Search People Result | Academic Influence

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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School

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Biology,

#101

Polly Matzinger

#17620

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Polly Celine Eveline Matzinger is a French-born immunologist who proposed the danger model theory of how the immune system works. Early years Polly Matzinger was born on July 21, 1947, in France, to a French mother and a Dutch father . In 1954, she immigrated to the US with her sister, Marjolaine, and parents. Her prior jobs included being a bass jazz musician, carpenter, dog trainer, waitress, and Playboy Bunny. Although it took her eleven years to finish her undergraduate degree, she finished her BS in biology at the University of California, Irvine, in 1976. She was talked into going to g...

#102

Jessica Meir

#10646

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Jessica Ulrika Meir is an American NASA astronaut, marine biologist, and physiologist. She was previously an assistant professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, following postdoctoral research in comparative physiology at the University of British Columbia. She has studied the diving physiology and behavior of emperor penguins in Antarctica, and the physiology of bar-headed geese, which are able to migrate over the Himalayas. In September 2002, Meir served as an aquanaut on the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations 4 crew. In 2013, she was selected by NASA to Astronaut Group 21.

#103

Elaine Jaffe

#19032

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Elaine Sarkin Jaffe is a senior National Cancer Institute investigator at the National Institutes of Health most well known for her contribution to hematopathology. She completed her medical education at Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania, receiving her M.D. degree from University of Pennsylvania in 1969. After an internship at Georgetown University she joined NCI as a resident in anatomic pathology, and has been a senior investigator since 1974, focusing on the classification and definition of lymphomas. Jaffe's early work helped to provide a deeper understanding of the origin of lymphomas, especially follicular lymphoma.

#104

Renata Laxova

#13302

Overall Influence

1931 - 2020 (89 years)

Renata Laxova was a Czech American pediatric geneticist and a professor of genetics at the Departments of Pediatrics and Medical Genetics, Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin–Madison. She was the discoverer of the Neu-Laxová syndrome, a rare congenital abnormality involving multiple organs, with autosomal recessive inheritance.

#105

Jillian Banfield

Jillian Banfield

#17499

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Jillian Fiona Banfield is professor at the University of California, Berkeley with appointments in the Earth Science, Ecosystem Science and Materials Science and Engineering departments. She leads the Microbial Research initiative within the Innovative Genomics Institute, is affiliated with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and has a position at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Some of her most noted work includes publications on the structure and functioning of microbial communities and the nature, properties and reactivity of nanomaterials.

#106

Ulrike Beisiegel

Ulrike Beisiegel

#27032

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Ulrike Beisiegel is a German biochemist and university professor who in 2011 became the first woman to serve as president of the University of Göttingen, founded in 1737. Her research on liver fats and disease was honored with the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize, the Rudolf Schönheimer Medal and an honorary doctorate. Intent on maintaining high levels of scholarship and diminishing scientific misconduct, she has served on many boards and committees, receiving the Ubbo-Emmius Medal for her commitment to good scientific practice and an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh.

#107

V. Narry Kim

#16668

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

V. Narry Kim is a South Korean biochemist and microbiologist, best known for her work on microRNA biogenesis. Her pioneering studies have laid the groundwork for the biology of microRNA and contributed to the improvement of RNA interference technologies.

#108

Sandra Schmid

#31914

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Sandra Louise Schmid is the first Chief Scientific Officer of the Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub. She is a Canadian cell biologist by training; prior to her move to CZI, she was Professor and Chair of the Cell Biology Department at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Throughout her academic career, she has authored over 105 publications on the molecular mechanism and regulation of clathrin-mediated endocytosis and the structure and function of the GTPase dynamin and mechanisms governing membrane fission. She was the first to identify dynamin's key role in endocytosis. She is a co-f...

#109

Mildred Cohn

#10729

Overall Influence

1913 - 2009 (96 years)

Mildred Cohn was an American biochemist who furthered understanding of biochemical processes through her study of chemical reactions within animal cells. She was a pioneer in the use of nuclear magnetic resonance for studying enzyme reactions, particularly reactions of adenosine triphosphate .

#110

Gertrud Schüpbach

#29521

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Trudi Schüpbach is a Swiss-American molecular biologist. She is an Emeritus Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, where her laboratory studies molecular and genetic mechanisms in fruit fly oogenesis.

#111

Xiaole Shirley Liu

Xiaole Shirley Liu

#24723

Overall Influence

Xiaole Shirley Liu is computational biologist, cancer researcher, and entrepreneur. She has been a Professor in the Department of Data Sciences at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is now the co-founder and CEO of GV20 Therapeutics.

