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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Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Biology,

#1501

Marie T. Ruel

#125786

Overall Influence

#1502

Sue Black, Baroness Black of Strome

Sue Black, Baroness Black of Strome

#61215

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Susan Margaret Black, Baroness Black of Strome, is a Scottish forensic anthropologist, anatomist and academic. She was the Pro Vice-Chancellor for Engagement at Lancaster University and is past President of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. From 2003 to 2018 she was Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology at the University of Dundee. She is President of St John's College, Oxford.

#1503

Ellen Kandeler

#110704

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Ellen Kandeler is a German biologist and agricultural scientist specialising in soil biology at University of Hohenheim. She also heads the Soil Biology area in the EU Biofector project. Life and work After leaving school in Vienna in 1975 Kandeler studied biology at the University of Vienna and obtained a diploma in 1979. She then attained a doctorate in chemical plant physiology in 1983 at the same university, and afterwards worked as a scientific assistant at the State Institute of Soil Science in Vienna and as a university lecturer at the Institute of Soil Science and Engineering Geology at the Zoological Institute at Vienna University .

#1504

Dena Grayson

#98362

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Dena Minning Grayson is an American medical doctor and researcher. In 2016, she ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for the United States House of Representatives for Florida's 9th congressional district.

#1505

Susan Riechert

#121457

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Susan Elise Riechert is an American behavioral ecologist known for her research in evolutionary biology, evolutionary game theory and the behavior of spiders. She is also known for her "biology in a box" teaching materials, used by hundreds of thousands of elementary and secondary school students in Tennessee.

#1506

Judith Breuer

#110842

Overall Influence

Judith Breuer is a British virologist who is professor of virology and director of the Pathogen Genomics Unit at University College London. She was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2019. Breuer is part of the United Kingdom genome sequencing team that looks to map the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019.

#1507

Manuela Giovannetti

#126095

Overall Influence

#1508

Illana Gozes

#126147

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

#1509

Margaret Byrne

#101712

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Margaret Mary Byrne is senior principal research scientist and director of the Science Division within WA Dept of Parks and Wildlife. She is a member of the Board of Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network . Her research background is in population genetics and conservation genetics, with applications to choosing provenances for restoration as well as to understanding phylogeographic history. She has been a longstanding treasurer of Genetics Society of Australia, a society relevant to NCEEC.

#1510

Concetta DiRusso

#123141

Overall Influence

Concetta DiRusso is an American scientist and Professor of Biochemistry. She is best known for her work on transcriptional regulation of fatty acid metabolism in bacteria. Biography DiRusso received her B.A. from Hampshire College, and in 1982 she completed her Ph.D. in cell and molecular biology from the University of Vermont. In 2015, she was invested with the George Holmes University Professorship in Biochemistry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln DiRusso is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2014, she served as Jefferson Science Fellow in the Gl...

#1511

Ann McDermott

#91918

Overall Influence

Ann E. McDermott is an American biophysicist who uses nuclear magnetic resonance to study the structure, function, and dynamics of proteins in native-like environments. She is currently the Esther Breslow Professor of Biological Chemistry and Chair of the Educational Policy and Planning Committee of the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University. She has also previously served as Columbia's Associate Vice President for Academic Advising and Science Initiatives in the Arts and Sciences. She is an elected member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences...

#1512

Wanda Wesołowska

#57871

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Wanda Wesołowska is a Polish zoologist known for her work with jumping spiders. She has described more species of jumping spider than any contemporary writer, and is second only to Eugène Simon in the history of arachnology. Originally a student of ornithology, she developed an interest in jumping spiders while still a student at the Siedlce University of Natural Sciences and Humanities in the 1970s.

#1513

Angela Santoni

#126247

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

#1514

Maria Yazdanbakhsh

#122571

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Maria Yazdanbakhsh is a Dutch immunologist who is Professor of Cellular Immunology of Parasitic Infections and Head of the Department of Parasitology at the Leiden University Medical Center. She was elected Fellow of the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2023.

#1515

Carina M. Schlebusch

#89237

Overall Influence

Carina Maria Schlebusch is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. She is a specialist in the population history of Africa. In 2017 she was the co-author of a paper that suggested that modern humans emerged more than 300,000 years ago.

