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,
#601
Caroline Austin
#58441
Overall Influence
Caroline Ann Austin is a British molecular biologist known for her work on human DNA topoisomerase enzymes. She is a Professor of Molecular Biology at the Institute for Cell and Molecular Biosciences at Newcastle University Medical School.
Go to Profile#602
Lila Gierasch
#70721
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Lila Mary Gierasch is an American biochemist and biophysicist. At present, she is a distinguished Professor working on "protein folding in the cell" in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the College of Natural Sciences, University of Massachusetts—Amherst.
Go to Profile#603
Mary Lou Clements-Mann
#27854
Overall Influence
1946 - 1998 (52 years)
Mary Lou Clements-Mann was the founder and first Director of the Center for Immunization Research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and is well known for her work in the areas of HIV and influenza vaccine research.
Go to Profile#604
Caroline Robert
#82719
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
#605
Anne Spang
#73234
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Anne Spang is a German Biochemist/Cell Biologist and Professor at the Biozentrum University of Basel, Switzerland. Life Anne Spang studied Chemical Engineering at the University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt and Biochemistry at the University of Paris VI, France. She received her PhD in 1996 at the Max-Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried. She was then a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. From 1999 to 2006 she was an Independent Research Group Leader at the Friedrich Miescher Laboratory of the Max Planck Society in Tübingen. Since 2005 Anne Spang...
Go to Profile#606
Doris Tsao
#45221
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Doris Ying Tsao is an American systems neuroscientist and professor of biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She was formerly on the faculty at the California Institute of Technology. She is recognized for pioneering the use of fMRI with single-unit electrophysiological recordings and for discovering the macaque face patch system for face perception. She is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and the director of the T&C Chen Center for Systems Neuroscience. She won a MacArthur "Genius" fellowship in 2018. Tsao was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in ...
Go to Profile#607
Judith G. Voet
#54071
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Judith Greenwald Voet is a James Hammons Professor, Emerita in the department of chemistry and biochemistry at Swarthmore College. Her research interests include enzyme reaction mechanisms and enzyme inhibition. She and her husband, Donald Voet, are authors of biochemistry textbooks that are widely used in undergraduate and graduate curricula.
Go to Profile#608
Helen F. James
#58443
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Helen Frances James is an American paleontologist and paleornithologist who has published extensively on the fossil birds of the Hawaiian Islands. She is the curator in charge of birds in the Department of Vertebrate Zoology at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
Go to Profile#609
Elizabeth F. Neufeld
#40960
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Elizabeth Fondal Neufeld is a French-American geneticist whose research has focused on the genetic basis of metabolic disease in humans. Life Neufeld and her Russian Jewish family emigrated to the United States from Paris in 1940; they had left Europe as refugees to escape Nazi persecution. The family settled in New York, where she attended Hunter College High School before graduating from Queens College in 1948 with a Bachelor of Science. She went on to work as a research assistant at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, looking at blood disorders in mice. Later on, she attended graduate school at University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a Ph.D.
Go to Profile#610
Anne Ephrussi
#76351
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Anne Ephrussi is a French developmental and molecular biologist. Her research is focused on the study of post-transcriptional regulations such as mRNA localization and translation control in molecular biology as well as the establishment of polarity axes in cell and developmental biology. She is head of the Developmental Biology Unit and director of the EMBL International Centre for Advanced Training program at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory .
Go to Profile#611
Kizzmekia Corbett
#58717
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (38 years)
Kizzmekia "Kizzy" Shanta Corbett is an American viral immunologist. She is an Assistant Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Shutzer Assistant Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute since June 2021.
Go to Profile#612
Gretchen Hofmann
#40538
Overall Influence
Gretchen Hofmann is professor of ecological physiology of marine organisms at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds a B.S. from the University of Wyoming, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder in Environmental, Population and Organismal Biology.
Go to Profile#613
Ruth Sonntag Nussenzweig
#60628
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Ruth Sonntag Nussenzweig was an Austrian-Brazilian immunologist specializing in the development of malaria vaccines. In a career spanning over 60 years, she was primarily affiliated with New York University . She served as C.V. Starr Professor of Medical and Molecular Parasitology at Langone Medical Center, Research Professor at the NYU Department of Pathology, and finally Professor Emerita of Microbiology and Pathology at the NYU Department of Microbiology.
Go to Profile#614
Nancy Turner
#60732
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Nancy Jean Turner is a Canadian ethnobiologist, originally qualified in botany, who has done extensive research work with the indigenous peoples of British Columbia, the results of which she has documented in a number of books and numerous articles.
Go to Profile#615
Jacquelyn Gill
#39902
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Jacquelyn Gill is a paleoecologist and assistant professor of climate science at the University of Maine. She has worked on such as the relationship between megafauna and vegetation in the Pleistocene, and the sediment cores of Jamaica. Gill is also a science communicator on climate change.
