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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Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Biology,

#201

Susan Gottesman

#33767

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Susan Gottesman is a microbiologist at the National Cancer Institute , which is part of the National Institutes of Health. Gottesman has been the editor of the Annual Review of Microbiology since 2008.

#202

Catherine Dulac

#43424

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Catherine Dulac is a French–American biologist. She is the Higgins Professor in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University, where she served as department chair from 2007 to 2013. She is also an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She was born in 1963 in France. She came to the United States for her postdoctoral study in 1991.

#203

Nancy Kleckner

#44803

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Nancy Kleckner is the Herchel Smith Professor of Molecular Biology at Harvard University and principal investigator at the Kleckner Laboratory at Harvard University. Education Nancy Kleckner worked with Matt Meselson as an undergraduate at Harvard University, earning her degree in 1968. She then moved on to do her PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology working with Ethan Signer on the genetics of lambda phage and DNA replication. She did a postdoc under David Botstein at Princeton University in 1974.

#204

Natasha Raikhel

#46314

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Natasha V. Raikhel is a professor of plant cell biology at University of California, Riverside and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Early life and education Raikhel, the daughter of a surgeon and an X-Ray technician, grew up in Leningrad in the Soviet Union. From a young age, she was cultivated to become a concert pianist, until a teacher dissuaded her during her final year of high school from pursuing music as a career. After transferring to a regular high school from the music conservatory, she studied various sciences day and night, finally earning high enough scores to attend Leningrad State University to study invertebrae biology.

#205

Susan E. Evans

#35706

Overall Influence

Susan E. Evans is British palaeontologist and herpetologist. She is the author or co-author of over 100 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters. She received a BSc in Zoology at Bedford College in 1974, and in 1977 a PhD in vertebrate palaeontology from the University College London. In 1980 she was Assistant Professor in biology at the University College of Bahrain and went continued as a lecturer in Anatomy at Middlesex Hospital Medical School. She was also Senior Lecturer with the Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology at the University College, London In 2003, she became a Profess...

#206

Jane Gibson

#33855

Overall Influence

1924 - 2008 (84 years)

Audrey Jane Gibson was a British-American microbiologist and biochemist who worked in the field of photosynthetic bacteria. She discovered that selenium is required by the metabolism of coliform bacteria and described a new species of sulphur bacterium in the genus Chloroherpeton. She became a Professor at Cornell University in 1979 and was editor of the scientific journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

#207

Shubha Tole

#32463

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Shubha Tole is an Indian neuroscientist, professor and principal Investigator at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India. Her research investigates the development and evolution of the mammalian brain. In 2014, she won the Infosys Prize in the Life Sciences category.

#208

Laurence Zitvogel

#33380

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Laurence Zitvogel is a French physician specializing in oncology and immunology with a large research experience in exosomess and the biological impact of those structures in malignant neoplasms. Personal life Laurence Zitvogel was born in Suresnes, France on 25 December 1963. She has worked with her spouse, Guido Kroemer, since 2001.

#209

Catherine Verfaillie

#17452

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Catherine M. Verfaillie obtained an M.D. from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 1982. After graduation, she specialized in internal medicine and in 1987. Currently she works as a Belgian molecular biologist and professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven . Her work on the ability of adult stem cells to differentiate to different cell types has garnered controversy due to accusations of poor laboratory practices and fabrication of data by members of her laboratory. In 2019, it was shown that several of her more recent papers also contained altered images and potential fraud was committed.

#210

Helen Hobbs

#27600

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Helen Haskell Hobbs is an American medical researcher who is professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, who won a 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and the 2018 Harrington Prize for Innovation in Medicine. She and Jonathan C. Cohen found that people with hypomorphic PCSK9 mutations had lower LDL-cholesterol levels and were almost immune to heart disease. This finding led to the development of a new class of cholesterol-lowering drugs that mimic the effects of the PCSK9 mutations. She and Cohen also identified t...

#211

Gillian Griffiths

#43246

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Gillian Griffiths, FMedSci FRS is a British cell biologist and immunologist. Griffiths was one of the first to show that immune cells have specialised mechanisms of secretion, and identified proteins and mechanisms that control cytotoxic T lymphocyte secretion. Griffiths is Professor of Cell Biology and Immunology at the University of Cambridge and is the Director of the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research.

#212

Janet Kelso

#48136

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Janet Kelso is a South African computational biologist and Group leader of the Minerva Research Group for Bioinformatics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. She is best known for her work comparing DNA from previous humans with those of the present .

