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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential female people in Biology,
#1901
Patricia G. Spear
#133479
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Patricia Gail Spear is an American virologist. She is a professor emeritus of microbiology and immunology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She is best known for her pioneering work studying the herpes simplex virus. Spear is a past president of the American Society for Virology and an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#1902
Aida Habtezion
#104812
Overall Influence
Aida Habtezion is an Eritrean physician and immunologist. In 2021, Habtezion took a leave of absence from Stanford University to become the Chief Medical Officer of Pfizer and head of Worldwide Medical and Safety within Worldwide Research, Development, and Medicine.
Go to Profile#1903
Marie-France Sagot
#82044
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Marie-France Sagot is director of research at the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation and a member of staff at Claude Bernard University Lyon 1 where she works on algorithms for computational biology and gene prediction and biological sequence analysis. She was elected a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology in 2019 for "outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics". Since 2002 she has been a visiting research fellow at King's College London.
Go to Profile#1904
Imogen Coe
#43095
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Imogen Ruth Coe is a British-born biochemist. Educated in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States, Coe has taught at York University in Canada. She is a professor of biochemistry and founding dean of the Faculty of Science at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto.
Go to Profile#1905
Amy B. Heimberger
#124875
Overall Influence
Amy B. Heimberger is an American neurosurgeon and physician-scientist. She is the Jean Malnati Miller Professor of Neurological Surgery, vice-chair for research in the department of neurological Surgery at Feinberg School of Medicine and scientific director of The Malnati Brain Tumor Institute at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Go to Profile#1906
Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz
#107987
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz is a French paediatrician, Professor and Director of the Developmental Neuroimaging Lab at CNRS. Her research uses non-invasive brain imaging to understand children's cognitive function. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Go to Profile#1907
Elizabeth A. Winzeler
#136555
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Elizabeth Ann Winzeler is an American microbiologist and geneticist. She is a professor in the Division of Host-Microbe Systems and Therapeutics of the School of Medicine at the University of California at San Diego. Although she works in a variety of different disease areas, most research focuses on developing better medicines for the treatment and eradication of malaria.
Go to Profile#1908
Dawn R. Bazely
#118605
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Dawn R. Bazely is a full professor in biology in the Faculty of Science, and the former Director of the Institute for Research Innovation in Sustainability , at York University in Canada. In 2015 she was awarded the title of University Professor for services to research, teaching, and the institution. Bazely has been a field biologist for forty years and her research specializes in plant-animal interactions in ecology. She has also been recognized for her science communication.
Go to Profile#1909
Li Ding
#127093
Overall Influence
Li Ding is the David English Smith Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Washington University. She is known for the development of multiple computational tools now commonly used in cancer biology research, including VarScan, HotSpot3D, and BreakDancer.
Go to Profile#1910
Natasha Mhatre
#79008
Overall Influence
Natasha Mhatre is a researcher in Canada at Western University whose research focuses on animal communication. Focusing on insect biomechanics, she is an assistant professor and NSERC Canada Research Chair in invertebrate neurobiology.
Go to Profile#1911
Paola Picotti
#129660
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Paola Picotti is an Italian biologist who is Professor for Molecular Systems Biology at ETH Zürich. She is Deputy Head of the Institute for Molecular Systems Biology. Her research investigates how the conformational changes of proteins impact cellular networks. She was awarded the 2020 ETH Zürich Rössler Prize and the 2019 EMBO Gold Medal.
Go to Profile#1912
María Domínguez Castellano
#140275
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
María Domínguez Castellano is a Spanish neuroscientist and director of the Department of Developmental Neurobiology in the Institute of Neurosciences, Alicante, Spain, which is a joint Miguel Hernández University of Elche and Spanish National Research Council institution.
Go to Profile#1913
Dana Philpott
#117945
Overall Influence
Dana Philpott is a professor of immunology at the University of Toronto. Biography Dana Philpott completed a B.Sc. in biology from the University of Calgary, and then completed her graduate studies in the department of microbiology at the University of Toronto. By the time she graduated, the departments of microbiology and genetics had merged, and Philpott became the first microbiologist with a PhD from the department of molecular genetics and microbiology at the University of Toronto. She studied enterohemorrhagic and enteropathogenic E.coli under Philip Sherman.
Go to Profile#1914
Maya Schuldiner
#131472
Overall Influence
Maya Schuldiner is an Israeli biologist working at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Her research focuses on organelles, using high-throughput screening and imaging techniques to discover the functions of proteins in yeast. She received the EMBO Gold Medal in 2017 for discovering the functions of proteins that no one had previously studied.
