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,

#151

Christine Orengo

Christine Orengo

#28002

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Christine Anne Orengo is a Professor of Bioinformatics at University College London known for her work on protein structure, particularly the CATH database. Orengo serves as president of the International Society for Computational Biology , the first woman to do so in the history of the society.

#152

Daria Mochly-Rosen

#23946

Overall Influence

Daria Mochly-Rosen is a Professor of Chemical and Systems Biology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, where she also holds the George D. Smith Chair for Translational Medicine. She is in addition the founder of Mitoconix Bio, a startup company whose goal is to produce drugs that treat Huntington's disease and other neurodegenerative illnesses.

#153

Susana López Charretón

#25098

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Susana López Charretón is a Mexican virologist specialized in understanding the mechanisms of infection of rotavirus. López Charretón has led a research program as principal investigator at the Biotechnology Institute in Cuernavaca, Mexico for over 25 years.

#154

Marion J. Lamb

#26484

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Marion Julia Lamb was Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London, before her retirement. She studied the effect of environmental conditions such as heat, radiation and pollution on metabolic activity and genetic mutability in the fruit fly Drosophila. From the late 1980s, Lamb collaborated with Eva Jablonka, researching and writing on the inheritance of epigenetic variations, and in 2005 they co-authored the book Evolution in Four Dimensions, considered by some to be in the vanguard of an ongoing revolution within evolutionary biology.

#155

Ruth E. Ley

#43850

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Ruth E. Ley is a British-American microbial ecologist. Ley was an associate professor in the Department of Microbiology and the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Cornell University until 2018. She is currently serving as the director of the Microbiome Science Department at the Max Planck Institute for Biology.

#156

Nancy Haigwood

#23842

Overall Influence

Nancy Logan Haigwood is an American scientist. She is a professor and the director of the Oregon National Primate Research Center. Haigwood is an HIV/AIDS researcher and serves as a volunteer board member on the Cascade AIDS Project. She is an advocate of science education and outreach.

#157

Claudia Neuhauser

#31661

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Claudia Maria Neuhauser is a mathematician whose research focuses on mathematical biology and spatial ecology. She also investigates computational biology and bioinformatics. Neuhauser is currently Interim Vice Chancellor/Vice President for Research at the University of Houston, where she has been employed since 2018.

#158

Ting Wu

#28289

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Chao-ting Wu is an American molecular biologist. After training at Harvard Medical School in genetics with William Gelbart, at Stanford Medical School with David Hogness, and in a fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital in molecular biology, Wu began her independent academic career as an assistant professor in Anatomy and Cellular Biology and then Genetics at Harvard Medical School in 1993. After a period as Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Molecular Medicine at the Boston Children's Hospital, she returned to the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School as a full profes...

#159

Pascale Cossart

Pascale Cossart

#31946

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Pascale Cossart is a French bacteriologist who is affiliated with the Pasteur Institute of Paris. She is the foremost authority on Listeria monocytogenes, a deadly and common food-borne pathogen responsible for encephalitis, meningitis, bacteremia, gastroenteritis, and other diseases.

#160

Barbara J. Meyer

#39877

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Barbara J. Meyer is a biologist and genetist, noted for her pioneering research on lambda phage, a virus that infects bacteria; discovery of the master control gene involved in sex determination; and studies of gene regulation, particularly dosage compensation. Meyer's work has revealed mechanisms of sex determination and dosage compensation—that balance X-chromosome gene expression between the sexes in Caenorhabditis elegans that continue to serve as the foundation of diverse areas of study on chromosome structure and function today.

#161

Christine Van Broeckhoven

#19145

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Christine Van Broeckhoven is a Belgian molecular biologist and professor in Molecular genetics at the University of Antwerp . She is also leading the VIB Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Antwerp of the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology . Christine Van Broeckhoven does research on Alzheimer dementia, bipolar mental disorders and other neurological diseases. Since 1983 she has had her own laboratory for molecular genetics at the University of Antwerp, and since 2005 is focussing her research on neurodegenerative brain diseases. She is an associate editor of the scientific jour...