#1516

Heidi Wunderli-Allenspach

#29886

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Heidi Wunderli-Allenspach is a Swiss biologist and was the first female director of ETH Zürich. Life and work Wunderli-Allenspach was born in 1947 in Niederuzwil in the Canton of St. Gallen in Switzerland. She graduated with the master's degree in biology at ETH Zurich in 1970, and then she worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Brain Research at the University of Zurich. Thenafter she postgraduatedin Experimental Medicine and Biology at the University of Zurich. Wunderli subsequently did her Ph.D. thesis at the Department of Microbiology at the Biozentrum in Basel, and as resear...

#1517

Cynthia Bauerle

#107354

Overall Influence

Cynthia M. Bauerle is an American molecular biologist and college administrator. They are currently the interim vice provost for Faculty and Curriculum at James Madison University. Early life and education Bauerle is from Charlottesville, Virginia. They completed a B.A. in biology at University of Virginia in 1984 and a Ph.D. in molecular biology at University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1990. Bauerle was a postdoctoral fellow at University of Oregon where they researched molecular biology. They were a Fulbright scholar at University of Dar es Salaam from 1999 to 2000.

#1518

Jacqueline Chaparro Olaya

#112074

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jacqueline Chaparro Olaya is a Colombian biologist and parasitologist, recipient of the L’Oréal-UNESCO for Women in Science grant in 2001 for her research on the application of molecular techniques in the field of infectious diseases.

#1519

JacSue Kehoe

#63736

Overall Influence

1935 - 2019 (84 years)

JacSue Kehoe was an American neuroscientist and neuroscience researcher. She spent decades working with the neurons of Aplysia californica, studying post-synaptic nerve response. She discovered that one neurotransmitter can have multiple types of receptors, which could vary in level and type of response. Kehoe worked for the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, where she made many other discoveries in neuroscience.

#1520

Sue Jinks-Robertson

#65874

Overall Influence

Sue Jinks-Robertson is an American professor of genetics and microbiology. She is currently a professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at the Duke University School of Medicine. In May 2019, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. She has published over 100 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals.

#1521

Emma Guttman-Yassky

#126580

Overall Influence

Emma Guttman-Yassky is the System Chair of the Department of Dermatology and Waldman professor of dermatology and immunology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. She is also director of its center for excellence in eczema, its occupational dermatitis clinic, and its inflammatory skin disease laboratory.

#1522

Amy Arnsten

#98045

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Amy F.T. Arnsten is an American neuroscientist. She is the Albert E. Kent Professor of Neuroscience and Professor of Psychology as well as a member of the Kavli Institute of Neuroscience at Yale University.

#1523

Carole Baldwin

#89724

Overall Influence

Carole C. Baldwin is a research zoologist, curator of fishes, and the vertebrate zoology department chair at the National Museum of Natural History. She researches the diversity and evolution of coral reef and deep sea fishes through integrative taxonomy. She is on the board of directors of the National Aquarium in Washington, D.C. She is a senior author on the educational seafood cookbook One Fish, Two Fish, Crawfish, Bluefish - The Smithsonian Sustainable Seafood Cookbook, and the principal investigator on the Deep Reef Observation Project which researches reefs to 300 meter depths. She...

#1524

Gail A. Bishop

#117694

Overall Influence

Gail A. Bishop is an American professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Iowa and director of the Center for Immunology & Immune-Based Diseases at the Carver College of Medicine. Early life and education Bishop was born in Wisconsin, United States. She became interested in science as a teenager after first studying biology in the 9th grade. She completed a summer job in a leukemia research laboratory in Milwaukee. Bishop studied biology at St. Olaf College. She earned a master's degree in oncology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Bishop moved to University of Michigan as a graduate student, working in cellular biology with Joseph Glorioso.

#1525

Rana Fine

#77470

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Rana Arnold Fine is Professor Emeritus at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. Her research primarily addresses understanding ocean circulation processes over time through the use of chemical tracers and the connection to climate.

#1526

Yamni Nigam

#45159

Overall Influence

Yamni Nigam FRES is a professor and scientist at Swansea University. Her scientific research focuses on the immune system of insects and invertebrates. She has a particular interest in wound healing and maggot therapy. Nigam additionally lectures on anatomy, physiology and pathophysiology within the School of Health & Social Care in the Faculty of Medicine, Health & Life - science at Swansea University.

#1527

Coleen T. Murphy

#113412

Overall Influence

Coleen T. Murphy is a geneticist and Richard B. Fisher Preceptor in Integrative Genomics Professor of Molecular Biology at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University. She is director of the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories For Aging Research at Princeton.