Go to Profile#1915
Lily Pereg
#142666
Overall Influence
1964 - 2019 (55 years)
Lily Pereg was an Australian microbiologist who was born in Israel and studied at university in Tel Aviv. She moved to Australia in the 1990s to undertake a PhD at the University of Sydney, which she completed in 1998. In 2001 Pereg took up an appointment at the University of New England, where she was promoted to Professor of Microbiology in 2018.
Go to Profile#1916
Helen Roy
#99900
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Helen Elizabeth Roy, is a British ecologist, entomologist, and academic, specialising in ladybirds and non-native species. Since 2007, she has been a principal scientist and ecologist at the NERC's Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. From 1997 to 2008, she taught at Anglia Ruskin University, rising to the rank of Reader in Ecology. She is the co-organiser of the UK Ladybird Survey, alongside Dr Peter Brown, is a visiting professor in the School of Biological Sciences, University of Reading, is co-chair of the IPBES assessment of invasive alien species, and is a past President of the Royal Entomo...
Go to Profile#1917
Lacey Knowles
#138548
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
L. Lacey Knowles is an ecologist and evolutionary biologist known for her work with speciation, sexual selection, phylogeography, and evolutionary radiation. As of 2012, she is a professor at the University of Michigan and the curator of insects at the university's museum of zoology. She has been an elected member of the councils for the Society for the Study of Evolution and the Society of Systematic Biology. Knowles received her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolution from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and had a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona.
Go to Profile#1918
Lia Osipian
#95723
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Lia Levonevna Osipian is an Armenian biologist, plant physiologist, and mycologist. Career Born in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, Osipian studied at Yerevan State University from 1947 to 1952. After graduating, she worked as an assistant and lecturer at the university until she received her doctorate in biological sciences in 1970. She became a professor in the Department of Botany in the Faculty of Botany at Yerevan State University in 1971. Twice, from 1986 to 1990 and 1999 to 2002, she served as the dean of the Faculty of Biology. In 1996, Osipian became a full member of the Armenian National Academy of Sciences and is an Honorary Scientist of Armenia.
Go to Profile#1919
Victoria Cowling
#138107
Overall Influence
Victoria Haigh Cowling FRSE is an English biologist who received the Women in Cell Biology Early Career Medal from the British Society for Cell Biology in 2014. Cowling is Professor of Biology, Lister Institute Fellow, MRC Senior Fellow and Deputy Head of The Centre for Gene Regulation and Expression at the University of Dundee.
Go to Profile#1920
Z. N. Tahmida Begum
#133747
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Z. N. Tahmida Begum is a botanist and former chairperson of Bangladesh Public Service Commission, the first woman chairperson of the commission. She is a professor of botany at the University of Dhaka.
Go to Profile#1921
Wendy Nelson
#111756
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Wendy Alison Nelson is a New Zealand marine scientist and world expert in phycology. She is New Zealand's leading authority on seaweeds. Nelson is particularly interested in the biosystematics of seaweeds/macroalgae of New Zealand, with research on floristics, evolution and phylogeny, as well as ecology, and life history studies of marine algae. Recently she has worked on the systematics and biology of red algae including coralline algae, distribution and diversity of seaweeds in harbours and soft sediment habitats, and seaweeds of the Ross Sea and Balleny Islands.
Go to Profile#1922
Liz Sockett
#125937
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Renee Elizabeth Sockett is a professor and microbiologist in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Nottingham. She is a world-leading expert on Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus, a species of predatory bacteria.
Go to Profile#1923
Maria Rosa Miracle Solé
#86764
Overall Influence
1945 - 2017 (72 years)
Maria Rosa Miracle Solé was a Catalan biologist, who held a Professor Emeritus of Ecology at the University of Valencia and a PhD in ecology from the University of Barcelona. Her research focused on the study of biodiversity, ecology, integrative taxonomy and biogeography of aquatic organisms.
Go to Profile#1924
Glenda Gobe
#131698
Overall Influence
Glenda Gobe is a molecular biologist specialising in the molecular controls of apoptosis in kidney disease. She is Co-Director of the Centre for Kidney Disease Research , School of Medicine, Translational Research Institute and The University of Queensland and Reader in the Discipline of Medicine at the School of Medicine, University of Queensland.
