Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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School

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Ranking

List of the most influential people in Psychology,

#2501

Edward Oren Bixler

#122499

Overall Influence

#2502

Linda S. Fidell

#122530

Overall Influence

#2503

Gretchen Marie Spreitzer

#122574

Overall Influence

#2504

John M. Broughton

#92227

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

John M. Broughton is an American psychologist and professor who specialises in cultural studies, media and visual culture, youth culture, popular culture, gender, and violence. Broughton graduated from Cambridge University with both a BA and Masters of Arts, later earning his PhD at Harvard University. He became an associate professor of Psychology and Education at the Teachers College at Columbia University in 1976, and continues to hold the position.

#2505

Robert J. Mislevy

#122679

Overall Influence

#2506

Yadin Dudai

#16336

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Yadin Dudai is a neuroscientist, Professor of Neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and the Albert and Blanche Willner Family Global Distinguished Professor of Neural Science at New York University .

#2507

Wayne H. Holtzman

#98035

Overall Influence

1923 - 2019 (96 years)

Wayne Harold Holtzman was an American psychologist best known for the development of the Holtzman Inkblot Test. Holtzman received a master's degree from Northwestern University and a doctorate from Stanford University. He worked at the University of Texas at Austin from 1949 until he retired in 1993. He developed the Holtzman Inkblot Test to address deficiencies in the Rorschach test.

#2508

Paul Light

#40504

Overall Influence

Paul Light is a British academic and psychologist. He was the first Vice-Chancellor of the University of Winchester. Early life Light was brought up in Weymouth in Dorset and studied Psychology from 1966 until c 1974 at St John's College, Cambridge, where he obtained an MA and also a doctorate.

#2509

Felix Tretter

#25238

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Felix Tretter is an Austrian psychologist and psychiatrist. From 1992 to 2014 he was head of the addiction department of the Isar-Amper-Klinikum München-Ost, formerly known as Bezirkskrankenhaus Haar, Bavaria, Germany. His scientific work has emphasis on modelling of psychophysical scenarios in schizophrenia and addiction research with methods of systems science.

#2510

E. J. Capaldi

#122802

Overall Influence

#2511

Robert R. Holt

#122850

Overall Influence

#2512

Ann M. Clarke

#114709

Overall Influence

1928 - 2015 (87 years)

Ann Margaret Clarke was a developmental psychologist who conducted research into children with learning disability. Career Clarke was born in Madras, India. She studied psychology at the University of Reading where she met Alan D.B. Clarke who would become her life-long partner. She obtained her PhD from the Institute of Psychiatry, London . She moved with Alan Clarke to Manor Hospital, Epsom where they worked with children with intellectual disability.

#2513

Rebecca Zwick

#43148

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Rebecca Zwick is an American statistician and researcher in educational assessment and psychometrics. She is a professor emeritus in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the author of a book on university and college admission, Who Gets In? Strategies for Fair and Effective College Admissions .

#2514

Dale T. Miller

#122936

Overall Influence

#2515

Bart Soenens

#122958

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

#2516

Rosine Perelberg

#111138

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Rosine Jozef Perelberg is a Brazilian-born British psychoanalyst. She served as president of the British Psychoanalytical Society between 2019 and 2022. Career Perelberg completed her master's degree in 1980 at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, and received her PhD in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics, University of London in 1983. Towards the end of her PhD, Perelberg worked with anorexia nervosa patients at Maudsley Hospital, before moving into a role as Senior Psychotherapist and Family Therapist at the Marlborough Family Service, where she worked between 1981 and 1991.

#2517

María Elena Medina-Mora Icaza

#75285

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

María Elena Medina-Mora Icaza is a Mexican researcher and psychologist. Medina-Mora Icaza was inducted into El Colegio Nacional on 6 March 2006. Early life and education Medina-Mora Icaza was born on 3 October 1951, in Mexico City. She obtained her primary education at the Colegio Francés del Pedregal from 1955-1961. She attended Palos Verdes & Margate School for junior high school from 1962-1963. She then returned to the French College of Pedregal for high school . Following high school, she obtained licensure to practice social and clinical psychology . Once licensed, she obtained her Bachelor of Psychology and her Masters in Psychology at the Ibero-American University.

