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,
#701
Anne Farmer
#45814
Overall Influence
Anne Farmer is emeritus professor of psychiatric nosology at the Institute of Psychiatry and was formerly lead consultant in the Affective Disorders Unit at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and the trust's director of medical education. Farmer's focus is on genetic research in affective disorders. Farmer was previously professor of psychiatry at the University of Wales College of Medicine.
Go to Profile#702
Marian Carlson
#86514
Overall Influence
Marian Bille Carlson is a geneticist and the Director of Life Sciences at the Simons Foundation. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a past president of the Genetics Society of America.
Go to Profile#703
Hynda Kleinman
#88989
Overall Influence
Hynda K. Kleinman is an American cell biologist who was the chief of the cell biology section at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research from 1985 to 2006. She co-invented Matrigel.
Go to Profile#704
Mary K. Firestone
#74512
Overall Influence
Mary K. Firestone is a professor of soil microbiology in the Department of Environmentalal Studies, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Her laboratory's research focuses on the ecology of microbes in various soils, and their contribution to the carbon cycle and nitrogen cycle in particular.
Go to Profile#705
Leena Peltonen-Palotie
#41808
Overall Influence
1952 - 2010 (58 years)
Leena Peltonen-Palotie was a Finnish geneticist who contributed to the identification of 15 genes for Finnish heritage diseases, including arterial hypertension, schizophrenia, lactose intolerance, arthrosis and multiple sclerosis. She was considered one of the world's leading molecular geneticists.
Go to Profile#706
Rosemary Redfield
#55144
Overall Influence
Rosemary Jeanne Redfield is a microbiologist associated with the University of British Columbia where she worked as a faculty member in the Department of Zoology from 1993 until retiring in 2021. Education Redfield completed her undergraduate degree in biochemistry at Monash University. She continued her education at McMaster University where she completed her MSc in 1980. Her thesis titled, "Methylation and chromatin conformation of adenovirus type 12 DNA sequences in transformed cells," dealt with the chromatin structure and SDNA methylation. Redfield received her PhD in Biological Sciences from Stanford University under Allan M.
Go to Profile#707
Rachel Wilson
#42285
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Rachel Wilson is a professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Wilson's work integrates electrophysiology, neuropharmacology, molecular genetics, functional anatomy, and behavior to explore how neural circuits are organized to react and sense a complex environment.
Go to Profile#708
Xiaoqi Feng
#81493
Overall Influence
Xiaoqi Feng is a Chinese plant geneticist, currently based at the John Innes Centre, Norwich, England. From 2008 to 2010, Feng was a lecturer at the University of Oxford where she won the Mendel Medal in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences category of the SET for Britain award, before moving to work as a postdoctoral researcher under Daniel Zilbermann at the University of California, Berkeley in 2011. She remained at Berkeley until 2014 when she joined the John Innes Centre as a project leader.
Go to Profile#709
Edith Widder
#39125
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Edith Anne "Edie" Widder Smith is an American oceanographer, marine biologist, author and the Co-founder, CEO and Senior Scientist at the Ocean Research & Conservation Association. Early life and education Widder was born in Arlington, Massachusetts to Dr. David Widder, a Harvard University mathematics professor, and Dr. Vera Widder, a mathematician turned stay at home mother. She also had an older brother, David Charles Widder.
Go to Profile#710
Marianne V. Moore
#55449
Overall Influence
Marianne V. Moore is an American aquatic ecologist, whose area of expertise is the threat posed to lakes from manmade origins. She was awarded the Ramón Margalef Award for Excellence in Education in 2015 for an innovative teaching program she designed which combines cultural and scientific research to give students an interdisciplinary understanding of the impact of changes in lake habitat to organisms in the water, as well as the people who populate the shores surrounding the lake.
Go to Profile#711
Doreen Cantrell
#81865
Overall Influence
Doreen Ann Cantrell CBE, FRS, FRSE, FMedSci is a Scottish scientist and Professor of Cellular Immunology at the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee. She researches the development and activation T lymphocytes, which are key to the understanding the immune response.
