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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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Psychology,

#4401

James M. Murphy

#188089

Overall Influence

#4402

Nicola Kayes

#186578

Overall Influence

Nicola M. Kayes is a New Zealand health psychologist, director of the Centre for Person Centred Research and professor of rehabilitation at Auckland University of Technology . Academic career Kayes graduated from the University of Auckland with a BSc in 1997 and MSc in 1999 for her thesis titled "The Role that Illness Perceptions Play in the Adjustment to Multiple Sclerosis". She completed a PhD at AUT titled "Physical activity engagement in people with Multiple Sclerosis" in March 2011.

#4403

Tracey Reynolds

#84339

Overall Influence

Tracey Reynolds is a British sociologist and professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Greenwich. She began working in academia in 1998 at London South Bank University in their Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Science. She is Professor of Social Sciences and Director of the Centre for Applied Sociology Research at the University of Greenwich.

#4404

Tracy Berno

#73008

Overall Influence

Tracy Berno is a New Zealand academic, specialising in cross-cultural psychology and food. As of 2022 she is a full professor of the culinary arts in the School of Hospitality and Tourism at Auckland University of Technology.

#4405

Emil Kirkegaard

#188149

Overall Influence

#4406

Elizabeth Allgeier

#188252

Overall Influence

1941 - 2016 (75 years)

Elizabeth Rice Allgeier was an American psychologist and sexologist. She was the Editor of the Journal of Sex Research in the 1990s. She was Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Bowling Green State University. She joined BGSU in 1980 and retired in 2004. She received her PhD from Purdue University. She was a Fellow of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, serving as its president between 1985 and 1986. She was one of the experts to file an amicus brief in United States v. Playboy Entertainment Group.

#4407

Maria Tumarkin

#105148

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Maria Tumarkin is an Australian cultural historian, essayist and novelist., and is senior lecturer in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, teaching creative writing.

#4408

Sara Nasserzadeh

#176699

Overall Influence

Sara Nasserzadeh is an Iranian-American social psychologist, relationship counselor, psychosexual therapist, public speaker and author. She is known mostly for her educational programs on BBC World Service and Persian TV on human sexuality and relationships. She received the BBC’s Innovation of the Year Award in 2007 and was among the BBC Persian 100 Influential Women. Nasserzadeh received the People of Distinction Humanitarian Award in New York City in 2014. She is also a winner of AASECT Book Award and AASECT Professional Standard of Excellence Award.

#4409

Natalie Matosin

#58658

Overall Influence

Dr. Natalie Matosin is an Australian scientist known for research into the human brain in health and disease, and particularly how stress raises risk to mental illness. Matosin's research has been published in prestigious academic journals, as well as on The Conversation. Matosin spoke at TEDx Hamburg in June 2017 and is the 2021 Al & Val Rosenstrauss Fellow. She was previously a National Health and Medical Research Council CJ Martin Early Career Research Fellow, and Alexander von Humboldt Fellow. In 2017, Matosin was listed as a Forbes 30 Under 30 in Europe in the category of Science & Health...

#4410

Barbara Bonner

#185025

Overall Influence

Barbara L. Bonner is a clinical psychologist and expert on juvenile sex offenders. She is known for her research on the assessment and treatment of abused children, prevention of child fatalities due to neglect, and treatment of children and adolescents with problematic sexual behavior. Bonner is the CMRI/Jean Gumerson Endowed Chair and Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine. She serves as the Director of the Child Abuse and Neglect at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center.

#4411

Diana Reiss

#188514

Overall Influence

#4412

Meike Bartels

#180877

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Meike Bartels is a Dutch psychologist and behavior geneticist known for her research on the genetics of happiness and subjective well-being. She is professor in "Behavior and Quantitative Genetics" at the Department of Biological Psychology at VU University Amsterdam and affiliated with the Amsterdam Public Health Institute. She also holds a University Research Chair in Genetics and Wellbeing at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In 2008, she received the Fuller & Scott Award from the Behavior Genetics Association. She is one of the principal investigators on the study finding genetic variants...

#4413

Talya Miron-Shatz

#185451

Overall Influence

Talya Miron-Shatz is an Israeli researcher who specializes in medical decision-making. She is a full professor at the Ono Academic College, a senior fellow at the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, New York, and a visiting researcher at the Wonton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, Cambridge University. She has worked as a consultant in the healthcare industry to companies from health advertising, digital health, wellness, and the pharmaceutical industry.

