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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential female people in Biology,
#551
Martha L. Ludwig
#30531
Overall Influence
1931 - 2006 (75 years)
Martha Ludwig was an American macromolecular crystallographer. She was the J. Lawrence Oncley Distinguished University Professor of Biological Chemistry at the University of Michigan. Personal life Ludwig was born on August 16, 1931, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her father was Leon Ludwig, a physicist, and her mother was Agnes Sutermeister Ludwig, a worker in the social services. Soon after her birth, her father accepted a job as the director of the Westinghouse facility, resulting in the family move to Buffalo, NY. As a child in school, Ludwig found a passion for mathematical puzzles and hop...
Go to Profile#552
Els Goulmy
#59868
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Els Goulmy is an eminent professor of transplantation biology, especially regarding minor histocompatibility antigen, at Leiden University. Goulmy is an expert in the area of tissue typing and belongs internationally to the absolute top of her discipline. She was awarded the Spinoza Prize in 2002.
Go to Profile#553
Mariann Bienz
#67681
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Mariann Bienz, Lady Pelham FRS FMedSci is a Swiss-British molecular biologist based at the UK Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology. She has been a member of their Senior Scientific Staff since 1991, was Joint-head of Cell Biology in 2007-08 and has been a Group Leader of Protein and Nucleic Acid Chemistry Division since 2008.
Go to Profile#554
Ruth Watkins
#30588
Overall Influence
Ruth V. Watkins is an American scholar of child language and speech pathology. She was the 16th president of the University of Utah. She stepped down from the role on April 7, 2021, to enter the private sector.
Go to Profile#555
Daisy Yen Wu
#50194
Overall Influence
1902 - 1993 (91 years)
Daisy Yen Wu was the first Chinese woman engaged as an academic researcher in biochemistry and nutrition. Born into a wealthy industrial family in Shanghai, from a young age she was tutored in English and encouraged to study. She graduated from Nanjing Jinling Women's University in 1921 and then studied in the United States, graduating with a master's degree in biochemistry from Teachers College, Columbia University in 1923. Returning to China, she became an assistant professor at Peking Union Medical College between 1923 and her marriage at the end of 1924 to Hsien Wu. Collaborating with him, she conducted research on proteins and studied nutrition.
Go to Profile#556
Tara Keck
#57127
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Tara Keck is an American-British neuroscientist and Professor of Neuroscience and Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow, at University College London working in the Department of Neuroscience, Physiology, and Pharmacology. She is the Vice-Dean International for the Faculty of Life Sciences. She studies experience-dependent synaptic plasticity, its effect on behaviour and how it changes during ageing and age-related diseases. She has worked in collaboration with the United Nations Population Fund on approaches for healthy ageing. Her recent work has focused on loneliness in older people, with a focus on gender.
Go to Profile#557
Ulrike Schmidt
#60630
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Ulrike Schmidt is a British psychiatrist at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London in London, where she is Professor of Eating Disorders as well as the Head of the Section of Eating Disorders. Schmidt is a consultant at the Eating Disorders Service within the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. Schmidt is known for her ground breaking work helping people with eating disorders and their clinicians.
Go to Profile#558
Laurie Glimcher
#24884
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Laurie Hollis Glimcher is an American physician-scientist who was appointed president and CEO of Dana–Farber Cancer Institute in October 2016. She was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019.
Go to Profile#559
Katherine Richardson Christensen
#42255
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Katherine Richardson Christensen is Professor in Biological Oceanography, leader of the Sustainability Science Centre and a principal investigator for the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate at the University of Copenhagen. She was the vice dean of the Faculty of Science from 2007–2012. Her research focuses on the importance of biological processes in the ocean for the uptake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and how ocean biology, including diversity, contributes to ocean function in the Earth System.
Go to Profile#560
Marilyn Renfree
#69788
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Marilyn Bernice Renfree is an Australian zoologist. She completed her PhD at the Australian National University, was a post-doctoral fellow in Tennessee and then Edinburgh before returning to Australia. Since 1991, Renfree has been Professor of Zoology at the University of Melbourne. Her main research interest focuses on reproductive and developmental biology of marsupials.
Go to Profile#561
Fátima Ferreira
#63237
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Fátima Ferreira-Briza is a Brazilian-Austrian biologist, biochemist and educator. Since 2010, she has been Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Salzburg, Austria, where, since October 2011, she has also been Vice-Rector for Research with responsibility for the Faculty of Natural Sciences.
Go to Profile#562
Susan J. Crockford
#64477
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Susan Janet Crockford is a Canadian contract scientist who runs a small business identifying bones and other items in scat of wildlife. She is a blogger who writes about zoology and climate science, specializing in Holocene mammals. From 2004 to 2019 she was an adjunct professor in Anthropology at the University of Victoria. She is known for her blog posts on polar bear biology, which are unsupported by the scientific literature and oppose the scientific consensus that polar bears are threatened by ongoing climate change.
