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,
#2051
Debra J. Skene
#148951
Overall Influence
Dr. Debra J. Skene is a chronobiologist with specific interest in the mammalian circadian rhythm and the consequences of disturbing the circadian system. She is also interested in finding their potential treatments for people who suffer from circadian misalignment. Skene and her team of researchers tackle these questions using animal models, clinical trials, and most recently, liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. Most notably, Skene is credited for her evidence of a novel photopigment in humans, later discovered to be melanopsin. She was also involved in discovering links between human PER3 genotype and an extremely shifted sleep schedules categorized as extreme diurnal preference.
Go to Profile#2052
Carmen Ayuso
#149836
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
#2053
Elizabeth Exley
#113591
Overall Influence
1927 - 2007 (80 years)
Elizabeth Morris Exley was an entomologist who researched Australian native bees particularly those in the subfamily Euryglossinae. Early life and education Elizabeth Exley was born in Bardon, Brisbane, Queensland, on 29 November 1927. Her extended family owned Bardon House, a home which later became part of St Joseph's Catholic School at Bardon in 1925. Her grandmother, also named Elizabeth Exley was credited with establishing a local branch of Mother's Union, which became a district nursing service now known as Anglicare. Young Elizabeth's father was a founding member of the Queensland Naturalists' Club, and the family had a strong interest in natural history.
Go to Profile#2054
Anita Hopper
#144214
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Anita Hopper is an American molecular geneticist who is a professor at the Ohio State University. She studies the mechanisms of distribution of RNA between the nucleus and cytoplasm. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2021.
Go to Profile#2055
Barbara Rehermann
#149972
Overall Influence
#2056
JoAnn Burkholder
#120186
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
JoAnn Marie Burkholder is an American professor of aquatic ecology at the North Carolina State University, Raleigh. She was responsible for identifying the cause, a dinoflagellate Pfiesteria piscicida and its toxins, of mass deaths of fish that posed a public health hazard. Her studies also helped in improving legislation to control pollution and eutrophication.
Go to Profile#2057
Sara Mednick
#91720
Overall Influence
Sara C. Mednick is a sleep researcher at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on the relationship between napping and performance. She is the author of several papers and a mass market book, Take a Nap! Change Your Life. She graduated with her PhD in psychology from Harvard University studying under Ken Nakayama and Robert Stickgold.
Go to Profile#2058
Leeanne Carey
#107982
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Professor Leeanne Carey is a world leading Australian neuroscientist in occupational therapy and stroke rehabilitation and recovery research. She is the founding leader of the Neurorehabilitation and Recovery research group in the Stroke division at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health in Melbourne, Australia, and currently holds a Future Fellowship awarded by the Australian Research Council .
Go to Profile#2059
Sally Leys
#148138
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Sally Leys is a Canadian spongiologist. She is a professor of biology at the University of Alberta where she and her colleagues study sponges in all their aspects including ecology, physiology, their adaptations to a fluid environment and the evolution of sensory systems using sponges as their model organism. A current project is Evaluating ecosystem function, vulnerability, resilience, and ability to recover from multiple stressors.
Go to Profile#2060
Donatella Marazziti
#150268
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
#2061
Uta Passow
#150363
Overall Influence
#2062
Nina Wedell
#149425
Overall Influence
Nina Wedell is a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. She was appointed as the Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow in 2019. She will investigate the evolutionary dynamics of sexual conflict and insecticide resistance genes at the University of Melbourne. Professor Wedell has pioneered the field of sexual selection, and is best known for her research on female multiple mating, polyandry. Her work has encompassed many insect systems including butterflies, moths, and flies.
Go to Profile#2063
Carol L. Boggs
#147151
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Carol Linda Boggs is an American biologist specializing in the reproductive biology, population biology, ecology, and evolution of butterflies. Boggs completed her BA in 1973 and her PhD in 1979 in zoology at the University of Texas at Austin. Since 2013, she has been a professor in the School of the Earth, Ocean and Environment and the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of South Carolina. Boggs is the author of more than 120 peer-reviewed articles and has served on editorial boards for several journals. She has been a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of...