#4414

Jack Dunham

#175035

Overall Influence

1938 - 1992 (54 years)

Jack Dunham was an American psychologist. Educational background Dunham grew up in Albion, IL- a town in the southern part of Illinois. Dunham received his B.A. degree from Portland State College in 1962 and his PhD from the University of Southern California in 1966. He studied at USC with Dr. J.P. Guilford. In his doctorate, Dunham and Guilford worked with the concept of intelligence, and developing factor structures that compose this construct. Dunham accepted a position as a faculty member with University of Texas, Austin in Educational Psychology. At the University of Texas, Dunham ran a c...

#4415

Colin Cooper

#87369

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Colin Cooper is a British psychologist and was a senior lecturer in the School of Psychology at Queen's University Belfast until 2012, when he took early retirement and moved to Picton, and latterly London Ontario, Canada. Cooper also devised the multiple-choice IQ tests for the BBC television programme Test the Nation. Among the questions, Cooper said that he had managed to "sneak in a few things that interested me", including questions "exploring the link between intelligence and genetics, height and the number of accidents they have had."

#4416

David Weisstub

#72954

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

David Norman Weisstub is the Philippe Pinel professor of legal psychiatry and biomedical ethics at the Université de Montréal. He is the founder and honorary life president of the International Academy of Law and Mental Health.He is also the co-president of the International Academy of Medical Ethics and Public Health, which he co-founded in 2016. He is the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, as well as co-editor of the Ethics, Medicine, and Public Health journal and of Springer's International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine. He also sits on the e...

#4417

Floretta Boonzaier

#183789

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Floretta Avril Boonzaier is a South African psychologist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Cape Town. She is noted for her work in feminist, critical and postcolonial psychologies, subjectivity in relation to race, gender and sexuality, and gender-based violence, and qualitative psychologies, especially narrative, discursive and participatory methods. She heads the Hub for Decolonial Feminist Psychologies in Africa with Shose Kessi.

#4418

Bruce F. Pennington

#187077

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Bruce Franklin Pennington is an American psychologist and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology at the University of Denver. He is recognized for his research on developmental disorders such as autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and developmental dyslexia.

#4419

Samuel Baskin

#87930

Overall Influence

1901 - 2002 (101 years)

Samuel Baskin was an American psychologist and educational reformer who served on the faculty of Stephens College, Antioch College and was the first president of the Union Institute & University. Baskin received his undergraduate education at Brooklyn College and his Ph.D. from New York University. While director of educational planning at Antioch College, Baskin helped lead the creation of the Union for Research and Experimentation in Higher Education . As head of the Union for Experimenting Colleges and Universities, Baskin was the "driving force" behind the national initiative to create "Un...

#4420

Sally Brinkman

#186641

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Dr. Sally Brinkman is a social epidemiologist with a focus on early childhood development and the impact of society on children's short and long term outcomes. Brinkman led the development and implementation of the Early Development Instrument for population level data across Australia, now known as the nationwide Australian Early Development Census measuring over 300,000 children in how they have developed by the time they start their first year of full-time school. Brinkman works for international organisations including World Bank, UNICEF and AusAID, and has over 100 publications covering child development and education.

#4421

Ama de-Graft Aikins

#188268

Overall Influence

Ama de-Graft Aikins is a British-Ghanaian Social Psychologist who is currently a British Academy Global Professor at University College London's Institute of Advanced Studies. Her research focuses primarily on the psychosocial and structural drivers of Africa's chronic non-communicable disease burden, but she also has interests in arts and health, and the history of psychology in Africa and its intersections with critical theory and African Studies. She has held teaching and research positions at the University of Cambridge, London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Ghana.

#4422

Anita Raj

#174027

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Anita Raj is an American developmental psychologist and global public health researcher focused on sexual and reproductive health, maternal and child health, and gender inequalities including gender-based violence, discrimination and bias. Until 2023, Raj was the Tata Chancellor Professor of Society and Health and was a professor in the Departments of Medicine and Education Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Raj was also the Founding Director of UCSD's Center on Gender Equity and Health. In 2023, Raj was named the Executive Director of the Newcomb Institute at Tulane Univers...

#4423

Michael E. Smith

#188841

Overall Influence

#4424

Klaus Baumann

#188842

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

#4425

Linda B. Smith

#188854

Overall Influence

#4426

Masahiko Minami

#188578

Overall Influence

Masahiko Minami is a linguistics professor at San Francisco State University where he specializes in Japanese language and cross-cultural studies. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Japanese Linguistics and associate editor of Narrative Inquiry . He is also coordinator for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test for Northern California. In addition, he served as president of the Foreign Language Association of Northern California and President of the Northern California Japanese Teachers’ Association .

