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,

#1501

Jozien Bensing

#58659

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Josina Maria "Jozien" Bensing is a Dutch clinical psychologist. Bensing was director of the between 1985 and 2008. Since 1993 she has been a professor of clinical and healthcare psychology at Utrecht University. Bensing was a winner of the 2006 Spinoza Prize.

#1502

Jonathan D. Cohen

#85784

Overall Influence

#1503

Timothy Z. Keith

#69597

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Timothy Zook Keith is an American psychologist. His research is focused on the nature and measurement of intelligence, understanding school learning, and on the methodologies of confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling, and he is considered a leading authority on in the use of structural equation modeling and confirmatory factor analysis in school psychology. He has been a Fellow of the American Psychological Association since 1991.

#1504

Ellen Bialystok

#14971

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Ellen Bialystok, OC, FRSC is a Canadian psychologist and professor. She carries the rank of Distinguished Research Professor at York University, in Toronto, where she is director of the Lifespan Cognition and Development Lab, and is also an associate scientist at the Rotman Research Institute of the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care.

#1505

Lucy Yardley

#70172

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Lucy Yardley is a British psychologist and professor of health psychology based at both the University of Bristol and University of Southampton . She is a senior investigator at the National Institute for Health Research and has a continuing role at the University of Southampton as Director of the LifeGuide Research Programme, and the Behavioural Science theme of the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre.

#1506

William N. Schoenfeld

William N. Schoenfeld

#53910

Overall Influence

1915 - 1996 (81 years)

William N. Schoenfeld was an American psychologist and author. Born in New York City, he conducted original research in experimental psychology, and advocated behaviorism, which seeks to understand behavior as a function of environmental histories of experiencing consequences. Dr. Schoenfeld's own original contributions in a long research career were influenced by those of B.F. Skinner and Ivan Pavlov. In a carefully devised set of experiments in 1953 he led a team of Columbia University psychologists in discovering that anxiety caused the human heart rate to slow rather than quicken under ce...

#1507

Jerker Rönnberg

#33243

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Jerker Rönnberg is a Swedish professor of psychology with the emphasis on disability science at Linköping University. Rönnberg was born in Backe, Sweden. He was awarded a Ph.D. in psychology at Uppsala University in 1980, became a reader at Umeå University in 1981 and a senior lecturer at Linköping University in 1983. From 1983 to 1984 he was a visiting researcher at the University of Toronto. Since 1997 he is a professor at Linköping University. He is also the director of the Swedish Institute for Disability Research and Linnaeus Centre HEAD at Linköping University.

#1508

Anne Campbell

#50974

Overall Influence

1951 - 2017 (66 years)

Anne C. Campbell was a British academic and author specializing in evolutionary psychology. Her research was largely concerned with sex differences in aggression between men and women. She was professor of psychology at Durham University.

#1509

Adrian Raine

#86028

Overall Influence

#1510

Michael J. Tarr

#67613

Overall Influence

Michael J. Tarr is an American cognitive neuroscientist who currently holds the Kavčić-Moura Professorship in Cognitive and Brain Science. He is a professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, a recipient of the APA Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association in 1997, a recipient of the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences in 2003, a Guggenheim Fellow in 2007, and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#1511

Hilda Borko

#81354

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Hilda Borko is an American educational psychologist who researches teacher cognition and changes in novice and experienced teachers' knowledge and beliefs.Her research explores teachers’ instructional practices, the process of learning to teach, the impact of teacher professional development programs on teachers and students, and the preparation of professional development leaders. Her work has identified factors that affect teachers' learning of reform-based practices. She is chair of the educational psychology program area in the school of education at the University of Colorado, and is a former president of the American Educational Research Association.

#1512

Svenn Torgersen

#85565

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Svenn Omar Torgersen is a Norwegian psychologist. He was born in Blaker. Torgersen took his dr.philos. degree in 1985, became professor of clinical psychology at the University of Oslo in 1986 and inducted into the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters; in 1999 he received the Researcher of the Year award at the University of Oslo. His fields of research being psychopathology and personality psychology, he is known for employing twin studies.

#1513

Fons van de Vijver

#77091

Overall Influence

1952 - 2019 (67 years)

Alphonsius Josephus Rachel van de Vijver was a Dutch psychologist and Professor of Cross-cultural Psychology at Tilburg University, North-West University, University of Queensland, and National Research University Higher School of Economics. He was known for his work on cross-cultural research and on methods of comparisons.

