The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential female people in Biology,
#751
Helen Battle
#73816
Overall Influence
1903 - 1994 (91 years)
Helen Irene Battle was a pioneering Canadian ichthyologist and marine biologist. She was the first Canadian woman to earn a PhD in marine biology and she was also one of the first zoologists to engage in laboratory research . She was an emeritus professor of zoology at the University of Western Ontario from 1972.
Go to Profile#752
June Lascelles
#77986
Overall Influence
1924 - 2004 (80 years)
June Lascelles was an Australian microbiologist. She is best known for pioneering work in microbial photosynthesis. Early life and education June Lascelles was born in 1924 and grew up in Sydney. She began her research career in microbiology, a field in which she remained for her entire life. She attended the University of Sydney and received a BSc in biochemistry in 1944. She remained there as a research scholar and teaching fellow and later, a Linnaean Macleay fellow, receiving her MSc in 1947. Her initial research was focused on the metabolism of molecular hydrogen in E. coli.
Go to Profile#753
Heather M. Ferguson
#47695
Overall Influence
Heather Margaret Ferguson FRSE, Professor of Medical Entomology and Disease Ecology, at Glasgow University; a specialist in researching mosquito vectors that spread malaria, in global regions where this is endemic, aiming to manage and control a disease which the World Health Organization estimates killed over 400,000 people in 2020. Ferguson co-chairs the WHO Vector Control Advisory Group and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2021.
Go to Profile#754
Angela E. Douglas
#87226
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Angela Elizabeth Douglas is a British entomologist who researches insect nutrition, and is known for her research on symbiotic relationships between insects and microorganisms. She has been the Daljit S. and Elaine Sarkaria Professor of Insect Physiology and Toxicology at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, since 2008, and previously held a chair at the University of York .
Go to Profile#755
Ana Belén Elgoyhen
#76509
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Ana Belén Elgoyhen is an Argentine scientist, professor of pharmacology at the University of Buenos Aires and independent researcher of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council . She is internationally recognized for her contributions to the understanding of the molecular basis of hearing . Her work could be useful to treat auditory deficiencies and other hearing pathologies.
Go to Profile#756
Rebecca Buckley
#46887
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Rebecca Hatcher Buckley is a medical doctor who has conducted research in pediatric immunological diseases. Biography Buckley graduated from Duke University in 1954 with a bachelor's degree. She received her Doctor of Medicine in 1958 from North Carolina School of Medicine, and training in pediatrics at Duke.
Go to Profile#757
Patricia Wright
#32944
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Patricia Chapple Wright is an American primatologist, anthropologist, and conservationist. Wright is best known for her extensive study of social and family interactions of wild lemurs in Madagascar.
Go to Profile#758
Heather Koldewey
#39112
Overall Influence
Heather Koldewey is the co-founder of Project Seahorse and head of marine and freshwater for the Zoological Society of London-London Zoo Aquarium. She additionally serves as an honorary professor for University of Exeter and a National Geographic explorer. Her research interests focus on marine and freshwater conservation, seahorse biology and genetics, and the impact of the aquarium trade on wild populations of fish and aquatic invertebrates.
Go to Profile#759
Cheryl Arrowsmith
#71806
Overall Influence
Cheryl H. Arrowsmith is a Canadian structural biologist and is the Chief Scientist at the Toronto laboratory of the Structural Genomics Consortium. Her contributions to protein structural biology includes the use of NMR and X-ray crystallography to pursue structures of proteins on a proteome wide scale.
Go to Profile#760
Kay Tye
#51860
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Kay M. Tye is an American neuroscientist and professor and Wylie Vale Chair in the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences. Her research has focused on using optogenetics to identify connections in the brain that are involved in innate emotion, motivation and social behaviors.
