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,

#1051

Lynn DeLisi

#84816
Overall Influence
Lynn Eleanor DeLisi is an American psychiatrist known for her research on schizophrenia. She is an attending psychiatrist at the VA Boston Healthcare System and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She is the editor-in-chief of Psychiatry Research and the president of the Schizophrenia International Research Society. She was a co-founder of both the Schizophrenia International Research Society and the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics, and went on to serve as secretary of both organizations. She was one of two founding editors-in-chief of Schizophrenia Research, which she founded with Henry Nasrallah in 1988.
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#1052

Aurore Avarguès-Weber

#61619
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Aurore Avarguès-Weber is a French cognitive neuroscientist and ethologist who is researching the behaviour of bees at the Centre de Recherche sur la Cognition Animale in Toulouse. In 2015, for investigating the brain mechanisms of visual cognition of social insects, she received an International Rising Talent Fellowship, one of the L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science. She has also received a CNRS Bronze Medal.
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#1053

Karen Oegema

#97959
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Karen Oegema is a molecular cell biologist at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and a professor of cellular and molecular medicine at the University of California, San Diego. She is best known for her research with Caenorhabditis elegans , which her lab uses as a model system in their mission to dissect the molecular mechanics of cytokinesis. She was given the Women in Cell Biology Mid-Career Award for Excellence in Research in 2017, as well as the Women in Cell Biology Junior Award for Excellence in Research in 2006.
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#1054

Tracy L. Kahn

#77800
Overall Influence
Tracy Lynn Kahn is a citrus scientist, that currently serves as the 11th curator of University of California, Riverside Citrus Variety Collection since 1995, succeeding her master Willard Paul Bitters.
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#1055

Urtė Neniškytė

Urtė Neniškytė
#96852
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Urtė Neniškytė is a Lithuanian neuroscientist. Her scientific interest and main area of work relates to the interaction of neurons and immune cells in the brain. She has studied the cellular mechanisms of Alzheimer's disease and is the co-author of the first articles about cell death in relation to phagocytosis.
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#1056

Noelle E. Cockett

Noelle E. Cockett
#65763
Overall Influence
Noelle E. Cockett is an American geneticist and academic administrator who served as the 16th president of Utah State University. On November 22, 2022 Cockett announced she would retire as USU's president effective July 1, 2023.
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#1057

Maria G. Castro

#74076
Overall Influence
Maria G. Castro is the R. C. Schneider Collegiate Professor of Neurosurgery and a Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of Michigan Medical School. Her research focuses on cancer immunology and gliomas.
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#1058

Dorothea Jameson

#36237
Overall Influence
1920 - 1998 (78 years)
Dorothea Jameson was an American cognitive psychologist who greatly contributed to the field of color and vision. Biography Jameson was born in Newton, Massachusetts. She went to Wellesley College. She elected psychology as her major in her first year because she was "intrigued that freshmen required special permission to enroll". She graduated in 1942. While at Welleseley she volunteered as a research assistant at Harvard, where she met her future husband, Leo Hurvich. They married in 1948.
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#1059

Nancy Grimm

#76829
Overall Influence
Nancy B. Grimm is an American ecosystem ecologist and professor at Arizona State University. Grimm's substantial contributions to the understanding of urban and arid ecosystem biogeochemistry are recognized in her numerous awards. Grimm is an elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, Ecological Society of America, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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#1060

Louise Allcock

Louise Allcock
#88699
Overall Influence
Louise Allcock is a British researcher, best known for her work on ecology and evolution of the cephalopods of the Southern Ocean and deep sea. She is the editor of the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.
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#1061

Elizabeth Harry

#100482
Overall Influence
Elizabeth "Liz" Harry is Professor of Biology and Director of the ithree institute at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia . Career Harry obtained her PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Sydney before attending Harvard University as a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow where she pioneered the development of fluorescence microscopy techniques for bacteria that enabled visualisation of the subcellular proteins inside bacterial cells. and revealed that the proteins within bacterial cells have specific cellular addresses.
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#1062

Karen Oberhauser

Karen Oberhauser
#96332
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Karen Suzanne Oberhauser is an American conservation biologist who specializies in monarch butterflies. Education and career She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in biology at Harvard College, a Bachelor of Science degree in natural science education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and a PhD in ecology and behavioral biology at the University of Minnesota. Oberhauser is an adjunct professor in the Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology department and former director of the Monarch Lab at the University of Minnesota. In October 2017, she became the director of the Univers...
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#1063

Valentina Greco

#98838
Overall Influence
Valentina Greco is an Italian-born biologist who teaches at the Yale School of Medicine as the Carolyn Walch Slayman Professor of Genetics and is an Associate Professor in the Cell Biology and Dermatology departments. Her research focuses on the role of skin stem cells in tissue regeneration.
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#1064