#2518

E. Kevin Kelloway

#123006

Overall Influence

#2519

Terence Tracey

#121802

Overall Influence

Terence J. G. Tracey is an American psychologist, author and researcher. He is professor emeritus of counseling and counseling psychology at Arizona State University. He is also a visiting professor at University of British Columbia. He has served in many administrative positions at Arizona State University including department head and associate dean. He is the former editor-in-chief of Journal of Counseling Psychology.

#2520

Carlo Arrigo Umiltà

#123032

Overall Influence

#2521

Kim L. Gratz

#123037

Overall Influence

#2522

Gary Dell

#120510

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Gary S. Dell is an American psycholinguist. He is Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Center for Advanced Study Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Early life and education Dell is from Delaware. He graduated from Alexis I. duPont High School in 1968; his senior yearbook noted "What little he says is well worth listening to." Following undergraduate studies at Swarthmore College he received his doctoral degree from the University of Toronto. His thesis, supervised by Peter Reich, used spontaneous and experimentally-induced speech errors to investigate the cognitive p...

#2523

Randall C. O'Reilly

#52760

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Randall Charles O'Reilly is a professor of psychology and computer science at the Center for Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis. His lab moved to UC Davis from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2019.

#2524

Martin Voracek

#88669

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Martin Voracek is an Austrian psychologist and Professor of Psychological Research Methods - Research Synthesis in the University of Vienna's Faculty of Psychology. He is also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Individual Differences.

#2525

Fiery Cushman

#105208

Overall Influence

Fiery A. Cushman is an American academic working as a professor of psychology at Harvard University, where he directs the Moral Psychology Research Laboratory. He is John L. Loeb Professor of the Social Sciences.

#2526

Abraham S. Fischler

#35653

Overall Influence

1928 - 2017 (89 years)

Abraham S. Fischler was an American academic, and was the second president of Nova Southeastern University. Fischler graduated from Columbia University in 1959 with his Ed.D. He went on to serve as assistant professor of Science Education at Harvard University and Professor of Education at the University of California, Berkeley before joining the fledgling Nova University in 1966. Fischler served as Dean of Graduate Studies and Director of the Behavioral Sciences Center from 1966 to 1969. He became the President of Nova Southeastern University in 1970 and was president until 1992.

#2527

Klaus Oberauer

#123300

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

#2528

Stella Vosniadou

#123318

Overall Influence

#2529

Oran Wendle Eagleson

#93171

Overall Influence

1910 - 1997 (87 years)

Oran Wendle Eagleson was the Callaway Professor of Psychology at Spelman College, Atlanta. He was the eighth black person in the United States to receive a doctorate in psychology. Early life and education Oran Wendle Eagleson was born in Unionville, Indiana in 1910. In Bloomington, Indiana he completed his PhD at Indiana University in 1935. He also earned a bachelor's degree in 1931 and a master's in 1932, both in Indiana. Eagleson worked as a shoe shiner and shoe repair finisher from high school through graduate years.

#2530

Muireann Irish

#68160

Overall Influence

Muireann Irish is a cognitive neuropsychologist at the Brain and Mind Centre at the University of Sydney. She has won international and national awards, including an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship and L’Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science Fellowship.

#2531

Howard Nusbaum

#96048

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Howard C. Nusbaum is professor at the University of Chicago, United States in the Department of Psychology and its College, and a steering committee member of the Neuroscience Institute. Nusbaum is an internationally recognized expert in cognitive psychology, speech science, and in the new field of social neuroscience. Nusbaum investigates the cognitive and neural mechanisms that mediate spoken language use, as well as language learning and the role of attention in speech perception. In addition, he investigates how we understand the meaning of music, and how cognitive and social-emotional pr...

