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,
#901
Patricia H. Clarke
#78761
Overall Influence
1919 - 2010 (91 years)
Patricia Hannah Clarke FRS was a British biochemist. Education and early life Clarke was born in Pontypridd, South Wales, and was educated at Howell's School, Llandaff, from 1930 to 1937, before studying the Natural Sciences Tripos at Girton College, Cambridge, from 1937 to 1940.
Go to Profile#902
Margaret Billingham
#64176
Overall Influence
1930 - 2009 (79 years)
Margaret E. Billingham was a pathologist at Stanford University Medical Center, who made significant achievements in the early recognition and grading of transplant rejection following cardiac transplantation, known as 'Billingham's Criteria'. She also described chronic rejection and techniques in heart endomyocardial biopsy.
Go to Profile#903
A. Oveta Fuller
#81326
Overall Influence
1955 - 2022 (67 years)
Almyra Oveta Fuller was an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at University of Michigan Medical School. She served as the director of the African Studies Center , faculty in the ASC STEM Initiative at the University of Michigan and an adjunct professor at Payne Theological Seminary. Fuller was a virologist and specialized in research of Herpes simplex virus, as well as HIV/AIDS. Fuller and her research team discovered a B5 receptor, advancing the understanding of Herpes simplex virus and the cells it attacks.
Go to Profile#904
Ellen Sidransky
#65825
Overall Influence
Ellen Sidransky is an American pediatrician and clinical geneticist in the Medical Genetics Branch of the National Human Genome Research Institute. She is chief of the Molecular Neurogenetics Section.
Go to Profile#905
Maria de Fátima Agra
#91590
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Maria de Fátima Agra is a Brazilian botanist and associate professor at the Universidade Federal da Paraíba , in João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil. Agra specializes in ethnobotany, pharmacognosy, and plant morphology, particularly pertaining to plants of the family Solanaceae in northeastern Brazil.
Go to Profile#906
Claire Wyart
#52810
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Claire Julie Liliane Wyart is a French neuroscientist and biophysicist, studying the circuits underlying the control of locomotion. She is a chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite. Early life Wyart was born into a family of scientists. Her mother, Françoise Brochard-Wyart, is a prominent French physicist and a professor at the Curie Institute. Her father, Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, was a Nobel-prize winning physicist. As their father was mostly absent, Wyart and her siblings were raised by their mother, though Claire thought of him as "the pillar who held our family together".
Go to Profile#907
Thelma Finlayson
#45589
Overall Influence
1914 - 2016 (102 years)
Thelma Finlayson was a Canadian entomologist. She was one of the first female scientists to work at a federal government's research branch and was Simon Fraser University's first professor emerita upon her retirement in 1979.
Go to Profile#908
Susan Golden
#57492
Overall Influence
Susan Golden is a Professor of molecular biology known for her research in circadian rhythms. She is currently a faculty member at UC San Diego. Golden was born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas in 1957. She attended the local public high school, where she was involved with the marching band and school newspaper. She was accepted to the Mississippi University for Women in 1976 as a journalism major, but soon switched her studies to major in biology and minor in chemistry.
Go to Profile#909
Ellen R.M. Druffel
#80435
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Ellen Druffel is an American oceanographer and isotope geochemist known for her research using radiocarbon to track marine processes. Career Druffel is a professor who holds the Fred Kavli Endowed Chair in Earth System Science at U.C. Irvine, where she was one of the department's founding faculty members. She received a B.S. in chemistry from Loyola Marymount University in 1975 and a PhD in chemistry in 1980 from the Department of Chemistry at U.C. San Diego, where her Ph.D. advisor was Hans Suess.
