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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential female people in Biology,
#501
Julia Clarke
#54555
Overall Influence
Julia Allison Clarke is an American paleontologist and evolutionary biologist who studies the evolution of birds and the dinosaurs most closely related to living birds. She is the John A. Wilson Professor in Vertebrate Paleontology in the Jackson School of Geosciences and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
Go to Profile#502
Teri Manolio
#36374
Overall Influence
Teri Ann Manolio is an American physician, epidemiologist, and geneticist. She is director of the Division of Genomic Medicine at the National Human Genome Research Institute , as well as Professor of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. She is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and of the American Heart Association's Council on Epidemiology. She also has a clinical appointment at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Before joining the NHGRI, she worked on large cohort studies, such as the Cardiovascular Health Stu...
Go to Profile#503
Sue Hartley
#47994
Overall Influence
Susan Elaine Hartley is a British ecologist and is Vice-President for Research at the University of Sheffield. Previously she was director of the York Environmental Sustainability Institute at the University of York and Professor of Ecology at the University of Sussex, specialising in interactions between plants and animals. In December 2009 she delivered the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on The 300 Million Years War, broadcast on More4.
Go to Profile#504
Carol Tamminga
#55491
Overall Influence
Carol A. Tamminga is an American psychiatrist and neuroscientist, focusing in treating psychotic illnesses, such as schizophrenia, psychotic bipolar disorder, and schizoaffective disorder, currently the Lou and Ellen McGinley Distinguished Chair in Psychiatric Research and the Chief of the Translational Neuroscience Division in Schizophrenia at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. She has been Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at UTSW since 2008. She is an Elected Fellow of the National Academy of Medicine. She serves on the advisory boards of the Brain and Behavioral Research Foundation and of the National Institute of Mental Health .
Go to Profile#505
Akiko Iwasaki
#72901
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Akiko Iwasaki is a Sterling Professor of Immunobiology and Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale University. She is also a principal investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her research interests include innate immunity, autophagy, inflammasomes, sexually transmitted infections, herpes simplex virus, human papillomavirus, respiratory virus infections, influenza infection, T cell immunity, commensal bacteria, COVID-19 and Long COVID.
Go to Profile#506
Nadia Rosenthal
#48953
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Nadia A. Rosenthal FMedSci is a scientist who specializes in heart development related research. Rosenthal began her undergraduate degree at the University of Wales and then transferred to Harvard. She received her PhD from Harvard Medical School and was an associate professor of biochemistry at Boston University and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School before transferring to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory where she replaced Klaus Rajewsky who had just gone to work at Harvard Medical School. In 2006, she presented the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Holiday Lectures together with Douglas A.
Go to Profile#507
Agnes Wold
#28011
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Agnes Wold, born January 7, 1955, is a professor of clinical bacteriology specializing in the normal flora of the body, at the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden. She is a nationally known commentator on television, radio and in newspapers on issues related to infectious disease and women in science.
Go to Profile#508
Wanda Półtawska
#17423
Overall Influence
1921 - Present (103 years)
Wanda Wiktoria Półtawska was a Polish physician, author, Holocaust survivor and pro-life activist. Biography Wanda Wiktoria Półtawska was born in Lublin, Poland on 2 November 1921. During World War II, she was interred at Ravensbrück concentration camp, just north of Berlin, having been arrested in February 1941 and charged with assisting the Polish resistance movement. She was used as a human guinea pig and became the subject of various medical experiments. She spent four years in the camp and afterwards wrote an account of her experiences, And I Am Afraid of My Dreams. In 1947 she married p...
Go to Profile#509
Rivka Carmi
#20431
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Rivka Carmi is an Israeli pediatrician and geneticist. She served as President of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev from May 2006 until December 2018. Carmi is the first woman to be appointed president of an Israeli university.
Go to Profile#510
Miriam Merad
#55727
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Miram Merad is a French-Algerian professor in Cancer immunology and the Director of the Marc and Jennifer Lipschultz Precision Immunology Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, NY. She is the corecipient of the 2018 William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Basic Immunology and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine.
Go to Profile#511
Valeria Souza
#69400
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Valeria Francisca Eugenia Leopoldina de María de Guadalupe Souza Saldívar is a Mexican scientist who specializes in evolutionary and microbial ecology. She is a senior researcher in the Department of Evolutionary Ecology of the Institute of Ecology of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a level III researcher in the National System of Researchers. She was the former president of the Scientific Society of Ecology of Mexico.