#213

Frances Ashcroft

#29107

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Dame Frances Mary Ashcroft is a British ion channel physiologist. She is Royal Society GlaxoSmithKline Research Professor at the University Laboratory of Physiology at the University of Oxford. She is a fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, and is a director of the Oxford Centre for Gene Function. Her research group has an international reputation for work on insulin secretion, type II diabetes and neonatal diabetes. Her work with Andrew Hattersley has helped enable children born with diabetes to switch from insulin injections to tablet therapy.

#214

Paola S. Timiras

#29154

Overall Influence

1923 - 2008 (85 years)

Paola S. Timiras, born Paola Silvestri, was an endocrinologist studying stress. Background and education Paola Silvestri was born on July 21, 1923, in Rome, Italy, just after Italy's takeover by Mussolini and his Fascist movement. Her father, a statistician and strong anti-Fascist, fled the following year to France, where his daughter visited often. Even as a girl, she dreamed of becoming a doctor, like her grandfather and uncle.

#215

Isabel Pérez Farfante

#41999

Overall Influence

1916 - 2009 (93 years)

Isabel Pérez Farfante was a Cuban-born carcinologist. She was the first Cuban woman to receive her Ph.D. from an Ivy League school. She returned to Cuba from the United States only to be blacklisted by Fidel Castro's government. She and her family escaped Cuba, and she became one of the world's foremost zoologists studying prawns. She discovered large populations of shrimp off the coast of Cuba and published one of the most noted books on shrimps: "Penaeoid and Sergestoid Shrimps and Prawns of the World. Keys and Diagnoses for the Families and Genera."

#216

Shiu-Ying Hu

#30095

Overall Influence

1910 - 2012 (102 years)

Shiu-Ying Hu, BBS , or Hu Xiuying, was a Chinese botanist. She was an expert in the plant genera of Ilex , Hemerocallis , and Panax . She studied the families Orchidaceae, Compositae, and Malvaceae, and Chinese medicinal herbs and food plants. She was given the nickname "Holly Hu" by her colleagues for her extensive work with holly plants.

#217

Riitta Hari

#28975

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Riitta Kyllikki Hari is a Finnish neuroscientist, physician and professor at Aalto University. She has led the Brain Research Unit at the Low Temperature Laboratory since 1982. Hari was appointed as Academician of Science on 26 November 2010.

#218

Aoife McLysaght

#26531

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Aoife McLysaght is an Irish geneticist and a professor in the Molecular Evolution Laboratory of the Smurfit Institute of Genetics, Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. Education McLysaght was educated at the Trinity College Dublin where she was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in Genetics in 1998, followed by a PhD in 2002 for research supervised by Kenneth H. Wolfe on the evolution of vertebrate genome organisation.

#219

Galit Lahav

#44827

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Galit Lahav is an Israeli-American systems biologist and Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. In 2018 she became Chair of the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. She is known for discovering the pulsatile behavior of the tumor suppressor protein p53 and uncovering its significance for cell fate, and for her contributions to the culture of mentoring in science. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

#220

Suzanne Batra

#35054

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Suzanne Wellington Tubby Batra is an American entomologist best known for her work on the classification of insect societies and for coining the term eusociality. Batra was born in New York City where her father Roger W. Tubby was a journalist and secretary to President Truman, later serving in the United Nations as US Ambassador during the Kennedy period. At a young age, she was exposed to outdoor life, natural history, fishing and hunting especially after the family moved to the Adirondacks. She graduated from Saranac Lake High School in 1956 and received a Bachelor of Arts in zoology from Swarthmore College in 1960.

#221

Judy Armitage

#42554

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Judith Patricia Armitage is a British molecular and cellular biochemist at the University of Oxford. Early life and education Armitage was born on 21 February 1951 in Shelley, Yorkshire, England. She attended Selby Girls' High School, an all-female grammar school, then located in the West Riding of Yorkshire. In her sixth form, the school became the co-educational Selby Grammar School.

#222

Sarah O'Connor

#36335

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Sarah E. O'Connor is an American molecular biologist working to understand the molecular machinery involved in assembling important plant natural products – vinblastine, morphine, iridoids, secologanin – and how changing the enzymes involved in this pathway lead to diverse analogs. She was a Project Leader at the John Innes Centre in the UK between 2011 and 2019. O'Connor was appointed by the Max Planck Society in 2018 to head the Department of Natural Product Biosynthesis at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, taking up her role during 2019.

#223

Maria Grazia Spillantini

#29766

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Maria Grazia Spillantini , is Professor of Molecular Neurology in the Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Cambridge. She is most noted for identifying the protein alpha-synuclein as the major component of Lewy bodies, the characteristic protein deposit found in the brain in Parkinson's disease and dementia with Lewy bodies. She has also identified mutations in the MAPT gene as a heritable cause for frontotemporal dementia.