#2532

John Christopher Muran

John Christopher Muran

#113212

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

John Christopher Muran is an American clinical psychologist and psychotherapy researcher. Education John Christopher Muran graduated cum laude from The Hotchkiss School in 1980 and Hamilton College in 1984. He completed a doctorate in combined professional-scientific psychology at Hofstra University in 1989. He also completed postdoctoral training in cognitive therapy at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in 1990 and in psychoanalysis at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in 1998.

#2533

Robert Ladouceur

#123412

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

#2534

Maria Concetta Morrone

#123525

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

#2535

Steven Gangestad

#123528

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Steven Warren Gangestad is an American evolutionary psychologist who is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology at the University of New Mexico. With his University of New Mexico colleague Randy Thornhill, he has conducted considerable research pointing to the existence of concealed ovulation in humans.

#2536

Howard B. Kaplan

#123649

Overall Influence

#2537

Donald Gerald Stein

#123653

Overall Influence

#2538

Irwin Hyman

#64777

Overall Influence

1935 - 2005 (70 years)

Irwin Abraham Meltzer Hyman was an American school psychologist known for his research on, and opposition to, corporal punishment of children. Early life and education Hyman was born on March 22, 1935, in Neptune, New Jersey. He received his B.A. from the University of Maine in 1958, followed by a M.Ed. in 1961 and Ed.D. in 1964, both from Rutgers University.

#2539

Peter Cooper

#120058

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Peter J. Cooper, is a British psychopathologist and academic. He is Professor of Psychopathology at the University of Reading. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2016. Cooper is a specialist in intergenerational transmission of psychopathology, child cognitive and socio-emotional development in the developing world, and the development evaluation and dissemination of parenting interventions.

#2540

Anthony Biglan

#123672

Overall Influence

#2541

Marjorie Hines Woollacott

#123688

Overall Influence

#2542

Pamela Trotman Reid

#81347

Overall Influence

Pamela Trotman Reid is an American developmental psychologist, former professor, and president emerita of the University of Saint Joseph. Biography Pamela Trotman Reid grew up in Brooklyn and Queens, New York. She has said what she loved most when she was a child was reading and science. She is married to her college boyfriend, Irvin Reid, whom she met at Howard University when they were taking psychology classes together during her freshman year and his first year of graduate school. The couple later set up an endowment for the school's psychology department.

#2543

Shelly Grabe

#43629

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Shelly Grabe is a professor in Social Psychology at the University of California Santa Cruz, where she has affiliations with Feminist Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies. Her research involves women's human rights and globalization and the international attention given to women's empowerment.

#2544

Kate Nation

#118269

Overall Influence

Kate Nation is an experimental psychologist and expert on language and literacy development in school age children. She is Professor of Experimental Psychology and Fellow of St. John's College of the University of Oxford, where she directs the ReadOxford project and the Language and Cognitive Development Research Group.

#2545

Hugo Critchley

#48483

Overall Influence

Hugo Critchley is a British professor of psychiatry at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, a partnership of the University of Brighton and the University of Sussex. Early life and education Critchley spent childhood years in Blackburn, Lancashire. His father, Edmund Critchley, worked as a neurologist, and his mother, Mair Critchley, née Bowen, as a physician in nuclear medicine. Critchley went to the University of Liverpool, attaining degrees in Physiology and Medicine . After a period as a junior doctor in Walton and Fazakerley Hospitals, he pursued doctorate training, studying cross-moda...

#2546

Leonard Bickman

#123871

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

#2547

Ruth A. Baer

#123893

Overall Influence

#2548

Jonathan Abramowitz

Jonathan Abramowitz

#101059

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Jonathan Stuart Abramowitz is an American clinical psychologist and Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . He is an expert on obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety disorders whose work is highly cited. He maintains a research lab and currently serves as the Director of the UNC-CH Clinical Psychology PhD Program. Abramowitz approaches the understanding and treatment of psychological problems from a cognitive-behavioral perspective.

#2549

Gordon Winocur

#123915

Overall Influence

#2550

Rolf Antonius Zwaan

#123941

Overall Influence

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