The Most Influential People Across History
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 female people in Sociology,
#451
Heidi Safia Mirza
#90618
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Heidi Safia Mirza is a British academic, who is Professor of Race, Faith and Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London, Professor Emerita in Equalities Studies at the UCL Institute of Education, and Visiting Professor in Social Policy at the London School of Economics . She has done pioneering research on race, gender and identity in education, multiculturalism, Islamophobia and gendered violence, and was one of the first black women professors in Britain. She is author and editor of several notable books, including Young, Female and Black , Black British Feminism , Tackling the Roots of Ra...
Go to Profile#452
Marina Fischer-Kowalski
#67123
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Marina Fischer-Kowalski is an Austrian sociologist and social ecologist and a professor emeritus of the University of Klagenfurt, currently teaching at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, the University of Klagenfurt and the University of Vienna. She is known for founding the Vienna School of Social Ecology and for her pioneering work on the widely used metric for material and energy flows to complement economic accounting. Fischer-Kowalski works on socio-environmental change, sustainable development and the Anthropocene.
Go to Profile#453
Judith Blake
#133957
Overall Influence
1926 - 1993 (67 years)
Judith Kincade Blake was an American sociologist and demographer. She established the first Department of Demography, at the University of California, Berkeley and was the first holder of an endowed chair, at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#454
Ann C. Noble
#28768
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Ann C. Noble is a sensory chemist and retired professor from the University of California, Davis. During her time at the UC Davis Department of Viticulture and Enology, Noble invented the "Aroma Wheel" which is credited with enhancing the public understanding of wine tasting and terminology. At the time of her hiring at UC Davis in 1974, Noble was the first woman hired as a faculty member of the Viticulture department. Noble retired from Davis in 2002 and in 2003 was named Emeritus Professor of Enology. Since retirement she has participated as a judge in the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Compet...
Go to Profile#455
Rebecca Sandefur
#57640
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Rebecca Leigh Sandefur is an American sociologist. She is Professor in the School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University and a faculty fellow of the American Bar Foundation . At the ABF, she founded the access to justice research initiative in 2010. Sandefur also won a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship in 2018 for "promoting a new, evidence-based approach to increasing access to civil justice for low-income communities".
Go to Profile#456
Masha Gessen
#1459
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist, author, translator, and activist who has been an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Gessen is nonbinary and trans and uses they/them pronouns. Gessen has written extensively on LGBT rights. Described as "Russia's leading LGBT rights activist", they have said that for many years they were "probably the only publicly out gay person in the whole country". They now live in New York with their wife and children.
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Jocelyn Viterna
#146816
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Jocelyn Viterna is an American academic. She is a professor of Sociology at Harvard University, and the author of a book about the role of women in the Salvadoran Civil War. Early life Jocelyn Viterna grew up in Curtis, Nebraska and Manhattan, Kansas. She earned a bachelor's degree from Kansas State University in 1995 and a PhD from Indiana University Bloomington in Sociology and Latin American Studies in 2003.
Go to Profile#458
Jennifer Dowd
#54242
Overall Influence
Jennifer Beam Dowd is an American social scientist who is a Professor of Demography and Population Health and deputy director of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford. Her research considers the social determinants of health and the relationship between infections and immune function. She is a member of Those Nerdy Girls, an all-woman team of public health researchers who are relaying COVID-19 information as part of Dear Pandemic.
Go to Profile#459
Marie Huchzermeyer
#96839
Overall Influence
Marie Huchzermeyer is an academic and public intellectual at the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Books Huchzermeyer, M., . Unlawful Occupation: Informal Settlements and Urban Policy in South Africa and Brazil. Africa World Press/The Red Sea Press, Trenton New Jersey.Huchzermeyer, M., . Tenement Cities: From 19th Century Berlin to 21st Century Nairobi. Africa World Press/The Red Sea Press, Trenton New Jersey.Huchzermeyer, M., .with ‘Slums’: From Informal Settlement Eradication to a Right To The City In Africa University ...
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Judith H. Hibbard
#101551
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Judith Hoffman Hibbard is the senior researcher of the Health Policy Research Group at the University of Oregon. She is also the professor emerita of the university's Department of Planning, Public Policy, and Management. Her research mostly concerns topics such as health literacy and how consumers utilize health information, and patient activation.
