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,

#1451

Elena Bennett

#113084

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Elena M. Bennett is an American ecosystem ecologist specializing in studying the interactions of ecosystem services on landscape. She is currently a Professor and the Canada Research Chair in Sustainability Science at McGill University. She was inducted to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists in 2017. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022 and became a Guggenheim Fellow in the same year.

#1452

Cristina Sánchez

#117885

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Dr. Cristina Sánchez is a Spanish molecular biologist. She was born in Madrid, Spain in 1971. She graduated from biology at the Complutense University of Madrid in 1994. She obtained her PhD with Honors in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Complutense University in 2000 and went into postdoc studying the antitumoral and other properties of medical cannabis, especially cancer and the therapeutic qualities of cannabinoids.

#1453

Yasmin Hurd

#107220

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Yasmin Hurd is the Ward-Coleman Chair of Translational Neuroscience and the Director of the Addiction Institute at Mount Sinai. Hurd holds appointments as faculty of Neuroscience, Psychiatry, Pharmacology and Systems Therapeutics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City and is globally recognized for her translational research on the underlying neurobiology of substance use disorders and comorbid psychiatric disorders. Hurd's research on the transgenerational effects of early cannabis exposure on the developing brain and behavior and on the therapeutic properties of cannabidiol has garnered substantial media attention.

#1454

Karen Chin

#65702

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Karen Chin is an American paleontologist and taphonomist who is considered one of the world's leading experts in coprolites. Biography Chin loved studying living things as a child, and enjoyed memorizing the names of species that she read about. As a college student, she worked as a nature interpreter for the National Park Service.

#1455

Jenny Hsieh

#99092

Overall Influence

Jenny Hsieh is an American cell biologist and Semmes Foundation professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio . Her work focuses on epilepsy and stem cell biology. Education Hsieh received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University, where she worked with Andrew Fire. In 2005, Hsieh completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Fred Gage at the Salk Institute.

#1456

Elizabeth M. Brannon

#83742

Overall Influence

Elizabeth M. Brannon is an American neuroscientist. She serves as Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Chair in the Natural Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Brannon's research, focused on comparative cognition, numerical cognition, and educational neuroscience, has earned an h-index of 68.

#1457

Angela McLean

#43510

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Dame Angela Ruth McLean is professor of mathematical biology in the Department of Biology, University of Oxford, and Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government. Early life and education McLean was born on 31 May 1961 in Kingston, Jamaica, the daughter of Elizabeth and Andre McLean. She was educated at Mary Datchelor Girls’ School, Camberwell, London, going on to study for a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics at the University of Oxford where she was a student of Somerville College, Oxford. She was taught mathematical biology by Jim Murray, and graduated in 1982. In 1987 she received h...

#1458

Marie Bashir

#8120

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Dame Marie Roslyn Bashir is the former and second longest-serving Governor of New South Wales. Born in Narrandera, New South Wales, Bashir graduated from the University of Sydney in 1956 and held various medical positions, with a particular emphasis in psychiatry. In 1993 Bashir was appointed the Clinical Director of Mental Health Services for the Central Sydney Area Health Service, a position she held until appointed governor on 1 March 2001. She has also served as the Chancellor of the University of Sydney . Bashir retired on 1 October 2014 and was succeeded as governor by General David Hu...

#1459

Karen Messing

#87085

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Karen Messing is a Canadian geneticist and ergonomist. She is an emeritus professor in the biological sciences at the University of Quebec at Montreal. She is known for her work on gender, environmental health and ergonomics. She was given the Jacques Rousseau Award in 1993, the Governor General's Award in 2009, and was named an Officer of the Order of Canada on December 27, 2019.

#1460

Beatriz Luna

#99178

Overall Influence

Beatriz Luna is a developmental neuroscientist known for conducting neuroimaging research on the development of cognitive control, reward, and reinforcement learning from early childhood to adolescence.

#1461

Lucia Banci

#123656

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Lucia Banci is an Italian chemist who is a professor at the University of Florence. Her research considers structural biology and biological nuclear magnetic resonance, with a focus on the role of metal ions in biological systems.

#1462

Lorna Casselton

Lorna Casselton

#81280

Overall Influence

1938 - 2014 (76 years)

Lorna Ann Casselton, was a British academic and biologist. She was Professor Emeritus of Fungal Genetics in the Department of Plant Science at the University of Oxford, and was known for her genetic and molecular analysis of the mushroom Coprinus cinereus and Coprinus lagopus.

#1463

Julia Bailey-Serres

#114358

Overall Influence

Julia Bailey-Serres is professor of genetics, director of the Center for Plant Cell Biology, and a member of the Institute for Integrative Genome Biology at the University of California, Riverside. Her accomplishments include the pioneering of methods for profiling the "translatomes" of discrete cell-types of plants and identification of a homeostatic sensor of oxygen deprivation in plants.

