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,

#2251

Loraine Obler

#119290
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Loraine Katherine Obler is an American linguist and neuroscientist, internationally recognized as a leading scholar in the field of neurolinguistics and multilingualism. Obler is known for her contributions to understanding how language-related behavior is controlled within the brain. Her research spans diverse sub-disciplines such as the neurolinguistics of bilingualism, language processing in aging and Alzheimer's disease, and the cross-language study of aphasia.
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#2252

Susan A. Martinis

#128682
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Susan A. Martinis is an American biochemist. She has co-authored over 57 publications in peer reviewed journals and scientific book chapters. Her expertise is in protein:RNA interactions and aminoacyl tRNA synthetases. As of 2019, she is the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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#2253

Joanna Verran

#145048
Overall Influence
Joanna Verran is an Emeritus Professor of Microbiology and Head of Science Communication at Manchester Metropolitan University . She studies the interaction of microorganisms with inert surfaces. She was awarded the 2019 AAAS Award for Public Engagement with Science.
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#2254

Mary Dasso

#144219
Overall Influence
Mary C. Dasso is an American biochemist known for research on chromosome segregation and the discovery of Ran GTPase. She is the acting scientific director of the division of intramural research and a senior investigator in the section on cell cycle regulation at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
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#2255

Diva Amon

Diva Amon
#68476
Overall Influence
Diva Joan Amon is a marine biologist from Trinidad. She is currently a post-doctoral researcher in the Benioff Ocean Initiative at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a 2022 Pew Marine Fellow. Previously, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Research Fellow at the Natural History Museum, London.
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#2256

Marisa Roberto

Marisa Roberto
#101200
Overall Influence
Marisa Roberto is an Italian-American neuroscientist and professor in the Department of Molecular Medicine and Neuroscience at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Roberto is recognized for her contributions to the understanding of alcohol addiction, specifically for her research on the effects of alcohol and neuromodulators on synaptic transmission in the central amygdala, a critical addiction-related brain region.
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#2257

Pamela Raymond

#133678
Overall Influence
Pamela A. Raymond is an American biologist. She is the Stephen S. Easter Collegiate Professor Emerita at University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. Education Raymond earned a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from University of Michigan.
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#2258

Nancy G. Klimas

#161287
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
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#2259

Yupa Hanboonsong

#138982
Overall Influence
Yupa Hanboonsong is a Thai entomologist, specializing in entomophagy . Hanboonsong received her PhD in insect systematics from Lincoln University in New Zealand, and currently works as an associate professor in the entomology department at Khon Kaen University.
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#2260

Lisa Giocomo

#123117
Overall Influence
Lisa Giocomo is an American neuroscientist who is a Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Giocomo probes the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying cortical neural circuits involved in spatial navigation and memory.
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#2261

Judith King

#148156
Overall Influence
1926 - 2010 (84 years)
Judith Eveleigh King was a British zoologist who specialised on seals. After graduating with honours from the University of London in 1948, she worked for 20 years in London at the Natural History section of the British Museum, and from 1969 to 1984 in the zoology department of the University of New South Wales. As well as publishing scholarly papers on taxonomy, her books Marine Mammals with Richard Harrison, and Seals of the World are standard reference works.
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#2262

Helle Krogh Johansen

#161600
Overall Influence
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#2263

Joni L. Rutter

#135474
Overall Influence
Joni L. Rutter is an American geneticist and director of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences . Rutter was previously director of the scientific programs in the All of Us initiative and served as the neuroscience and behavior division director at the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Her scientific experience includes clinical research in human genetics and environmental risk factors focusing on the fields of cancer and addiction.
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#2264

Claudia Mauri

#161704
Overall Influence
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#2265

Sarah Fawcett

#96108
Overall Influence
Sarah Fawcett is a South African oceanographer and climatologist. A senior lecturer in the Department of Oceanography at the University of Cape Town, she is particularly interested in the role of oceans in regulating biogeochemical cycles and how their dysregulation contributes to climate change. She was honoured in the World Economic Forum Young Scientists Class of 2020, and a P-Rating from the National Research Foundation, which recognizes that the scientist's work will likely have high impact.
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#2266

Diane Mathis

#120442
Overall Influence
Diane J. Mathis is the Morton Grove-Rasmussen chair of immunohematology at Harvard Medical School. She has been recognized for her research with elections to the National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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#2267

Susana Aurora Magallón Puebla

#157828
Overall Influence
Susana Aurora Magallón Puebla is a Mexican biologist and scientist. Her research areas are evolutionary biology and bioinformatics, mainly focused on plant evolution. In 2019 she was appointed director of the UNAM Institute of Biology for the period 2019–2023. In 2022, she was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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#2268