Go to Profile#761
Nancy Lee Harris
#17328
Overall Influence
For the Irish playwright and screenwriter, see Nancy Harris. Nancy Lee Harris is an educator as well as a well-established medical professional. She currently serves as a professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School. She is also a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and an editor with the New England Journal of Medicine. She was trained at multiple different hospitals; however, the majority of her adult life has been spent working in Boston, Massachusetts. Throughout her life she has held many notable positions including but not limited to: Director of Hematopathology, Director of ...
Go to Profile#762
Carol Prives
#88227
Overall Influence
Professor Carol L. Prives FRS is the Da Costa Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University. She is known for her work in the characterisation of p53, an important tumor suppressor protein frequently mutated in cancer.
Go to Profile#763
Zhang Dongju
#29185
Overall Influence
Zhang Dongju is a Chinese archeologist and an associate professor at the College of Earth and Environmental Sciences of Lanzhou University. Zhang's research determined that the Xiahe mandible found in the Baishiya Karst Cave on the Tibetan Plateau shared DNA with fossilized remains found in the Denisova Cave in Siberia. This moved to 120,000 years earlier the dates of earliest proven hominin activities in the Tibetan Plateau, and revealed for the first time that the Denisovan hominins had spread throughout Asia rather than being located only near the Denisova Cave. Zhang's work is considered likely to prompt reconsideration of other fossil remains using ancient protein analysis.
Go to Profile#764
Judith Gay West
#81166
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Judith Gay West is an Australian scientist currently working as an executive director of the Australian National Botanic Gardens. West holds a doctor of philosophy by thesis on "A taxonomic revision of Dodonaea in Australia". She completed her PhD in 1981 from the University of Adelaide, South Australia.
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Joan Ruderman
#76964
Overall Influence
Joan V. Ruderman is an American molecular and cell biologist. She is a Professor Emeritus at Harvard University and Visiting Senior Biologist at Princeton University. She has researched cell division and embryo development, and more recently the effects of, and the public understanding of, environmental estrogens and other endocrine disruptors. She was elected as a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1998.
Go to Profile#766
Jessica Polka
#73988
Overall Influence
Jessica Polka is a biochemist and the Executive Director of ASAPbio , a non-profit initiative promoting innovation and transparency via preprints and open peer review. She was one of the organizers of a recent meeting they held on scholarly communication.
Go to Profile#767
Angharad Gatehouse
#72955
Overall Influence
Angharad M. R. Gatehouse is an entomologist in the UK. Gatehouse is Professor of Invertebrate Molecular Biology at Newcastle University, is on the Council of the International Congress of Entomology, and is the Director of Expertise for BioEconomy.
Go to Profile#768
Sonja Vernes
#47221
Overall Influence
Sonja Catherine Vernes is a neuroscientist who is, as of 2022, the head of the Neurogenetics of Vocal Communication Research Group at the University of St Andrews. She holds a UK Research and Innovation future leaders fellowship. Her research investigates vocal communication between mammals. She was a laureate for the 2022 Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists.
Go to Profile#769
Janet Siefert
#63688
Overall Influence
Janet Louise Siefert received her PhD from the University of Houston and is an Associate Research Professor in the Department of Statistics at Rice University since January, 1998. She is an origin of life researcher who received her training from Dr. George E. Fox, co-discoverer of the third domain of life.
Go to Profile#770
Mary Bartlett Bunge
#56725
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Mary Bartlett Bunge is an American neuroscientist currently researching a cure for paralysis at University of Miami, where she is a Professor of Cell Biology. Early life Mary Bartlett was born on April 3, 1931, in New Haven, Connecticut, to George Chapman Bartlett and Margaret Elizabeth Reynolds Bartlett. Her father built and renovated houses, including the house in which she grew up, whereas her mother worked as a painter and decorator. Neither of her parents had a college education, and her father thought that a college education was useless for women. Their careers were filled with an artistic expression that Mary found appealing.
Go to Profile#771
Yasmine Belkaid
#63523
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Yasmine Belkaid is an Algerian immunologist and senior investigator at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She is best known for her work studying host-microbe interactions in tissues and immune regulation to microbes. Belkaid currently serves as the director of the NIAID Microbiome program. On 29 March 2023, she was appointed as President of the Pasteur Institute for a six-year term, starting from January 2024.
