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,

#3801

Virginia Valian

#101224

Overall Influence

Virginia Valian is an American psycholinguist, cognitive scientist, and theorist of male-female differences in professional achievement. Vallen is a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College as well as a member of the doctoral faculties of Psychology, Linguistics, and Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center. She directs the Language Acquisition Research Center and the Gender Equity Project , both at Hunter College. For her work on gender equity, Valian received the 2006 Betty Vetter Award for Research from WEPAN . She became an elected member of the American Academy of Ar...

#3802

Dare Baldwin

#151797

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Dare Ann Baldwin is a scientist known for her research on learning mechanisms and early social skills of infants and young children. Baldwin is a professor of psychology at Oregon University. Baldwin is the recipient of various awards including the 1994 Boyd McCandless Award from Division 7 of the American Psychological Association, 1995 John Merck Scholars Award, 1997 APA Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology, 2006-2007 James McKeen Cattell Sabbatical Fellowship, 2006 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, 2006-2007 University of Oregon Fund for Facul...

#3803

Helene Polatajko

#151771

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Helene J. Polatajko is an occupational therapy scholar, and Professor Emerita in the department of occupational science and occupational therapy at the University of Toronto's Temerty Faculty of Medicine.

#3804

Richard Pringle

#111701

Overall Influence

Leslie Richard Pringle is an American psychologist and professor. Pringle holds the Henry S. Dulaney Professorship of Psychology and is affiliated with the peace studies program at Goucher College. He researches the psychology of community service and relational psychology in line with relational cultural theory.

#3805

Victoria Plaut

#137462

Overall Influence

Victoria Caroline Plaut is a professor of law and social science at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studies the challenges and opportunities of multiculturalism and diversity. Her pioneering work has examined barriers faced by women in computer science, Whites' reactions to multiculturalism, and the myth of colorblindness in organizations. A noted expert on the causes and consequences of implicit bias, she has penned articles for venues such as the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and Scientific American; and served as an amicus curae to the U.S. Supreme Court.

#3806

Shlomo Hareli

#136718

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Shlomo Hareli is an Israeli psychologist, Full Professor of Social Psychology at the School of Business Administration at the University of Haifa. At present, he is serving as the head of the school.

#3807

James E. Carr

#168031

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

#3808

Stanley O. Gaines

#145327

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Stanley O. Gaines Jr. is a Social Psychologist and Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at Brunel University. Gaines is the lead author of Culture, Ethnicity, and Personal Relationship Processes, published by Routledge in 1997 .

#3809

Kenneth S. Wagoner

#129160

Overall Influence

1911 - 2000 (89 years)

Kenneth Shrout Wagoner was an American psychologist, a professor of psychology on the faculty of DePauw University, and a physiological skin scientist. Early life and education Born in Waldron, Indiana, the son of Otto Wagoner and his wife, Nannie Shrout Wagoner, he graduated from DePauw University in 1932 and studied at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Then, he went on to do graduate work at Washington University in St. Louis, where he completed his M.A. in 1932 with a thesis on "The effect of warmth stimulation of one hand upon the temperature limen in the contralateral hand" and his Ph.D.

#3810

Sherry Pagoto

#149166

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Sherry Pagoto is a professor in the Department of Allied Health Sciences at the University of Connecticut and director of the UConn Center for mHealth and Social Media. A behavioural scientist and licensed clinical psychologist, she is an expert in leveraging technology, especially social media, to promote health behavior change with extensive research on the topics of obesity management and cancer prevention. She is the President of the Society of Behavioral Medicine.

#3811

Robert DuPont

#28377

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Robert L. DuPont is an American psychiatrist, known for his advocacy in the field of substance abuse. He is president of the Institute for Behavior and Health, whose mission is "to reduce the use of illegal drugs". He has written books including Chemical Slavery: Understanding Addiction and Stopping the Drug Epidemic, The Selfish Brain: Learning from Addiction, as well as Drug Testing in Treatment Settings, Drug Testing in Schools, and Drug Testing in Correctional Settings, published by the Hazelden Foundation. DuPont is a fellow of the American Society of Addiction Medicine and a life fellow...