Go to Profile#712
Eva Olsson Engvall
#89670
Overall Influence
#713
Barbara Engelhardt
#9433
Overall Influence
Barbara Elizabeth Engelhardt is an American computer scientist and specialist in bioinformatics. Working as a Professor at Stanford University, her work has focused on latent variable models, exploratory data analysis for genomic data, and QTLs. In 2021, she was awarded the Overton Prize by the International Society for Computational Biology.
Go to Profile#714
Beverly Wendland
#80278
Overall Influence
Beverly Wendland is the Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at Washington University in St. Louis. Her laboratory investigates the molecular mechanisms and regulation of endocytic vesicle formation, using cell biology, genetic, and structural biology approaches. Wendland's research has successfully taken advantage of the highly genetically tractable eukaryote, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Her research in yeast has advanced the molecular understanding of the cell biology underlying human cancer, cardiovascular disease, lysosomal-storage disorders and infections.
Go to Profile#715
Clotilde Théry
#70184
Overall Influence
Clotilde Théry is a professor and INSERM director of research at Institut Curie in Paris, France. She is president of the International Society for Extracellular Vesicles , where she previously served as founding secretary general and as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Extracellular Vesicles. She is team leader of the group "Extracellular Vesicles, Immune Responses and Cancer" within the INSERM Unit 932 on "Immunity and Cancer." Théry researches extracellular vesicles that are released by immune and tumor cellss, including exosomess that originate in the multivesicular body.
Go to Profile#716
Christina Riesselman
#42075
Overall Influence
Christina Riesselman is an American paleoceanographer whose research focus is on Southern Ocean response to changing climate. Early life and education After completing her bachelor's degree at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in Geology and English in 2001, Riesselman spent time at the Joint Oceanographic Institution in Washington DC, then moved to Stanford for her PhD which was completed in 2011.
Go to Profile#717
Marina Picciotto
#57569
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Marina Rachel Picciotto is an American neuroscientist known for her work on the role of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors in addiction, memory, and reward behaviors. She is the Charles B. G. Murphy Professor of Psychiatry and professor in the Child Study Center and the Departments of Neuroscience and of Pharmacology at the Yale University School of Medicine. She was named Director of the Yale University Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program in September 2023. From 2015-2023, she was editor-in-chief of the Journal of Neuroscience. She will become President of the Society for Neuroscience afte...
Go to Profile#718
Danielle N. Lee
#47085
Overall Influence
Danielle N. Lee is an American assistant professor of biology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, best known for her science blogging and outreach efforts focused on increasing minority participation in STEM fields. Her research interests focus on the connections between ecology and evolution and its contribution to animal behavior. In 2017, Lee was selected as a National Geographic Emerging Explorer. With this position Lee traveled to Tanzania to research the behavior and biology of landmine-sniffing African giant pouched rats.
Go to Profile#719
Jane Roskams
#60439
Overall Influence
Angela Jane Roskams is a neuroscientist at the University of British Columbia with a joint appointment in Neurosurgery at the University of Washington. She is professor at the Centre for Brain Health at UBC, and directed the laboratory of neural regeneration and brain repair, before winding down her lab in 2015–16 to become Executive Director of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and a leader in the Open Science movement. After leading Strategy and Alliances for the Allen institute's multiple branches, she has become an influencer in the fields of neuroinformatics, public-private partners...
Go to Profile#720
Susan Band Horwitz
#38283
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Susan Band Horwitz is an American biochemist and professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine where she holds the Falkenstein chair in Cancer Research as well as co-chair of the department of Molecular Pharmacology.