Go to Profile#461
Ethel Shanas
#140433
Overall Influence
1914 - 2005 (91 years)
Ethel Shanas was an American scholar in the fields of Sociology of medicine and gerontology. Biography Shanas graduated in 1949 at the University of Chicago with a dissertation on the social aspects of aging, under the mentorship of Ernest Burgess and Robert J. Havighurst. She worked at the University of Chicago until 1965, as a member of the university’s Committee on Human Development, a lecturer in Sociology and a staff member of the National Opinion Research Center.
Go to Profile#462
Bente Halkier
#101885
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Bente Halkier is a Danish sociologist and academic. Since 2016, she has been Professor in Sociology at the University of Copenhagen. Career Halkier was born in 1964 and completed studied at Lancaster University in England, graduating in 1991 with an MA in contemporary sociology. Two years later, she was awarded a master's degree from Århus University. She was then a research assistant and teaching assistant at Roskilde University until she commenced doctoral studies there in 1995; her PhD was awarded in 1998 and she then spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at Århus University and Roskilde University.
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J. Jill Suitor
#110377
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Jaclynn Jill Suitor is an American Distinguished Professor of Sociology and a member of the Center on Aging and the Life Course at Purdue University. Her research focuses primarily on the relationship between parents and adult children. Since 2000, she has led the Within-Family Differences Study, a panel investigation of the predictors and consequences of parental favoritism in the middle and later years among more than 500 multigenerational families. She is an elected Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and an elected member of the Sociological Research Association.
Go to Profile#464
Stephani Hatch
#77726
Overall Influence
Stephani Louise Hatch is an American sociologist who is a psychiatric epidemiologist at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience. Her research consider urban mental health and inequality in mental health provision.
Go to Profile#465
Emily Grundy
#97695
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Emily Marjata Dorothea Grundy, is a British demographer and academic, specialising in ageing and health inequalities. Since 2013, she has been Professor of Demography at the London School of Economics and Political Science . She was previously Professor of Demographic Gerontology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine from 2003 to 2012, and Professor of Demography at the University of Cambridge from 2012 to 2013. From October 2017, she will be Professor of Population Science and Director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex.
Go to Profile#466
Frauke Kreuter
#108840
Overall Influence
Frauke Kreuter is a German sociologist and statistician. She is a professor of the Joint Program in Survey Methodology of the University of Maryland, College Park and a professor in statistics and data science at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. Her research in survey methodology includes work on sampling error and observational error.
Go to Profile#467
Anna Triandafyllidou
#122453
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Anna Triandafyllidou is a sociologist. She holds the Canada Excellence Research Chair on Migration and Integration at Toronto Metropolitan University . She is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies. Her main areas of research and teaching are the governance of cultural diversity, migration, and nationalism from a European and international perspective.
Go to Profile#468
Julia Heiman
#34673
Overall Influence
Dr Julia R. Heiman is an American sexologist and psychologist. The sixth Director of The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University, she began on June 1, 2004. Dr. Heiman is also a professor in the Psychology Department at Indiana University with a joint appointment in the Psychiatry Department at the IU School of Medicine in Indianapolis.
Go to Profile#469
Jennifer Malat
#59233
Overall Influence
Jennifer Malat is an American sociologist. She is associate vice president for development in the Office of Development and Alumni Relations at Virginia Commonwealth University. Early life and education Malat was raised in Rochester, Minnesota and attended the University of Minnesota for her Bachelor of Science degree in sociology. She then traveled to Michigan to earn her Master's degree and PhD from the University of Michigan.
Go to Profile#470
Kanai Yoshiko
#106309
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Kanai Yoshiko is Japanese academic and feminist theorist. She explored the complexities of the feminist movements in Japan and the difficulty in launching women's studies in a society bound by dualistic definitions of gender. Coining the phrase "housewife feminism", she addressed how Japanese society had attempted to appease women without addressing the underlying systemic problems that continued to foster inequality.