Go to Profile#616
Camilla Pang
#69124
Overall Influence
1993 - Present (31 years)
Camilla Sih Mai Pang is a British computational biologist, writer, and autism advocate. In 2020, she was awarded the Royal Society Prize for Science Books for her memoir, Explaining Humans: What Science Can Teach Us about Life, Love and Relationships.
Go to Profile#617
Lesley Joy Rogers
#64126
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Lesley Joy Rogers is a neurobiologist and emeritus professor of neuroscience and animal behaviour at the University of New England. Academic career and education Rogers obtained Bachelor of Science with honours at the University of Adelaide in 1964. She worked in various positions at Harvard University, New England Medical Centre Hospital, University of Sussex, and Open University. She obtained her Doctor of Philosophy in 1971 and a Doctor of Science in 1987, both from the University of Sussex.
Go to Profile#618
Anne Rasa
#74412
Overall Influence
1940 - 2020 (80 years)
Olwen Anne Elisabeth Rasa was a British ethologist, known for her long-duration study of the social behaviour of the dwarf mongoose in Kenya. She had studied aggression among coral reef fish under the pioneering ethologist Konrad Lorenz. Her fieldwork in Kenya's Taru Desert led to a book, Mongoose Watch: A Family Observed, and to a popular German television series, Expedition ins Tierreich. She later studied social behaviour in the yellow mongoose and the sub-social tenebrionid beetle Parastizopus armaticeps.
Go to Profile#619
Elisabeth Gantt
#80755
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Elisabeth Gantt is a botanist, known for her work in plant physiology and structure. Born in Yugoslavia, she later immigrated to the United States, where she got her Ph.D. at Northwestern University. Her work mostly focused on photosynthesis, especially that of algae. Today, she is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, where she still studies and teaches botany and cell biology, which is a part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. Her work has garnered her the Darbaker Prize from the Botanical Society of America in 1958 and the Gilbert Morgan Smith Medal of the National Academy of Sciences in 1994.
Go to Profile#620
Helen Blau
#76097
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Helen Margaret Blau is an American biologist and the Donald E. and Delia B. Baxter Foundation Professor and Director of the Baxter Laboratory for Stem Cell Biology at Stanford University School of Medicine. She is known for establishing the reversibility of the mammalian differentiated state. Her landmark papers showed that nuclear reprogramming and the activation of novel programs of gene expression were possible, overturning the prevailing view that the differentiated state was fixed and irreversible. Her discoveries opened the door for cellular reprogramming and its application to stem ce...
Go to Profile#621
Carole LaBonne
#48182
Overall Influence
Carole LaBonne is a Developmental and Stem Cell Biologist at Northwestern University. She is the Erastus O. Haven Professor of Life Sciences, and Chair of the Department of Molecular Biosciences. Education and early career LaBonne received her bachelor's degree from the University of Rochester, doing research with Sayeeda Zain on the molecular basis of Alzheimer's disease. Inspired by the work of famed embryologist and Rochester emeritus professor Johannes Holtfreter, LaBonne pursued doctoral work at Harvard University studying germ layer formation using Xenopus as a model. As a National Scien...
Go to Profile#622
Letitia Obeng
#35136
Overall Influence
1925 - 2023 (98 years)
Letitia Eva Takyibea Obeng was the first Ghanaian woman to obtain a degree in zoology and the first to be awarded a doctorate. She is described as "the grandmother of female scientists in Ghana". Early life and education Letitia Obeng was born at Anum in the Eastern Region on 10 January 1925. She attended a primary school in Abetifi, Kwahu and a middle school in Kyebi. Between 1939 and 1946, she had her secondary school education at Achimota College. While at school she took the London University International Examination to continue her education, courtesy of a government scholarship at the University of Birmingham , where she was the only African female student on the Edgbaston campus.
Go to Profile#623
Alice Mossie Brues
#46809
Overall Influence
1913 - 2007 (94 years)
Alice Mossie Brues was a physical anthropologist. Biography Alice was the daughter of Charles Thomas Brues, an entomologist at Harvard University and her botanist mother, Beirne Barrett Brues. Alice was a naturalist who specialised in botany. During her youth she was often assigned the task of collecting insects from plants by her parents and her mother in 1924 published a diary work of the families observations. In 1933, Alice graduated from Bryn Mawr College, majoring in philosophy and psychology. Later studying under Earnest Hooton, she obtained a PhD from Harvard in 1940 in physical anth...
Go to Profile#624
Ruth Turner
#73937
Overall Influence
1914 - 2000 (86 years)
Ruth Dixon Turner was a pioneering U.S. marine biologist and malacologist. She was the world's expert on Teredinidae or shipworms, a taxonomic family of wood-boring bivalve mollusks which severely damage wooden marine installations.