Go to Profile#772
Carmen Sandi
#91534
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Carmen Sandi is a Spanish and Swiss behavioral neuroscientist. She is a professor of neuroscience and director of the Laboratory of Behavioral Genetics at the Brain Mind Institute . Early life and education Born and raised in Torrelavega , Spain, Sandi moved to Salamanca to obtain her BS and MS from the University of Salamanca in 1984 and further to Madrid for her PhD at the Cajal Institute and the Autonomous University of Madrid in 1988. She continued her postdoctoral research at INSERM, Bordeaux, France and Open University, UK .
Go to Profile#773
Rosemary Grant
#89998
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
#774
Kayo Inaba
#75332
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Kayo Inaba is a professor at Kyoto University where she heads the Graduate School of Biostudies. She is also the Vice-President for Gender Equality and the Director of the Centre for Women Researchers.
Go to Profile#775
Daphne Osborne
#57728
Overall Influence
1930 - 2006 (76 years)
Daphne J. Osborne was a British botanist. Her research in the field of plant physiology spanned five decades and resulted in over two hundred papers, twenty of which were published in Nature. Her obituary in The Times described her scientific achievements as "legendary"; that from the Botanical Society of America attributed her success to "her wonderful intellectual style, combined with her proclivity for remarkable and perceptive experimental findings".
Go to Profile#776
Ulla Hansen
#89438
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Ulla Hansen is a professor emerita of biology at Boston University. Her research group focuses on the study of transcription factor LSF . Biography Hansen received her bachelor's degree in 1974 from Oberlin College and her Ph.D. in 1980 from Harvard University, where she worked with William R. McClure. She then held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Phillip A. Sharp. She became an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School in 1983, and moved to the department of biology at Boston University in 1998. She served as associate chair of the department fo...
Go to Profile#777
Karolin Luger
#67852
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Karolin Luger is an Austrian-American biochemist and biophysicist known for her work with nucleosomes and discovery of the three-dimensional structure of chromatin. She is a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University in Fort Collins and works with the University of Colorado School of Medicine's Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics.
Go to Profile#778
Cheryl Hayashi
#38818
Overall Influence
Cheryl Y. Hayashi is a biologist who specializes in the evolution and functional properties of spider silk. She is a curator, professor, and director of comparative biology research at the American Museum of Natural History, while also serving as the director of the Institute for Comparative Genomics and Provost of Science. She was a graduate of Yale University, a professor at University California Riverside, and a 2007 MacArthur Fellow.
Go to Profile#779
Yang Dan
#55317
Overall Influence
Yang Dan is a Chinese-American neuroscientist. She is the Paul Licht Distinguished Professor of Neurobiology at the University of California, Berkeley and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. She is a past recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, Beckman Young Investigator Award, and Society for Neuroscience Research Awards for Innovation in Neuroscience. Recognized for her research on the neural circuits that control behavior, she was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2018.
Go to Profile#780
Krystal Tsosie
#23144
Overall Influence
Dr. Krystal Tsosie is a Navajo geneticist and bioethicist at Arizona State University and activist for Indigenous data sovereignty. She is also an educator and an expert on genetic and social identities. Her advocacy and academic work in ameliorating disparities in genetics through community-based participatory research has been covered by various national news sources, including The New York Times, Nova, The Washington Post, NPR, The Atlantic, Forbes, and The Boston Globe.
Go to Profile#781
Margaret Bryan Davis
#86046
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Dr. Margaret Bryan Davis is an American palynologist and paleoecologist, who used pollen data to study the vegetation history of the past 21,000 years . She showed conclusively that temperate- and boreal-forest species migrated at different rates and in different directions while forming a changing mosaic of communities. Early in her career, she challenged the standard methods and prevailing interpretations of the data and fostered rigorous analysis in palynology. As a leading figure in ecology and paleoecology, she served as president of the Ecological Society of America and the American Qua...