Go to Profile#471
Melissa Steyn
#67105
Overall Influence
Melissa Steyn is a South African academic based at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Prior to moving to Johannesburg in 2011, she taught at the University of Cape Town. Life Steyn obtained her BA in 1977 from the University of South Africa, passing all her subjects, bar one, with distinction. In 1982, she completed a BA Honours in English Literature, Cum Laude, from Stellenbosch University. Having been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to pursue a master's degree in Intercultural Communication at Arizona State University in the US, she graduated in 1996 as the top graduate in Co...
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Nicole W. Biggart
#73377
Overall Influence
Nicole Woolsey Biggart is a Research Professor and Professor Emerita and was the Jerome J. and Elsie Suran Chair in Technology Management at the University of California, Davis from 2002 until 2010. She received her Ph.D. in economic sociology from the University of California, Berkeley with a dissertation titled The Magic Circle: A Study of Personal Staffs in the Administrations of Governors Ronald Reagan and Jerry Brown, M.A. in sociology from the University of California, Davis, and a B.A. in communication from Simmons College.
Go to Profile#473
Susan Cotts Watkins
#147908
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Susan Cotts Watkins is an American demographer. She has been a professor at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania. She is now professor emerita at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research has focused on the impact of social networks on cultural change in the demography of the U.S., Western Europe, and Africa.
Go to Profile#474
Madawi al-Rasheed
#24533
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Madawi al-Rasheed, is a British citizen of Saudi origin and a professor of social anthropology. Al-Rasheed has held a position at the Department of Theology and Religious Studies in King's College London and as a Visiting Professor at the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She gives occasional lectures in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. She is the granddaughter of Muhammad bin Talāl al-Rashid, the last prince of the Emirate of Ha'il, which was conquered by the Al-Saud in the early 20th century. She has written several books and articl...
Go to Profile#475
Fiona Devine
#58159
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Fiona Devine CBE FAcSS is a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester and Vice-President and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Manchester. Education Devine's degrees, master's and doctorate were all gained from the University of Essex.
Go to Profile#476
María Teresa Uribe
#97589
Overall Influence
1940 - 2019 (79 years)
María Teresa Uribe de Hincapié was a Colombian sociologist, specialising in research into conflict and violence. Early life and education Born in Pereira, Risaralda, in 1940, Uribe grew up during the period of Colombian civil war known as La Violencia. Injured and wounded travellers, displaced from their rural homes, came to her family home in the 1950s seeking medical treatment from her father, a doctor, and Uribe helped him to care for them. She later stated that this early experience of the result of conflict inspired her academic research interests.
Go to Profile#477
Carole A. Estabrooks
#146377
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Carole Anne Estabrooks is a Canadian applied health services researcher. She is a Canada Research Chair in Knowledge Translation and a professor in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Alberta. She has been listed amongst the highest cited researchers in her field and was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2016.
Go to Profile#478
Faina Jyrkilä
#60020
Overall Influence
1917 - 2008 (91 years)
Faina Jyrkilä was the first female Finnish sociologist. She also was one of the first sociologists to study aging. Biography Faina Jyrkilä was born 1 September 1917 in Sortavala, Finland, graduating from high school in 1941 and completing a social work degree in 1945. Between 1952 and 1953, Jyrkilä attended school at Columbia University and Harvard. In 1960, she obtained the first Ph.D earned by a woman in sociology in Finland.
Go to Profile#479
Veronika Kalmus
#133722
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Veronika Kalmus is an Estonian sociologist and competitive draughts player. She is a professor of sociology at the University of Tartu. She specializes in trends in societal attitudes, particularly in Estonia, and the uses of educational media. She has won eight gold medals in national competitions of Russian draughts.
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Samantha Brennan
#65273
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Samantha J. Brennan is a British-born philosopher and scholar of women's studies who is currently dean of the College of Arts and faculty member in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Guelph. She was previously a professor in the Department of Women's Studies and Feminist Research at Western University, Canada. She remains a member of Western's Rotman Institute of Philosophy and the graduate faculty of the Departments of Political Science and of Philosophy. Brennan was Department Chair of Philosophy at Western from 2002 to 2007, and 2008–2011. She is a past president of the Canad...