Go to Profile#512
Shirley Hodgson
#19435
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Shirley Victoria Penrose Hodgson, FRCP, FRSB is a British geneticist. Biography Hodgson studied at Somerville College, Oxford. She worked as a GP, then performed as a locum in clinical genetics at Guy's Hospital, saying she found the subject "irresistible". She became Senior Registrar in Clinical Genetics for the South Thames Regional Genetics Centre and Honorary Senior Registrar at Hammersmith Hospital, London, from 1983 to 1988; then Consultant Geneticist at Addenbrooke's Hospital from 1988 to 1990. In the 1990s, she led the regional cancer genetics service at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital...
Go to Profile#513
Kathryn Virginia Anderson
#72746
Overall Influence
1952 - 2020 (68 years)
Kathryn Virginia Anderson was an American developmental biologist researching about the various gene and protein interactions that guide the process of embryogenesis and especially neurulation. Early life and education Anderson was born in La Jolla, San Diego in 1952. She was schooled at Point Loma High School and she has ascribed her interest in biological sciences to its biology teacher and parents. She graduated from University of California, Berkeley in biochemistry. In 1973, she began her post-graduate studies in neurodevelopment at Stanford University and left after 2 years.
Go to Profile#514
Erica Ollmann Saphire
#46855
Overall Influence
Erica Ollmann Saphire is an American structural biologist and immunologist and a professor at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology. Her research investigates the structural biology of viruses that cause hemorrhagic fever such as Ebola, Sudan, Marburg, Bundibugyo, and Lassa. She was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2008.
Go to Profile#515
Karen Steel
#47603
Overall Influence
Karen Penelope Steel FRS FMedSci is a British scientist who studies the genetics of deafness, using the mouse as a model to identify the genes involved and to understand the molecular, cellular and physiological mechanisms involved. She is Professor of Sensory Function at the Wolfson Centre for Age-Related Diseases, King's College London. Previously she was Principal Investigator of the Genetics of Deafness research programme at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
Go to Profile#516
Nessa Carey
#61148
Overall Influence
Nessa Carey is a British biologist working in the field of molecular biology and biotechnology. She is International Director of the technology transfer organization PraxisUnico and a visiting professor at Imperial College London.
Go to Profile#517
Linda Saif
#65178
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Linda J. Saif is an American microbial scientist who works at Ohio State University. In 2015, she became the first female recipient of the Wolf Prize in Agriculture for her research in virology and immunology.
Go to Profile#518
Katja Becker
#59700
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Katja Becker is a German physician and biochemist who has been serving as the president of the German Research Foundation since 2020. She had previously been the organization's vice president from 2014 to 2019.
Go to Profile#519
Delphine Parrott
#32855
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Delphine Mary Vera Parrott FRSE was a British endocrinologist, immunologist, and academic. She did research at the National Institute for Medical Research in the 1950s and the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in the 1960s.
Go to Profile#520
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore
#34283
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore is Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge and co-director of the Wellcome Trust PhD Programme Neuroscience at University College London.
Go to Profile#521
Lise Eliot
#37154
Overall Influence
Lise Eliot is Professor of Neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. She is best known for her book, on the gender differences between boys and girls, Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps and What We Can Do About It .
Go to Profile#522
Deborah M. Gordon
#71565
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Deborah M. Gordon is an American biologist best known for her impactful research in the behavioral ecology of ants and her studies on the operations of ant colonies without a central control. In addition to overseeing The Gordon Lab, she is currently a Professor of Biology at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#523
Elizabeth Arnold
#64701
Overall Influence
A. Elizabeth "Betsy" Arnold is an American evolutionary biologist who is Professor of Plant Sciences and Curator of the Robert L. Gilbertson Mycological Herbarium at the University of Arizona. Her research considers fungal biology. She was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2021.
Go to Profile#524
Isabella Abbott
#41066
Overall Influence
1919 - 2010 (91 years)
Isabella Aiona Abbott was an educator, phycologist, and ethnobotanist from Hawaii. The first native Hawaiian woman to receive a PhD in science, she became a leading expert on Pacific marine algae. Early life Abbott was born Isabella Kauakea Yau Yung Aiona in Hana, Maui, Territory of Hawaii, on June 20, 1919. Her Hawaiian name means "white rain of Hana" and she was known as "Izzy". Her father was ethnically Chinese while her mother was a Native Hawaiian. Her mother taught her about edible Hawaiian seaweeds and the value and diversity of Hawaii's native plants. Abbott was the only girl and seco...
Go to Profile#525
Yukiko Yamashita
#45673
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Yukiko Yamashita is an American developmental biologist. She joined the Whitehead Institute in September 2020 and has been appointed a Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . She is the inaugural incumbent of the Susan Lindquist Chair for Women in Science at Whitehead Institute. She was previously a faculty member of the University of Michigan Life Sciences Institute and a professor in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of Michigan Medical School. She was appointed an HHMI Investigator in 2013. In November 2013 she received a 5-year ...
