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,

#1801

Robert Bradley

#90533

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Robert Harold Bradley is an American psychologist. He is a professor in the T. Denny Sanford School of Social & Family Dynamics and the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University , where he is also director of the Center for Child and Family Success. Before joining the faculty at ASU in 2009, he was a professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and an adjunct professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. He is a member of the Society for Research in Child Development and the National Council on Family Relations.

#1802

M. David Rudd

#16932

Overall Influence

M. David Rudd is an American psychologist and academic administrator who has served as the president of the University of Memphis since 2014. Education Rudd earned a bachelor’s degree cum laude in psychology from Princeton University in 1983, where he also lettered in Varsity football. He returned to his home state of Texas to study at University of Texas at Austin, where he holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. in psychology. Rudd then began active duty service in the United States Military as a U.S. Army Captain originally stationed at Fort Ord, California and later at Fort Hood, Texas, transitioning from active duty service following the Gulf War.

#1803

Warren Bickel

#95520

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Warren Kurt Bickel is an American behavioral pharmacologist and the Virginia Tech Carilion Behavioral Health Research Professor at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute in Virginia Tech's Carilion School of Medicine. He is also a professor of psychology at Virginia Tech and a professor of psychiatry and behavioral medicine in their Carilion School of Medicine, the director of Virginia Tech's Addiction Recovery Research Center, and the co-director of their Center for Transformative Research on Health Behaviors. He formerly served as editor-in-chief of Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmaco...

#1804

Constance L. Hammen

#97420

Overall Influence

#1805

Jeffry H. Larson

#84083

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Jeffry H. Larson, Ph.D., LMFT, CFLE, is a retired Professor of Marriage and Family Therapy at Brigham Young University. He is the author of Should We Stay Together? A Scientifically Proven Method for Evaluating Your Relationship and Improving its Chances for Long Term Success and the E-book entitled The Great Marriage Tune-Up Book: A Proven Program for Evaluating and Renewing Your Relationship , among others.

#1806

Paulina Kernberg

#68156

Overall Influence

1935 - 2006 (71 years)

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

#1807

Elliott Mishler

#88793

Overall Influence

1924 - 2018 (94 years)

Elliot George Mishler was an American social psychologist who had significant influence on the development of narrative psychology. Life and work Mishler was born in Astoria, New York in 1924. He completed his doctoral degree at the University of Michigan in 1951. His dissertation was entitled: Personality Characteristics And The Resolution Of Role Conflicts.

#1808

Peter McGraw

#50026

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Peter McGraw is an American professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder. As a behavioral scientist his research spans the fields of judgment and decision making, emotion, affect, mood, and behavioral economics.

#1809

Jans Aasman

#72124

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Jannes "Jans" Aasman is a Dutch psychologist and cognitive science expert. He is also the chief executive officer of Franz Inc, an early innovator in Artificial Intelligence and provider of Semantic Graph Databases and Analytics. He is a frequent speaker within the Database and Semantic Technology industries and has authored multiple research papers and bylines on the subject.

#1810

Max Taylor

#22273

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Maxwell "Max" Taylor is a criminal and legal psychologist. His early work specialised in the study of terrorism but he also became involved in the study of sex offenders, and in the development of capacity building activities for disadvantaged children in conflict zones, returning later to the study of terrorism.

#1811

James E. Cutting

James E. Cutting

#44019

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

James Eric Cutting is an American cognitive scientist and researcher. He is the Susan Linn Sage Professor emeritus in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University. He is known most recently for his research studying how the structure of movies in American cinema has evolved over the years, in terms of physical attributes and narratives. Cutting is also known for his research on the mere exposure effect, on navigation and wayfinding, and biological motion.

#1812

Diane M. Mackie

#42286

Overall Influence

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

#1813

Sidney Dekker

#84877

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Sidney W. A. Dekker , is a professor at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, where he founded the Safety Science Innovation Lab. He is also Honorary Professor of Psychology at the University of Queensland.

#1814

Michael C. Frank

#42885

Overall Influence

Michael C. Frank is a developmental psychologist at Stanford University who proposed that infants' language development may be thought of as a process of Bayesian inference. He has also studied the role of language in numerical cognition by comparing the performance of native Pirahã language speakers to that of MIT undergraduate students in numeric tasks. For this work, he traveled to Amazonas, Brazil with Daniel Everett, a linguist best known for his claim that Pirahã disproves a crucial component of Noam Chomsky's theory of universal grammar, recursion. Frank won the Cognitive Science Societ...