Go to Profile#481
Mary K. Trigg
#121134
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Mary K. Trigg is Associate Professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. Trained in women’s history and American Studies, her scholarship focuses on the history of feminism in the United States; motherhood studies and women, work, and family; and women’s/feminist leadership. Trigg is also Director of Leadership Programs and Research at the Institute for Women's Leadership, and the founding director of the Leadership Scholars Certificate Program which she has led since 1998. In her time at Rutgers she has also served as Associate Director of the Center for Wom...
Go to Profile#482
Mette Andersson
#133508
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Mette Andersson is a Norwegian sociologist. She is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bergen. Her fields of expertise are cultural and political sociology, especially migration, ethnicity and racism, identity and identity politics, social movements, sociology of sport, transnationality and religion.
Go to Profile#483
Francine Descarries
#116241
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Francine Descarries is a Canadian sociologist. She is a professor of sociology at the Université du Québec à Montréal. She is considered a leading figure in feminist studies in Quebec. Biography At the age of 16, after the death of her father, Descarries left school so that her family could afford her brother's medical training. Descarries found work as a legal secretary then as a travel agent, then left the workforce to care for her children. She returned to school at age 27, shortly after the birth of her second child. She attended Cégep Édouard-Montpetit. With a scholarly interest in women...
Go to Profile#484
Dagmar Schultz
#93836
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Dagmar Schultz is a German sociologist, filmmaker, publisher and professor. Biography Schultz grew up in a female household; her father committed suicide in World War II. After a few semesters studying journalism, North American studies and Romance studies at the Free University of Berlin. In 1965, she graduated from the University of Michigan inbroadcasting, television and film, with a master's thesis on "The Role of Broadcasting in Africa with Special Emphasis on West Africa". However, her dream of working as a documentary filmmaker on television proved to be unrealizable: "My job interview...
Go to Profile#485
Ursula Apitzsch
#126004
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Ursula Apitzsch is a German political scientist and sociologist. Since 1993, she has been Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the University of Frankfurt. Her research fields are cultural analysis, biographical research, migration, ethnicity and gender.
Go to Profile#486
Kim TallBear
#36893
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Kim TallBear (born 1968) is a Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate professor at the University of Alberta, specializing in racial politics in science. Holding the first ever Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience and Environment, TallBear has published on DNA testing, race science and Indigenous identities, as well as on polyamory as a decolonization practice. TallBear is a citizen of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate in South Dakota, as well as a descendant from the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma. TallBear pursued post-secondary education at the University of Massachusetts Boston obtaining an undergraduate degree in community planning.
Go to Profile#487
Anna Johnson Julian
#57655
Overall Influence
1903 - 1994 (91 years)
Anna Johnson Julian was the first African-American woman awarded a PhD in sociology by the University of Pennsylvania , a civic activist, and fourth national president of Delta Sigma Theta, a historically black sorority. In the 1930s, Julian studied factors inhibiting children's education and taught sociology at the University of the District of Columbia then known as Miner Teachers College. Her doctoral work was an analysis of the case records of 100 families receiving income support. She was married to prominent chemist, Percy Lavon Julian, from 1935 to his death in 1975, and had three children.
Go to Profile#488
Verta Taylor
#112512
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Verta Ann Taylor is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with focuses on gender, sexuality, social movements, and women's health. Education and career Taylor earned a degree in social work from Indiana State University in 1970, and then went to Ohio State University for graduate study in sociology, earning a master's degree in 1971 and completing her Ph.D. there in 1976.
Go to Profile#489
Margaret Poloma
#71719
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Margaret M. Poloma is an American sociologist, professor, and author who is known for her research on the Pentecostal movement in American Christianity. Poloma began her career as a sociologist with her research on two-career and child-free couples.
Go to Profile#490
Lynne Cossman
#123616
Overall Influence
Jeralynn Sittig Cossman, also known as Lynne Cossman, is the founding dean of UTSA's College for Health, Community and Policy. Prior to that appointment in 2020, she was Professor and head of the Department of Sociology at West Virginia University and before that, Department Head and Chair in the department of sociology at Mississippi State University in Starkville, Mississippi. Dr. Cossman was also a research fellow at the Social Science Research Center at Mississippi State University. She is the co-editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal Population Research and Policy Review.