Go to Profile#721
Naomi Wray
#72565
Overall Influence
Naomi Ruth Wray is an Australian statistical geneticist at the University of Queensland, where she is a Professorial Research Fellow at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience and an Affiliate Professor in the Queensland Brain Institute. She is also a National Health and Medical Research Council Principal Research Fellow and, along with Peter Visscher and Jian Yang, is one of the three executive team members of the NHMRC-funded Program in Complex Trait Genomics. Naomi pioneered the use of polygenic scores in human genetics, and has made significant contributions to both the development of met...
Go to Profile#722
Sharon Weiss
#59727
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Sharon Ann Whelan Weiss is an American pathologist who is best known for her contribution to the subspecialty of soft tissue pathology. She is the main author of Soft Tissue Tumors, one of the most widely used textbooks in the field of sarcoma and soft tissue pathology. She is also well known for her seminal descriptions of multiple soft tissue tumors, such as epithelioid hemangioendothelioma and pleomorphic hyalinizing angiectatic tumor of soft parts among others. She has also mentored and trained other well-known soft tissue pathologists.
Go to Profile#723
Jane Sowden
#75005
Overall Influence
Jane Caroline Sowden is a British biologist who is Professor of Developmental Biology and Genetics at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust. Her research investigates eye formation and repair by developing a better understanding the genetic pathways that regulate eye development.
Go to Profile#724
Debora Marks
#82195
Overall Influence
Debora S. Marks is a researcher in computational biology and a Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. Her research uses computational approaches to address a variety of biological problems.
Go to Profile#725
Barbara Pickersgill
#86489
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Barbara Pickersgill is a British botanist with a special interest in the domestication of crops, the genetics, taxonomy, and evolutionary biology of cultivated plants, and the preservation of crop diversity. Her 1966 dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from Indiana University concerned the taxonomy of Capsicum chinense. Her doctoral advisor was Charles B. Heiser.
Go to Profile#726
Gloria M. Coruzzi
#55234
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Gloria M. Coruzzi is an American molecular biologist specializing in plant systems biology and evolutionary genomics. Education and career As Carroll & Milton Petrie Professor of Biology at New York University’s Center for Genomics and Systems Biology, Coruzzi studies gene regulatory networks controlling nitrogen use efficiency and root nutrient foraging in the model plant Arabidopsis. She also examines phylogenomic approaches across higher plant species to identify genes associated with the evolution of key plant traits such as seeds. This research resides in Pasteur's quadrant as a scienti...
Go to Profile#727
Linda Liau
#42175
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Linda M. Liau is an American neurosurgeon, neuroscientist, and the W. Eugene Stern Chair of the Department of Neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Liau was elected to the Society of Neurological Surgeons in 2013 and the National Academy of Medicine in 2018. She has published over 230 research articles and a textbook, Brain Tumor Immunotherapy. She served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Neuro-Oncology from 2007 to 2017.
Go to Profile#728
Karen Ashe
#46585
Overall Influence
Karen K. Hsiao Ashe is a professor at the Department of Neurology and Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota Medical School, where she holds the Edmund Wallace and Anne Marie Tulloch Chairs in Neurology and Neuroscience. She is the founding director of the N. Bud Grossman Center for Memory Research and Care, and her specific research interest is memory loss resulting from Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. Her research has included the development of an animal model of Alzheimer's.
Go to Profile#729
Catherine M. Green
#54571
Overall Influence
Catherine Mary Green is an English biologist who is an Associate Professor in Chromosome Dynamics at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford. Her research considers chromosome stability during the replication of DNA. During the COVID-19 pandemic Green was part of the Oxford team who developed the Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.
Go to Profile#730
Hollis Cline
#53675
Overall Influence
Hollis T. Cline is an American neuroscientist and the Director of the Dorris Neuroscience Center at the Scripps Research Institute in California. Her research focuses on the impact of sensory experience on brain development and plasticity.