#1528

N. Louise Glass

#100776

Overall Influence

N. Louise Glass is the Fred E. Dickinson Chair of Wood Science and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley. She specialises in plant and microbial biology, particularly fungal cell biology and genetics

#1529

Danuta Wasserman

#57933

Overall Influence

Danuta Elizabeth Wasserman is a professor of psychiatry and suicidology at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. She is a public mental health and medical educator. She is currently the President of the World Psychiatric Association .

#1530

Marilyn Kilgen

#58922

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Marilyn Gayle Barrios Kilgen is an American microbiologist and seafood safety scientist. She is the Alcee Fortier Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at Nicholls State University. Personal life and education Growing up, Kilgen thought about becoming a doctor but changed her plans after her mother died of breast cancer. She chose to attend her father's alma mater for post-secondary education, Nicholls State University.

#1531

Camellia Okpodu

#119251

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Camellia Moses Okpodu , is a college professor and dean. Education and early life Camellia Okpodu graduated in 1982 from West Brunswick High School, Shallotte, North Carolina. She received both her undergraduate and postgraduate education from North Carolina State University , earning a B.S. in Biochemistry and a Ph.D. in Plant Physiology and Biochemistry .

#1532

Meghan Duffy

#103230

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Meghan Anne Duffy is an American biologist and the Susan S. Kilham Collegiate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan. She focuses on the causes and consequences of parasitism in natural populations of lake populations. In 2019, she created a task force to examine factors that influence the mental health and well-being of graduate students at the University of Michigan.

#1533

Lisa Ainsworth

#101828

Overall Influence

Elizabeth Anna Ainsworth is an American plant physiologist currently employed by the United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service . She also is an adjunct professor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign , a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was awarded the 2018 Crop Science Society of America Presidential Award. She is known for her work concerning the effects of specific atmospheric pollutants, including ozone and carbon dioxide, on the productivity of selected major crops such as corn and soybeans.

#1534

Sarah M. Assmann

#122747

Overall Influence

Sarah M. Assmann is an American biologist known for her research on plants and signal transduction. She is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Education and career Assmann undergraduate degree is from Williams College . She earned her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1986. Following her Ph.D., she was a postdoc at the University of California, Riverside until she joined the faculty at Harvard University in 1987. In 1993 she moved to Pennsylvania State and was promoted to professor in 1997. In 2002, Assmann was named the Waller Professor of Biology at ...

#1535

Meena Upadhyaya

#92343

Overall Influence

Meena Upadhyaya OBE, FRCPath, FLSW is an Indian-born Welsh medical geneticist and an honorary distinguished professor at Cardiff University. Her research has focused on the genes that cause various genetic disorders, in particular neurofibromatosis type I and facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy.

#1536

Jurgenne H. Primavera

Jurgenne H. Primavera

#109264

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Jurgenne Honculada-Primavera is a widely cited Filipina marine scientist. For her research in mangrove ecosystem conservation she was honored as one of Time magazine's Heroes of the Environment for 2008. She was inducted into the National Academy of Science and Technology in 2015.

#1537

Kit Prendergast

#114354

Overall Influence

Kit Prendergast, nicknamed "The Bee Babette", is a wild bee ecologist from Perth, Western Australia. She studied at Curtin University and gained her PhD after researching the biodiversity of native bees and pollination networks in urban areas, along with how to conserve them and the impact of honeybees on native bees. Prendergast has also researched and written about urban area issues for bees, focusing on Perth and the south west of Western Australia.

#1538

María Cordero Hardy

#61606

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Dr. María Cordero Hardy, M.D., a.k.a. Mary Hardy is a Puerto Rican physiologist, educator and scientist whose research on vitamin E helped other scientists understand how vitamins affect the human body.

#1539

Barbara Tudek

#66090

Overall Influence

1952 - 2019 (67 years)

Barbara Tudek was a Polish biologist who served as president of the Polish section of the European Environmental Mutagenesis and Genomics Society . In 2019, Tudek was a recipient of the Frits Sobels Award.