Go to Profile#2064
Kimberly A. With
#117408
Overall Influence
Kimberly A. With is an American ecologist. She is a Full Professor in the Division of Biology at Kansas State University. Career Between 1988 and 1992, With served as Associate Editor for the journal Proceedings of the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology, published by the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology. She simultaneously earned her PhD in Biology from Colorado State University.
Go to Profile#2065
Olga Hudlická
#125618
Overall Influence
1926 - 2014 (88 years)
Olga Hudlická was a Czech-born physiologist, who fled the normalization of communism in her country and moved to England. Working at the University of Birmingham, she studied blood flow and restriction, as well as capillary growth in cardiac and skeletal muscles.
Go to Profile#2066
Ruth Chiquet-Ehrismann
#119525
Overall Influence
1954 - 2015 (61 years)
Ruth Chiquet-Ehrismann was a Swiss biochemist and cell biologist working on interactions in the extracellular matrix. Life Ruth Chiquet-Ehrismann was born in Zürich. She received her Ph.D. from the ETH Zürich in 1981. Her mentors were Hans M. Eppenberger and David C. Turner. As a postdoctoral fellow she worked with Robert Dottin at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, US. In 1984 she joined the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel as a Junior group leader and was promoted to Senior group leader in 1993.
Go to Profile#2067
Frances James
#136242
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Frances Crews James is an American ecologist who served as a Professor of Biological Sciences at Florida State University. James studied geographic variation in the size and shape of birds, leading to transplant experiments with red-winged blackbirds and to tests of the theoretical assumptions underlying selection models. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. James, originally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was immersed in the stream of biology at an early age being involved in the Academy of Natural Sciences Expeditions for Everyone.
Go to Profile#2068
Karen Teff
#113201
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Karen Teff is a biologist and geneticist. She received her education in Canada and has since been working in the United States. Teff has spent most of her career studying the effects of diabetes and other related diseases on humans.
Go to Profile#2069
Emmie de Wit
#122507
Overall Influence
Emmie de Wit is a Dutch-American virologist. She is chief of the molecular pathogenesis unit at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories. Her research combines pathogenesis studies with detailed molecular analyses to identify molecular determinants of severe respiratory tract disease within the virus and the host.
Go to Profile#2070
Helen McGregor
#66506
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Helen McGregor is an Australian geologist and climate change researcher. She is currently a Fellow with the Research School of Earth Sciences at the Australian National University. Her areas of expertise include isotope geochemistry, palaeoclimatology, climate change processes, marine geology and Quaternary environments.
Go to Profile#2071
Priya Rajasethupathy
#126500
Overall Influence
Priya Rajasethupathy is a neuroscientist and assistant professor at the Rockefeller University, leading the Laboratory of Neural Dynamics and Cognition. Education and early career Priya Rajasethupathy grew up in Brockport, New York. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in biology with a pre-medicine concentration from Cornell University in 2004. For her undergraduate thesis, she identified Aptamers that provided structural and functional insight into therapeutic compounds for epilepsy. Following her Bachelors, she moved to India for a year to work with people with mental illness, while also conducting neuroscience research at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore.
Go to Profile#2072
Lyn Gilbert
#146722
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Gwendolyn Lesley Gilbert , better known as Lyn Gilbert, is an Australian microbiologist who specialises in the control and prevention of infectious diseases, including COVID-19. Early life and education Gwendolyn Lesley Stewart-Murray was born in Melbourne in 1942. She was educated at Camberwell High School from 1954 to 1959 and was awarded dux of the school and won three scholarships for university. She graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1965 with an MBBS and returned to that university to complete her MD in 1991 with her thesis, "Infectious diseases in pregnancy and the newborn infant".
Go to Profile#2073
Yardena Samuels
#91978
Overall Influence
Yardena Samuels or Samuels-Lev is an Israeli molecular biologist who is the Director of the Ekard Institute for Cancer Diagnosis Research at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Her research considers the genetic mutations of melanoma.