Go to Profile#910
Judith Frydman
#98697
Overall Influence
Judith Frydman is a biochemist and the Donald Kennedy Chair in the School of Humanities & Sciences and Professor of Genetics at Stanford University. Her research focuses on protein folding. Career Frydman attended the University of Buenos Aires, earning a PhD in biochemistry. After graduating, she did a postdoctoral fellowship in the lab of Ulrich Hartl at Memorial Sloan Kettering. She is currently the Donald Kennedy Chair in the School of Humanities & Sciences and Professor of Genetics at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#911
Andrea Ablasser
#65051
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Andrea Ablasser is a German immunologist, who works as a full professor of Life Sciences at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Her research has focused on how the innate immune system is able to recognise virus-infected cells and pathogens.
Go to Profile#912
Jennie Pryce
#85688
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Professor Jennie Elizabeth Pryce is a quantitative geneticist based in Melbourne, Australia. Jennie is the DairyBio animal program leader in conjunction with her role as principal research scientist for Agriculture Victoria and Professor of animal genetics at La Trobe University.
Go to Profile#913
Mariko Hasegawa
#54782
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Mariko Hiraiwa Hasegawa is a zoologist and anthropologist who studies behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, and physical anthropology. Hasegawa is president of the Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. She is "among the rare Japanese women primatologists to have gained international recognition."
Go to Profile#914
Bernice Giduz Schubert
#85092
Overall Influence
1913 - 2000 (87 years)
Bernice Giduz Schubert was an American botanist. Her academic career developed over 53 years as a professor and herbarium curator with Harvard University. She made many collection trips in Mexico and the United States.
Go to Profile#915
Cynthia C. Morton
#84063
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Cynthia Casson Morton is an American geneticist, professor at Harvard Medical School, and director of cytogenetics at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Biography Morton graduated in 1973 from Maryland's Easton High School and in 1977 from the College of William and Mary with a bachelor's degree in biology. In 1982 she received her Ph.D. in human genetics from the Medical College of Virginia.
Go to Profile#916
Daphne Gail Fautin
#88088
Overall Influence
1946 - 2021 (75 years)
Daphne Gail Fautin was an American professor of invertebrate zoology at the University of Kansas, specializing in sea anemones and symbiosis. She is world-renowned for her extensive work studying and classifying sea anemones and related species. A large sea anemone-like cnidarian species has been named in her honor, originally called Boloceroides daphneae, but recently renamed to Relicanthus daphneae, after it was discovered to belong to a previously unknown cnidarian order. Fautin has published numerous scientific articles and texts—including co-authoring Encyclopædia Britannica's entry on cnidarians—and her publications have been widely cited by other researchers in the field.
Go to Profile#917
Elizabeth Gould
#60150
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Elizabeth Gould is an American neuroscientist and the Dorman T. Warren Professor of Psychology at Princeton University. She was an early investigator of adult neurogenesis in the hippocampus, a research area that continues to be controversial. In November 2002, Discover magazine listed her as one of the 50 most important women scientists.
Go to Profile#918
Daphna Joel
#79275
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Daphna Joel is an Israeli neuroscientist and advocate for "neurofeminism". She is best known for her research which claims that there is no such thing as a "male brain" or a "female brain". Joel's research has been criticized by other neuroscientists who argue that male and female brains, on average, show distinct differences and can be classified with a high level of accuracy. Joel is a member of The NeuroGenderings Network, an international group of researchers in gender studies and neuroscience. They are critical of what they call neurosexism in the scientific community. Joel has given lec...
Go to Profile#919
Gwendalyn J. Randolph
#45776
Overall Influence
Gwendalyn J. Randolph is an American immunologist, the Emil R. Unanue Distinguished Professor in the Department of Immunology and Pathology at Washington University School of Medicine where she is currently co-director of the Immunology Graduate Program. During her postdoctoral work, Randolph characterized monocyte differentiation to dendritic cells and macrophages and made advances in our understanding of dendritic cell trafficking and the fate of monocytes recruited to sites of inflammation. Her lab has contributed to the Immunological Genome Project by characterizing macrophage gene expression.