Meredith Yeager

#158373
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Stella Meredith Yeager is an American geneticist who specializes in cancer genomics. She was the scientific director of the cancer genomics research laboratory at the National Cancer Institute. Yeager is an assistant professor of biology at Hood College.
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#2269

Karin Musier-Forsyth

#134228
Overall Influence
Karin Musier-Forsyth, an American biochemist, is an Ohio Eminent Scholar on the faculty of the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at Ohio State University. Musier-Forsyth's research involves biochemical, biophysical and cell-based approaches to understand the interactions of proteins and RNAs involved in protein synthesis and viral replication, especially in HIV.
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#2270

Carla Koehler

#105782
Overall Influence
Carla M. Koehler is an American biochemist who is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research considers mitochondria and the processes which import proteins to their appropriate locations in the organelles. She was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2018.
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#2271

Jorunn Sundgot-Borgen

#133268
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Jorunn Kaiander Sundgot-Borgen is a Norwegian professor of sports medicine. She took the MSc degree at the Arizona State University in 1985, and the dr.scient. degree at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in 1993. She held a post-doctorate scholarship at Yale University from 1993 to 1997. She was a part-time consultant for Olympiatoppen, the Norwegian elite sports program, from 1995 to 2008. She was an associate professor from 1997 to 2002, and is a professor since 2002, of sports medicine at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences. She is especially cited on her expertise in eating disord...
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#2272

Rosemary Boyton

#125426
Overall Influence
Rosemary Jane Boyton is a British immunologist who is Head of Lung Immunology and Adult Infectious Disease at Imperial College London. She works on the molecular immunology of infectious, allergic and autoimmune inflammation. She holds an honorary consultant position at the Royal Brompton Hospital, where she specialises in lung infection.
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#2273

Claudia Scott

#75770
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Claudia Devita Scott is an American-New Zealand academic. She is currently an emeritus professor of public policy at Victoria University of Wellington. Career Scott completed her BA at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. This was followed by MA and PhD qualifications at Duke University. Scott's 1971 PhD thesis was titled Forecasting public outlays: an expenditure model for New Haven, Connecticut.
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#2274

Elizabeth Hadly

#102181
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Elizabeth Hadly is a professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford University, and holds the Paul S. and Billie Achilles Chair of Environmental Science. Her research interests include links between ecology and evolution, and understanding of the impacts of the Anthropocene.
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#2275

Ann B. Moser

#120338
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Ann Boody Moser is an American biochemist specializing in neurology. She researches the development of therapies for adrenoleukodystrophy. Moser is an associate professor emerita in neurology at the Johns Hopkins University. She is a research associate in neurology and the co-director of the peroxisomal diseases laboratory at the Kennedy Krieger Institute.
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#2276

Cagla Eroglu

#146938
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Cagla Eroglu is a Turkish neuroscientist and associate professor of cell biology and neurobiology at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Eroglu is also the director of graduate studies in cell and molecular biology at Duke University Medical Center. Eroglu is a leader in the field of glial biology, and her lab focuses on exploring the role of glial cells, specifically astrocytes, in synaptic development and connectivity.
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#2277

Emma Yhnell

#125929
Overall Influence
Emma Yhnell is a British scientist, science communicator and senior lecturer based at Cardiff University. She has previously conducted research on computerised cognitive training and Huntington's disease. An advocate for public engagement and science communication, and a STEM ambassador, Yhnell won the British Science Association's Charles Darwin Award Lecture for Agricultural, Biological and Medical Sciences and the British Neuroscience Association's Public Engagement Award.
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#2278

Catherine Nobes

#154159
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Catherine D. Nobes is a Professor of Cell Biology and Head of School of Biochemistry at the University of Bristol. She studies the regulation of cell migration and invasion of cancer cells by Eph receptors.
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#2279

Edda Neele

#55563
Overall Influence
1910 - 2005 (95 years)
Edda Neele was a German psychiatrist, and a student and collaborator of Karl Kleist, who worked at the Goethe University Frankfurt Neuropsychiatric Clinic. Along with Karl Leonhard, she was among Kleist's most prolific disciples and contributed significantly to popularizing the terms unipolar and bipolar that are now used in the concepts of unipolar depression and bipolar disorder, and which had been coined by Kleist. Her 1949 Habilitation dissertation, a study of "cyclical psychoses" admitted to the Frankfurt University Neuropsychiatric Clinic between 1938 and 1942, was the first written p...
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#2280