#1514

Stuart Anstis

#84651

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Stuart M. Anstis is a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, San Diego, in the United States. Anstis was born in the United Kingdom. He went to Winchester, and then to Corpus Christi, Cambridge, where he did his PhD under Richard Gregory. He had teaching posts at the University of Bristol in the UK, at York University in Toronto and – from 1991 – at the University of California in San Diego, California. He is a fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists. In 2013, Anstis won the Kurt Koffka Medal for "advancing the field of perception ... to an extraordinary ...

#1515

Michael D. Rugg

#75065

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Michael Derek Rugg FRSE is a Distinguished Chair in Behavioral and Brain Sciences at University of Texas at Dallas. He is director of The Center for Vital Longevity in Dallas, Texas. His current research program involves the use of electrophysiological and functional magnetic resonance imaging methods to investigate the cognitive and neural bases of memory encoding and memory retrieval, as well as how and why memory function differs as a result of healthy aging or neurological disease.

#1516

Elwood Robinson

Elwood Robinson

#76528

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Elwood L. Robinson is an American academic, university administrator and clinical psychologist currently serving as the 13th Chancellor of Winston-Salem State University. He previously served as Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at Cambridge College in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

#1517

Sander van der Linden

Sander van der Linden

#53043

Overall Influence

Sander L. van der Linden is a Dutch social psychologist and author who is a professor of social psychology at the University of Cambridge. He studies the psychology of social influence, risk, human judgment, and decision-making. He is particularly known for his research on the psychology of social issues, such as fake news, COVID-19, and climate change. He is recognized as an authority on understanding and dealing with misinformation.

#1518

Emily Balcetis

#44322

Overall Influence

Emily E. Balcetis is an American social psychologist and Associate Professor of Psychology at New York University. Her research focuses on people's perception of world and how their motivations, goals, and emotions influence it, especially with regards to visual perception.

#1519

Michael Fanselow

#84824

Overall Influence

Michael S. Fanselow is an American psychologist, currently a Distinguished Professor at University of California, Los Angeles, specializing in learning and behavior and behavioral neuroscience, and is also a published author of 4 books, having a total number of 655 library holdings, the highest book is held in 513 libraries worldwide.

#1520

George Rekers

#24672

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

George Alan Rekers is an American psychologist and ordained Southern Baptist minister. He is emeritus professor of Neuropsychiatry and Behavioral Science at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine. Rekers has a PhD from University of California, Los Angeles and has been a research fellow at Harvard University, a professor and psychologist for UCLA and the University of Florida, and department head at Kansas State University.

#1521

Marlene Behrmann

#52615

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Marlene Behrmann is a Professor in the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Pittsburgh. She was previously a Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. She specializes in the cognitive neuroscience of visual perception, with a specific focus on object recognition.

#1522

Todd Kashdan

#83145

Overall Influence

Todd Barrett Kashdan is an American psychologist. He is a professor of psychology and director of the Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University. His research explores why people suffer, with an emphasis on the transition from normal to pathological anxiety. Other research explores the nature of well-being, with an emphasis on the critical functions of curiosity, meaning and purpose in life, and psychological flexibility to human performance.

#1523

J. Richard Hackman

#86415

Overall Influence

#1524

Johannes Siegrist

#86429

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

#1525

Nicki R. Crick

#75103

Overall Influence

1958 - 2012 (54 years)

Nicki Rae Crick was a psychologist and professor of child development and family studies known internationally for her research on relational aggression, defined as the use of relationships as agents of harm . At the time of her death, she held the position of Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Irving B. Harris Professor of Child Psychology at the Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota.

#1526

Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt

Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt

#21268

Overall Influence

1928 - 2018 (90 years)

Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt was an Austrian ethologist in the field of human ethology. In authoring the book which bears that title, he applied ethology to humans by studying them in a perspective more common to volumes studying animal behavior.

#1527

Mark Olfson

#86492

Overall Influence

#1528

Ralf Schwarzer

#86526

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

#1529

Hans Joachim Schneider

#27540

Overall Influence

1928 - 2015 (87 years)

Hans Joachim Schneider was a German jurist, criminologist and psychologist. He taught as Professor of Criminology at the University of Münster. Life Hans Joachim Schneider was born in Biedenkopf, a small market town in the hills between Cologne and Kassel. From 1940 till 1949 he attended the Christian Rauch School at nearby Arolsen.