#1464

Camille Parmesan

#119456

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Camille Parmesan is an ecologist and an expert in the effects of global climate change on biodiversity. She is the National Aquarium Chair in the Public Understanding of Oceans and Human Health at The University of Plymouth U.K., at SETE-Theoretical and Experimental Ecology Station, CNRS Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France and is adjunct professor at The University of Texas at Austin U.S.A..

#1465

Doris Abele

#117857

Overall Influence

1901 - 2021 (120 years)

Doris Abele was an Antarctic marine biologist based at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. She led the research group working on stress physiology and aging in marine invertebrates and also the Ecology Polar regions And Coasts in the changing Earth System programme.

#1466

Marilyn Anderson

#122860

Overall Influence

Marilyn Anderson is an Australian scientist and entrepreneur in the area of biochemistry and plant molecular biology. She is a professor at La Trobe University and co-founded Hexima, an agribiotechnology company, in 1998.

#1467

Ellen Baake

#77948

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Ellen Baake is a German mathematical biologist who works as a professor of biomathematics and theoretical bioinformatics at Bielefeld University. Her research uses probability theory and differential equations to study biological evolution; she has also studied mathematical immunobiology and the mathematical modeling of photosynthesis.

#1468

Hilda Tracy

#105762

Overall Influence

1927 - 2010 (83 years)

Hilda Tracy worked at University of Liverpool, UK, with Rod Gregory FRS to isolate and characterise the gastrointestinal hormone gastrin. She led the structure-function studies and had the first insight into gastrin's role in the clinical pathology of pancreatic Zollinger-Ellison tumours.

#1469

Janet Jansson

#114735

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Janet Knutson Jansson is an American biological scientist who is the Chief Scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. She investigates complex microbial communities, including those found in soil and the human gut. Jansson is part of the Phenotypic Response of the Soil Microbiome to Environmental Perturbations Science Focus Area, and is a Fellow of the American Society for Microbiology.

#1470

Iva Greenwald

#118014

Overall Influence

Iva Susan Greenwald is an American biologist who is Professor of Cell and Molecular Biology at Columbia University. She studies cell-cell interactions and cell fate specification in C. elegans. She is particularly interested in LIN-12/Notch proteins, which is the receptor of one of the major signalling systems that determines the fate of cells.

#1471

Dorothee Kern

#87261

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Dorothee Kern, is a professor of Biochemistry at Brandeis University and former player for the East German national basketball team. In 2016, she cofounded Relay Therapeutics, a Massachusetts-based drug research company studying the motion of proteins using genomic data and computational biology. In 2020, she cofounded MOMA Therapeutics, a company working on drug discovery.

#1472

Dolores Ramirez

#54889

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Dolores A. Ramirez is a Filipino geneticist. She specializes in plant breeding and plant cytogenetics. She was named a National Scientist of the Philippines in 1998. Early life and education Dolores A. Ramirez was born on September 20, 1931, in Calamba, Laguna to Leonor Altoveros and Augusto U. Ramirez. She was the oldest of eight children and her father died when she was young. She graduated from Laguna Institute in 1952 with a First Honorable Mention award.

#1473

Paula Traktman

#118980

Overall Influence

Paula Traktman is an American virologist and academic administrator at the Medical University of South Carolina. She is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Microbiology. From 2013 to 2014 she was the president of the American Society for Virology.

#1474

Mariana Wolfner

#117842

Overall Influence

Mariana Federica Wolfner is the Goldwin Smith Professor of molecular biology and genetics at Cornell University. Her research investigates sexual conflict in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019 in recognition of her distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

#1475

Lori L. Altshuler

Lori L. Altshuler

#93175

Overall Influence

1957 - 2015 (58 years)

Lori Altshuler was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and held the Julia S. Gouw Endowed Chair for Mood Disorders. Altshuler was the Director of the UCLA Mood Disorders Research Program and the UCLA Women's Life Center, each being part of the Neuropsychiatric Hospital at UCLA.

#1476

Patricia Lindop

#67325

Overall Influence

1930 - 2018 (88 years)

Patricia Joyce Lindop FRCP was British professor of radiation biology at the University of London and the organiser of at least 100 "Pugwash" meetings at which scientists met to discuss their campaign for nuclear disarmament.