#4427

Susie Linfield

#67492

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Susie Linfield is a social and cultural theorist at New York University. Background and education Between the ages of 8 and 15 Linfield was a student at George Balanchine's School of American Ballet in New York City. She danced as a student in productions of the ballets Don Quixote, A Midsummer Night's Dream and in the Royal Ballet's New York production of The Nutcracker under the directorship of Rudolf Nureyev. She decided to continue her education at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City. Then earned a bachelor's degree in American history at Oberlin College in Ohio.

#4428

John Chandler

#102030

Overall Influence

1923 - Present (103 years)

John Wesley Chandler was an American educator who was the 15th president of Hamilton College, from 1968 to 1973 and the 12th president of Williams College, from 1973 to 1985. He was also president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities from 1985 to 1990.

#4429

David M. Greenberg

#188496

Overall Influence

David Michael Greenberg is a psychologist, neuroscientist, and musician. He is best known for his contributions to personality psychology, social psychology, social neuroscience, music psychology, and autism.

#4430

Helen Bee

#31145

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Helen L. Bee is a psychologist and author of several books on the subject of human development, including both child development and adult development. Education Bee was one of the two daughters of Austin Bee, who influenced her deeply. She received her BA from Radcliffe College in 1960 and her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1964, under the tutelage of Robert Sears and Eleanor Maccoby.

#4431

Christopher Harding

#87460

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Christopher Harding is a cultural historian of modern India and Japan, lecturer in Asian history at the University of Edinburgh, broadcaster and journalist. His series on culture and mental health, The Borders of Sanity, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service in 2016.

#4432

Sabina Brennan

#184409

Overall Influence

Sabina Brennan is an Irish neuroscientist, psychologist, and former television actress. She is currently an adjunct assistant professor working at Trinity College Dublin. Early life and family Brennan is the youngest of five children. Her father worked for Irish Life and she followed him into this business after finishing school. She is married and has two sons.

#4433

John Glad

#30160

Overall Influence

1941 - 2015 (74 years)

John Glad was an American academic who specialized in the literature and politics of exile, especially Russian literature. He also wrote about, and advocated for, eugenics. Biography John Glad was born in Gary, Indiana in a family of immigrants from Croatia. His surname in Croatian means "hunger". "I am Ivan Hunger", he used to tell his Russian colleagues.

#4434

Lucas Gottzén

#159341

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Lucas Martin Gottzén , formerly Lucas Forsberg, is a Swedish social scientist and an expert on men's studies and violence. He is full Professor of Child and Youth Studies at Stockholm University. He was editor-in-chief of the men's studies journal Norma from 2014 to 2018; he was also editor of the child and youth studies journal Locus 2009–2010, and was editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Masculinity Studies. He is particularly noted for his research on the relation between the perception of masculinity and physical and sexual violence, and is a frequent commentator in the media ...

#4435

Anne Speckhard

#188111

Overall Influence

Anne Speckhard is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington D.C. Her research focuses on developing counter-terrorism initiatives and understanding the motivations of terrorists. She is the Director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism .

#4436

Jennie Ponsford

#186075

Overall Influence

Jennie Louise Ponsford is an Australian neuroscience researcher at Monash University, Victoria who has a special interest in Traumatic Brain Injury . Jennie is a clinical neuropsychologist, whose work is focused on developing a deeper understanding of the negative consequences of TBI, particularly those related to fatigue, sleep disturbance, attentional, memory and executive problems, psychiatric and behavioural disturbances and sexuality, and the development of rehabilitation interventions to improve long term recovery and quality of life in individuals with TBI.

#4437

Jacqueline Lerner

#118138

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Jacqueline V. Lerner is Professor of Applied Developmental & Educational Psychology in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College, where she has taught since 1996. She is a member of the Society for Research in Child Development, the International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development, and Psi Chi. With her husband and research collaborator Richard M. Lerner, she has been active in promoting the concept of positive youth development.

#4438

Eugene Revitch

#95573

Overall Influence

1909 - 1996 (87 years)

Dr. Eugene Revitch, M.D. was born in Riga, Latvia, attended the University of Montpellier in France, and graduated from the University of Paris Medical School in 1936. He received his psychiatry and neurology training in the United States and served in the United States Army during World War II, evaluating and treating military prisoners at Fort Missoula, Montana. He became a captain in the United States Army Medical Corps.