#162

Nina Papavasiliou

Nina Papavasiliou

#25870

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Nina Papavasiliou is an immunologist and Helmholtz Professor in the Division of Immune Diversity at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, Germany. She is also an adjunct professor at the Rockefeller University, where she was previously associate professor and head of the Laboratory of Lymphocyte Biology. She is best known for her work in the fields of DNA and RNA editing.

#163

Marianne Bronner

#38598

Overall Influence

Marianne Bronner is a developmental biologist who currently serves as Edward B. Lewis Professor of Biology and an executive officer for Neurobiology at the California Institute of Technology. Her most notable work includes her research on the neural crest. Bronner's research focuses on studying the cellular events behind the migration, differentiation, and formation of neural crest cells. She currently directs her own laboratory at the California Institute of Technology called the Bronner Laboratory, and she has authored over 400 articles in her field.

#164

E. C. Pielou

#36779

Overall Influence

1924 - 2016 (92 years)

Evelyn Chrystalla "E.C." Pielou was a Canadian statistical ecologist. Biography Pielou studied at the University of London, where she obtained her bachelor's degree in botany in 1951 and her PhD in 1962. From 1963 to 1964, she worked as a researcher for the Canadian Department of Forestry, followed by the Canadian Department of Agriculture between 1964 and 1967. Later she was professor of biology at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario and at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia and then Oil Sands Environmental Research Professor working out of the University of Lethbridge, Alberta...

#165

Stefanie Dimmeler

#24298

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Stefanie Dimmeler is a German biologist specializing in the pathophysiological processes underlying cardiovascular diseases. Her awards and honours include the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation for her work on the programmed cell death of endothelial cells. Since 2008 she has led the Institute for Cardiovascular Regeneration at the University of Frankfurt. Her current work is focusing to develop cellular and pharmacological strategies to improve cardiovascular repair and regeneration. Her work aims to establish non-coding RNAs as novel therapeutic targets.

#166

Sallie W. Chisholm

#29879

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Sallie Watson "Penny" Chisholm is an American biological oceanographer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is an expert in the ecology and evolution of ocean microbes. Her research focuses particularly on the most abundant marine phytoplankton, Prochlorococcus, that she discovered in the 1980s with Rob Olson and other collaborators. She has a TED talk about their discovery and importance called "The tiny creature that secretly powers the planet".

#167

Rebecca Heald

#45832

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Rebecca W. Heald is an American professor of cell and developmental biology. She is currently a Professor in the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. In May 2019, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. She has published over 120 research articles in peer reviewed journals.

#168

Martha Farah

#20856

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Martha Julia Farah is a cognitive neuroscience researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. She has worked on an unusually wide range of topics; the citation for her lifetime achievement award from the Association for Psychological Science states that “Her studies on the topics of mental imagery, face recognition, semantic memory, reading, attention, and executive functioning have become classics in the field.”

#169

Pardis Sabeti

#11354

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Pardis Christine Sabeti is an Iranian American computational biologist, medical geneticist, and evolutionary geneticist. She developed a bioinformatic statistical method which identifies sections of the genome that have been subject to natural selection and an algorithm which explains the effects of genetics on the evolution of disease.

#170

Brenda Andrews

#30521

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Brenda Jean Andrews is a Canadian academic, researcher and biologist specializing in systems biology and molecular genetics. Andrews is known for her studies on cell cycle-regulated transcription and protein kinase function in yeast and for pioneering work with Charles Boone on genetic networks. As an example, in 2015, Andrews co-led a team of biology scientists at the University of Toronto's Donnelly Centre to create the first ever fully detailed protein map of a cell, the map showed the location of all protein in a cell, the project aimed to benefit and help increase research for cancer cells.

#171

Marie Tharp

#7021

Overall Influence

1920 - 2006 (86 years)

Marie Tharp was an American geologist and oceanographic cartographer. In the 1950s, she collaborated with geologist Bruce Heezen to produce the first scientific map of the Atlantic Ocean floor. Her cartography revealed a more detailed topography and multi-dimensional geographical landscape of the ocean bottom.