Go to Profile#920
Sofia Simmonds
#78601
Overall Influence
1917 - 2007 (90 years)
Sofia S. "Topsy" Simmonds was an American biochemist who studied amino acid metabolism and peptide metabolism in E. coli. Following training with Vincent du Vigneaud at Cornell University, she spent most of her career at Yale University. After decades as a researcher and then associate professor there, Simmonds became a full professor of biochemistry in 1975, and later served as Associate Dean of Yale College. With her husband Joseph Fruton, Simmonds coauthored the influential General Biochemistry, the first comprehensive biochemistry textbook. Simmonds received the American Chemical Society'...
Go to Profile#921
Kim Barrett
#94938
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Kim Elaine Barrett is a research physiologist, specialising in digestive disorders such as inflammatory bowel disease. She was Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Dean of the Graduate Division at University of California, San Diego before moving to her current position as Vice Dean for Research and Distinguished Professor of Physiology and Membrane Biology in the School of Medicine at University of California, Davis in 2021. She was the Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Physiology from 2016–2022, and is a Past-President of the American Physiological Society.
Go to Profile#922
Li Zhaoping
#54799
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Li Zhaoping, born in Shanghai, China, is a neuroscientist at the University of Tübingen in Germany. She is the only woman to win the first place in CUSPEA, an annual national physics competition in China, during CUSPEA's 10-year history . She proposed V1 Saliency Hypothesis , and is the author of Understanding vision: theory, models, and data published by Oxford University Press.
Go to Profile#923
Betty Diamond
#78912
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Betty Diamond is an American physician and researcher. She is director of the Institute of Molecular Medicine at Northwell Health's Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, NY. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Go to Profile#924
Ellen Silbergeld
#52379
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Ellen Kovner Silbergeld is a leading American expert in the field of environmental health. Background Elizabeth Kovner was born in 1945. Her parents were Joseph Kovner, a lawyer and Mary Helen Gion. She has two siblings.
Go to Profile#925
Molly Przeworski
#72909
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Molly Fox Przeworski is an American population geneticist and professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, where she is also affiliated with the Department of Systems Biology, Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, and Program for Mathematical Genomics. Her research focuses on identifying the effects of natural selection on genetic variation in human and non-human organisms.
Go to Profile#926
Diana W. Bianchi
#66349
Overall Influence
Diana W. Bianchi is the director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, a post often called “the nation’s pediatrician.” She is a medical geneticist and neonatologist noted for her research on fetal cell microchimerism and prenatal testing. Bianchi had previously been the Natalie V. Zucker Professor of Pediatrics, Obstetrics, and Gynecology at Tufts University School of Medicine and founder and executive director of the Mother Infant Research Institute at Tufts Medical Center. She also has served as Vice Chair ...
Go to Profile#927
Karen Guillemin
#47075
Overall Influence
Karen Guillemin is an American microbiologist known for her work on the role of bacteria in influencing animal development and health. She trained with renowned microbiologist Stanley Falkow, studying how the stomach bacterium Helicobacter pylori interacts with gastric epithelial cells. She joined the University of Oregon faculty in 2001, where she continued her work on H. pylori and gained widespread recognition for developing zebrafish as a model organism to study the effects of the microbiome on animal development and health. In 2012, she co-founded the Microbial Ecology and Theory of Animals Center for Host-Microbe Systems Biology.
Go to Profile#928
Jenny Baeseman
#55071
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (123 years)
Jenny Baeseman is an American polar researcher who studies the survival mechanisms of bacteria in cold environments. She is the founding director of the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists , executive director of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research , and was previously the executive director of the World Climate Research Program Climate and Cryosphere.
Go to Profile#929
Christine L. Mummery
#91657
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Christine L. Mummery is an appointed professor of Developmental Biology at Leiden University and the head of the Department of Anatomy and Embryology at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands.
Go to Profile#930
Paula Rudall
#81153
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Paula J Rudall is a British botanist, who was head of the Department of Comparative Plant and Fungal Biology at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Career Paula Rudall graduated from the University of London, with a B.Sc., and went on to get her Ph.D. and D.Sc. at the same institution. She was the head of the Department of Comparative Plant and Fungal Biology at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and has been the recipient of a number of awards including the Linnean Medal . She is known for her work on the taxonomy and phylogeny of monocotyledons. Retired.