Go to Profile#731
Sabine Werner
#84876
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Sabine Werner is a German biochemist and professor. Biography Sabine Werner was born on 5 September 1960 in Tübingen, Germany. She attended Universities of Tubingen and Munich where she studied Biochemistry. Her PhD was in cancer research at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, completed in 1989. Werner then went to the University of California San Francisco working on growth factor action and tissue repair. Werner took a position as group leader at the Max-Planck-Institute from 1993 to 1999 while also working as an Associate Professor in the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich.In 1999 Werner became the Professor of Cell Biology at ETH Zürich.
Go to Profile#732
Aude Oliva
#21785
Overall Influence
Aude Oliva is a French professor of computer vision, neuroscience, and human-computer interaction at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory . Education Oliva has a dual French baccalaureate in mathematics and physics. She then earned a Masters of Science in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience from the Institut National Polytechnique in Grenoble and then a doctorate from the same university in 1995. She joined the MIT faculty in 2004 and CSAIL in 2012.
Go to Profile#733
Emma Whitelaw
#83465
Overall Influence
Emma Whitelaw is an eminent molecular biologist and NHMRC Australia Fellow at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research and is among Australia's leading researchers of epigenetics. Whitelaw was the first to demonstrate epigenetic inheritance in mammals. She now currently works at La Trobe University in Australia.
Go to Profile#734
Anjana Rao
#87342
Overall Influence
Anjana Rao is a cellular and molecular biologist of Indian ethnicity, working in the US. She uses immune cells as well as other types of cells to understand intracellular signaling and gene expression. Her research focuses on how signaling pathways control gene expression.
Go to Profile#735
Carolyn King
#70985
Overall Influence
Carolyn Mary King is a New Zealand zoologist specialising in mammals, particularly small rodents and mustelids. She is currently a professor of biological sciences at the University of Waikato. Career King got her first PhD in Zoology from the University of Oxford entitled 'Studies on the ecology of the weasel ' studying under ornithologist Henry Neville Southern, before moving to DSIR's Ecology Division and from there to the University of Waikato, where she rose to full professor.
Go to Profile#736
Lisa Coussens
#90590
Overall Influence
Lisa M. Coussens is an American cancer scientist who is Chair of the Department of Cell, Developmental and Cancer Biology and Professor and Associate Director for Basic Research in the Knight Cancer Institute at the Oregon Health & Science University. She serves as President of the American Association for Cancer Research.
Go to Profile#737
Daniela Rhodes
#27701
Overall Influence
Daniela Bargellini Rhodes FRS is an Italian structural and molecular biologist. She was a senior scientist at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, where she worked, and later studied for her PhD under the supervision of Nobel laureate Aaron Klug. Continuing her work under the tutelage of Aaron Klug at Cambridge, she was appointed group leader in 1983, obtained tenure in 1987 and was promoted to senior scientist in 1994 . Subsequently, she served as director of studies between 2003 and 2006. She has also been visiting professor at both "La Sapienza" in Rome, Italy and the...
Go to Profile#738
Laura Piddock
#78367
Overall Influence
Laura Piddock is a microbiologist, specialising in antibiotics and antibiotic resistance in bacteria. She is Professor Emeritus at the University of Birmingham, UK and also Scientific Director within the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership.
Go to Profile#739
Susan McConnell
#68750
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Susan McConnell is a neurobiologist who studies the development of neural circuits in the mammalian cerebral cortex. She is a professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford University, where she is the Susan B. Ford Professor of Humanities and Sciences, a Bass University Fellow, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#740
Alina Chan
#34652
Overall Influence
Alina Chan is a Canadian molecular biologist specializing in gene therapy and cell engineering at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she is a postdoctoral fellow. During the COVID-19 pandemic she became known for questioning the prevailing consensus regarding the origins of the virus and publicly advocating a laboratory escape hypothesis.
Go to Profile#741
Marian Koshland
#54924
Overall Influence
1921 - 1997 (76 years)
Marian Elliott "Bunny" Koshland was an American immunologist who discovered that the differences in amino acid composition of antibodies explain the efficiency and effectiveness with which they combat a huge range of foreign invaders.