Go to Profile#526
Mayana Zatz
#45763
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Mayana Zatz is a Brazilian molecular biologist and geneticist. She is a professor at the University of São Paulo, is its Research dean. Biography Professor Zatz's accomplishments have been recognized and she has received many awards and prizes, including the 2000 L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science and the 2001 Claudia Woman of the Year Award, by Claudia Magazine.
Go to Profile#527
Christine Winterbourn
#75095
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Christine Coe Winterbourn is a New Zealand biochemist. She is a professor of pathology at the University of Otago, Christchurch. Her research in the biological chemistry of free radicals earned her the 2011 Rutherford Medal and the Marsden Medal, the top awards from each of New Zealand's two top science bodies.
Go to Profile#528
Jean Beggs
#62128
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Jean Duthie Beggs CBE FRS FRSE DSc is a Scottish geneticist. She is the Royal Society Darwin Trust Professor in the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology at the University of Edinburgh. Biography Beggs was born Jean Duthie Lancaster on 16 April 1950 to Jean Crawford and William Renfrew Lancaster. She attended Glasgow High School for Girls. She graduated from the University of Glasgow with a BSc in Biochemistry in 1971, and received her PhD from the University in 1974. From 1974-1977 she held a postdoctoral position in the Department of Molecular Biology at the University of Edinburgh working with Professors Kenneth and Noreen Murray.
Go to Profile#529
Barbara Hohn
#65147
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Barbara Hohn ForMemRS is an Austrian molecular biologist, particularly known for her research into the Agrobacterium tumefaciens. Early life and education Hohn was born Barbara Freiinger, in Klagenfurt, Austria. From 1957 to 1962, she studied chemistry at the University of Vienna and then worked at the Max Planck Institute for Virus Research at the University of Tübingen, where she received her doctorate in 1967. Her PhD thesis supervisor was Professor Friedrich Freksa.
Go to Profile#530
Anna Christina Nobre
#21472
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Anna Christina Nobre FBA, MAE, fNASc is a Brazilian and British cognitive neuroscientist working at Yale University in New Haven, CT, USA. Nobre is a Wu Tsai Professor at Yale University, where she directs the Center for Neurocognition and Behavior at the Wu Tsai Institute. She is an honorary member of the Departments of Psychiatry and Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford; an honorary fellow of New College, Oxford; and an adjunct professor at the Mesulam Center for Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
Go to Profile#531
Wendy Gibson
#53617
Overall Influence
Wendy Gibson is Professor of Protozoology at University of Bristol, specialising in trypanosomes and molecular parasitology. Career Wendy C. Gibson studied B. Sc. Zoology at University College London, UK graduating in 1975 followed by a doctorate at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine that was awarded in 1979. She continued to work there with Wallace Peters for a short time after her doctorate. She was awarded DSc by the University of London in 1997.
Go to Profile#532
Mary Jane West-Eberhard
#41943
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Mary Jane West-Eberhard is an American theoretical biologist noted for arguing that phenotypic and developmental plasticity played a key role in shaping animal evolution and speciation. She is also an entomologist notable for her work on the behavior and evolution of social waspss.
Go to Profile#533
Corinne Le Quéré
#31157
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Marie Corinne Lyne Le Quéré is a Canadian scientist. She is Royal Society Research Professor of Climate Change Science at the University of East Anglia and former Director of Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. She is the chair of the French High Council on Climate and member of the UK Climate Change Committee. Her research focuses on the interactions between the carbon cycle and climate change.
Go to Profile#534
Dianne Edwards
#61840
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Professor Dianne Edwards CBE, FRS, FRSE, FLS, FLSW is a palaeobotanist, who studies the colonisation of land by plants, and early land plant interactions. Early life Edwards was born in Swansea, South Wales, and spent much of her time at her parents' bungalow on the Gower Peninsula.
Go to Profile#535
Mary Morgan-Richards
#27045
Overall Influence
Mary Morgan-Richards is a New Zealand biologist, and as of 2019 is a full professor at Massey University. Academic career In 1995, Morgan-Richard's completed a PhD thesis titled 'Weta Karyotypes: the Systematic Significance of Their Variation' at the Victoria University of Wellington. Between 1996 and 2003, she worked at the University of St Andrews, University of Otago, the Natural History Museum, London, and the University of Canterbury successively. In 2005 Morgan-Richards moved to the Massey University, rising to full professor in 2018.