#1530

John Ehrenreich

#23030

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

John Ehrenreich is an American clinical psychologist and social critic, who has published books on health policy, humanitarian policy, US history and US social policy. He is known for his development of the idea of the "medical–industrial complex" and the concept of the "professional–managerial class".

#1531

Richard Beckhard

#11360

Overall Influence

1918 - 1999 (81 years)

Richard Beckhard was an American organizational theorist, adjunct professor at MIT, and pioneer in the field of organization development. Beckhard co-launched the Addison-Wesley Organization Development Series and began the Organization Development Network in 1967. His classic work, Organization Development: Strategies and Models, was published in 1969. Beckhard was an adjunct professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management from 1963 to 1984. He died on December 28, 1999.

#1532

David P. Schmitt

#74445

Overall Influence

David P. Schmitt is a personality psychologist who founded the International Sexuality Description Project . The ISDP is the largest-ever cross-cultural research study on sex and personality. Over 100 psychologists simultaneously administered an anonymous self-report survey to 17,837 individuals representing 56 different nations, 6 continents, 13 islands, and 30 languages. Direct assessments of people's personality traits and sexual behaviors have led to innovative tests of evolutionary psychology and social role theory. A second wave of the ISDP is currently underway and includes measures of ...

#1533

Robert Nosofsky

#78464

Overall Influence

Robert Mark Nosofsky is an American psychologist. He is a professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University Bloomington, who is known for his exemplar theory. His research interest are categorization, recognition memory, math modeling, combining formal modeling and FMRI Studies. His research is in the development and testing of formal mathematical models of perceptual category learning and representation.

#1534

Martha W. Alibali

#62147

Overall Influence

Martha W. Alibali is a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Psychology and Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and an investigator at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research.

#1535

Patrick Haggard

#63655

Overall Influence

Patrick Neville Haggard, FBA, is a cognitive neuroscientist and academic. He is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. Haggard completed his undergraduate degree at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and then spent a year as a Harkness Fellow at Yale University. He returned to Trinity Hall to complete his PhD, which was awarded in 1991. He then spent three years as a Wellcome Trust prize fellow at the University of Oxford and as a junior research fellow at Christ Church, Oxford. In 1995, he joined UCL as a lecturer, and was promoted to senior lecturer in 1998 and to a readers...

#1536

Gerald E. McClearn

Gerald E. McClearn

#34111

Overall Influence

1927 - 2017 (90 years)

Gerald "Jerry" McClearn was an American behavior geneticist and professor emeritus of health and human development and biobehavioral health at the Pennsylvania State University. Education McClearn received his undergraduate degree from Allegheny College and took his Ph.D. in psychology at University of Wisconsin. After two year-long spells as instructor at Yale University, and then assistant professor of psychology at Allegheny College, he took up postdoctoral positions at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and University College London.

#1537

Paula Tallal

#38507

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Paula Tallal is a Rutgers Board of Governors Professor of Neuroscience and co-director of the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. Tallal is a participant on scientific advisory boards and government committees for both learning disabilities and developmental language disorders.

#1538

Herb Goldberg

#22223

Overall Influence

1937 - 2019 (82 years)

Herb Goldberg was the author of the book What Men Still Don't Know About Women, Relationships, and Love, previously authored The Hazards of Being Male: Surviving the Myth of Masculine Privilege , related to the formative men's movement. He was a professor emeritus of psychology at California State University, Los Angeles and a practicing psychologist in Los Angeles.

#1539

William E. Cross Jr.

#58323

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

William E. Cross Jr. is a theorist and researcher in the field of ethnic identity development, specifically Black identity development. He is best known for his nigrescence model, first detailed in a 1971 publication, and his book, Shades of Black, published in 1991. Cross's nigrescence model expanded upon the work of Black psychologists who came before him and created an important foundation for racial/ethnic identity psychology. It has proved a framework for both individual and collective social change. Throughout his career, Cross has been concerned with racial/ethnic identity theory and t...

#1540

Daniel R. Montello

#49913

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Daniel R. Montello is an American geographer and professor at the Department of Geography of the University of California Santa Barbara, and at its Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, known for his work on geovisualization and cognitive geography.