Beatrix Hamburg

#22121
Overall Influence
1923 - 2018 (95 years)
Beatrix A. Hamburg was an American psychiatrist whose long career in academic medicine advanced the field of child and adolescent psychiatry. Hamburg was the first known African-American to attend Vassar College, and was also the first African-American woman to attend Yale Medical School. Hamburg held professorships at Stanford, Harvard, Mt. Sinai and—most recently—at Weill Cornell Medical College. She was on the President's Commission on Mental Health under President Jimmy Carter. Hamburg was a president of the William T. Grant Foundation, and also directed the child psychiatry divisions at Stanford University and Mount Sinai.
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#1065

Jane Visvader

Jane Visvader
#99552
Overall Influence
Jane Visvader is a scientist specialising in breast cancer research who works for the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, Australia. She is the joint head of the Breast Cancer Laboratory with Geoff Lindeman.
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#1066

Jayne Belnap

#104510
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Jayne Belnap is an American soil ecologist. Her expertise lies in desert ecologies and grassland ecosystems. In 2008, she was recognised by the Ecological Society of America as one of the most outstanding ecologists in the United States. In 2010 and 2013, she received awards from the United States Department of Interior as one of the most outstanding women in science. In 2015, she was elected as a fellow of the Ecological Society of America.
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#1067

Lynne Boddy

#99674
Overall Influence
Lynne Boddy is a Professor of Microbial Ecology at Cardiff University. She works on the ecology of wood decomposition, including synecology and autecology. She won the 2018 Learned Society of Wales Frances Hoggan Medal.
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#1068

Anne Klibanski

#107777
Overall Influence
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#1069

Anne Ulrich

#88462
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Anne S. Ulrich is a German chemist. She is the director of the Institute of Biological Interfaces and Chair of Biochemistry at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Education She studied chemistry at the University of Oxford - continued her doctoral work in the laboratory of Anthony Watts - held subsequent research positions as an EMBO-Fellow with Hartmut Oschkinat at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg and as a Liebig-Fellow with Felix Wieland at the University of Heidelberg - became Associate Professor at the University of Jena - until she moved her group in 2002 to th...
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#1070

Dianne Brunton

Dianne Brunton
#31856
Overall Influence
Dianne Heather Brunton is a New Zealand ecologist, and head of the Institute of Natural and Computational Sciences at Massey University. Her research area is the behaviour and cultural evolution of animal communication, especially bird song in southern hemisphere species such as the New Zealand bellbird.
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#1071

Maret G. Traber

#101618
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Maret Gillett Traber is an American research biochemist. She is the Ava Helen Pauling Professor at the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University. Early life and education Traber was born in Stockton, California in 1950 to a milkman father and Estonian immigrant mother. She attended the University of California, Berkeley for her Bachelor of Science and PhD in nutrition during the 1970s. Upon graduating, she followed her husband Biff to New Jersey and accepted a part time position assisting graduate students at Rutgers University.
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#1072

Margaret McFall-Ngai

#57530
Overall Influence
Margaret McFall-Ngai is an American animal physiologist and biochemist best-known for her work related to the symbiotic relationship between Hawaiian bobtail squid, Euprymna scolopes and bioluminescent bacteria, Vibrio fischeri. Her research helped expand the microbiology field, primarily focused on pathogenicity and decomposition at the time, to include positive microbial associations. She currently is a professor at PBRC’s Kewalo Marine Laboratory and director of the Pacific Biosciences Research Program at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
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#1073

Christine Mannhalter

Christine Mannhalter
#91394
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Christine Mannhalter is an Austrian molecular biologist and hematologist who is a Professor of Molecular Diagnostics at the Medical University of Vienna. She has been a vice-president at the Austrian Science Fund since 2010 and took over its interim presidency in 2015.
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#1074

Marjolein Visser

#108000
Overall Influence
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#1075

Rachel Tanner

#77972
Overall Influence
Rachel Tanner is an immunologist working at the University of Oxford. She won the UK 'Women of the Future' Award for Science in 2019. Research Tanner researches tuberculosis with a focus on immune correlates of protection and the host immune response to TB vaccination. She has worked extensively on in vitro functional assays for vaccine testing to reduce the number of animals used in 'challenge' or infection experiments, and has led an NC3Rs funded project to transfer one such assay internationally. Her research interests also include the specific and non-specific effects of the BCG vaccine across different populations, and development of a vaccine against Mycobacterium bovis in cattle.
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#1076

Primarosa Chieri

#43905
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Primarosa Rinaldi de Chieri is an Argentine-Italian geneticist and physician. In 1965, she obtained her medical degree, from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1978, she received a doctorate from the same university. She is a consultant and lecturer in genetics and serves as First Chair at the pediatrics department of UBA. She is also a director of the laboratory of genetic analysis at Primagen.
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#1077