#3812

Irwin Silverman

#124451

Overall Influence

Irwin Silverman is a professor of psychology at York University. With Marion Eals, he has studied sex differences in intelligence from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. External links Faculty page

#3813

Erika Hoff

#96060

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Erika Hoff is a developmental psychologist and an expert on language development and bilingualism. She is a professor of psychology at Florida Atlantic University, where she directs the Language Development Laboratory.

#3814

Anthony Pratkanis

Anthony Pratkanis

#138456

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Anthony R. Pratkanis is a researcher, author, consultant, media commentator and a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of several books, and has published research papers in scientific journals on the topics of social influence, fraud, terrorist and dictator propaganda, marketing and consumer behavior, and subliminal persuasion.

#3815

Maria Simon

#49105

Overall Influence

1918 - 2022 (104 years)

Maria Dorothea Simon was an Austrian psychologist and scholar of social work. Born into a Jewish family in Vienna near the end of the First World War, she was educated in Austria and Czechoslovakia but emigrated to London after the latter was annexed by Germany in 1938. While in the United Kingdom, she worked at the Hampstead Nurseries, an experimental child care centre run by the psychoanalyst Anna Freud. She was married to the jurist and resistance activist .

#3816

James H. Geer

#168505

Overall Influence

James H. Geer is an American psychologist. His area of research is sexuality. Career Geer has researched sexuality for over 30 years. He explores the psychophysiology of sexual arousal and cognitive variables in sexuality. He worked on the faculty at University at Buffalo, University of Pennsylvania, and Stony Brook University. He retired from his position at Louisiana State University and moved to the Lancaster area to work as a visiting scholar at Franklin & Marshall College.

#3817

Michael J. Beran

#168547

Overall Influence

#3818

Mark L. Davison

#167961

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Mark Leonard Davison is an American psychometrician. Davison earned his undergraduate degree from Augustana College in 1970. He completed his doctoral dissertation, titled Fitting a Set of Points to a Space Defined by a Second Set: An Extension of Multidimensional Scaling and Unfolding Models, at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1974, where he was advised by Lawrence E. Jones. Davison subsequently taught at the University of Minnesota as the John P. Yackel Professor in Educational Assessment and Measurement.

#3819

Susan Kippax

#119252

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Susan Caroline Kippax is an Australian social psychologist and is Emeritus Professor at the University of New South Wales. Academic career Born in 1941, Kippax graduated from the University of Sydney with a BA . In 1970 she won a Rhodes Travelling Fellowship to study at the University of Oxford. She completed her PhD at the University of Sydney. Her thesis was titled Attitudes: A theory and experimental investigation of their complex nature.

#3820

Michael Warner

#7346

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Michael David Warner is an American literary critic, social theorist, and Seymour H. Knox Professor of English Literature and American Studies at Yale University. He also writes for Artforum, The Nation, The Advocate, and The Village Voice. He is the author of Publics and Counterpublics, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, The English Literatures of America, 1500–1800, Fear of a Queer Planet, and The Letters of the Republic. He edited The Portable Walt Whitman and American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King, Jr.

#3821

Alexander Huk

#100562

Overall Influence

Alexander C. Huk is an American neuroscientist. Prior to moving to UCLA in 2022, he was the Raymond Dickson Centennial Professor #2 of Neuroscience and Psychology, and the Director of the Center for Perceptual Systems at The University of Texas at Austin. His laboratory studies how the brain integrates information over space and time and how these neural signals guide behavior in the natural world. He has made contributions towards understanding how the brain represents 3D visual motion and how those representations are used to make perceptual judgments

#3822

John Horgan

#165095

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

John G. Horgan is a Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. He studies involvement and engagement with terrorism, with a focus on disengagement and deradicalisation from terrorist movements. He has been described by the European Eye on Radicalization research group as the "world’s most distinguished expert in the psychology of terrorism". Since 2019, Horgan has been leading a team of researchers funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to research the incel subculture.

#3823

Robert Serpell

#116481

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Robert Nicholas Serpell is a Zambian citizen and Professor of Psychology at the University of Zambia. From 2003 to 2006 he was Vice-Chancellor of the University. He also serves as the current Chancellor of Eden University in Lusaka, Zambia.

#3824

Ed Byrne

#33759

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Sir Edward Byrne is a neuroscientist who served as Principal of King's College London from August 2014 until January 2021. He was previously Vice-Chancellor of Monash University. Early life and education Born 15 February 1952, Byrne grew up in northeast England, the son of a general practitioner, and moved to Australia at the age of 15. He studied medicine at the University of Tasmania, graduating with a Bachelor of Medical Science in 1971, Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery with First Class Honours in 1974, and a Doctor of Medicine in 1982. Byrne also holds a Master of Business A...