#172

Suzanne Corkin

#11535

Overall Influence

1937 - 2016 (79 years)

Suzanne Corkin was an American professor of neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. She was a leading scholar in neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience. She is best known for her research on human memory, which she studied in patients with Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and amnesia. She is also well known for studying H.M., a man with memory loss whom she met in 1962 and studied until his death in 2008.

#173

Corrie Moreau

#22796

Overall Influence

Corrie S. Moreau is an evolutionary biologist and entomologist with a specialty in myrmecology, the study of ants. She is currently a professor and curator at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Moreau studies the evolution, ecology, biogeography, systematics, and diversification of insects and their microbial gut-symbionts using molecular and genomic tools. She has also been an advocate for increasing women and diversity in the sciences.

#174

Thereza Imanishi-Kari

#23792

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Thereza Imanishi-Kari is an associate professor of pathology at Tufts University. Her research focuses on the origins of autoimmune diseases, particularly systemic lupus erythematosus, studied using mice as model organisms. Previously she had been a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is notable for her role in what became known as the "Baltimore affair", in which a 1986 paper she co-authored with David Baltimore was the subject of research misconduct allegations. Following a series of investigations, she was fully exonerated of the charges in 1996.

#175

Eleanor Maguire

Eleanor Maguire

#12300

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Eleanor Anne Maguire is an Irish neuroscientist. Since 2007, she has been Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London where she is also a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow.

#176

Marina Rodnina

#27538

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Marina V. Rodnina is a German biochemist. Life Born in Kyiv, Rodnina studied biology at the University of Kyiv and obtained her PhD in molecular biology and genetics in 1989. From 1990 to 1992, she was a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Witten/Herdecke University. Afterwards, she was a research assistant at the same university and she received her habilitation in 1997. From 1998 to 2008, she was a professor at the Witten/Herdecke University. Since 2008, she is a scientific member and the director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry.

#177

Georgina Mace

#33476

Overall Influence

1953 - 2020 (67 years)

Dame Georgina Mary Mace, was a British ecologist and conservation scientist. She was Professor of Biodiversity and Ecosystems at University College London, and previously Professor of Conservation Science and Director of the Natural Environment Research Council Centre for Population Biology, Imperial College London and Director of Science at the Zoological Society of London .

#178

Alexandra Elbakyan

Alexandra Elbakyan

#3173

Overall Influence

1988 - Present (36 years)

Alexandra Asanovna Elbakyan is a Kazakhstani computer programmer and creator of the website Sci-Hub, which provides free access to research papers without regard for copyright. According to a study published in 2018, Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature.

#179

Nicole Dubilier

#29389

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Nicole Dubilier is a marine microbiologist and director of the Symbiosis Department at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology since 2013 and a Professor of Microbial Symbioses at the University of Bremen. She is a pioneer in ecological and evolutionary symbiotic relationships between sea animals and their microbial partners inhabiting environments that harbour low nutrient concentrations. She was responsible for the discovery of a new form of symbiosis between two kinds of bacteria and the marine oligochaete Olavius algarvensis.

#180

Andrea Brand

#38127

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Andrea Hilary Brand is the Herchel Smith Professor of Molecular Biology and a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. She heads a lab investigating nervous system development at the Gurdon Institute and the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience. She developed the GAL4/UAS system with Norbert Perrimon which has been described as “a fly geneticist's Swiss army knife”.

#181

Berta Scharrer

#34622

Overall Influence

1906 - 1995 (89 years)

Berta Vogel Scharrer was an American scientist who helped to found the scientific discipline now known as neuroendocrinology. Career She received her Ph.D. from the University of Munich in 1930. She worked at the university with Professor Karl von Frisch, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973 for his work with bees. After completing her education, Berta and her husband, Ernst Scharrer embarked on a remarkable scientific career together. Their journey began at the Research Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, where Berta focused on the study of spirochaete infections in th...