#1540

Marla Sokolowski

#118904

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Marla B. Sokolowski is a University Professor in the Departments of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. Sokolowski is a scientist whose work is widely considered to be groundbreaking, foundational for a variety of fields, and instrumental in refutations of genetic determinism, and has, according to the Royal Society of Canada, "permanently changed the way we frame questions about individual differences in behaviour". Sokolowski's comprehensive study of the fruit fly and other animal systems, including humans, has shaped fundamental concepts in behavioural evolution, plasticity, and genetic pleiotropy.

#1541

Katherine Belov

Katherine Belov

#108923

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Katherine Belov is an Australian geneticist, professor of comparative genomics in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences and Pro Vice Chancellor of Global Engagement at the University of Sydney. She is head of the Australasian Wildlife Genomics Group and research expert in the area of comparative genomics and immunogenetics, including Tasmanian devils and koalas, two iconic Australian species that are threatened by disease processes. Throughout her career, she has disproved the idea that marsupial immune system is primitive, characterized the South American gray short-tailed opossum's...

#1542

Louise H. Emmons

#110614

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Louise H. Emmons is an American zoologist who studies tropical rainforest mammals, especially rodents. She has conducted fieldwork in Gabon, Sabah , Peru, and Bolivia. Her best known work is the field guide, Neotropical Rainforest Mammals: A Field Guide, first published in 1990, with a second edition in 1997.

#1543

Priya Davidar

#119028

Overall Influence

Priya Davidar is an Indian scientific researcher, conservation biologist, scholar, and author. She retired as a Professor at Pondicherry University and has conducted ecological research in different regions of India. She has authored a few books, including Whispers from the Wild, co-authored with E.R.C Davidar and published by Penguin India books. She was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2012. She is actively involved with the conservation of forests and wildlife. She has published about 100 papers in scientific journals.

#1544

Margaret A. Dix

#112358

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Margaret Ann Dix is a Jersey-born Guatemalan botanist. In 1972, she founded the Center for Environmental Studies and Biodiversity at the . Biography Born on Jersey in the Channel Islands, she attended London University where she graduated in biology in 1962. She received her masters in zoology from Mount Holyoke College, Massachchusetts, in 1964. From 1964 to 1968, she studied entomology, ecology and animal behaviour at Harvard University under E. O. Wilson. While studying at Harvard, she was required to spend two years abroad. At the end of 1972, together with her American husband, Michael W.

#1545

Barbara Wienecke

Barbara Wienecke

#62962

Overall Influence

Barbara Wienecke is a senior research scientist with the Australian Antarctic Division. She is a seabird ecologist who uses satellite tracking to investigate seabird population dynamics and ecology. Wienecke has played a key role in enhancing the quality of, and overseeing the implementation of, a number of Antarctic Specially Protected Area management plans for wildlife concentrations in East Antarctica.

#1546

Joan Gardner

#86773

Overall Influence

1918 - 2013 (95 years)

Joan Forrest Gardner was an Australian microbiologist who had an extensive career researching and teaching in the areas of disinfection, infection control, and sterilisation. Early life and education Gardner was born in 1918 into a distinguished medical and scientific family. Her uncle was Nobel laureate Howard Florey; her mother, Hilda Josephine Gardner, was a leading bacteriologist, serologist and hematologist in Melbourne; and her father, Jack Gardner, was a physician and army medical officer during World War I.

#1547

Wendy Hoy

#124020

Overall Influence

Professor Wendy Elizabeth Hoy AO is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science , the Director of the Centre for Chronic Disease at the University of Queensland, Australia, and was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2010 and elected as a member of the Australian Academy of Science in 2015. Hoy's research has involved developing new types of kidney imaging and improving health and lives for indigenous populations, in Australia, Sri Lanka and the USA.

#1548

Tara Spires-Jones

#21281

Overall Influence

Tara Spires-Jones is professor of neurodegeneration and deputy director of the Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. She is also a group leader in the UK Dementia Research Institute.

#1549

Mounira Hmani Aifa

#113228

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Mounira Hmani Aifa is a Tunisian geneticist, best known for her work in mapping the PRSS56 gene. She has been a recipient of the "Sur les traces de Marie Curie" award from UNESCO and the L'Oreal Foundation in 2012, and a fellowship from them in 2002.

#1550

Joan Murrell Owens

#81117

Overall Influence

1933 - 2011 (78 years)

Joan Murrell Owens was an American educator and marine biologist specializing in corals. She received degrees in geology, fine art, and guidance counseling. She described a new genus, Rhombopsammia, and three new species of button corals, R. niphada, R. squiresi, and Letepsammia franki.

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