#1541

Matthew Walker

#37149

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Matthew Walker is a British author, scientist and professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. As an academic, Walker has focused on the impact of sleep on human health. He has contributed to many scientific research studies. Why We Sleep is his first work of popular science.

#1542

Susana Urbina

#62908

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Susana Urbina is a Peruvian-American psychologist. She received her Ph.D. in Psychometrics from Fordham University in 1972 and was licensed in Florida in 1976. She currently teaches at University of North Florida, where her principal areas of teaching and research are psychological testing and assessment.

#1543

Robert Arkin

#87269

Overall Influence

Robert M. Arkin was a social psychologist and member of the social psychology program faculty at Ohio State University. He was primarily known for his research on self-handicapping. Research Arkin’s research concerned the self in social interaction, with special emphasis on the uncertain self . Arkin developed the Subjective Overachievement Scale in 2001 to tap feelings of self-doubt coupled with a performance outcome concerns. He was the editor of the books Most Underappreciated: 50 Prominent Social Psychologists Describe Their Most Unloved Work, Handbook of the Uncertain Self , and Han...

#1544

Peter F. Langman

#22524

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Peter Fabbri Langman is an American counseling psychologist and author. He is a known expert on school shooters. Professional career Langman received his B.A. in psychology from Clark University, his M.A. in counseling psychology from Lesley College, and his Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Lehigh University.

#1545

Mary Czerwinski

#30771

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Mary Czerwinski is an American cognitive scientist and computer-human interaction expert who works for Microsoft Research as manager of their research group on visualization and interaction. Czerwinski earned her doctorate in cognitive science from Indiana University. She worked in computer-human interaction for Bellcore, the Johnson Space Center, and Compaq, and also held an adjunct position at Rice University while at Compaq. She moved to Microsoft in 1996, as a usability tester in product development. Two years later, she joined Microsoft Research, as the first social scientist to work there.

#1546

John Read

#42012

Overall Influence

John Read is a psychologist and mental health researcher from England. He is professor of clinical psychology in the University of East London's School of Psychology. Read was formerly a clinical psychologist in the Department of Psychology at the University of Auckland. His research interests include: attitudes towards 'mental illness', psycho-social causes of psychosis, and the role of the pharmaceutical industry in psychology.

#1547

Bonnie Burstow

#38394

Overall Influence

1945 - 2020 (75 years)

Bonnie Burstow was a Canadian psychotherapist, author, and anti-psychiatry scholar. She was a professor in the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Burstow argued that conditions that the medical profession described as mental illnesses are in fact rational reactions to social, economic and political conditions and that psychiatry is rooted in patriarchy with a tendency to view troubled women as “hysterical” and to overdiagnose their conditions and overmedicate them. Burstow said that in psychiatry's view: “Women are disordered if they acted like women; wo...

#1548

Nambury S. Raju

#36905

Overall Influence

1937 - 2005 (68 years)

Nambury S. Raju was an American psychology professor known for his work in psychometrics, meta-analysis, and utility theory. He was a Fellow of the Society of Industrial Organizational Psychology. Professional biography At the time of his death, Raju was a Distinguished Professor in the Institute of Psychology at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Illinois. Raju worked at Science Research Associates from 1961 to 1978, specializing in psychometrics and test validation. His first published article, A new working formula for the split-half reliability model appeared in Educational and Psychological Measurement in 1965 and was published with Isaiah Guttman, a colleague from SRA.

#1549

Halford Fairchild

#35242

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Halford Hosoi Fairchild is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Black Studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, California. He was the editor of Psych Discourse: The Monthly Newsjournal of The Association of Black Psychologists from 1991 until 2014. He is a former president of the Association of Black Psychologists and Chairman of the Intercollegiate Department of Africana Studies at the Claremont Colleges. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Michigan in 1977. Professor Fairchild published a series of papers that challenged the practice of scientific racism within psych...

#1550

Lenora Fulani

#13265

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Lenora Branch Fulani is an American psychologist, psychotherapist, and political activist. She is best known for her presidential campaigns and development of youth programs serving minority communities in the New York City area. In the 1988 United States presidential election heading the New Alliance Party ticket, she became the first woman and the first African American to achieve ballot access in all fifty states. She received more votes for president in a U.S. general election than any other woman until Jill Stein of the Green Party of the United States in 2012. Fulani's political concern...

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