#182

Marguerite Vogt

Marguerite Vogt

#32804

Overall Influence

1913 - 2007 (94 years)

Marguerite Vogt was a cancer biologist and virologist. She was most noted for her research on polio and cancer at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Early life Vogt was born in Germany in 1913. The youngest daughter of Oskar Vogt and French-born Cécile Vogt-Mugnier, Vogt took her M.D. degree from the University of Berlin in 1937. Her parents were prominent neuroscientists and she grew up in an intense scientific environment. Her older sister, Marthe Vogt was a neuropharmacologist who became a fellow of the Royal Society and a professor at Cambridge.

#183

Tania Singer

#16553

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Tania Singer is a German psychologist and social neuroscientist and the scientific director of the Max Planck Society's Social Neuroscience Lab in Berlin, Germany. Between 2007 and 2010, she became the inaugural chair of social neuroscience and neuroeconomics at the University of Zurich and was the co-director of the Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research in Zurich. Her research focuses on the developmental, neuronal, and hormonal mechanisms underlying human social behavior and social emotions such as compassion and empathy. She is founder and principal investigator of the ReSource...

#184

Helia Bravo Hollis

Helia Bravo Hollis

#41529

Overall Influence

1901 - 2001 (100 years)

Helia Bravo Hollis was a Mexican botanist who did research in the Faculty of Science at UNAM. Background and studies Helia Bravo Hollis was born and raised in Mixcoac, located in present-day Mexico City. Her interest in the study of living beings came from Sunday walks with her parents. She excelled in school from a young age. President Porfirio Diaz gave her recognition for her grades upon her completion of primary school.

#185

Kirsten Bomblies

#34257

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Kirsten Bomblies is an American biological researcher. Her research focuses primarily on species in the Arabidopsis genus, particularly Arabidopsis arenosa. She has studied processes related to speciation and hybrid incompatibility, and currently focuses on the adaptive evolution of meiosis in response to climate and genome change.

#186

Nancy Hopkins

#27080

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Nancy Hopkins, an American molecular biologist, is the Amgen, Inc. Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is known for her research identifying genes required for zebrafish development, and for her earlier research on gene expression in the bacterial virus, lambda, and on mouse RNA tumor viruses. She is also known for her work promoting equality of opportunity for women scientists in academia.

#187

Marilyn Kozak

#26792

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Marilyn S. Kozak is an American professor of biochemistry at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. She was previously at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey before the school was merged. She was awarded a PhD in microbiology by Johns Hopkins University studying the synthesis of the Bacteriophage MS2, advised by Daniel Nathans. In her original faculty job proposal, she sought to study the mechanism of eukaryotic translation initiation, a problem long thought to have already been solved by Joan Steitz. While in the Department of Biological Sciences at University of Pittsbu...

#188

Brigid Hogan

#34034

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Brigid L. M. Hogan FRS is a British developmental biologist noted for her contributions to mammalian development, stem cell research and transgenic technology and techniques. She is currently a Professor in the Department of Cell Biology at Duke University, Born in the UK, she became an American citizen in 2000.

#189

Dafna D. Gladman

#26754

Overall Influence

Dafna D. Gladman, MD, FRCPC, is a Canadian doctor and medical researcher working in the fields of psoriatic arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, and rheumatoid arthritis. She is a professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine and Senior Scientist at the Krembil Research Institute. She is Deputy Director, Centre for Prognosis Studies in the Rheumatic Diseases , Co-Director, Lupus Clinic, Toronto Western Hospital and Director, Psoriatic Arthritis Program, Toronto Western Hospital.

#190

Lisa Levin

#40123

Overall Influence

Lisa A. Levin is a Distinguished Professor of biological oceanography and marine ecology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She holds the Elizabeth Hamman and Morgan Dene Oliver Chair in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation Science. She studies coastal and deep-sea ecosystems and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#191

Patricia K. Kuhl

#16515

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Patricia Katherine Kuhl is a Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences and co-director of the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. She specializes in language acquisition and the neural bases of language, and she has also conducted research on language development in autism and computer speech recognition. Kuhl currently serves as an associate editor for the journals Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Neuroscience, and Developmental Science.