Go to Profile#782
Anne-Claude Gingras
#87333
Overall Influence
Anne-Claude Gingras is a senior investigator at Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, and a professor in the department of molecular genetics at the University of Toronto. She is an expert in mass spectrometry based proteomics technology that allows identification and quantification of protein from various biological samples.
Go to Profile#783
Charlotte Cunningham-Rundles
#90732
Overall Influence
Charlotte Cunningham-Rundles, an American physician, is the David S. Gottesman Professor of Immunology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. a specialist in primary immunodeficiency disorders. She is also director of the Immunodeficiency Clinic at Mount Sinai Hospital, and the program director of their Allergy Immunology Fellowship training program.
Go to Profile#784
Fatimah Jackson
#44133
Overall Influence
Fatimah Linda Collier Jackson is an American biologist and anthropologist. She is a professor of biology at Howard University and Director of its Cobb Research Laboratory. Early life, family and education Jackson was raised in Denver, Colorado. Her mother was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Fatimah's father was a mechanic who died when she was six years old. One of her great-grandmothers was descended from Choctaw people and was an herbalist. She attended elementary school, junior high school, and high school which were predominantly African-American.
Go to Profile#785
Blossom Damania
#81850
Overall Influence
Blossom Damania is a virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is known for her work on oncogenic viruses that cause human cancer. Damania has also been serving as vice dean for research at the UNC Chapel Hill School of Medicine since 2016.
Go to Profile#786
Margarita del Val
#63177
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Margarita del Val Latorre is a Spanish chemist, immunologist, and virologist. She coordinates the Salud Global platform run by the Spanish National Research Council . Early life and education Margarita del Val was born in Madrid in 1959 to the chemists Manuel del Val and Consuelo Latorre. del Val attended the Autonomous University of Madrid starting in 1976, during the Transition. During this time, increasing protests on university grounds against the Francoist dictatorship culminated in all Spanish universities going on strike starting in 1973, which was ongoing when she arrived at the university.
Go to Profile#787
Gillian Bates
#67027
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Gillian Patricia Bates FMedSci FRS is a British biologist. She is distinguished for her research into the molecular basis of Huntington's disease and in 1998 was awarded the GlaxoSmithKline Prize as a co-discoverer of the cause of this disease. As of 2016, she is Professor of Neurogenetics at UCL Institute of Neurology and the co-director of UCL Huntington's Disease Centre.
Go to Profile#788
Amishi Jha
#38154
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Amishi Jha is a professor of psychology at the University of Miami. Jha's research on attention, working memory, and mindfulness has investigated the neural bases of executive functioning and mental training using various cognitive neuroscience techniques. Past studies have focused on the method by which attention selects information as relevant or irrelevant and how working memory then allows that information to be manipulated.
Go to Profile#789
Pamela Robey
#92144
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Pamela Gehron Robey is an American cell biologist. She is a senior investigator in the skeletal biology section at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research. Education Robey received her B.A. in biology from Susquehanna University in 1974. She completed a M.S. in biochemistry in 1977 and a Ph.D. in cell biology in 1979 from the Catholic University of America. Her Master's graduate thesis was titled The isolation, purification and characterization of A/J skin collagen and the effects of dexamethasone on skin collegen metabolism. Her 1979 dissertation was titled Studies on the Collagenous Component of a Tumor Basement Membrane.
Go to Profile#790
Saba Valadkhan
#21736
Overall Influence
Saba Valadkhan is an Iranian American biomedical scientist, and an Assistant Professor and RNA researcher at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. In 2005, she was awarded the GE / Science Young Scientist Award for her breakthrough in understanding the mechanism of spliceosomes - "akin to finding the Holy Grail of the splicing catalysis field" - a critical area of research, given that "20 percent or 30 percent of all human genetic diseases are caused by mistakes that the spliceosome makes".