#112

Teruko Ishizaka

#25086

Overall Influence

1926 - 2019 (93 years)

Teruko "Terry" Ishizaka was a Japanese scientist and immunologist who along with her husband Kimishige Ishizaka discovered the antibody class Immunoglobulin E in 1966. Their work was regarded as a major breakthrough in the understanding of allergy, and for this work she received the 1972 Passano Award and the 1973 Gairdner Foundation International Award. She was known in the science world for her generosity and collaborative spirit.

#113

Jane Lubchenco

#13143

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

#114

Naomi Pierce

#25693

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Naomi E. Pierce is an American entomologist and evolutionary biologist who studies plant-herbivore coevolution and is a world authority on butterflies. She is the Hessel Professor of Biology and Curator of Lepidoptera in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.

#115

Pamela Ronald

#14832

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Pamela Christine Ronald is an American plant pathologist and geneticist. She is a professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and the Genome Center at the University of California, Davis and a member of the Innovative Genomics Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. She also serves as Director of Grass Genetics at the Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville, California. In 2018 she served as a visiting professor at Stanford University in the Center on Food Security and the Environment.

#116

Julia Polak

#25984

Overall Influence

1939 - 2014 (75 years)

Dame Julia Margaret Polak, was an Argentine-born Polish pathologist who lived in England. She was head of the Centre for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine at Imperial College London, a centre for medical research she set up with Larry Hench, also from Imperial College, to develop cells and tissues for transplantation into humans.

#117

Louise Chow

#17983

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Louise Tsi Chow is a professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and a foreign associate with the National Academy of Sciences, known for her research on the human papillomavirus. Her research contributed to the discovery of gene splicing, and in 1993, her collaborator, Richard J. Roberts, received the Nobel Prize for the research, leading some to assert that Chow should have received the honor as well.

#118

Ruth Patrick

#18058

Overall Influence

1907 - 2013 (106 years)

Ruth Myrtle Patrick was an American botanist and limnologist specializing in diatoms and freshwater ecology. She authored more than 200 scientific papers, developed ways to measure the health of freshwater ecosystems and established numerous research facilities.

#119

Hayat Sindi

#10243

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Dr. Hayat Al Sindi is a Saudi Arabian medical scientist and one of the first female members of the Consultative Assembly of Saudi Arabia. She is famous for making major contributions to point-of-care medical testing and biotechnology. She was ranked by Arabian Business as the 19th most influential Arab in the world and the ninth most influential Arab woman. In 2018, she was listed as one of BBC's 100 Women.

#120

Mary Osborn

#32234

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Mary Osborn is a L'Oréal-UNESCO Women in Science Award-winning English cell biologist who, until she stopped running an active laboratory in 2005, was on the scientific staff at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, Germany. Osborn established two techniques frequently used by cell biologists. She pioneered both molecular weight determination of proteins using SDS PAGE and immunofluorescence microscopy. Osborn also used the immunofluorescence microscopy method to work out the details of the eukaryotic cytoskeleton. Small differences in the intermediate filament constituents helped her distinguish differentiated cells from each other.

#121

Jo Handelsman

#18633

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Areas of Specialization: Microbiology, Bacteriology, Plant Pathology Jo Handelsman was born in New York City. She is Professor of Plant Pathology, Vilas Research Professor, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor, and Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, all at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Handelsman obtained her bachelor’s degree in agronomy from Cornell University in 1979, and her PhD in molecular biology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1984. In 2010, Handelsman joined the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University, where her research focused on the microorganisms present in soil and insect gut.

#122

Christine Petit

Christine Petit

#30443

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Christine Petit is a French geneticist. She holds professorships at the Collège de France and the Pasteur Institute. Biography Petit was born in Laignes in 1948. She initially studied at the Paris teaching hospital, Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital and at the Pasteur Institute. She completed two pieces of post-doctoral research at the Centre for Molecular Research in Gif-sur-Yvette and another in Basel.

#123

Zena Werb

#34493

Overall Influence

1945 - 2020 (75 years)

Zena Werb was a professor and the Vice Chair of Anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco. She was also the co-leader of the Cancer, Immunity, and Microenvironment Program at the Hellen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and a member of the Executive Committee of the Sabre-Sandler Asthma Basic Research Center at UCSF. Her research focused on features of the microenvironment surrounding cells, with particular interest in the extracellular matrix and the role of its protease enzymes in cell signaling.

#124

Nobuyo Maeda

#26192

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Nobuyo N. Maeda is a Japanese geneticist and medical researcher, who works on complex human diseases including atherosclerosis, diabetes and high blood pressure, and is particularly known for creating the first mouse model for atherosclerosis. Maeda has worked in the United States since 1978; as of 2017, she is the Robert H. Wagner Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

#125

Hilary Blumberg

#17042

Overall Influence

Hilary Patricia Blumberg is a medical doctor and the inaugural John and Hope Furth Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. She is also a professor of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, and works in the Child Study Center at Yale where she has been a faculty member since 1998. She attended Harvard University as an undergraduate, and completed medical school at Cornell University Medical College . She completed her medical internship and psychiatry residency at Cornell University Medical College/New York Hospital, and her neuroimaging fellowship training at Cornell University, Weill Medical College.