Go to Profile#625
Christine Maggs
#43088
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Christine Adair Maggs is a British phycologist. Formerly Executive Dean of the Faculty of Science & Technology at Bournemouth University, she was the first Chief Scientist of the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, retiring in 2022. She is now an independent non-executive Director of Ocean Harvest Technology https://oceanharvesttechnology.com/corporate-governance/board-of-directors/
Go to Profile#626
Glenda Halliday
#82067
Overall Influence
Glenda Margaret Halliday is an Australian neuroscientist. As of 2021, she is a professor at the University of Sydney and research fellow in the National Health and Medical Research Council . She was named 2022 NSW Scientist of the Year.
Go to Profile#627
Ruth Smith Lloyd
#66831
Overall Influence
1917 - 1995 (78 years)
Ruth Smith Lloyd was a 20th-century scientist whose research focused on fertility, the relationship of sex hormones to growth, and the female sex cycle. She earned a PhD in the field of anatomy from Western Reserve University in 1941, making her the first African-American woman to have reached this achievement. Lloyd worked on the faculty of medicine at Howard University from 1942 to 1977. She married physician Sterling Morrison Lloyd in 1939, and they had three children: Marilyn, Sterling and David. She died of cancer in 1995.
Go to Profile#628
Geraldine Seydoux
#54369
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Geraldine C. Seydoux is a Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics , the Huntington Sheldon Professor in Medical Discovery , and the Vice Dean for Basic Research at Johns Hopkins University. She is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. In 2002, Discover magazine recognized her as one of the 50 most important women in science.
Go to Profile#629
Zeba Islam Seraj
#71561
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Zeba Islam Seraj is a Bangladeshi scientist known for her research in developing salt-tolerant rice varieties suitable for growth in the coastal areas of Bangladesh. She is currently a professor at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Dhaka.
Go to Profile#630
Nathalie Le Bot
#56137
Overall Influence
Nathalie Le Bot is a French biologist and the chief life sciences editor of Nature Communications. Education She is a graduate of École normale supérieure having studied molecular and cell biology before joining the European Molecular Biology Laboratory graduate program in 1995.
Go to Profile#631
Leslie Leinwand
#81380
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Leslie Leinwand is an American biologist and serial entrepreneur who works on the genetics and molecular physiology of inherited diseases of the heart, and on how gender and diet modify the heart. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, and the Chief Scientific Officer of the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Go to Profile#632
Mary Hagedorn
#84776
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Mary Margaret Hagedorn is a US marine biologist specialised in physiology who has developed a conservation program for coral species, using the principles of cryobiology, the study of cellular systems under cold conditions, and cryopreservation, the freezing of sperm and embryos.
Go to Profile#633
Judy Illes
#36773
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Judy Illes, , PHD, FRSC, FCAHS, is Professor of Neurology and Distinguished University Scholar in Neuroethics at the University of British Columbia. She is Director of Neuroethics Canada at UBC, and faculty in the Brain Research Centre at UBC and at the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute. She also holds affiliate appointments in the School of Population and Public Health and the School of Journalism at UBC, and in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA. USA. She was appointed a member of the Order of Canada in 2017.
Go to Profile#634
Louise Vet
#65844
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Louise Elisabeth Maria Vet is a Dutch biologist and emeritus professor of ecology at Wageningen University. In addition to her scientific career, she focuses on increasing environmental awareness among the general public and promoting environmentally friendly initiatives.
Go to Profile#635
Nancy Pedersen
#66437
Overall Influence
Nancy L. Pedersen is an American genetic epidemiologist. She is Professor of Genetic Epidemiology and the leader of the Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. She is known for her research on human twins, much of which is based on the Swedish Twin Registry. This has included research on the genetic basis of Alzheimer's disease and self-confidence.
Go to Profile#636
Azra Raza
#21431
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Azra Raza is the Chan Soon-Shiong Professor of Medicine and Director of Myelodysplastic Syndrome Center at Columbia University. She has previously held positions at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of Cincinnati, Rush University, and the University of Massachusetts. Raza's research focuses on myelodysplastic syndrome and acute myeloid leukemia.
Go to Profile#637
Ingrid Johnsrude
#35942
Overall Influence
Ingrid Suzanne Johnsrude is a Canadian neuroscientist, a professor of psychology at University of Western Ontario, and was the holder of the Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience. Her research involves brain imaging, the connections between brain structure and language ability, and the diagnosis of degenerative brain diseases in the elderly.