#4439

John D. Robinson

#159071

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Dr. John D. Robinson was a psychologist and Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Surgery at Howard University College of Medicine. In 1973, Robinson became the first African-American psychologist in the U.S. Air Force, and, in 1975, the first African-American psychologist in the U.S. Navy. He also served as the first African-American administrator at the University of Texas at Austin.

#4440

Shari Thurer

#82854

Overall Influence

Shari Thurer is a psychoanalytically trained psychologist practicing in Boston and an adjunct associate professor at Boston University. Select publications She is the author of The Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother and The End of Gender: A Psychological Autopsy

#4441

Qi Wang

#185519

Overall Influence

Qi Wang is a Chinese-born American psychologist and Professor of Human Development at Cornell University. She is best known for her study of memory and culture. Wang is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Psychonomic Society. She is also a member of the American Psychological Association, the Society for Research in Child Development, the Cognitive Development Society, the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development, and the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. She serves on many editorial boards and is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition.

#4442

Brian Lowery

#189488

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Brian S. Lowery is an American social psychologist. Lowery obtained a bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1996, and subsequently began graduate study at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned a master's degree in 1998 and a doctorate in 2002. He began teaching at Stanford University upon graduation, and was later named Walter Kenneth Kilpatrick Professor of Organizational Behavior.

#4443

Richard Lowry

#187221

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Richard J. Lowry is an American psychologist and Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. He is the developer of the computational statistics website VassarStats and its political offshoot Scoping the Polls. He received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1965, and first joined the faculty of Vassar College the same year. He was named the William R. Kenan Chair at Vassar in 1987, and was later named the Jacob P. Giraud Chair of Natural History there. He retired from the faculty at Vassar in 2006.

#4444

Pierre Fédida

#101392

Overall Influence

1934 - 2002 (68 years)

Pierre Fédida was a French psychoanalyst, who studied under Gilles Deleuze.

#4445

Sally Haydon

#127549

Overall Influence

1959 - 2014 (55 years)

Sally Haydon was an American professor of equine science and a trainer of American Saddlebred horses and riders. She was Chair of the Equine Studies department at Midway College in Midway, Kentucky, president and founder of the Intercollegiate Saddle Seat Riding Association , and the Owner/Director of Educational Programs at the Bluegrass Riding Academy. Haydon worked several years teaching saddle seat equitation with renowned trainer and author Helen Crabtree, and she was also a former board member of The Cleveland Home .

#4446

Thomas J. Meyer

#189636

Overall Influence

#4447

Elizabeth Boase

#115232

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Elizabeth Boase is an Australian biblical scholar and the inaugural Dean of the School of Graduate Research at the University of Divinity in Melbourne. Boase uses a range of hermeneutical approaches in her work but is particularly known for her use of trauma theory as an hermeneutical lens to interpret the Bible. She also publishes in the areas of Hebrew Bible, the Book of Lamentations, the Book of Jeremiah, Biblical Hermeneutics, Bakhtin and the Bible, and Ecological Hermeneutics.

#4448

Winifred Cavenagh

#85974

Overall Influence

1908 - 2004 (96 years)

Winifred Elizabeth Cavenagh was a British criminologist, social scientist, and academic. She joined the University of Birmingham as a lecturer in social studies in 1946 and was made Professor of Social Administration and Criminology in 1972: she retired from academia in 1976 and was appointed professor emeritus. Outside of her university career, she served as a local magistrate, on numerous boards, and, after study law and qualifying, worked as a barrister.

#4449

Lori Verstegen Ryan

#169305

Overall Influence

Lori Verstegen Ryan is professor of management at San Diego State University. She is the director of SDSU's Corporate Governance Institute. She is on the editorial boards of Business & Society and Business Ethics Quarterly and previously served on the editorial board of Academy of Management Review and as associate editor for corporate governance of Business & Society. Ryan is a Fellow of the International Association for Business and Society, having served as conference chair and president .

#4450

Tina Maria Harris

#189883

Overall Influence

Tina M. Harris, the LSU Manship School of Mass Communication’s Douglas L. Manship Sr.-Dori Maynard Race, Media, and Cultural Literacy Endowed Chair, is the winner of the Francine Merritt Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Lives of Women in Communication. She has publications on representations of African American women in television, racial identity negotiation and family communication within multiracial/multiethnic families, and mentoring and race in higher education. Alma Mater: PhD from University of Kentucky Academic Website Professional Website

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