#3825

Amanda Sheffield Morris

#158641

Overall Influence

Amanda Sheffield Morris is an American developmental scientist, known primarily for her work on parenting, emotion regulation, and the neuroscience of adversity and resilience in terms of optimal child and adolescent development. She is currently the Regents Professor of Psychology at Oklahoma State University.

#3826

David Rindskopf

#127205

Overall Influence

David Rindskopf is an American psychologist and applied statistician, currently a Distinguished Professor at City University of New York, and a published author of both books and many articles in refereed journals. . He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association , was the President of its New York section, and American Educational Research Association and also former editor of the ASA-AERA journal Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics.

#3827

Carole Peterson

#159403

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Carole L. Menig-Peterson is an American–Canadian child psychologist. She is a professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland who specializes in early childhood memory. In 2012, Peterson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada for pioneering narrative ability, eyewitness memory, and early childhood amnesia.

#3828

Norma Graham

#130445

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Norma Van Surdam Graham is an American psychologist, neuroscientist and the Centennial Professor of Psychology at Columbia University. She has been a faculty member at Columbia since 1972. She has been elected to several scholarly societies, including the National Academy of Sciences.

#3829

Claire Wiseman

#163182

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Claire V. Wiseman is an assistant clinical professor of psychology at the Yale School of Medicine and a practicing clinical Psychologist and researcher who specializes in eating disorders and adolescent body image.

#3830

Joy Harden Bradford

#126489

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Joy Harden Bradford is an African American clinical psychologist based in Atlanta, Georgia. She is best known as the founder of a mental health platform called Therapy for Black Girls, which includes a podcast of the same name, that specializes in mental health issues relevant to Black women. As of 2019, the podcast's episodes have been downloaded over two million times.

#3831

David A. Washburn

#158534

Overall Influence

David Alan Washburn is an American psychologist who is professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at Georgia State University. From 2001 to 2019, he also served as the Director of the Georgia State University Language Research Center. In August, 2019, he retired at Georgia State University and joined the faculty of his alma mater as professor of psychology at Covenant College. His research includes studies of individual and group differences in cognitive competencies, particularly attention and its relation to learning, memory, and executive functioning. He is best known for his noninv...

#3832

Joseph P. Allen

#93632

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Joseph P. Allen is an American psychologist and academic. He is currently the Hugh P. Kelly Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. Education He received a B.A. in psychology from the University of Virginia in May 1980, and then a Ph.D. in Clinical/Community Psychology from Yale University in May 1986. He subsequently worked as a post-doctoral fellow in research at Harvard Medical School from 1986 until 1988.

#3833

Lola Cuddy

#104639

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Lola L. Cuddy is a Canadian psychologist recognized for her contributions to the field of music psychology. She is a professor emerita in the Department of Psychology at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.

#3834

Benjamin Levin

#149726

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Benjamin Ruvin Levin is a Canadian former civil servant, educational scholar, and convicted sex offender. He was a Canada Research Chair in Education Leadership and Policy at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education , University of Toronto. He served for three years in the Ontario Liberal provincial government of Dalton McGuinty, as Deputy Minister in the Ministry of Education, after having held a similar post in Manitoba. He also served as an advisor to Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne.

#3835

Jan-Eric Gustafsson

#125042

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Jan-Eric Gustafsson is a Swedish educational psychologist. He is professor of education at the University of Gothenburg and professor II at the University of Oslo's Faculty of Educational Sciences. He was named a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1993 and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oslo in 2017.

#3836

Paul Irwing

#145878

Overall Influence

Paul Irwing is a Reader in organisational psychology at the University of Manchester. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Intelligence and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine. Paul Irwing has published research on gender differences in six articles in Intelligence, two articles in the British Journal of Psychology and one article in Nature. He has a total of 70+ publications, including 31 journal articles.

#3837

Rosalind Ridley

Rosalind Ridley

#69708

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Rosalind Ridley is a British psychologist and researcher who was head of the Medical Research Council Comparative Cognition Research Team in the Department of Psychology, Cambridge, UK, until 2005. She was a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge from 1995–2010 and Vice-Principal from 2000–2005. She holds the privileges of a Fellow Emerita at Newnham College.