Go to Profile#791
Adrienne Fairhall
#55275
Overall Influence
Adrienne Fairhall is a University Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics and an adjunct Professor in the Departments of Physics and Applied Mathematics, as well as the director of the Computational Neuroscience Program and co-director of the Institute for Neuroengineering at the University of Washington.
Go to Profile#792
Judy Mikovits
#17893
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Judy Anne Mikovits is an American former research scientist who is known for her discredited medical claims, such as that murine endogenous retroviruses are linked to chronic fatigue syndrome . As an outgrowth of these claims, she has engaged in anti-vaccination activism, promoted conspiracy theories, and been accused of scientific misconduct. She has made false claims about vaccines, COVID-19, and CFS, among others.
Go to Profile#793
Ann Tsukamoto
#76867
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Ann Tsukamoto was born in California on July 6, 1952. She is well known now as an Asian American stem cell researcher and inventor. During her career, she co-patented a process that allowed the human stem cell to be isolated, and the patent was granted in 1991. Tsukamoto’s research and contributions in the medical field have led to groundbreaking advancements of stem cell research as it pertains to cancer patients. She is a pioneer in her field, yet is underrepresented for her discoveries.
Go to Profile#794
Elizabeth A. Phelps
#62843
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Elizabeth Anya Phelps is the Pershing Square Professor of Human Neuroscience at Harvard University in the Department of Psychology. She is a cognitive neuroscientist known for her research at the intersection of memory, learning, and emotion. She was the recipient of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society Distinguished Scholar Award and the 21st Century Scientist Award from the James S. McDonnell Foundation, as well as other honors and awards in her field. Phelps was honored with the 2018 Thomas William Salmon Lecture and Medal in Psychiatry at the New York Academy of Medicine. She r...
Go to Profile#795
Clare Blackburn
#59032
Overall Influence
Catherine Clare Blackburn is a British biologist. She received her Bachelor of Science degree at University of Edinburgh in 1984 and her PhD at Imperial College London in 1991. Following Wellcome Trust fellowships at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, University of Oxford, she returned to the University of Edinburgh in 1997. Since 2011, she has been Professor of Tissue Stem Cell Biology at the Centre for Regenerative Medicine.
Go to Profile#796
Pamela Sklar
#65332
Overall Influence
1959 - 2017 (58 years)
Pamela Sklar was an American psychiatrist and neuroscientist. She was Chair of the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and professor of psychiatry, neuroscience, and genetic and genomic sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She was also chief of the Division of Psychiatric Genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Sklar is known for her large-scale gene discovery studies in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and for making some of the first statistically meaningful gene identifications in both mental illnesses.
Go to Profile#797
Anne Innis Dagg
#50093
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Anne Christine Innis Dagg is a Canadian zoologist, feminist, and author of numerous books. A pioneer in the study of animal behaviour in the wild, Dagg is credited with being the first to study wild giraffes. Her impact on current understandings of giraffe biology and behaviour were the focus of the 2011 CBC radio documentary Wild Journey: The Anne Innis Story the 2018 documentary film The Woman Who Loves Giraffes, and the 2021 children’s book ‘’The Girl Who Loved Giraffes and Became the World’s First Giraffologist’’.
Go to Profile#798
Joanna Masel
#85475
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Joanna Monti-Masel is an American theoretical evolutionary biologist. Since 2016 she has been a full professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. She studies the question of evolvability, namely, why evolution works given that mutations to working systems will usually be detrimental to their function.
Go to Profile#799
Núria López Bigas
#88739
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Núria López Bigas is a Spanish biologist and research professor with expertise in medical genetics, computational biology, and bioinformatics. She is an ICREA professor at Pompeu Fabra University and she also leads the Biomedical Genomics Research Group at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Barcelona, Spain. Her research is focused on developing computational approaches to investigate cancer genomes.
Go to Profile#800
Margaret Livingstone
#51818
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Margaret Stratford Livingstone is the Takeda Professor of Neurobiology in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School in the field of visual perception. She authored the book Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing. She was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.
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