Go to Profile#1925
Elizabeth Cutter
#130431
Overall Influence
1929 - 2010 (81 years)
Elizabeth Graham Cutter was a Scottish professor at the University of Manchester and oversaw its botany department merged with ten other departments and worked to ensure it would be established in the new school.
Go to Profile#1926
Tracey Shors
#92970
Overall Influence
Tracey Shors is a neuroscientist and distinguished professor in behavioral neuroscience, systems neuroscience, and psychology as well as a member of the Center for Collaborative Neuroscience at Rutgers University. She is currently vice chair and director of graduate studies in the department of psychology.
Go to Profile#1927
Etheldreda Nakimuli-Mpungu
#64756
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Etheldreda Nakimuli-Mpungu is a professor, researcher, epidemiologist and psychiatrist at the Department of Psychiatry in the Faculty of Medicine, Makerere University in Uganda. Her research is particularly focused on supportive group psychotherapy as a first-line treatment for depression in people with HIV. She is one of only five recipients of the Elsevier Foundation Award for Early Career Women Scientists in the Developing World in Biological Sciences, as well as listed at one of the BBC's 100 Women in 2020.
Go to Profile#1928
Maria Jasin
#82464
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Maria Jasin is a developmental biologist at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She is known for studying homologous recombination, a method in which double-strand breaks in DNA strands are repaired, and for discovering the role of BRCA1 and BRCA2 in cancers.
Go to Profile#1929
Iruka Okeke
#123078
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Iruka Okeke is a Nigerian microbiologist who studies the genetics of enteric disease-causing bacteria such as E. coli. She also researches ways to improve microbiology laboratory practices in Africa. She is a fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Sciences and the African Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#1930
Barbara E. Ehrlich
#97132
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Barbara E. Ehrlich is Professor of Pharmacology and of Cellular and Molecular Physiology at Yale University working on the biophysics of membrane ion channels. Recent research investigates the function of polycystin-2, the inositol trisphosphate receptor, and the ryanodine receptor.
Go to Profile#1931
Jun Zhu
#72930
Overall Influence
Jun Zhu is a statistician and entomologist who works as a professor in the Departments of Statistics and Entomology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research interests involve the analysis of spatial data and spatio-temporal data, and the applications of this analysis in environmental statistics.
Go to Profile#1932
Andrea L. Graham
#143861
Overall Influence
Andrea L. Graham is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and a former co-director of the Global Health Program at Princeton University. She works in immunoparasitology to understand the evolutionary ecology of host defenses and parasite transmission strategies. In 2018, she was named a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow, and in 2020 she was elected as a Fellow of AAAS. From 2006 to 2010, she was awarded a BBSRC David Phillps Fellowship to investigate immune responses to co-infection while at the University of Edinburgh.
Go to Profile#1933
Margreet Vissers
#139537
Overall Influence
Margreet Catherina Maria Vissers is a New Zealand biochemistry academic, and as of 2019 is a full professor at the University of Otago. Academic career After a PhD titled 'The Effects of neutrophil oxidants and proteinases on the degradation of glomerular basement membrane : implications for inflammatory tissue damage ' at the University of Otago, Vissers joined the staff, rising to full professor.
Go to Profile#1934
Neelima Sinha
#141091
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Neelima Roy Sinha is an American botanist. She is a professor at the University of California Davis. Early life and education Neelima Sinha was born on March 26, 1954, in a small town near New Delhi, India. She earned her masters in Botany from Lucknow University in 1975 after which she worked for nine years as a bank manager before returning to academia, first moving to Waco, Texas in 1985 for a one year masters in environmental studies and then in 1986 entered the University of California, Berkeley where she was the first student to join the lab Sarah Hake a maize geneticist at the Plant Gene Expression Center.
Go to Profile#1935
Katherine L Nathanson
#143959
Overall Influence
#1936
Chonnettia Jones
#103922
Overall Influence
Chonnettia Jones is an American geneticist and developmental biologist. She has served as the executive director of Addgene since 2022. Jones was previously the vice president of research at the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research and the director of Insight & Analysis at the Wellcome Trust.
Go to Profile#1937
Zoe G. Cardon
#77785
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Zoe G. Cardon is an American ecosystems ecologist focused on observing and understanding ecosystem interactions in the rhizosphere. She has also played an integral role in developing systems to better study the rhizosphere without digging it up and interfering with the ecosystems using stable isotopes and mathematical modeling. Cardon is currently a senior scientist at the Marine Biology Laboratory at the Ecosystems Center and an adjunct professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Brown University. She is credited with helping to establish the National Microbiome Initiative at the White H...