#1815

Deborah Beidel

#86002

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

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

#1816

René Diekstra

#95286

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

René F.W. Diekstra is a Dutch psychologist. Apart from being a scientist, he is also well known as an author of popular psychology books. He is the developer of many psychological programs for policy and well-being and writes for Dutch regional newspapers and several magazines. From 1987 to 1989, he was appointed manager of the programme on Psychosocial and Behavioral aspects of Health and Development of the World Health Organization in Geneva. He was also the founder of the International Academy of Suicide Research and the scientific journal Archives of Suicide Research. Diekstra became one ...

#1817

Ágnes Szokolszky

Ágnes Szokolszky

#64859

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

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

#1818

Til Wykes

#59913

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

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

#1819

Cynthia Baum

#42870

Overall Influence

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

#1820

Neville Moray

#33988

Overall Influence

1935 - 2017 (82 years)

Neville Moray was a British-born Canadian psychologist. He served as an academic and professor at the Department of Psychology of the University of Surrey, known from his 1959 research of the cocktail party effect.

#1821

Barbara Landau

#71659

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

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

#1822

A. Thomas Mclellan

#97735

Overall Influence

#1823

Janet L. Kolodner

#8612

Overall Influence

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

#1824

Warren Throckmorton

#68300

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Earl Warren Throckmorton is a retired professor of psychology at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania. He developed the Sexual Identity Therapy Framework and was a creator of the documentary I Do Exist, about people who say they have changed their sexual orientation. He is an example of an evangelical Christian who has changed his view about human sexuality, from traditional to more progressive.

#1825

Tony Charman

#97789

Overall Influence

#1826

Andrew M. Mathews

#97825

Overall Influence

#1827

Lee N. Robins

#97827

Overall Influence

#1828

Kay Deaux

#94587

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

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

#1829

Maryse Lassonde

Maryse Lassonde

#90778

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Maryse Lassonde is a Canadian academic and neuropsychologist. She holds the Canada Research Chair in Developmental Neuropsychology at the Université de Montréal and the University Hospital Center Sainte-Justine researching brain disorders.

#1830

Ralph Hertwig

#35681

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Ralph Hertwig is a German psychologist whose work focuses on the psychology of human judgment and decision making. Hertwig is Director of the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. He grew up with his brothers Steffen Hertwig and Michael Hertwig in Talheim, Heilbronn.

#1831

Gerald R. Ferris

#69453

Overall Influence

Gerald R. Ferris is the Francis Eppes Professor of Management and professor of psychology at Florida State University. He has published extensive research in the areas of social influence in organizations, performance evaluation, relationships at work and reputation in organizational contexts. Ferris served as editor of the annual series Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management from 1981–2003, and has authored or edited a number of books including: Political Skill at Work: Impact on Work Effectiveness, Handbook of Human Resource Management, Strategy and Human Resources Management, ...

#1832

Larry J. Seidman

#81183

Overall Influence

Larry J. Seidman was an American neuropsychologist who served as a professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School starting in 2004, and as vice chair for research in the Massachusetts Mental Health Center Public Psychiatry Division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center starting in 2005. His research focused on the neuropsychology of epilepsy and schizophrenia. On September 7, 2017, he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 67. Since 2018, the International Early Psychosis Association has awarded the annual Larry J. Seidman Award for Outstanding Mentorship in his honor.

#1833

James S. House

#51071

Overall Influence

James Stephen House is an American social psychologist. He is the Angus Campbell Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Survey Research, Public Policy, and Sociology at the University of Michigan.

#1834

Nicholas J. Wade

#65132

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Nicholas J. Wade is a British psychologist and academic. He is an emeritus professor in the psychology department of the University of Dundee in Scotland, and the author of books and technical articles. His work has focused on visual perception.

#1835

Barbara M. Rogoff

#98083

Overall Influence

#1836

Susan Gathercole

#83082

Overall Influence

Susan Elizabeth Gathercole was the Unit Director at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. from 2011 until 2018. She is a research psychologist, best known for her studies into working memory deficits in children. She has worked extensively with Professor Alan Baddeley, the co-creator, along with Professor Graham Hitch, of arguably the most well-researched working memory model. In 2014 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

#1837

Donald Dutton

#73535

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Donald George Dutton is a Canadian psychologist who is a tenured professor emeritus in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia. He received his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Toronto in 1970.

#1838

Felix Mikhailov

#74686

Overall Influence

1930 - 2006 (76 years)

Felix Trofimovich Mikhailov was a Russian psychologist. In the 1980s he worked at the Institute of General and Pedagogical Psychology in Moscow under Vasily Davydov. Works The Riddle of the Self ObschScestvennoe soznanie i samosoznanie individa , Moscow, Nauka, 1990.