#224

Anne O'Garra

#35665

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Anne O'Garra FRS FMedSci is a British immunologist who has made important discoveries on the mechanism of action of Interleukin 10. O'Garra was born in Gibraltar. Biography She was born to Fred O,Garra and Isaac Wimett in 1954, as a child she was noted as having a keen mind.

#225

Tania A. Baker

#34695

Overall Influence

Tania A. Baker is an American biochemist who is a Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and formally the head of the Department of Biology. She earned her B.S. in Biochemistry from University of Wisconsin–Madison and her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Stanford University under the guidance of Arthur Kornberg. She joined the MIT faculty in 1992 and her research is focused on the mechanisms and regulation of DNA transposition and protein chaperones. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been a How...

#226

Mary Blue

#22891

Overall Influence

Mary Elizabeth Blue is an American neurobiologist and computational neurologist. She is an associate professor of neurology and neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a research scientist in the neuroscience laboratory at Kennedy Krieger Institute.

#227

Francesca Happé

Francesca Happé

#22626

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Francesca Gabrielle Elizabeth Happé is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Director of the MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London. Her research concerns autism spectrum conditions, specifically the understanding social cognitive processes in these conditions.

#228

Claire M. Fraser

Claire M. Fraser

#32573

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Claire M. Fraser is an American genome scientist and microbiologist who has worked in microbial genomics and genome medicine. Her research has contributed to the understanding of the diversity and evolution of microbial life. Fraser is the director of the Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD, where she holds the Dean's Endowed Professorship in the School of Medicine. She has joint faculty appointments at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in the Departments of Medicine and Microbiology/Immunology. In 2019, she began servin...

#229

Margaret Hotchkiss

#43292

Overall Influence

Margaret Hotchkiss was a distinguished professor at the University of Kentucky. She is a microbiologist known for her work on bacteria in seawater and sewage, and fungi that cause disease. In 1957, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.

#230

Elisa Izaurralde

#35212

Overall Influence

1959 - 2018 (59 years)

Elisa Izaurralde was an Uruguayan biochemist and molecular biologist. She served as Director and Scientific Member of the Department of Biochemistry at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen from 2005 until her death in 2018. In 2008, she was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, shared with Elena Conti, for "fundamental new insights into intracellular RNA transport and RNA metabolism". Together with Conti, she helped characterize proteins important for exporting mRNA out of the nucleus and later in her career she helped elucidate mechanisms of mRNA silencing, t...

#231

Lalita Ramakrishnan

Lalita Ramakrishnan

#28859

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Lalita Ramakrishnan is an Indian-born American microbiologist who is known for her contributions to the understanding of the biological mechanism of tuberculosis. she serves as a professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the University of Cambridge, where she is also a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow and a practicing physician. Her research is conducted at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology , where she serves as the Head of the Molecular Immunity Unit of the Department of Medicine embedded at the MRC LMB. Working with Stanley Falkow at Stanford, she developed the strategy of using Mycobacterium marinum infection as a model for tuberculosis.

#232

Ursula Goodenough

Ursula Goodenough

#12412

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Ursula W. Goodenough is a Professor of Biology Emerita at Washington University in St. Louis where she engaged in research on eukaryotic algae. She authored the textbook Genetics and the best-selling book Sacred Depths of Nature and speaks regularly about religious naturalist orientation and evolution. She contributed to the NPR blog, 13.7: Cosmos & Culture, from 2009 to 2011.

#233

Mary-Lou Pardue

#49956

Overall Influence

Mary-Lou Pardue is an American geneticist who is a professor emerita in the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which she originally joined in 1972. Her research focused on the role of telomeres in chromosome replication, particularly in Drosophila .

#234

Melanie Brinkmann

#45993

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Melanie Brinkmann is a German virologist. Until 2019 she was probably best known in connection with her work on the Cytomegalovirus. During 2020 she has emerged as a much consulted expert-pundit for media commentators keen to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic. Brinkmann takes a robust public position in the campaign against pandemic misinformation: she has described the so-called "virus of false information" as "more deadly than the [COVID-19] virus itself".

#235

Yehudith Birk

#27181

Overall Influence

1926 - 2013 (87 years)

Yehudith Birk was a Polish-born Israeli biochemist, awarded the 1998 Israel Prize for agricultural research. Biography Yehudith Gershtanski was born in Grajewo, Poland to Frida and Yitzhak Gershtanski , both ardent Zionist activists. Frida was an accountant and Baruch was a businessman. The family immigrated to the British Mandate for Palestine in 1935, settling in Tel Aviv. Gershtanski attended the school for workers’ children on Lasalle Street in Tel Aviv. She studied for a master's degree in biochemistry and microbiology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, completing her degree in December 1950.