Go to Profile#1938
Sally Aitken
#107861
Overall Influence
Sally Nora Aitken is a Professor and Associate Dean of Research and Innovation at the University of British Columbia. In 2017, Aitken was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Career After earning her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, Aitken joining the faculty at Oregon State University. She was then offered a position at the University of British Columbia as a NSERC Industrial Research Chair. In 2001, Aitken helped start the Centre for Forest Conservation Genetics at UBC alongside Tongli Wang.
Go to Profile#1939
Pirjo Nuutila
#144152
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
#1940
Kate Lajtha
#143389
Overall Influence
Kate Lajtha is an ecologist known for her use of stable isotopes to examine biogeochemical cycling in soils. Education and career Lajtha has a B.A. in biology from Harvard University and earned her Ph.D. from Duke University in botany in 1986. Following her Ph.D. she was a postdoctoral fellow at Ohio State University before joining Boston University in 1987. In 1996 she moved to Oregon State University where she was promoted to Professor in 2010. Lajtha has been Editor-in-Chief of the journal Biogeochemistry since 2002.
Go to Profile#1941
Sandra Davidge
#138836
Overall Influence
Sandra Davidge is a Canadian scientist whose research explores pregnancy complications. She is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Alberta in Canada, and the Executive Director of the Women and Children’s Health Research Institute. Davidge was appointed as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada , and a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.
Go to Profile#1942
Elza Polak
#104376
Overall Influence
1910 - 1995 (85 years)
Elza Polak was a Yugoslav horticulturist and gardener. She is considered one of the pioneers of modern horticulture in Croatia. Education and early career Polak was born in Ogulin on 25 May 1910. "A love for flowers and nature", as she put it, led her to study agronomy at the University of Zagreb. As a student, she became a member of Zagreb's horticultural society, where she took gardening classes.
Go to Profile#1943
Dani Rabaiotti
#48619
Overall Influence
Dani Rabaiotti is an English environmental scientist and popular science writer based at the Institute of Zoology at the Zoological Society of London. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Does It Fart, as well as two other books. Her fields of research include global change biology, science policy and science communication.
Go to Profile#1944
Holly Brown-Borg
#119660
Overall Influence
Holly Brown-Borg is an American biologist and biogerontologist best known for her research on the regulation of lifespan by growth hormone. She is the Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology, Physiology & Therapeutics at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences.
Go to Profile#1945
Janet Grieve
#103181
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Janet Mary Grieve , also known as Janet Bradford-Grieve and Janet Bradford, is a New Zealand biological oceanographer, born in 1940. She is researcher emerita at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in Wellington. She has researched extensively on marine taxonomy and biological productivity. She was president of both the New Zealand Association of Scientists and the World Association of Copepodologists .
Go to Profile#1946
Angela Sessitsch
#144432
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
#1947
Patricia Burrowes
#140807
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Patricia A. Burrowes Gomez is an American herpetologist. She is a professor of biology at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus where she serves as principal investigator of the Amphibian Disease Ecology Lab. Burrowes specializes in amphibian population dynamics.
Go to Profile#1948
Patsy Ann McLaughlin
#116938
Overall Influence
1932 - 2011 (79 years)
Patsy Ann "Pat" McLaughlin , was an American carcinologist and was regarded as being one of the most influential scientists in her field. The crab genus Patagurus was named in her honor in 2013. Early life and education McLaughlin was born in Seattle on May 27, 1932 to Edna Pearl Lessenger and Elmer Robert McLaughlin. She attended both Palo Alto Junior and Senior High School and graduated in 1946. She went on to attend both the University of Utah and the University of Washington, but did not obtain a degree. After serving in the United States Air Force, McLaughlin returned to tertiary educatio...
Go to Profile#1949
Katalin Susztak
#115671
Overall Influence
Katalin Susztak is a Hungarian American scientist and nephrologist at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a professor of medicine and genetics, and currently the codirector of the Complications Unit at the Institute for Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism. Her laboratory made major contributions to the current understanding of kidney disease development. She is also the founder of the Transformative Research In DiabEtic NephropaThy , a collaborative network of physicians and basic scientists, to find cures for diabetic kidney disease.
Go to Profile#1950
Susan Henry
#144593
Overall Influence
Susan Henry is a professor of molecular biology and genetics at Cornell University, and formerly the Ronald P. Lynch Dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. She is best known for her work in the genetic regulation of lipid metabolism in yeast.
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