#1477

Britta Engelhardt

#124581

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

#1478

Llewellya Hillis

Llewellya Hillis

#112907

Overall Influence

1930 - 2019 (89 years)

Llewellya Williams Hillis , later Llewellya Hillis-Colinvaux, was a Canadian-born American marine biologist. Early life Llewellya Hillis was born in Windsor, Ontario and raised in Walkerville. She graduated from Walkerville Collegiate Institute. Her father Llewellyn Hillis worked at an automotive plant, and her mother Pearl Evelina Hillis was a teacher. She earned her bachelor's degree at Queen's University in 1952. In 1957 she completed her doctoral work in botany at the University of Michigan; her thesis titled "A Revision of the Genus Halimeda " was published in 1959. As a graduate student,...

#1479

Vicki Huff

#119634

Overall Influence

Vicki D. Huff is an American geneticist and cancer researcher. She is a professor in the department of genetics and the director of the Sequence and Microarray Facility at University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Huff is also a professor at UTHealth Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. She completed a doctor of philosophy in human genetics at University of Michigan in 1987. From 1987 to 1990, Huff was a postdoctoral fellow in biochemistry and molecular biology at MD Anderson Cancer Center.

#1480

Mary Ann Moran

#120996

Overall Influence

Mary Ann Moran is a distinguished research professor of marine sciences at the University of Georgia in Athens. She studies the role of bacteria in Earth's marine nutrient cycles, and is a leader in the fields of marine sciences and biogeochemistry. Her work is focused on how microbes interact with dissolved organic matter and the impact of microbial diversity on the global carbon and sulfur cycles. By defining the roles of diverse bacteria in the carbon and sulfur cycles, she connects the biogeochemical and organismal approaches in marine science.

#1481

Jane E. Aubin

#124708

Overall Influence

#1482

Tracey Gloster

#39546

Overall Influence

Tracey Maureen Gloster is a chemist at the University of St Andrews UK. Her research interests are in structural biology, chemical biology, glycobiology and carbohydrate processing enzymes. Education Gloster studied biochemistry at University of Warwick, graduating in 2002 and then moved to University of York where she was awarded a PhD in chemistry in 2005 for research supervised by Gideon Davies.

#1483

Phyllis Coley

#119522

Overall Influence

Phyllis Dewing Coley is a Biology professor currently teaching at the University of Utah. In 1996 she received the University's Distinguished Research Award. She has been a research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute since 1995. In 2023, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

#1484

Christina Warinner

#73055

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Christina Warinner is an American anthropologist best known for her research on the evolution of ancient microbiomes. She is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University and the Sally Starling Seaver Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute. Warinner is also a Research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.

#1485

Diana Six

#118656

Overall Influence

Diana L. Six is a forest entomologist and professor at the University of Montana. Her research focuses primarily on bark beetle ecology and forest adaptation to climate change. Six is the recipient of the 2018 Edward O. Wilson Biodiversity Technology Pioneer Award, has presented at TEDx, and has been featured in National Geographic among other nationally recognized media.

#1486

Noel Michele Holbrook

#121057

Overall Influence

Noel Michele Holbrook is the Charles Bullard Professor of Forestry in the department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. Her work primarily focuses on the study of the physiology of vascular transport in plants, with the intent of understanding the impact of the movement of water and solutes on the ecological and evolutionary processes.

#1487

Angela N. Brooks

Angela N. Brooks

#84882

Overall Influence

Angela Brooks is an Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a member of the Genomics Institute. Early life and education Brooks watched Gattaca in 1997 and was inspired to study genetics. Brooks studied biology at the University of California, San Diego, where she specialised in bioinformatics. She became interested in alternative splicing, and decided to focus on this for her doctoral studies. She moved to University of California, Berkeley for her graduate program, working with Steven E. Brenner. During her doctorate she worked on Moden...

#1488

Jessica Hellmann

Jessica Hellmann

#67367

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jessica Hellmann is a Professor of Ecology and the director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota. She is recognized as "one of the nation’s leading researchers on global change ecology and climate adaptation". Hellmann was one of the first to identify that living with climate change is "just as crucial to the future of humanity and Earth’s ecosystems as slowing and stopping greenhouse gas emissions". Her lab uses mathematical models, genomic techniques to identify the impact of climate change on ecology and evolution. Jessica Hellmann also has a spouse, Larry LaTa...

#1489

Lora Hooper

#62609

Overall Influence

Lora V. Hooper is an American biologist, currently the Jonathan W. Uhr Distinguished Chair in Immunology and Nancy Cain and Jeffrey A. Marcus Scholar in Medical Research at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. In 2015, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

#1490

Serap Aksoy

#43859

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Fatma Serap Aksoy is a Turkish–American medical entomologist. Early life and education Aksoy was born in Fatih, Istanbul in 1955. After graduating from Robert College, she moved to the United States for her Bachelor of Science degree in biology from Vassar College. Following this, she earned a PhD in Biology from Columbia University and then completed a postdoctoral fellowship the Yale School of Public Health.