Rachel E. Klevit

#53597
Overall Influence
Rachel E. Klevit is professor of biochemistry, adjunct professor of chemistry, and adjunct professor of pharmacology at the University of Washington. She holds the Edmond H. Fischer-Washington Research Foundation Endowed Chair in Biochemistry. Klevit's research focuses on molecular interactions in human diseases and includes research on BRCA1, the protein ubiquitination system, and human heat shock proteins.
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#1078

Diana Reiss

#59204
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Diana Reiss is a professor of psychology at Hunter College and in the graduate program of Animal Behavior and Comparative Psychology at the City University of New York. Reiss's research has focused on understanding cognition and communication in dolphins and other cetaceans. Her important contributions include demonstrating mirror self-awareness in dolphins via the Mirror test.
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#1079

Nadia Pinardi

#66345
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Nadia Pinardi is an Italian oceanographer and academic. Early life and education She was born in Bologna and studied physics at the University of Bologna. Pinardi went on to receive a master's degree in applied physics and a PhD in applied physics from Harvard University.
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#1080

Nancy Huntly

#84919
Overall Influence
Nancy Huntly is an American ecologist based at Utah State University, where she is a Professor in the Department of Biology and director of the USU Ecology Center. Her research has been on biodiversity, herbivory, and long-term human ecology. She started her position at USU in 2011, after serving as a Program Officer in the Division of Environmental Biology at the National Science Foundation. Prior to that she was a faculty member in the Department of Biological Sciences at Idaho State University .
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#1081

Elena J. Tucker

#69759
Overall Influence
Elena Jane Tucker is an Australian geneticist and medical genomics researcher and a 2016 Rising Talent in the L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Awards. Biography Tucker earned her B.S. at University of Melbourne in 2006. She earned her Ph.D in medical genomics at the same university's Murdoch Children's Research Institute in 2011 focusing on using new approaches to genomics to improve the diagnosis and management of patients with mitochondrial disease. She continues to work there as a research fellow, investigating the molecular basis of disorders of sex development.
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#1082

Emily Willingham

#50550
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Emily Jane Willingham is an American journalist and scientist. Her writing focuses on neuroscience, genetics, psychology, health and medicine, and occasionally on evolution and ecology. She is the joint recipient with David Robert Grimes of the 2014 John Maddox Prize, awarded by science charity Sense about Science, for standing up for science in the face of personal attacks.
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#1083

Joan S. Valentine

#68925
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Joan Selverstone Valentine is a biological inorganic chemist and biochemist. Valentine's current work examines the role of transition metals, metalloenzymes, and oxidative stress in health. Her foremost expertise is superoxide anion and its functional enzyme superoxide dismutase. Valentine has been a member of the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles since 1980. She served as Associate Editor of the journal Inorganic Chemistry from 1989 to 1995, and has served as Editor-in-Chief of Accounts of Chemical Research since 1994. In 2005, she was elected to the National Academy of Sc...
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#1084

Isabelle M. Côté

Isabelle M. Côté
#107045
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Isabelle M. Côté is a professor of marine ecology at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Life and education Côté is from Montreal, Quebec. She received her B.Sc. in marine biology from McGill University in 1984, her M.Sc. in zoology from the University of Alberta in 1987, and her Ph.D. in behavioral ecology from the University of Toronto in 1993. Her research is notable for its impact on coral reef conservation.
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#1085

María Elena Caso

#103302
Overall Influence
1915 - 1991 (76 years)
María Elena Caso was a Mexican biologist who pioneered the study of starfish and other echinoderms in Mexico. She started the National Collection of Equinoderms in Mexico, the most important one in Latin America, which currently counts with at least 100.000 samples from 800 species from the Mexican coast and participated in the foundation of the laboratory of hydrobiology of the Biology Institute at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, currently known as "Marine Sciences and Limnology Institute". She became a reference scientist in marine biodiversity.
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#1086

Beth Stevens

#59642
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Beth Stevens is an associate professor in the Department of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and the F. M. Kirby Neurobiology Center at Boston Children’s Hospital. She has helped to identify the role of microglia and complement proteins in the "pruning" or removal of synaptic cells during brain development, and has also determined that the impaired or abnormal microglial function could be responsible for diseases like autism, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer's.
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#1087

Christa Schleper

#89019
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Christa Schleper is a German microbiologist known for her work on the evolution and ecology of Archaea. Schleper is Head of the Department of Functional and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Vienna in Austria.
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#1088

Ruth Buskirk

#104327
Overall Influence
Ruth Buskirk is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She has served on the university's faculty for over twenty five years and is a Distinguished Senior Lecturer in Biology. She holds the Worthington Endowed Professorship for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in Plan II.
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#1089