Go to Profile#931
Karen R. Hitchcock
#64613
Overall Influence
1943 - 2019 (76 years)
Karen R. Hitchcock was an American biologist and university administrator who had leadership positions at an American and a Canadian university. She served as the President of SUNY's University at Albany in Albany, New York, from 1996 until her resignation in 2003. She was Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Queen's University, in Kingston, Ontario from 2004 until an abrupt resignation in 2008, when she announced her departure in a sudden email to students. After her sudden departure from Queen's University, she returned, with husband Murray Blair, to the Albany, New York, area to live in Vische...
Go to Profile#932
P. Dee Boersma
#90087
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
P. Dee Boersma, also known as Dee Boersma is a conservation biologist and professor at the University of Washington, where she is Wadsworth Endowed Chair in Conservation Science. Dr. Boersma's area of work focuses on seabirds, specifically Magellanic penguins. She has directed the Magellanic Penguin Project at Punta Tombo, Argentina since 1982. She is the founder of the Center for Ecosystem Sentinels, hosted at the University of Washington, and dedicated to the study of sential species as early warning systems of natural or human caused environmental change.
Go to Profile#933
Beryl B. Simpson
#97128
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Beryl B. Simpson is a professor emerita in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously she was an associate curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in the Department of Botany. She studies plant systematics and tropical botany, focusing on angiosperms found in the American Southwest, Mexico, and Central and South America. She was awarded the José Cuatrecasas Medal for Excellence in Tropical Botany for her decades of work on the subject.
Go to Profile#934
Helen Rodd
#83434
Overall Influence
Helen Rodd is a Canadian zoologist who is a professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. Rodd's work focuses on reproductive strategies among live-bearing fish as a system to understand mate selection among animals. Her work on mate preference in guppy fish attracted media attention in numerous nature magazines and the United States public broadcasting service, as well as academic notice, based upon her research finding that female guppies in Trinidad may choose males for orange coloration similar to a favored food, the fruit of a local tree. In 2001, Rodd was a...
Go to Profile#935
Melita Švob
#84088
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Melita Švob is a Croatian Jewish biologist, scientist, and historian. Early life Švob was born in Zagreb to a middle class Jewish family. As a child she survived the horror of the Holocaust and the NDH regime under a false identity. After the war, she attended a Gymnasium in Zagreb. Having completed her secondary education, she studied biology at the University of Zagreb from where she graduated successfully.
Go to Profile#936
Karen Bush
#74083
Overall Influence
Karen Bush is an American biochemist. She is a professor of Practice in Biology at Indiana University and the interim director of the Biotechnology program. Bush conducts research focusing on bacterial resistance mechanisms to beta-lactam antibiotics.
Go to Profile#937
Sondra Schlesinger
#97225
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Sondra Schlesinger is an American virologist and professor emeritus at the Washington University School of Medicine. Early life and education Schlesinger was born in New Jersey in 1934. She was an undergraduate at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, graduating in 1956 with a degree in chemistry; she remained at the same institution for doctoral work and received her Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1960. She then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Italy and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#938
Mary V. Seeman
#95488
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Mary V. Seeman, OC, FRCPC, is a Canadian psychiatrist who is Professor Emerita in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. She served as the Tapscott Chair in Schizophrenia from 1997 to 2000.
Go to Profile#939
Adelaide Carpenter
#57131
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Adelaide T. C. Carpenter is an American fruit fly geneticist at the University of Cambridge. Biography Carpenter was born 24 June 1944, in Georgia, United States and grew up in North Carolina. In the 1970s, whilst at the University of Washington, she was one of the numerous graduate students mentored by Larry Sandler. In 1976, she obtained a faculty position at the University of California, San Diego. In 1989, after becoming full professor, she took a second sabbatical in the United Kingdom.