#126

Jeanne Altmann

#27626

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Jeanne Altmann, born March 18, 1940, in New York City, is a professor emerita and Eugene Higgins Professor of ecology and evolutionary biology currently at Princeton University. She is known for her research on the social behaviour of baboons and her contributions to contemporary primate behavioural ecology. She is a founder and co-director of the Amboseli Baboon Research Project. Her paper in 1974 on the observational study of behaviour is a cornerstone for ecologists and has been cited more than 10,000 times. She is a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, and a member of the American ...

#127

Anjali Goswami

#22564

Overall Influence

Anjali Goswami is a Resesarch Leader and Dean of the Graduate Centre at the Natural History Museum. She is an Honorary Professor of Paleobiology at University College London in the Department of Genetics, Evolution, and Environment. She was elected President of the Linnean Society of London, in 2022 and is the first person of colour elected to this role since its founding in 1788. Goswami's expertise is in vertebrate evolution and development, particularly using high-resolution 3D images of specimens to quantify and reconstruct the evolution of biodiversity and understand how development, eco...

#128

Olivia Judson

#20288

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Olivia P. Judson is a British evolutionary biologist and science writer. She is a former journalist for The Economist, a former online columnist for The New York Times and has published in a number of other publications, including National Geographic, The Atlantic and the Financial Times. Judson was a fellow of the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study in 2010–2011, and a Guggenheim fellow in 2020.

#129

C. Sue Carter

#22290

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

C. Sue Carter is an American biologist and behavioral neurobiologist. She is an internationally recognized expert in behavioral neuroendocrinology. In 2014 she was appointed Director of The Kinsey Institute and Rudy Professor of Biology at Indiana University. Carter was the first person to identify the physiological mechanisms responsible for social monogamy.

#130

Wendy Suzuki

#22954

Overall Influence

Wendy Suzuki is a Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the New York University Center for Neural Science and popular science communicator. She is the author of Healthy Brain, Happy Life: A Personal Program to Activate Your Brain and Do Everything Better. Since September 1, 2022, she has served as Dean of the New York University College of Arts & Science.

#131

Pauline Johnson

#35640

Overall Influence

Pauline Johnson is an English immunologist and microbiologist at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on innate and adaptive immune mechanisms — in particular, the mobility of proteins in membranes, lymphocyte cell surface molecules, T cell signalling, leukocyte adhesion, and macrophages in lung inflammation.

#132

Karin Mölling

#27303

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Karin Mölling is a German virologist whose research focused on retroviruses, particularly human immunodeficiency virus . She was a full professor and director of the Institute of Medical Virology at the University of Zurich from 1993 to 2008. She is retired but retains affiliations with the University of Zurich and with the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin.

#133

Louise Fresco

#17744

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Louise Ottilie Fresco is a Dutch scientist and writer known for her work on globally sustainable food production. Career in academia Fresco has been the President of the Wageningen University & Research Executive Board since 1 July 2014. She is a professor at Wageningen University and a corresponding member of Belgium's Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences.

#134

Huda Zoghbi

#12757

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Huda Yahya Zoghbi , born Huda El-Hibri, is a Lebanese-born American geneticist, and a professor at the Departments of Molecular and Human Genetics, Neuroscience and Neurology at the Baylor College of Medicine. She is the director of the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute. She became the editor of the Annual Review of Neuroscience as of 2018.

#135

Gaiti Hasan

#27873

Overall Influence

Gaiti Hasan is an Indian scientist who researches in the fields of molecular biology, genetics, neuroscience and cell signalling. Hasan is a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy , the apex body of Indian scientists and technologists. From 2013 onwards she has been serving as a Senior Professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences , Bangalore.

#136

Nancy Rothwell

#11768

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Areas of Specialization: Physiology Nancy Rothwell is the President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Manchester, the director of AstraZeneca, a global pharmaceuticals company, and a physiologist. She is also a trustee of Cancer Research UK and chair of the Research Defence Society. She earned her first class degree in physiology and a PhD from Queen Elizabeth College. Her early research efforts were focused on obesity, cachexia, and energy balance regulation. She is a vocal supporter of women in science and has provided visionary leadership in her roles as the president of the Royal Society of Biology.

#137

Deborah Charlesworth

#37234

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Deborah Charlesworth is a population geneticist from the UK, notable for her important discoveries in population genetics and evolutionary biology. Her most notable research is in understanding the evolution of recombination, sex chromosomes and mating system for plants.