Go to Profile#2074
Gail Jarvik
#144687
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Gail Jarvik is an American geneticist who is currently the Arno G. Motulsky Endowed Chair at University of Washington and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Go to Profile#2075
Ewa Kamler
#129790
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Ewa Kamler is a Polish biologist and ichthyologist, Professor of Natural Sciences specializing in the fields of ecology, hydrobiology and zoology. Life and career She graduated from the Juliusz Słowacki High School No. 7 in Warsaw and subsequently from the Faculty of Biology and Earth Sciences of the University of Warsaw. In 1965, she obtained a doctoral degree at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. In 1977, she received her habilitation from the Institute of Ecology of the Polish Academy of Sciences . On 9 March 1992, she obtained the title of Professor of Natural Sciences.
Go to Profile#2076
Janina R. Galler
#66335
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Janina R. Galler is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and Psychiatrist in the Chester M. Pierce MD Division of Global Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. She co-founded the 45-year Barbados Nutrition Study in the Lesser Antilles, in the Americas, with the late Sir Dr. Frank C. Ramsey, who was knighted for their joint efforts in eliminating malnutrition from Barbados. Dr. Galler has served as Director of this study since 1973. The Barbados Nutrition Study is a unique longitudinal study that has shown how the intergenerational legacy of poverty and disadvantage result from early childhood malnutrition and associated childhood adversities.
Go to Profile#2077
Vernonica Franklin-Tong
#140320
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Vernonica "Noni" Elsa Franklin-Tong is an English plant cell biologist who is Emeritus Professor at the University of Birmingham. She is known for her studies on self-incompatibility in Papaver rhoeas. In 2021 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Go to Profile#2078
Lucilla Parnetti
#151254
Overall Influence
#2079
Julie A. Mennella
#151302
Overall Influence
#2080
Andrea Antal
#151449
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
#2081
Yu Myeong-Hee
#136318
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Yu Myeong-Hee is a South Korean microbiologist, currently serving as the president of Korea Federation of Women's Science & Technology Associations and a principle researcher at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology. In July 2010, under President Lee Myung-bak, she was appointed as an inaugural Chief Secretary to the Future Strategy Planning Office, and served until February 2013.
Go to Profile#2082
Eugenia Brandt Böhlke
#122014
Overall Influence
1929 - 2001 (72 years)
Eugenia Brandt Böhlke was an American ichthyologist who published over thirty-five academic papers about moray eels. She was also an active collaborator with her husband James Erwin Böhlke, an ichthyologist who specialized in neotropical fishes. Both were associated with the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, and Genie Böhlke contributed research to the institution until her death in 2001.
Go to Profile#2083
Rosalind A. Segal
#129966
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Rosalind Anne Segal is an American neurobiologist. She is a Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and the Co-Chair of the Cancer Biology Department at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. Segal's work employs modern methods of cell and molecular biology to study the development of the mammalian brain with the goal of understanding how disruption of this normal process leads to the formation of brain malignancies.
Go to Profile#2084
Leah E. Cowen
#140241
Overall Influence
Leah Elizabeth Cowen is a Canadian mycologist and the Vice-President, Research and Innovation, and Strategic Initiatives at the University of Toronto. Early life and education Cowen earned her Bachelor of Science degree from the University of British Columbia and her PhD from the University of Toronto . During this time, she received a postgraduate scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the Whitehead Institute. While at MIT, she also received the 2005 Genzyme Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Go to Profile#2085
Cassandra Quave
#113703
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Cassandra Leah Quave is an American ethnobotanist, herbarium curator, and associate professor at Emory University. Her research focuses on analyzing natural, plant-based medicine of indigenous cultures to help combat infectious disease and antibiotic resistance. In particular, she studies bacterial biofilm inhibition and quorum-sensing inhibition of botanical extracts for inflammatory skin conditions.
Go to Profile#2086
Hazel Dockrell
#120895
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Hazel Marguerite Dockrell is an Irish-born microbiologist and immunologist whose research has focused on immunity to the human mycobacterial diseases, leprosy and tuberculosis. She has spent most of her career at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where as of 2020 she is a professor of immunology. She was the first female president of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Jimmy Whitworth of the Wellcome Trust describes her as "a marvellous ambassador for global health and research."