#236

Tali Sharot

#17512

Overall Influence

Tali Sharot is an Israeli/British/American neuroscientist and professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and MIT. Sharot began studying at Tel Aviv University, receiving a B.A. in economics in 1999, and an M.A. in psychology from New York University in 2002. She received her Ph.D in psychology and neuroscience from New York University. Sharot is known for her research on the neural basis of emotion, decision making and optimism. Sharot hopes to better understand these processes to enhance overall well-being.

#237

Tracy L. Johnson

#48618

Overall Influence

Tracy L. Johnson is the Keith and Cecilia Terasaki Presidential Endowed Chair in the Life Sciences and Professor of Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles . She is also a professor of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In May 2020, she was named Dean of the UCLA Division of Life Sciences.

#238

Evelyn M. Witkin

Evelyn M. Witkin

#23360

Overall Influence

1921 - 2023 (102 years)

Evelyn M. Witkin was an American bacterial geneticist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory , SUNY Downstate Medical Center , and Rutgers University . Witkin was considered innovative and inspirational as a scientist, teacher and mentor.

#239

Pamela C. Rasmussen

Pamela C. Rasmussen

#32233

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Pamela Cecile Rasmussen is an American ornithologist and expert on Asian birds. She was formerly a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and is based at the Michigan State University. She is associated with other major centers of research in the United States and the United Kingdom.

#240

Gina Rippon

#23381

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Gina Rippon is a British neurobiologist and feminist. She is a professor emeritus of cognitive neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre, Aston University, Birmingham. Rippon has also sat on the editorial board of the International Journal of Psychophysiology. In 2019, Rippon published her book, Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience that Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain, which investigates the role of life experiences and biology in brain development.

#241

Melitta Schachner

#56354

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

#242

Kamal Ranadive

#35796

Overall Influence

1917 - 2001 (84 years)

Kamal Jayasing Ranadive was an Indian biomedical researcher known for her research on the links between cancers and viruses. She was a founding member of the Indian Women Scientists' Association . In the 1960s, she established India's first tissue culture research laboratory at the Indian Cancer Research Centre in Mumbai.

#243

Vanessa Ruta

#30009

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Vanessa Julia Ruta is an American neuroscientist known for her work on the structure and function of chemosensory circuits underlying innate and learned behaviors in the fly Drosophila melanogaster. She is the Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Associate Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Neurophysiology and Behavior at The Rockefeller University and, as of 2021, an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

#244

Yuan Chang

#27609

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Yuan Chang is a Taiwanese-American virologist and pathologist who co-discovered together with her husband, Patrick S. Moore, the Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus and Merkel cell polyomavirus, two of the seven known human oncoviruses.

#245

Elisabeth Bik

#27939

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Elisabeth Margaretha Harbers-Bik is a Dutch microbiologist and scientific integrity consultant. Bik is known for her work detecting photo manipulation in scientific publications, and identifying over 4,000 potential cases of improper research conduct, including 400 research papers published by authors in China from a research paper mill company. Bik is the founder of Microbiome Digest, a blog with daily updates on microbiome research, and the Science Integrity Digest blog.

#246

Sylvie Cloutier

#39694

Overall Influence

Sylvie Cloutier is a Canadian scientist. She is a specialist in molecular genetics at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's Ottawa Research and Development Centre and an adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa. She has co-led two Genome Canada Large Scale Applied Research projects of $11M each and has been involved in over 110 published research papers and made contributions to many books.

#247

Therese Ann Markow

#45754

Overall Influence

Therese Ann Markow is the Amylin Chair in Life Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Her research involves the use of genetics and ecology to study the insects of the Sonoran Desert. She was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2001 and the Genetics Society of America George Beadle Award in 2012. Her research received widespread attention for its alleged misuse of Native American genetic data.

#248

Mae-Wan Ho

#26399

Overall Influence

1941 - 2016 (75 years)

Mae-Wan Ho was a geneticist known for her critical views on genetic engineering and evolution. She authored or co-authored a number of publications, including 10 books, such as The Rainbow and the Worm, the Physics of Organisms , Genetic Engineering: Dream or Nightmare? , Living with the Fluid Genome and Living Rainbow H2O .

#249

Suzanna Lewis

#44196

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Suzanna E. Lewis was a scientist and Principal investigator at the Berkeley Bioinformatics Open-source Project based at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory until her retirement in 2019. Lewis led the development of open standards and software for genome annotation and ontologies.

#250

Joan Brugge

#50424

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Joan S. Brugge is the Louise Foote Pfeiffer Professor of Cell Biology and the Director of the Ludwig Center at Harvard Medical School, where she also served as the Chair of the Department of Cell Biology from 2004 to 2014. Her research focuses on cancer biology, and she has been recognized for her explorations into the Rous sarcoma virus, extracellular matrix adhesion, and epithelial tumor progression in breast cancer.

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