Go to Profile#491
Guo Yuhua
#105565
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Guo Yuhua is a Chinese liberal intellectual and professor of sociology at Tsinghua University, noted for her criticism of the Chinese government. Early life and education Guo was born in 1956 to parents who worked as military officers for the central government in Beijing. Her father was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, dying of liver cirrhosis in 1968 after being denied medication. Guo was sent "Down to the Countryside" to perform labor in Wuhan, returning to Beijing in 1980.
Go to Profile#492
Carolyn Baylies
#82551
Overall Influence
1947 - 2003 (56 years)
Carolyn Louise Baylies , was an American academic and activist. She was particularly active in the fields of health and sociology of the third world and international development, and especially on the gendered aspects of development. Baylies was particularly notable for her work on the ways in which the AIDS epidemic threatened existing social structures and food security, a connection which she was one of the first to make.
Go to Profile#493
Mildred Blaxter
#99494
Overall Influence
1925 - 2010 (85 years)
Mildred Lillington Blaxter was a British sociologist and writer. According to her obituary in The Guardian, she "shed new light on the causes of deprivation". Early life She was born Mildred Lillington Hall on 27 March 1925 in Jesmond, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the elder child and only daughter of Robert Charlton Hall, a bank manager, and his wife, Mildred Violet Hall, née Gleed , an actress. She was educated at St Anne's College, Oxford, and earned a bachelor's degree in English in 1949, and was the first woman to be assistant editor of the student newspaper, Isis.
Go to Profile#494
Radhika Balakrishnan
#73479
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Radhika Balakrishnan is the faculty director of the Center for Women's Global Leadership at Rutgers University. Currently, she serves as the Chair of the Board of the United States Human Rights Network and Chair on the Board of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Commissioner for the Commission for Gender Equity for the City of New York, and President of the International Association for Feminist Economics for 2020-2021.
Go to Profile#495
Sharon M. Donovan
#130470
Overall Influence
Sharon Marie Donovan is an American dietitian. She holds the Melissa M. Noel Endowed Chair in Nutrition and Health at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and heads the Donovan Lab. In 2017, she was elected a member of the National Academy of Medicine.
Go to Profile#496
Guðbjörg Linda Rafnsdóttir
#68786
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Guðbjörg Linda Rafnsdóttir is a professor of sociology and the pro-rector of science at the University of Iceland. Career Guðbjörg Linda Rafnsdóttir completed a BA in sociology and teaching certification from the University of Iceland in 1984, an MA in sociology from Lund University in Sweden in 1990 and a PhD from the same university in 1995. From 1994–2007, she was head of the Education Department and later programme director at the Research and Health Department of the Administration of Occupational Health and Safety where she conducted research into the working conditions and wellbeing of...
Go to Profile#497
Anne Hendershott
#104422
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Anne Hendershott is an American sociologist and author known for her conservative Christian writings on Catholic issues in US politics. She is the author of several books, including The Politics of Deviance, The Politics of Abortion, and Status Envy: The Politics of Catholic Higher Education. She has taught at the University of San Diego and at The King's College in New York City. She is currently a professor of Psychology, Sociology, and Social Work at Franciscan University .
Go to Profile#498
Alexandra Killewald
#79247
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Alexandra Killewald is an American educator, demographer, and professor of sociology at Harvard University since 2012. Biography Killewald holds a BS in mathematics, MA in sociology, MA in statistics, and PhD in sociology from the University of Michigan. After earning her doctorate in 2011, Killewald worked as a researcher for Mathematica Policy Research before becoming an assistant professor at Harvard University in 2012. In 2016 she became full professor at Harvard University. She is currently the director of graduate studies for the PhD program in social policy at the John F. Kennedy Sch...
Go to Profile#499
Nicole Hahn Rafter
#62585
Overall Influence
1939 - 2016 (77 years)
Nicole Hahn Rafter was a feminist criminology professor at Northeastern University. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, achieved her Master of Arts in Teaching from Harvard University, and obtained a Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from State University of New York in Albany. She began her career as a high school and college English professor and switched to criminal justice in her mid-thirties.
Go to Profile#500
Rula Quawas
#118757
Overall Influence
1960 - 2017 (57 years)
Dr. Rula Butros Audeh Quawas was a Jordanian academic known for her advocacy for women's advancement in Jordan and as the first academic to introduce courses on feminism at the University of Jordan.
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