetic resonance imaging . In the 2019 New Year Honours List, Owen was made an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for services to scientific research.

#1430

David Budescu

#72240

Overall Influence

David Budescu is a psychologist and academic. He is the Anne Anastasi Professor of Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology at Fordham University. Personal life Budescu graduated from the University of Haifa in Haifa, Israel and received his Ph.D. in quantitative psychology from the University of North Carolina in 1980. From 1982 to 1992 he taught at the University of Haifa and, in 1992, accepted an appointment at the University of Illinois. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Society and is a past director of the European Association of Decision Making. In 2016 he won the Exeter Pri...

#1431

Philip A. Vernon

#60933

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Philip Anthony "Tony" Vernon is a Canadian psychologist. He is a professor and intelligence researcher. Vernon is the former editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Personality and Individual Differences and formerly sat on the editorial board of Intelligence and the board of directors of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences .

#1432

Benton J. Underwood

#61903

Overall Influence

1915 - 1994 (79 years)

Benton J. Underwood was an American psychologist. Underwood was chairman of the department of psychology at Northwestern University, a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Underwood also was president of the Midwestern Psychological Association, president of the Experimental Psychology, president of the General Psychology divisions of the American Psychological Association, Stanley G. Harris Professor of Social Science, and chairman of the psychology section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Chicago Tribune called Underwood "a leading expert from the 1940s to the 1980s on verbal learning and memory".

#1433

Kennon Sheldon

#77406

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Kennon Marshall Sheldon is a professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. His research is in the areas of well-being, motivation, self-determination theory, personality, and positive psychology. In 2002 he was a recipient of a Templeton Foundation "Positive Psychology" prize and in 2014 received the Ed and Carol Diener award for mid-career achievement in personality psychology. He is the author of Optimal Human Being: An Integrated Multi-level Perspective, Self-determination Theory in the Clinic: Motivating physical and mental health, and has writt...

#1434

Diana Raab

#44216

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Diana Raab is an American author, poet, lecturer, educator and inspirational speaker. Early life Raab was born in Brooklyn, New York of two immigrant parents. She received her B.S. from Cortland State University in Health Administration with a minor in Journalism. She received her R.N. degree from Vanier College in Quebec, Canada and took her licensure in French. In 2003, she earned her MFA in Writing from Spalding University's low residency program in Kentucky. Raab was a medical journalist for 25 years. She has a Ph.D. in Psychology with a concentration in Transpersonal Psychology from Sofia University in Palo Alto.

#1435

Howard Eichenbaum

#70579

Overall Influence

1947 - 2017 (70 years)

Howard B. Eichenbaum was an American psychologist and neuroscientist who studied the hippocampus. He was a university professor and director of the Center for Memory and Brain at Boston University, having previously worked at Wellesley College. He was the editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Hippocampus.

#1436

Gary Namie

#26584

Overall Influence

Gary Namie is a social psychologist and anti-workplace bullying activist. He is the co-founder and director of the Workplace Bullying Institute, and is widely regarded as North America's foremost authority on the topic of workplace bullying.

#1437

Janet F. Werker

Janet F. Werker

#74936

Overall Influence

Janet F. Werker is a researcher in the field of developmental psychology. She researches the foundations of monolingual and bilingual infant language acquisition in infants at the University of British Columbia's Infant Studies Centre. Her research has pioneered what are now accepted baselines in the field, showing that language learning begins in early infancy and is shaped by experience across the first year of life.

#1438

Michael Inzlicht

#50074

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Michael Inzlicht is professor of psychology at the University of Toronto recognized in the areas of social psychology and neuroscience. Although he has published papers on the topics of prejudice, academic performance, and religion, his most recent interests have been in the topics of self-control, where he borrows methods from affective and cognitive neuroscience to understand the underlying nature of self-control, including how it is driven by motivation.

#1439

Francesca Gino

#28213

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Francesca Gino is an Italian-American behavioral scientist. In June 2023, after an investigation concluded that she had falsified data in her research, she was placed on unpaid administrative leave from her position as Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and as head of HBS's Negotiation, Organizations and Markets unit.

#1440

Paul R. Lawrence

#10824

Overall Influence

1922 - 2011 (89 years)

Paul Roger Lawrence was an American sociologist, Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Harvard Business School, and consultant, known from his work with Jay W. Lorsch on "Differentiation and integration in complex organizations."

#1441

Oliver John

#75841

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Oliver Peter Martin John is a German personality psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for co-developing the 1998 Big Five Inventory. External links Faculty page

#1442

Martha E. Bernal

#48537

Overall Influence

1931 - 2001 (70 years)

Martha E. Bernal was an American clinical psychologist. She earned her doctoral degree at Indiana University Bloomington in 1962. She was the first Latina to receive a doctorate degree in psychology in the United States. She helped with the treatment and assessment of children with behavioral problems and worked to develop organizations that have a focus on ethnic groups.

#1443

Nancy Adler

#47707

Overall Influence

Nancy Elinor Adler is an American health psychologist. She is the Lisa and John Pritzker Professor of Medical Psychology at the University of California, San Francisco and director of UCSF's Center for Health and Community Sciences. Adler is known for her research on health behaviors, health disparities, and social determinants of health.

#1444

Rex Jung

#50127

Overall Influence

Rex Eugene Jung is an American psychologist who has researched on the neural basis of human intelligence and creativity. He is an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico, where he is the director of neuropsychological services. Jung is also a practicing psychologist at his private clinic.

#1445

Yuko Munakata

#55256

Overall Influence

Yuko Munakata is a professor of psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder. She has specialized in developmental cognitive neuroscience, taking a connectionist approach to cognitive development. Her research investigates the processing mechanisms underlying cognitive development, using converging evidence from behavior, computational modeling, and cognitive neuroscience. She also focuses on understanding the prevalence of task-dependent behaviors during the first years of life. Munakata received a B.S. in symbolic systems at Stanford University in 1991 and a PhD in psychology at Carnegie...

#1446

James Frederick Leckman

#83159

Overall Influence

#1447

Ralph Adolphs

#83165

Overall Influence

#1448

Brenda Major

#75467

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Brenda Nelle Major is an American social psychologist and distinguished professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she heads the Self and Social Identity Lab.

#1449

Benjamin Drake Wright

Benjamin Drake Wright

#33754

Overall Influence

1926 - 2015 (89 years)

Benjamin Drake Wright was an American psychometrician. He is largely responsible for the widespread adoption of Georg Rasch's measurement principles and models. In the wake of what Rasch referred to as Wright's “almost unbelievable activity in this field” in the period from 1960 to 1972, Rasch's ideas entered the mainstream in high-stakes testing, professional certification and licensure examinations, and in research employing tests, and surveys and assessments across a range of fields. Wright's seminal contributions to measurement continued until 2001, and included articulation of philosophi...

#1450

Anne Ancelin Schützenberger

Anne Ancelin Schützenberger

#36302

Overall Influence

1919 - 2018 (99 years)

Anne Ancelin Schützenberger was a French psychologist and psychotherapist. During the Second World War she was a member of the French Resistance. She was born in Moscow, into a Jewish family, but grew up in Paris, where she received her education, leading eventually to doctorates in literature and psychology. As a result of her Resistance activities, she became regional secretary of the newly-formed Mouvement de libération nationale in 1944, and on 6 June of the same year her home was burned down by the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich. Having gained experience working on the MLN's journal, ...

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