Go to Profile#638
Gina G. Turrigiano
#45355
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Gina G. Turrigiano is an American neuroscientist, and is the Levitan Chair of Vision Science at Brandeis University. Turrigiano is known for her pioneering work on the mechanisms that allow brain circuits to remain both flexible and stable. Turrigiano and colleagues discovered several forms of "homeostatic" plasticity, most notably Synaptic scaling and intrinsic homeostatic plasticity, and have characterized how these forms of plasticity contributes to learning and experience-dependent plastic changes in the brain.
Go to Profile#639
Roxie Collie Laybourne
#38538
Overall Influence
1910 - 2003 (93 years)
Roxie Collie Simpson Laybourne was an American ornithologist born in Fayetteville, North Carolina. She pioneered the study of forensic ornithology while at the National Museum of Natural History; these forensic techniques for identifying species of birds involved in bird strikes led to aircraft safety improvements.
Go to Profile#640
Grace Oladunni Taylor
#27670
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Grace Oladunni Taylor is a biochemist, formerly at University of Ibadan, Nigeria. She was the second woman to be inducted into the Nigerian Academy of Science and the first African awarded a L'Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science.
Go to Profile#641
Helen Christensen
#65524
Overall Influence
Scientia Professor Helen Christensen is Scientia Professor of Mental Health at UNSW Sydney and Board Director of Black Dog Institute . She is the former Executive Director and Chief Scientist at Black Dog Institute, having led the organisation from 2011 to 2021.
Go to Profile#642
Mary Jane Osborn
#59505
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
Mary Jane Osborn was an American biochemist and microbiologist known for her research on the biosynthesis of lipopolysaccharide , a key component of the outer membrane of Gram-negative bacteria, and discovering the mechanism of action of the anti-cancer drug methotrexate. She headed the Department of Molecular Biology and Biophysics at the University of Connecticut Health Center and served as president of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
Go to Profile#643
Lenore Fahrig
#51926
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Lenore Fahrig is a Chancellor's Professor in the biology department at Carleton University, Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Fahrig studies effects of landscape structure—the arrangement of forests, wetlands, roads, cities, and farmland—on wildlife populations and biodiversity, and is best known for her work on habitat fragmentation. In 2023, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#644
Kathleen Matthews
#64954
Overall Influence
Kathleen Matthews is an American biochemist specializing in DNA/protein interactions, specifically related to the lac repressor. She is the Stewart Memorial Professor Emerita of BioSciences at Rice University.
Go to Profile#645
Rebecca J. Nelson
#43352
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Rebecca J. Nelson is an American biologist and a professor at Cornell University and a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Her work focuses on natural genetic diversity for disease resistance in maize. Biography Nelson's parents were researchers at the National Institutes of Health. Rebecca holds a BA degree from Swarthmore College, 1982 and a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Washington, 1988. She is married to public radio journalist Jonathan Miller and has two children, William and Benjamin.
Go to Profile#646
Mya Breitbart
#71577
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Mya Breitbart is an American biologist and professor of biological oceanography at the University of South Florida's College of Marine Science. She is best known for her contributions to the field of viral metagenomics. Popular Science recognized her because of her approach of not trying to sequence individual viruses or organisms but to sequence everything in a given ecosystem.
Go to Profile#647
Nicola Spence
#55862
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Nicola Jane Spence is the Chief Plant Health Officer and Deputy Director for plant and bee health at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Early life and education Spence was educated at The Mount School, York and Bridlington School. She obtained a BSc in Botany from the University of Durham. Before starting her Masters, Spence volunteered at the Bermuda Marine Biology Research Institute then worked as a tutor for O level and A level students, and was unsure if she wanted to pursure a career in research. Spence undertook a Msc Microbiology from Birkbeck College, which she s...
Go to Profile#648
Suzana Herculano-Houzel
#46290
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Suzana Herculano-Houzel is a Brazilian neuroscientist. Her main field of work is comparative neuroanatomy; her findings include a method of counting of neurons of human and other animals' brains and the relation between the cerebral cortex area and thickness and number of cortical folds .
Go to Profile#649
Carolyn Cohen
#43318
Overall Influence
1929 - 2017 (88 years)
Carolyn Cohen was an American biologist and biophysicist. She was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Early life and education Carolyn Cohen was born June 18th, 1929 to parents Anna and Philip Cohen. After Cohen's father died in 1939, she credited his lawyer Samuel Sumner Goldberg for mentoring her and nurturing her curiosity. Cohen attended Joan of Arc Junior High School, then the selective Hunter College High School. After rejections from McGill University and Barnard College, Cohen's French teacher urged her to apply to Bryn Mawr College, where she was accepted with a full-tuition scholarship.
Go to Profile#650
Carmen Birchmeier-Kohler
#47088
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Carmen Birchmeier-Kohler is a German geneticist and developmental biologist. The focus of her research group is the development of embryonic tissues and the nervous system. The model organism for her investigations is the mouse.
Go to Profile