Go to Profile#2087
Annemarie Ohler
#141697
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Annemarie Ohler is an Austrian herpetologist and professor who concentrates on the taxonomy of amphibians. She has 3,602 citations and an h-index of 36. Life and work After graduating from the federal higher boarding school in Traunsee Castle, Upper Austria, Ohler studied zoology, botany and biochemistry at the University of Vienna, where she wrote a dissertation in 1987 on the larval development of the pond frog , a hybridogenetic hybrid from the complex of forms of water frogs and received her Ph.D. During her studies she had a one-year research stay at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, where she studied experimental embryology.
Go to Profile#2088
Kanaka Rajan
#113574
Overall Influence
Kanaka Rajan is a computational neuroscientist in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and founding faculty in the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University. Rajan trained in engineering, biophysics, and neuroscience, and has pioneered novel methods and models to understand how the brain processes sensory information. Her research seeks to understand how important cognitive functions — such as learning, remembering, and deciding — emerge from the cooperative activity of multi-scale neural processes, and how those processes are affected by various neuropsychiatric disease states.
Go to Profile#2089
Anita Corbett
#137643
Overall Influence
Anita Hargrave Corbett is an American biochemist who is the Samuel C. Dobbs Professor in the Department of Biology at Emory University. Her research investigates the molecular basis for disease, the regulation of protein import and mRNA export. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
Go to Profile#2090
Jan E. Leach
#117095
Overall Influence
Jan Elnor Leach is an American plant pathologist. She is known for her research of the molecular biology of plant pathogens, particularly those affecting rice plants. She has been the co-editor of the Annual Review of Phytopathology since 2015 and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#2091
Deborah Goldberg
#112664
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Deborah Esther Goldberg is an American ecologist and Margaret B. Davis Distinguished University Professor Emerita and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor Emerita in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan.
Go to Profile#2092
Valerie Speirs
#145373
Overall Influence
Valerie Speirs is a Professor of Molecular Oncology at the University of Aberdeen. Her research aims to identify biomarkers of breast cancer to inform diagnosis and treatment. Education Speirs studied zoology at the University of Aberdeen. She completed her graduate studies at the University of Glasgow. She worked with Ian Freshney on cell culture and became interested in how cell culture systems can be used to model disease.
Go to Profile#2093
Jean Beagle Ristaino
#103888
Overall Influence
Jean Beagle Ristaino is an American scientist and William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor of Plant Pathology. She is best known for her work on the epidemiology and population genetics of Oomycete plant pathogens in the genus Phytophthora and her work on the population genomics of historic outbreaks of the Irish famine pathogen, Phytophthora infestans
Go to Profile#2094
Carolina Villagrán
#119883
Overall Influence
Carolina Villagrán Moraga is a Chilean biologist known for her work on Quaternary biogeography. Her works include models for the past extent of different altitudinal zonations in Chile and on the origin of the Chilean flora. She is part of the Faculty of Science for the University of Chile.
Go to Profile#2095
Marla Feller
#134530
Overall Influence
Marla Beth Feller is the Paul Licht Distinguished Professor in Biological Sciences and Member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies the mechanisms that underpin the assembly of neural circuits during development. Feller is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#2096
Penelope Boston
#53319
Overall Influence
Penelope J. Boston is a speleologist. She was associate director of the National Cave and Karst Research Institute in Carlsbad, New Mexico, along with founding and directing the Cave and Karst Studies Program at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro. Among her research interests are geomicrobiology of caves and mines, extraterrestrial speleogenesis, and space exploration and astrobiology generally.
Go to Profile#2097
Sylvie Belleville
#152577
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
#2098
Cecilia Moens
#99100
Overall Influence
Cecilia Moens is a Canadian developmental biologist. Moens is part of the faculty at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, where she researches the vertebrate brain using zebrafish as a model organism.
Go to Profile#2099
Walborg Thorsell
#124820
Overall Influence
1919 - 2016 (97 years)
Walborg Susanna Thorsell was a Swedish scientist who performed research mainly on mosquitoes and mosquito repellents. Education Thorsell defended her thesis for her doctorate in veterinary medicine at the Swedish Veterinarian Institute in 1967, and was a docent in experimental parasitology.
Go to Profile#2100
Monique Simmonds
#100343
Overall Influence
Monique Sheelagh Jacquard Simmonds is a botanist who is deputy keeper of the Jodrell Laboratory at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Simmonds earned her BSc at the University of Leeds and her PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London.
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