#3838

Raz Yirmiya

#97280

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Raz Yirmiya is an Israeli behavioral neuroscientist and director of the Laboratory for Psychoneuroimmunology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. He is best known for providing the first experimental evidence for the role of immune system activation in depression, for discovering that disturbances in brain microglia cells underlie some forms of depression, and for elucidating the involvement of inflammatory cytokines in regulation of cognitive and emotional processes.

#3839

Michael Anestis

#150446

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Michael David Anestis is an American clinical psychologist and associate professor in the Department of Urban-Global Public Health in the Rutgers School of Public Health, as well as the executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center. Before joining the faculty of Rutgers in 2020, he taught at the University of Southern Mississippi, where he first joined the faculty in 2012.

#3840

Phillip M. Merikle

#158126

Overall Influence

Philip M. Merikle is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He is known for his published work on attentional processes, memory and anaesthesia see anaesthesia awareness, perception without awareness , and synaesthesia Merikle's early contributions rebutted against Daniel Holender's 1986 criticism of prior experiments which claimed to demonstrate unconscious priming following Anthony Marcel's work on unconscious processes. Merikle's work sought to shift the debate from indirect-without-direct effects determined by Holender to...

#3841

John Ross

#169440

Overall Influence

#3842

Danièle Brun

#98195

Overall Influence

1938 - 2023 (85 years)

Danièle Brun was a French academic and psychologist. She was a member of the . Biography Brun first studied English and German at the University of Paris before completing her studies in psychology at Paris Diderot University and the University of Vincennes. She had also enrolled at Paris Descartes University.

#3843

Joni Wallis

#93896

Overall Influence

Joni Wallis is a cognitive neurophysiologist and Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Education and early career Wallis received her Bachelors of Science in Psychology and Neuroscience from the University of Manchester in 1995. She received her PhD in Experimental Psychology and Anatomy from the University of Cambridge, where she worked in the laboratory of .

#3844

Susan Meyer Markle

#122013

Overall Influence

1928 - 2008 (80 years)

Susan Meyer Markle was an American psychologist. She worked with B. F. Skinner on programmed instruction. Biography Susan Meyer Markle was born Susan Rogers on November 11, 1928, to Alden and Ruth Rogers. Considered a luminary of B.F. Skinner's teaching machine innovation, Markle worked as a researcher at his Harvard laboratory from 1956 to 1960.

#3845

Caryn Lerman

#143646

Overall Influence

Caryn E. Lerman is an American psychologist. She is the director of the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center through the Keck School of Medicine. Early life and education Lerman completed her Bachelor of Science degree in psychology from Pennsylvania State University in 1981 before moving to California and enrolling in the University of Southern California for her Master's degree and PhD.

#3846

Andrew Christensen

#127023

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Andrew Christensen is a distinguished research professor at University of California, Los Angeles, specializing in clinical psychology. He is also a published author of 10 books, and is held in 3,151 libraries worldwide, the highest held book being in 804 libraries.

#3847

John Hitt

#115850

Overall Influence

1940 - 2023 (83 years)

John C. Hitt was an American professor and academic administrator, who served as the fourth president of the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida from 1992 to 2018. He was named the Orlando Sentinel's Central Floridian of the Year in 2005, and twice Orlando's most powerful person by Orlando Magazine. He was the dean of Florida's university presidents, as the longest tenured president in the state. His reputation was materially tarnished by auditor findings that tens of millions of dollars were improperly spent on construction during his tenure as president. He acknowledged the spending and resigned from his compensated fundraising role.

#3848

Harriet Holter

#29858

Overall Influence

1922 - 1997 (75 years)

Harriet Holter was a Norwegian social psychologist. Career She graduated with the cand.oecon. degree in 1946, and was eventually hired as a research fellow at the Norwegian Institute for Social Research, which was established in 1950.

#3849

Lazarre Seymour Simckes

Lazarre Seymour Simckes

#105650

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Lazarre Seymour Simckes is a playwright, novelist, educator, Hebrew-English translator, and psychotherapist. He has developed approaches to the use of creative writing in areas including prison therapy and cross-cultural communication between students in the Middle East.

#3850

George Butterworth

#169703

Overall Influence

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