#1491

Mary Bernheim

#90007

Overall Influence

1902 - 1997 (95 years)

Mary Lilias Christian Bernheim was a British biochemist best known for her discovery of the enzyme tyramine oxidase, which was later renamed as monoamine oxidase. Bernheim discovered the enzyme system of tyramine oxidase during her doctorate research at the University of Cambridge in 1928, and her research has been referred to as "one of the seminal discoveries in twentieth century neurobiology".

#1492

Geeta Kashyap Vemuganti

#66269

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Geeta Kashyap Vemuganti is an Indian ocular pathologist and the head of the department at the Ophthalmic Pathology Service and Stem Cell Laboratory of the L. V. Prasad Eye Institute . She is also a dean and professor at the school of medical sciences of the University of Hyderabad.

#1493

Roberta F. Colman

Roberta F. Colman

#62782

Overall Influence

1938 - 2019 (81 years)

Roberta F. Colman , born Roberta Fishman, was an American biochemist. Early life Roberta Fishman was from New York City, the daughter of William and Esther Fishman of Brooklyn. As a student at Forest Hills High School in 1955, she received a Westinghouse Science Talent Search Award, and met president Dwight D. Eisenhower. Colman earned her bachelor's degree at Radcliffe College in 1959, and completed doctoral studies at Harvard University in 1962, with Frank Westheimer as her advisor. She held post-doctoral fellowships at the National Institutes of Health and the Washington University School o...

#1494

Kavita Shah

#118413

Overall Influence

Kavita Shah is an Indian environmental biotechnologist at the Institute of Environmental and Sustainable Development, Banaras Hindu University. She is one of the six directors and the only woman director of Banaras Hindu University . She is known for her role in the area of Environmental Biotechnology, Health and water Resource Management.

#1495

Rashika El Ridi

#125484

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Rashika Ahmed Fathi El Ridi is a professor of Immunology at the Department of Zoology Faculty of Science, Cairo University. In October 2009, Professor Rashika El Ridi won L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science for the year 2010 within the five most achievable women in the continents of the world. The jury for the prize said in a statement that the winning of professor Rashika El Ridi for Africa Group and the Arab countries was based on her contribution to the development of a vaccine to eradicate the cycle of schistosomiasis, a tropical disease infecting more than 200 million people in the...

#1496

Pauline Harrison

#111087

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (98 years)

Pauline May Harrison is a British protein crystallographer and professor emeritus at the University of Sheffield. She gained her chemistry degree from Somerville College, Oxford in 1948, followed by a DPhil in X-ray crystallography in 1952 supervised by Dorothy Hodgkin. After 3 years at King's College London she moved to the University of Sheffield in 1955 as a demonstrator in the Biochemistry department , obtaining an MRC grant to study the iron storage protein Ferritin, publishing preliminary X-ray diffraction data in the 1st volume of the Journal of Molecular Biology in 1959. The molecule which became her life's work.

#1497

Jody Deming

#121244

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Jody W. Deming is an American oceanographer. She is a professor of Oceanography and a marine microbiologist at the University of Washington . Her research interests include studies of cold adapted microbes in their relation to astrobiology, biotechnology, and bioremediation. She is known for her extensive field work, being involved in over 50 nautical research expeditions. Deming is also the cofounder of the UW Astrobiology Extremophile Laboratory.

#1498

Ulrike Mathesius

#112818

Overall Influence

Ulrike Mathesius is a German–Australian plant microbiologist in the Division of Plant Sciences at Australian National University . She is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the ANU, National Tertiary Education Union member and Professor at the ANU in plant science, biotechnology and plant-microbe interactions. Her research focuses on root microbe interactions and symbionts to parasites. Mathesius won the 2013 Fenner Medal awarded by the ARC for research in biology for outstanding early-career researchers under the age of 40.

#1499

Leah Krubitzer

#51413

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Leah Krubitzer is an American neuroscientist, Professor of Psychology at University of California, Davis, and head of the Laboratory of Evolutionary Neurobiology. Her research interests center on how complex brains in mammals evolve from simpler forms. To do this, she focuses on anatomical connections and electrophysiological characteristics of neurons in the neocortex . Using comparative studies, she determines which features of the neocortex are shared by all mammals and how new features of the neocortex have evolved. This allows her to reconstruct evolutionary phylogenies of the neocortex together with their relationship to functional changes.

#1500

Shubha Sathyendranath

#121677

Overall Influence

Shubha Platt , known professionally as Shubha Sathyendranath, is a marine scientist known for her work on marine optics and remote sensing of ocean colour. She is the 2021 recipient of the A.G. Huntsman Award for Excellence in the Marine Sciences.

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