#138

Huda Akil

#14470

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Huda Akil is a Syrian–American neuroscientist whose pioneering research has contributed to the understanding of the neurobiology of emotions, including pain, anxiety, depression, and substance abuse. Akil and colleagues are best known for providing the first physiological evidence for a role of endorphins in the brain and demonstrating that endorphins are activated by stress and can cause pain inhibition.

#139

Patricia Adair Gowaty

#36573

Overall Influence

Patricia Adair Gowaty is an American evolutionary biologist. She received her B.A. in biology at Tulane University and her PhD in zoology at Clemson University in 1980. She is currently a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

#140

Joan Slonczewski

Joan Slonczewski

#11430

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Joan Lyn Slonczewski is an American microbiologist at Kenyon College and a science fiction writer who explores biology and space travel. Their books have twice earned the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel: A Door into Ocean and The Highest Frontier . With John W. Foster and Erik Zinser, they coauthor the textbook, Microbiology: An Evolving Science now in its fifth edition. They explore ideas of biology, politics, and artificial intelligence at their blog Ultraphyte.

#141

Nancy Kanwisher

#13249

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Nancy Gail Kanwisher FBA is the Walter A Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She studies the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying human visual perception and cognition.

#142

Deborah Mowshowitz

Deborah Mowshowitz

#29677

Overall Influence

Deborah Mowshowitz is an American biochemist and a Professor of Biology and Director of Undergraduate Programs and Lab Operations at Columbia University. Mowshowitz was trained in pure biochemistry and has done research in RNA processing. In her early work she focused on pedagogy and biology education.

#143

Angelika Amon

#32031

Overall Influence

1967 - 2020 (53 years)

Angelika Amon was an Austrian American molecular and cell biologist, and the Kathleen and Curtis Marble Professor in Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Amon's research centered on how chromosomes are regulated, duplicated, and partitioned in the cell cycle. Amon was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.

#144

Maiken Nedergaard

#29615

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Maiken Nedergaard is a Danish neuroscientist most well known for discovering the glymphatic system. She is a jointly appointed professor in the Departments of Neuroscience and Neurology at the University of Rochester Medical Center. She holds a part-time appointment in the Department of Neurosurgery within the University of Rochester Center for Translational Neuromedicine, where she is the principal investigator of the Division of Glial Disease and Therapeutics laboratory. She is also Professor of Glial Cell Biology at the University of Copenhagen, Center for Translational Neuromedicine.

#145

Rebecca L. Cann

#33852

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Rebecca L. Cann is a geneticist who made a scientific breakthrough on mitochondrial DNA variation and evolution in humans, popularly called Mitochondrial Eve. Her discovery that all living humans are genetically descended from a single African mother who lived <200,000 years ago became the foundation of the Out of Africa theory, the most widely accepted explanation of the origin of all modern humans. She is currently Professor in the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

#146

Barbara Block

#24294

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Barbara Block is an American marine biologist and Charles & Elizabeth Prothro Professor of Biology in Marine Sciences at the Stanford University Hopkins Marine Station and a co-director of Stanford University's Tuna Research and Conservation Center, with the Monterey Bay Aquarium. She has published numerous bodies of work throughout her career in marine biology and chemistry, mainly focusing on the biology and chemistry of metabolism in different tuna and shark species. Additionally, she has helped develop two new types of electronic tags for large pelagic predators in order to track the migra...

#147

Anne Simon

#31671

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Anne Simon is an American biology professor, scientist, and a science advisor on the American television series The X-Files, both the original series for all nine seasons and the 2016 miniseries. The first episode of the original series that she provided science consultation on was the first-season finale "The Erlenmeyer Flask", which was telecast on May 13, 1994. She became involved with the series through her connection as a family friend of series creator Chris Carter. She wrote a 2001 book about the biological science of the show, The Real Science Behind the X-Files: Microbes, Meteorites a...

#148

Louise Johnson

#12097

Overall Influence

1940 - 2012 (72 years)

Dame Louise Napier Johnson, , was a British biochemist and protein crystallographer. She was David Phillips Professor of Molecular Biophysics at the University of Oxford from 1990 to 2007, and later an emeritus professor.

#149

Annica Dahlström

#35085

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Annica Dahlström is a Swedish physician and Professor Emerita of Histology and Neuroscience at the Department of Medical Chemistry and Cell Biology at Gothenburg University. Dahlström's research focuses on how nerve cells store and transport signals, but she has also published research on many other areas of histology and neuroscience. She earned her doctorate at 25 as the youngest Swedish physician to earn a doctorate. She was Professor of Histology and Neuroscience at Gothenburg University from 1983 until her 2008 retirement.

#150

Margaret T. Fuller

#39129

Overall Influence

Margaret "Minx" T. Fuller is an American developmental biologist known for her research on the male germ line and defining the role of the stem cell environment in specifying cell fate and differentiation.

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