Go to Profile#563
Sudha Bhattacharya
#54700
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Sudha Bhattacharya is an Indian academic, scientist and a writer. She is recognized primarily for her in-depth study of Entamoeba histolytica, a parasitic protozoan that causes amoebiasis: Dr. Bhattacharya's laboratory first detected Ribosomal RNA genes on Circular DNA, while studying the parasite, and also discovered families of retrotransposons in the parasite genome. Her work has primarily been in the fields of Molecular Parasitology and Gene Regulation.
Go to Profile#564
Rebeccah Slater
#70727
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Rebeccah Slater is a British neuroscientist and academic. She is professor of paediatric neuroscience and a senior Wellcome Trust research fellow at the University of Oxford. She is also a professorial fellow in Neuroscience at St John's College.
Go to Profile#565
Ann Kiessling
#35239
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Ann Kiessling is an American reproductive biologist and a researcher in human parthenogenic stem cell research at The Bedford Research Foundation. She was an associate professor in teaching hospitals of Harvard Medical School from 1985 until 2012.
Go to Profile#566
Erika Hagelberg
#50734
Overall Influence
Erika Hagelberg is a British Evolutionary geneticist and Professor of Biosciences at the University of Oslo. She works on ancient DNA and pioneered a means to extract DNA from bones. Her research has applications in evolutionary biology and forensic science.
Go to Profile#567
Alexandra Worden
#56696
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Alexandra Z. Worden is a microbial ecologist and genome scientist known for her expertise in the ecology and evolution of ocean microbes and their influence on global biogeochemical cycles. Research contributions Worden's research focuses on the physiology and ecology of eukaryotic phytoplankton and their roles in the carbon cycle. She initiated this research through an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology and expanded it thereafter by adapting multiple molecular and omic methods to characterize the evolution and ecological contributions of these photosynthetic plankton, which are now known to be major ocean primary producers.
Go to Profile#568
Ana Pombo
#72760
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Ana Pombo is an appointed Professor of Biology at Humboldt University and senior group leader at the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin-Buch with the focus on "Epigenetic Regulation and Chromatin Architecture". Since May 2018, Pombo is an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization .
Go to Profile#569
Robyn Mary Barker
#79453
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Robyn M. Barker is an Honorary Research Associate of the South Australian Herbarium. She now works part-time, her duties include maintenance of the Vascular Plant Census for the State. Barker's research interests also include systematics and several plant genera. She is a life member of the Australian Systematic Botany Society. Some of the species named and described by Barker include Hakea bicornata, H. horrida, H. oligoneura and H. pendens.
Go to Profile#570
Diana Bautista
#55433
Overall Influence
Diana M. Bautista is an American neuroscientist known for her work on the molecular mechanisms underlying itch, touch and pain. She is a full professor of cell and developmental biology in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and is affiliated with the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#571
Ruth W. Nduati
#33085
Overall Influence
Karithi Ruth Wanjiru Nduati is a Kenyan Pediatrician and Epidemiologist who also teaches at the University of Nairobi College of Health Sciences. She is also currently leading an interdisciplinary program through the University of Nairobi School of Medicine to educate physician-researchers to best implement HIV treatment and prevention methods backed by research. The program was funded by the Fogarty Training Grant which is a part of the PEPFAR funds the country of Kenya received.
Go to Profile#572
Olufunmilayo Olopade
#16966
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Olufunmilayo I. Olopade born in the year 1957, is a Nigerian hematology oncologist, Associate Dean for Global Health and Walter L. Palmer, Distinguished Service Professor in Medicine and Human Genetics at the University of Chicago. She also serves as director of the University of Chicago Hospital's Cancer Risk Clinic.
Go to Profile#573
Laura Machesky
#75883
Overall Influence
Laura Machesky FRSE FMedSci is a British-American cancer research scientist currently based in the University of Cambridge. Professor Machesky is the Sir William Dunn Professor of Biochemistry in the Department of Biochemistry, and the current president of the British Society for Cell Biology.
Go to Profile#574
Keiko Torii
#58014
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
is a Japanese plant scientist and academic teaching at the University of Texas at Austin as of September 2019. Research Torii researches stem cell maintenance and the cell-to-cell communication required to correctly pattern tissue during development, focusing on stomatal development as a model. Her work on cell-to-cell communication has also focused on the mechanisms that determine organ size and shape in plants. Her achievements include discoveries of key signaling ligands, receptor kinase signaling pathways, and master regulatory transcription factors that specify stomatal patterning and differentiation.