Go to Profile#940
Eleanor Dodson
#39725
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Eleanor Joy Dodson FRS is an Australian-born biologist who specialises in the computational modelling of protein crystallography. She holds a chair in the Department of Chemistry at the University of York. She is the widow of the scientist Guy Dodson.
Go to Profile#941
Guillermina Lozano
#80837
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Guillermina 'Gigi' Lozano is an American geneticist. She is a professor at University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Lozano is recognised for her studies of the p53 tumour suppressor pathway, characterising the protein as a regulator of gene expression .
Go to Profile#942
Wendy Bickmore
#89481
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Wendy Anne Bickmore is a British genome biologist known for her research on the organisation of genomic material in cells. Early life and education Bickmore was born at Shoreham-by-Sea on 28 July 1961 to Beryl and Keith Bickmore. She was educated at Chichester High School for Girls where her interest in science began being influenced by her biology teacher and her parents who were keen amateur gardeners. Her interest in biochemistry was confirmed having read ‘The Chemistry of Life’ by Steven Rose and she went on to study biochemistry at St Hugh's College, Oxford graduating with a BA. She the...
Go to Profile#943
Anne Dell
#68754
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Anne Dell is an Australian biochemist specialising in the study of glycomics and the carbohydrate structures that modify proteins. Anne's work could be used to figure out how pathogens such as HIV are able to evade termination by the immune system which could be applied toward understanding how this occurs in fetuses. Her research has also led to the development of higher sensitivity mass spectroscopy techniques which have allowed for the better studying of the structure of carbohydrates. Anne also established GlycoTRIC at Imperial College London, a research center that allows for glycobiology to be better understood in biomedical applications.
Go to Profile#944
Brigitta Stockinger
#95825
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Brigitta Stockinger, FMedSci, FRS, is a molecular immunologist in the Francis Crick Institute in London. Stockinger's lab focus on understanding how certain immune cells, called T cells, develop and function as well as investigating how diet and other environmental factors can affect the way the immune system works.
Go to Profile#945
Rebecca D. Jackson
#84255
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Rebecca D. Jackson is a medical researcher, medical practitioner and professor of endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism. Her research has been significant in the understanding and treatment of osteoporosis. She also researches the opioid crisis in Ohio.
Go to Profile#946
Lynda Bonewald
#95620
Overall Influence
Lynda Bonewald is a professor of anatomy, cell biology, physiology, and orthopaedic surgery and the founding director of the Indiana Center for Musculoskeletal Health at the Indiana University School of Medicine. She studies bone and the musculoskeletal system. She has served as president of the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research and the Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities .
Go to Profile#947
Jacqueline Whang-Peng
#84160
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Jacqueline Jia-Kang Whang-Peng is a Taiwanese-American physician-scientist specialized in cytogenetics of cancer, as well as medical genetics, genetic oncology, and gene mapping. She was a researcher at the National Cancer Institute from 1960 to 1993.
Go to Profile#948
Nilufar Mamadalieva
#95382
Overall Influence
Nilufar Mamadalieva is a biochemist from Uzbekistan. Biography Mamadalieva completed a Master's in science at Fergana State University and a PhD at the Institute of the Chemistry of Plant Substances in Tashkent. She is a scientific researcher at the institute. Her work focuses on the phytochemical and biological investigation of active compounds in the local medicinal plants of Central Asia.
Go to Profile#949
Vanessa M. Hirsch
#83581
Overall Influence
Vanessa M. Hirsch is a Canadian-American veterinary pathologist and scientist. She is a senior investigator and chief of the nonhuman primate virology section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Hirsch researches AIDS pathogenesis, the evolution and origins of primate lentiviruses, and HIV vaccine development.
Go to Profile#950
Liette Vasseur
#86432
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Liette Vasseur is a Canadian biologist who has held the UNESCO Chair in Community Sustainability: From Local to Global in the Department of Biological Sciences since 2014 at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. She is also a member of the Women and Gender Studies program and the Environmental Sustainability Research Centre. She is the President of the Canadian Commission for UNESCO.
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