Go to Profile#742
Rima Rozen
#65243
Overall Influence
Rima Rozen is a Canadian geneticist who is a professor at McGill University. Her current research focuses on genetic and nutritional deficiencies in folate metabolism and their impact on complex traits.
Go to Profile#743
Kerstin Johannesson
#91369
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Kerstin Johannesson is a Swedish biologist. From the age of fifteen, Johannesson resided on the island of Tjärnö in Strömstad Municipality during the summer, where the University of Gothenburg's Tjärnö Marine Biological Laboratory was located. Living on Tjärnö inspired Johannesson's interest in marine sciences, and she later attended the University of Gothenburg to study biology. She subsequently joined the University of Gothenburg's faculty, and became an elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#744
Bertha Madras
#53457
Overall Influence
Bertha Kalifon Madras is a professor of psychobiology in the Department of Psychiatry and the chair of the Division of Neurochemistry at Harvard Medical School, Harvard University. She served as associate director for public education in the division on Addictions at Harvard Medical School. Madras has published research in the areas of drug addiction , ADHD, and Parkinson's disease.
Go to Profile#745
Rana Ellen Munns
#90174
Overall Influence
Rana Ellen Munns is an Australian botanist whose primary research has been to determine the traits that underpin salinity tolerance and adaptation to drought in crop plants. Rana was born in Sydney Australia and attended the University of Sydney, receiving her undergraduate degree in Biochemistry in 1966. She completed her Ph.D. in 1972 to begin a lifelong course of research on salt tolerance of plants first as a Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia and later at CSIRO Plant Industry in Canberra. In the early 1990s, she found that sodium exclusion was an important trait associated with the salt tolerance in wheat using a seedling stage assay.
Go to Profile#746
June Almeida
#46514
Overall Influence
1930 - 2007 (77 years)
June Dalziel Almeida was a Scottish virologist, a pioneer in virus imaging and identification. Her skills in electron microscopy earned her an international reputation. In 1964, Almeida was recruited by St Thomas's Hospital Medical School in London. By 1967, she had earned her Doctor of Science on the basis of her research and the resulting publications, while working in Canada, at Toronto's Ontario Cancer Institute and then in London at St Thomas's. she then continued her research at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School , which later became part of the Imperial College School of Medicine.
Go to Profile#747
Estella Leopold
#51065
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Estella Bergere Leopold is an American paleobotanist and a conservationist. As a researcher in the United States Geological Survey, she aided in uncovering records of plant life from the Miocene around the Eniwetok and Bikini Atolls in the southern Pacific Ocean and from the Cenozoic era in the Rocky Mountains. As a professor of botany and forest sciences at the University of Washington, she directed the Quaternary Research Center, researched the forest history of the Pacific Northwest, and collaborated with Chinese paleobotanists. Leopold's work as a conservationist includes taking legal action to help save the Florissant Fossil Beds in Colorado, and fighting pollution.
Go to Profile#748
Isabelle M. Germano
#38431
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Isabelle M. Germano is a neurosurgeon and professor of neurosurgery, neurology, and oncology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital. She is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. Germano works with image-guided brain and spine surgery.
Go to Profile#749
Ulrike Protzer
#88614
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Ulrike Protzer is a German virologist who has been a professor at the Chair of Virology at the Technical University of Munich since 2007. Her primary field of study is virus-host interactions of the hepatitis B virus and her work is focused on developing new therapeutic approaches for the treatment of chronic hepatitis B infection and related secondary diseases. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the novel virus SARS-CoV-2 has also been one of her research areas, and she has been a prominent voice in German media on this topic.
Go to Profile#750
Benita Katzenellenbogen
#91310
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Benita S. Katzenellenbogen née Schulman is an American physiologist and cell biologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has studied cancer, endocrinology, and women's health, focusing on nuclear receptors. She also dedicated efforts to focusing on improving the effectiveness of endocrine therapies in breast cancer.
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