Go to Profile#575
Niki Erlenmeyer-Kimling
#25296
Overall Influence
Niki Erlenmeyer-Kimling was a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and chief of the Division of Genetics at New York State Psychiatric Institute. Research Her research interests included genetic aspects of mental disorders and human behavior genetics generally. She conducted a longitudinal, prospective study of early indicators of later schizophrenia and a genetic-linkage, gene search study of schizophrenia in Croatia.
Go to Profile#576
Bette Korber
#35529
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Bette Korber is an American computational biologist focusing on the molecular biology and population genetics of the HIV virus that causes infection and eventually AIDS. She has contributed heavily to efforts to obtain an effective HIV vaccine. She created a database at Los Alamos National Laboratory that has enabled her to design novel mosaic HIV vaccines, one of which is currently in human testing in Africa. The database contains thousands of HIV genome sequences and related data.
Go to Profile#577
Isabel Gauthier
#48555
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Isabel Gauthier is a cognitive neuroscientist currently holding the position of David K. Wilson Professor of Psychology and head of the Object Perception Lab at Vanderbilt University’s Department of Psychology. In 2000, with the support of the James S. McDonnell Foundation, she founded the Perceptual Expertise Network , which now comprises over ten labs based across North America. In 2006 PEN became part of the NSF-funded Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center .
Go to Profile#578
Angela Rasmussen
#25659
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Angela Lynn Rasmussen is an American virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. Education and early career During graduate school, Rasmussen worked in the laboratory of Vincent Racaniello where she developed a mouse model of rhinovirus infection in order to better understand the pathogenesis of illnesses caused by the virus, such as the common cold.
Go to Profile#579
Talma Hendler
#55510
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Talma Hendler is a psychiatrist and researcher in neuroscience and one of the pioneers in the field of functional imaging of the brain in Israel. Her research focuses on understanding emotion, particularly in the context of human interactions with each other and when facing distressing life events.
Go to Profile#580
Melissa Cristina Márquez
#37786
Overall Influence
Melissa Cristina Márquez is a Puerto Rican marine biologist and science communicator. She studies chondrichthyan fishes, including great white sharks. Early life and education Márquez was inspired to study sharks when she first saw a great white shark on the Discovery Channel program Shark Week when she moved from Mexico to the United States. She completed her undergraduate degree at the New College of Florida in Sarasota, Florida, and a master's degree from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.
Go to Profile#581
Dana Pe'er
#44301
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Dana Pe'er , Chair and Professor in Computational and Systems Biology Program at Sloan Kettering Institute is a researcher in computational systems biology. A Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator since 2021, she was previously a professor at Columbia Department of Biological Sciences. Pe'er's research focuses on understanding the organization, function and evolution of molecular networks, particularly how genetic variations alter the regulatory network and how these genetic variations can cause cancer.
Go to Profile#582
Anne Osbourn
#68054
Overall Influence
Anne Elisabeth Osbourn is a professor of biology and group leader at the John Innes Centre, where she investigates plant natural product biosynthesis. She discovered that in the plant genome, the genes involved with biosynthesis organise in clusters. She is also a popular science communicator, poet and is the founder of the Science, Art and Writing Initiative. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Go to Profile#583
Ottoline Leyser
#43759
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Dame Henrietta Miriam Ottoline Leyser is a British plant biologist and Regius Professor of Botany at the University of Cambridge, Chief Executive Officer of UK Research and Innovation and the Sainsbury Laboratory, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#584
Anne E. Pusey
#41884
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Anne Elizabeth Pusey is director of the Jane Goodall Institute Research Center and a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University. Since the early 1990s, Pusey has been archiving the data collected from the Gombe chimpanzee project. The collection housed at Duke University consists of a computerized database that Pusey oversees. In addition to archiving Jane Goodall’s research from Gombe, she is involved in field study and advising students at Gombe . She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Go to Profile#585
Mildred Esther Mathias
#60518
Overall Influence
1906 - 1995 (89 years)
Mildred Esther Mathias was an American botanist and professor. She was a professor at UCLA from 1962 until 1974. She also served as president of the American Society for Plant Taxonomists and the Botanical Society of America.
Go to Profile#586
Viviane Slon
#56253
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Viviane Slon is a paleogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. She identified that a teenage girl born 90,000 years ago had both Neanderthal and Denisovan parents. She was selected as one of Nature's 10 in 2018.
Go to Profile#587
Nouria Hernandez
#39277
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Nouria Hernandez is a Swiss biologist and the rector of the University of Lausanne . She was professor of molecular biology at the University of Lausanne from 2004 to 2016. Life and career Nouria Hernandez studied at the University of Geneva and received a doctorate from the University of Heidelberg . From 1983 to 1986, she then worked at the Yale University. In 1987, she was nominated group leader at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and, in 1988, became professor at the Watson School of Biological Sciences.