#192

Jyotsna Dhawan

#24991

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Jyotsna Dhawan is an Indian Cell and Developmental Biologist, Emeritus Scientist at Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology and Visiting Professor, Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine . Dhawan's research has focused on adult stem cell function and skeletal muscle regeneration. Dhawan is the current President of the Indian Society for Cell Biology and the Indian Society of Developmental Biologists . Dhawan was elected as a fellow to the Indian National Science Academy in 2019.

#193

Suzanne Pfeffer

#33990

Overall Influence

Suzanne Ruth Pfeffer is an American neuroscientist who is a professor at Stanford University. Her research investigates the molecular mechanisms that cause receptors to be transported between membrane compartments in cells, and she is an expert in Rab GTPases and the molecular basis of inherited Parkinson's disease. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Society for Cell Biology.

#194

Jingmai O'Connor

#36835

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

Jingmai Kathleen O'Connor is a paleontologist who works as a curator at the Field Museum. Biography O'Connor is from Pasadena, California. Her mother is a geologist. O'Connor says that while she was not a dinosaur enthusiast as a child, being present for her mother's geology fieldwork began her interest in the subject. She explains, "I enjoyed going to the field with her, collecting rocks, minerals, and fossils, and playing in the lab."

#195

Doris Löve

#37832

Overall Influence

1918 - 2000 (82 years)

Doris Benta Maria Löve, née Wahlén was a Swedish systematic botanist, particularly active in the Arctic. Biography Doris Löve was born in Kristianstad, Sweden. She studied botany at Lund University from 1937. She married her fellow student and colleague, the Icelander Áskell Löve. She received her PhD in botany in 1944. She focused her doctorate on the sexuality of Melandrium. After their studies, the couple moved to Iceland. They moved to Winnipeg in 1951, to Montreal in 1955, and to Boulder in 1965. At universities where Áskell Löve taught, Doris Löve could not hold a faculty position at the same time as her husband.

#196

Elly Tanaka

#44489

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Elly Margaret Tanaka is a biochemist and senior scientist at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, Austria. Tanaka studies the molecular cell biology of limb and spinal cord regeneration as well as the evolution of regeneration.

#197

Jennifer Thomson

#41458

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Jennifer Ann Thomson is a South African microbiologist, author and most notably an expert on and proponent of the agricultural benefit of Genetically modified organisms . Thomson was born in Cape Town, South Africa and she is currently a professor at her alma mater the University of Cape Town.

#198

Ruth Nussinov

#40744

Overall Influence

Ruth Nussinov is an Israeli-American biologist born in Rehovot who works as a Professor in the Department of Human Genetics, School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University and is the Senior Principal Scientist and Principal Investigator at the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health. Nussinov is also the Editor in Chief of the Current Opinion in Structural Biology and formerly of the journal PLOS Computational Biology.

#199

Mary Collins

#31913

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Mary Katharine Levinge Collins, Lady Hunt is a British Professor of virology and the director of the Queen Mary University of London Blizard Institute. She served as Provost at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan. Formerly, Collins taught in the Division of Infection and Immunity at University College London, and was the head of the Division of Advanced Therapies at the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control, and the Director of the Medical Research Council Centre for Medical Molecular Virology. Her research group studies the use of viruses as vectors for ...

#200

Jennifer Gardy

#40581

Overall Influence

Jennifer Gardy is a Canadian scientist, educator and broadcaster, with expertise in the fields of molecular biology, biochemistry, and bioinformatics. Since February 2019 she has been the Deputy Director, Surveillance, Data, and Epidemiology on the Global Health: Malaria team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She was previously an associate professor at the University of British Columbia's School of Population and Public Health, a Canada Research Chair in Public Health Genomics, and a Senior Scientist at the BC Centre for Disease Control. She is an occasional host of CBC's The Nature of Things, a science communicator, and a children's book author.

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