Go to Profile#536
Michelle A. Petri
#77977
Overall Influence
#537
Erika L. Pearce
#48854
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Erika L. Pearce is an American immunologist. She is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins University after serving as director and a scientific member at Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg, Germany. Her work investigates the connection between metabolism and immune cell function with a particular focus on the regulation of T-cells. In 2018, she was awarded the Leibniz Prize for her "outstanding work in metabolism and inflammation research."
Go to Profile#538
Helen Asemota
#27621
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Helen Nosakhare Asemota is a biochemist and agricultural biotechnologist based in Jamaica. She is Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Director of the Biotechnology Centre at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. Her research develops biotechnology strategies for production and improvement of tropical tuber crops. She is notable for leading large international biotechnology collaborations, as well as for acting as an international biotechnology consultant for the United Nations .
Go to Profile#539
Cathy Drennan
#45790
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Catherine Drennan is an American biochemist and crystallographer. She is the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Biochemistry professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a professor at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Go to Profile#540
Marie Åsberg
#40505
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Marie Åsberg is a Swedish psychiatrist. She was based at the Karolinska Institute until retirement in 2004. In a pioneering 1976 paper, Åsberg found a link between low serotonin and violent suicide.
Go to Profile#541
Valerie Daggett
#36850
Overall Influence
Valerie Daggett is a professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, United States. Education and career Daggett has a B.S. from Reed College. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Francisco, advised by Irwin Kuntz and Peter Kollman, and subsequently held a postdoctoral position at Stanford University with Michael Levitt, a co-recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Go to Profile#542
Shoshana Wodak
#65229
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (123 years)
Shoshana Wodak is a computational biologist and an organizational leader in the field of protein-protein docking. Wodak was one of the first people to dock proteins together using a computer program.
Go to Profile#543
Rebecca Saxe
#32474
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Rebecca Saxe is a professor of cognitive neuroscience and associate Dean of Science at MIT. She is an associate member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and a board member of the Center for Open Science. She is known for her research on the neural basis of social cognition. She received her BA from Oxford University where she studied Psychology and Philosophy, and her PhD from MIT in Cognitive Science. She is the granddaughter of Canadian coroner and politician Morton Shulman.
Go to Profile#544
Federica Sallusto
#78424
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Federica Sallusto is an Italian-Swiss biologist and immunologist. After high school, she studied Biology at Sapienza - University of Rome where she graduated cum laude. In 1999, Sallusto, alongside David Dombrowicz, was awarded the Pharmacia Allergy Research Foundation Award, which is given annually to researchers under the age of 40 who are working on IgE‐associated disease.
Go to Profile#545
Alison Heather
#61216
Overall Influence
Alison Kay Heather is an Australian synthetic and molecular biologist at the University of Otago and founder of Insitugen. Academic career After obtaining her PhD in 1996 from the University of Sydney for a thesis entitled Between feast and famine: adaptation of Escherichia coli to growth on low carbohydrate concentrations, Heather moved to the Sydney Heart Research Institute and University of Technology Sydney, and then to the University of Otago, rising to full professor. Heather is the Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Insitugen.
Go to Profile#546
Sally Kornbluth
#13501
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Sally Ann Kornbluth is a cell biologist and academic administrator, currently serving as the 18th president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since January 2023. Kornbluth previously served as provost of Duke University from 2014 to 2022 and vice dean for basic sciences of Duke University School of Medicine from 2006 to 2014.
Go to Profile#547
Patricia Vickers-Rich
#56773
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Patricia Arlene Vickers-Rich , also known as Patricia Rich, is an Australian Professor of Palaeontology and Palaeobiology, who researches the environmental changes that have impacted Australia and how this shaped the evolution of Australia’s fauna and flora.
Go to Profile#548
Beatrice de Gelder
#51038
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Beatrice M. L. de Gelder is a cognitive neuroscientist and neuropsychologist. She is professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and director of the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at the Tilburg University , and was senior scientist at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Harvard Medical School, Boston . She joined the Department of Cognitive Neuroscince at Maastricht University in 2012. Her research interests include behavioral and neural emotion processing from facial and bodily expressions, multisensory perception and interaction between auditory and visual processes, and nonconscious perception in neurological patients.
Go to Profile#549
Usha Goswami
#34035
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Usha Claire Goswami is a researcher and professor of Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, and the director of the Centre for Neuroscience in Education, Downing Site. She obtained her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of Oxford before becoming a professor of cognitive developmental psychology at the University College London. Goswami's work is primarily in educational neuroscience with major focuses on reading development and developmental dyslexia.
Go to Profile#550
Sarah Young
#78710
Overall Influence
Sarah Louise Young is a New Zealand immunology academic, and as of 2014 was head of pathology at the University of Otago. From 2020-2023 she ran the School of Medical Sciences at the University of Sydney. In 2023 Prof Young was appointed as the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.
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