#1839

Soo Jung Lee

#69028

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Soo Jung Lee is a South Korean forensic psychologist, professor of forensic psychology at Kyonggi University in Seoul, and part of the country's first generation of criminal profilers. She has been named part of BBC's list of 100 inspiring and influential women from around the world for 2019, in the leadership category. Lee has worked numerous high-profile murder cases, and believes stalking is what leads to more serious crimes. As a result of this she helped introduce an anti-stalking bill now passed in South Korea.

#1840

Rainer Krause

#93183

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Rainer Krause is a German psychologist, psychoanalyst and researcher of human emotions. Background Rainer Krause has five siblings, both parents were physicians. He is married and has one son. Krause lives and works in the Saarland area of Germany. Although he is retired as a professor of the Saarland University, he continues to participate in the public discourse.

#1841

Joseph White

#76391

Overall Influence

1932 - 2017 (85 years)

Joseph L. White was Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of California, Irvine and "godfather" of the field of Black Psychology. Early and personal life Joseph White was born on December 19, 1932, in Lincoln, Nebraska to Dorothy Lee and Joseph L. White. At a very young age, his family moved to Minneapolis where they remained until White's mother sent him to San Francisco to live with his aunt after completing high school. White only intended to work as a waiter; however, his aunt, Reverend Margaret Brown suggested that he go to college.

#1842

David L. Braff

#98377

Overall Influence

#1843

Nicholas Tucker

#16918

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Nicholas Tucker is an English academic and writer who is an honorary Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex. He was educated at Burgess Hill School in Hampstead, London, where his English teacher was briefly Bernice Rubens. A former teacher and then an educational psychologist, he has had a long association with the Sussex University, having lectured in educational psychology and cultural studies and children's literature at the institution. He was a Senior Lecturer in several of these disciplines.

#1844

Steven Fein

#39830

Overall Influence

Steven Fein is a professor of psychology in the Department of Psychology at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Fein has two daughters named Alina and Hannah. He attended Princeton and the University of Michigan, where he received his Ph.D. in social psychology. His primary research interests are stereotypes and prejudice, suspicion and attribution theory, and how the media affects both men and women’s views of women.

#1845

Brinton Lykes

#48283

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

M. Brinton Lykes is an American psychologist who has established a reputation for her work on psychosocial effects of state-sponsored terror and organized violence. Life Lykes originally hailed from New Orleans. She obtained her first BA degree from Hollins University before proceeding to Harvard University where she obtained an M.Div. in Applied Theology. She obtained a Ph.D. in Community Psychology from Boston College.

#1846

John J. McArdle

#59003

Overall Influence

John J. McArdle is Professor of Psychology and Gerontology at the University of Southern California , where he is also director of the Unified Studies of Cognition Lab. He is known for his work on quantitative research methodology and on the changes in cognitive function and personality that occur as individuals age.

#1847

Stephen Crain

#64715

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Stephen Crain is the director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders , and a distinguished professor at Macquarie University in the Department of Linguistics. He is a well-known researcher specializing in language acquisition, focusing specifically on syntax and semantics. Crain views language acquisition as based on language-specific faculties, and he conducts his research in the tradition of Chomskyan generative grammar. Recently, Crain has proposed that language is based on a universal logical system, and he has begun to explore the neural correlates of language acquisition from a cross-linguistic perspective using magnetoencephalography .

#1848

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek

#53322

Overall Influence

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek is the Stanley and Debra Lefkowitz Professor of Psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she directs the Temple University Infant Language Laboratory. She is the author of 14 books and over 200 publications on early childhood and infant development, with a specialty in language and literacy, and playful learning.

#1849

Jagannath Prasad Das

#60425

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Jagannath Prasad Das is an Indo-Canadian educational psychologist specialized in educational psychology, intelligence and childhood development. Among his contributions to psychology are the PASS theory of intelligence and the Das-Naglieri Cognitive Assessment System. Das was the Director of the JP Das Developmental Disabilities Centre at the University of Alberta. He formally retired in 1996, and is currently Emeritus Director of the Centre on Developmental and Learning Disabilities and Emeritus Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Alberta. He is a member of the Royal S...

#1850

Lorenza Colzato

#78964

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Lorenza S. Colzato is an Italian cognitive psychologist who is best known for the attention she received in the mainstream media in the Netherlands for multiple incidents of scientific misconduct. Her research "aims to understand the neural and neuromodular underpinnings of cognitive control in humans."

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