Go to Profile#588
Barbara York Main
#59743
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Barbara Anne York Main was an Australian arachnologist and adjunct professor at the University of Western Australia. The author of four books and over 90 research papers, Main is recognised for her prolific work in establishing taxonomy for arachnids, personally describing 34 species and seven new genera. The BBC and ABC produced a film about her work, Lady of the Spiders, in 1981.
Go to Profile#589
Claire Kremen
#40151
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Claire Kremen is an American conservation biologist. She is a professor of conservation biology at the University of British Columbia, having formerly worked at the University of California, Berkeley, where she remains professor emerita.
Go to Profile#590
Cinzia Verde
#57952
Overall Influence
Cinzia Verde is an Italian researcher in marine biochemistry at the National Research Council , Institute of Biosciences and BioResources . Early life and education Verde received her Degree in Biological Sciences cum laude from the University of Naples in 1987.
Go to Profile#591
Mary Kalin Arroyo
#66531
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Dr. Mary Therese Kalin-Arroyo was born in 1944 in New Zealand. She is currently a professor of biology at the University of Chile. Kalin-Arroyo is notable for revising the indigenous genus Ourisia and discovering several new species in New Zealand. Her studies have also led to the designation of central Chile as a biodiversity hotspot.
Go to Profile#592
Jennifer Raff
#43239
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Jennifer Anne Raff is an American geneticist and an associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Kansas. She specializes in anthropological genetics relating to the initial peopling of the Americas and subsequent prehistory of Indigenous populations throughout North America. She is the President of the American Association of Anthropological Genetics. Alongside her research, Raff is a science communicator who writes and gives public talks about topics in science literacy.
Go to Profile#593
Nancy A. Moran
#37634
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
For the American folk-rock singer-songwriter, see Nancy Moran. Nancy A. Moran is an American evolutionary biologist and entomologist, University of Texas Leslie Surginer Endowed Professor, and co-founder of the Yale Microbial Diversity Institute. Since 2005, she has been a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. Her seminal research has focused on the pea aphid, Acyrthosiphon pisum and its bacterial symbionts including Buchnera . In 2013, she returned to the University of Texas at Austin, where she continues to conduct research on bacterial symbionts in aphids, bees, and other insect species.
Go to Profile#594
Melissa J. Moore
#66615
Overall Influence
Melissa J. Moore is an American biochemist who focuses on RNA. She was the Chief Scientific Officer of Moderna from 2016-2023, where her team contributed to the development of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.
Go to Profile#595
Anne Beloff-Chain
#36864
Overall Influence
1921 - 1991 (70 years)
Anne Ethel Beloff-Chain, Lady Chain was a British biochemist. She worked at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità , Imperial College London and the University of Buckingham . Her research focused on carbohydrate metabolism and the hormones involved in diabetes and obesity.
Go to Profile#596
Barbara Lynette Rye
#77462
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Barbara Lynette Rye is an Australian botanist born in 1952. Barbara Rye has been associated with the Western Australian Herbarium, where her work as a taxonomist has been the source of many new descriptions of plants. The number of taxa recorded as described by women authors is historically very low, of the terrestrial plant species this amount is around three percent, yet in analysis published in 2019 Rye is amongst the ten most prolific women taxonomists.
Go to Profile#597
Paola Arlotta
#36562
Overall Influence
Paola Arlotta is the Golub Family Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University and chair of the Harvard Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology . Her research focuses on the development of neuron types in the cerebral cortex. She is best known for her work using 3D cerebral organoids derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells to study cortical development in neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders.
Go to Profile#598
Isabel Morgan
#61220
Overall Influence
1911 - 1996 (85 years)
Isabel Merrick Morgan was an American virologist at Johns Hopkins University, who prepared an experimental vaccine that protected monkeys against polio in a research team with David Bodian and Howard A. Howe. Their research led to the identification of three distinct serotypes of poliovirus, all of which must be incorporated for a vaccine to provide complete immunity from poliomyelitis. Morgan was the first to successfully use a killed-virus for polio inoculation in monkeys. After she married in 1949, she left the field of polio research in part because she was uncomfortable with trials that tested polio vaccines on the nerve tissue of children.
Go to Profile#599
Viviana Simon
#21209
Overall Influence
Viviana Simon is a Professor of Microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai . She is a member of the ISMMS Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute. Her research considers viral-host interactions and the mode of action of retroviral restriction factors. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Simon developed an antibody test that can determine immunity to Coronavirus disease 2019.
Go to Profile#600
Patricia Bergquist
#40946
Overall Influence
1933 - 2009 (76 years)
Dame Patricia Rose Bergquist was a New Zealand zoologist who specialised in anatomy and taxonomy. At the time of her death, she was professor emerita of zoology and honorary professor of anatomy with radiology at the University of Auckland.
Go to Profile