Juliane Koepcke

Juliane Koepcke
#24876
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Juliane Margaret Beate Koepcke , also known by her married name Juliane Diller, is a German-Peruvian mammalogist who specialises in bats. The daughter of German zoologists Maria and Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke, she became famous at the age of 17 as the sole survivor of the 1971 LANSA Flight 508 plane crash; after falling while strapped to her seat and suffering numerous injuries, she survived 11 days alone in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest until she was rescued by local fishermen after finding their camp.
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#1090

Marie Dacke

#50774
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Marie Ann-Charlotte Dacke is a professor in the Lund Vision Group at Lund University in Sweden. She received an Ig Nobel Prize in 2013 for her work on the navigation system of dung beetles. She is also a panel member on the Swedish TV show Studio Natur, and was named best science communicator in Sweden during the 2012 Forskar Grand Prix.
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#1091

Sybil P. Seitzinger

#33192
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Sybil P. Seitzinger is an oceanographer and climate scientist at the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions. She is known for her research into climate change and elemental cycling, especially nitrogen biogeochemistry.
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#1092

Janet Wilder Dakin

#60561
Overall Influence
1910 - 1994 (84 years)
Janet Wilder Dakin , was an American philanthropist and zoologist, known for her animal advocacy and environmental work. Biography Janet Frances Wilder was born in China, the daughter of Isabella Niven and Amos Parker Wilder. She was the youngest of several siblings who would become well known in adulthood: theologist and poet Amos Niven Wilder, author Thornton Wilder, poet Charlotte Wilder and writer Isabel Wilder.
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#1093

Helena Nader

Helena Nader
#92074
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Helena Bonciani Nader is a Brazilian biomedical scientist based at the Federal University of São Paulo. She served as president of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science from 2011 to 2017. She works in glycobiology, specialising in the characterisation of proteoglycans. She is a member of The World Academy of Sciences.
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#1094

Barbara Low

Barbara Low
#40346
Overall Influence
1920 - 2019 (99 years)
Barbara Wharton Low was a biochemist, biophysicist, and a researcher involved in discovering the structure of penicillin and the characteristics of other antibiotics. Her early work at Oxford University with Dorothy Hodgkin used X-ray crystallography to confirm the molecular structure of penicillin, which at the time was the largest molecule whose structure has been determined using that method. Later graduate work saw her study with Linus Pauling and Edwin Cohn before becoming a professor in her own right. Low's laboratory would accomplish the discovery of the pi helix, investigate the struc...
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#1095

Elizabeth Fisher

#92082
Overall Influence
Elizabeth Mary Claire Fisher is a British geneticist and Professor at University College London. Her research investigates the degeneration of motor neurons during amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and Alzheimer's disease triggered by Down syndrome.
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#1096

Pat Nuttall

#61505
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Patricia Anne Nuttall, OBE is a British virologist and acarologist known for her research on tick-borne diseases. Her discoveries include the fact that pathogens can be transmitted between vectors feeding on a host without being detectable in the host's blood. She is also a science administrator who served as the director of the Natural Environment Research Council Centre for Ecology & Hydrology . As of 2015, she is professor of arbovirology in the Department of Zoology of the University of Oxford.
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#1097

Sabina Leonelli

#34424
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Sabina Leonelli is a philosopher of science and professor at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom. She is well known for her work on scientific practices, data-centric science, and open science policies. She was awarded the 2018 Lakatos award for her book Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study .
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#1098

Morag Crichton Timbury

#97098
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
Morag Crichton Timbury FRCPG FRCPath FRSE FRCP was a Scottish medical virologist, bacteriologist and science writer. Early life and education Morag Crichton McCulloch was born on 29 September 1930. Her parents were Dr Esther Sinclair McCulloch and William McCulloch. She attended St Bride's High School in East Kilbride before studying medicine at University of Glasgow. She graduated from the university with a MB ChB in 1953 and MD in 1960, and received her PhD in 1976.
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#1099

Biljana Stojković

#83208
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Biljana Stojković is a Serbian biologist, activist, and professor at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Biology. Stojković was the candidate of the We Must coalition in the 2022 presidential election.
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#1100

Joyce Lambert

#66797
Overall Influence
1916 - 2005 (89 years)
Joyce Mildred Lambert was a British botanist and ecologist. She is credited with proving that the Norfolk Broads were man-made. Early life Joyce Lambert was born on 23 June 1916 at 50 Oakbank Grove, Herne Hill, London. She was the daughter of Loftus Sidney Lambert, clerk for an electrical supply company, and later estate agent, and his wife, Mildred Emma, née Barker. She was brought up in Brundall, Norfolk, and was educated at Norwich High School for Girls.
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