Margaret Morgan Lawrence

Margaret Morgan Lawrence
#27025
Overall Influence
1914 - 2019 (105 years)
Margaret Cornelia Morgan Lawrence was an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, gaining those qualifications in 1948. Her work included clinical care, teaching, and research, particularly into the presence and development of ego strength in inner-city families. Lawrence studied young children identified as "strong" by their teachers in Georgia and Mississippi, as well as on sabbatical in Africa in 1973, writing two books on mental health of children and inner-city families. Lawrence was chief of the Developmental Psychiatry Service for Infants and Children at Harlem Hospital for 21 years, ...
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#2281

Yulia Kovas

#115423
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Yulia Kovas is a geneticist and psychologist - currently a professor of genetics and psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London , and a visiting professor at UCL, King's College, Sussex and New York universities - in the United Kingdom. Kovas received the British Academy Wiley Prize in Psychology in 2012. Kovas is the director of the International Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Investigations into Individual Differences in Learning at Goldsmiths, and leads the genetically-informative research into individual differences in mathematical ability and achievement as part of the Twins Early ...
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#2282

Aina Puce

#99904
Overall Influence
Aina Puce is the Eleanor Cox Riggs Professor of Social Justice and Ethics in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, US. Her research is on the brain basis of understanding the actions of others. She is the coauthor with Riitta Hari of MEG-EEG Primer , an introduction to magnetoencephalography and electroencephalography techniques for studying brain activity noninvasively.
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#2283

Pamela L. Schwartzberg

#163367
Overall Influence
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#2284

Luciana Migliore

#163373
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
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#2285

Joni Wallis

#93896
Overall Influence
Joni Wallis is a cognitive neurophysiologist and Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Education and early career Wallis received her Bachelors of Science in Psychology and Neuroscience from the University of Manchester in 1995. She received her PhD in Experimental Psychology and Anatomy from the University of Cambridge, where she worked in the laboratory of .
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#2286

Amy Y. Rossman

#153438
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Amy Yarnell Rossman is an American mycologist and a leading expert in identifying fungi. Biography Born in Spokane, Amy Rossman moved with her family, when she was six months old, to Portland, Oregon, and considers herself to be a native Oregonian. Rossman graduated with a B.A. in biology from Grinnell College in 1968. She received her Ph.D. in mycology in 1975 from Oregon State University . Her Ph.D. thesis The genus Ophionectria was supervised by William C. Denison . As a graduate student she collected fungi in June 1970 in Puerto Rico's El Yunque National Forest and in Dominica and then in January 1971 in Jamaica.
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#2287

Barbara Mazzolai

#163466
Overall Influence
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#2288

Panayiota Poirazi

#157378
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Panayiota Poirazi is a neuroscientist known for her work in modelling dendritic computations. She is an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization . Education and career Poirazi studied at the University of Cyprus from 1992 until 1996. She earned an M.S. from the University of Southern California in 1998, and went on to earn her Ph.D. from there in 2000. Following her Ph.D., she worked at the Alexander Fleming Instite of Immunology in Greece until 2001, when she moved to the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas in Crete, Greece in 2004. As of 2021, she is the direc...
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#2289

Anna Lembke

#35539
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Anna Lembke is an American psychiatrist who is Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University. She is a specialist in the opioid epidemic in the United States, and the author of Drug Dealer, MD, How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It’s So Hard to Stop. Her latest book, a New York Times bestseller, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, was released in August 2021.
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#2290

Kelly Falkner

#87274
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Kelly Kenison Falkner is an American chemical oceanographer and educator. She is the Director of the National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs . Her work in the position led her NSF colleagues to name the Falkner Glacier, in Victoria Land, Antarctica, after her.
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#2291

Gretta Pecl

#157515
Overall Influence
Gretta T. Pecl is an Australian marine ecologist, Australian Research Council Future Fellow, and the Director of the Centre for Marine Socioecology at the University of Tasmania. Her work focuses on species and ecosystem responses to climate change, as well as using socioecological approaches to adapt natural resource management for climate change. She is on the editorial board of Springer Nature's Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries, and is a Subject Editor for Ecography.
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#2292

Katharina Domschke

#163799
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
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#2293

Jacqueline Capeau

#163801
Overall Influence
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#2294

Robyn S. Klein

#160876
Overall Influence
Robyn S. Klein is an American neuroimmunologist as well as the Vice Provost and Associate Dean for Graduate Education at Washington University in St. Louis Missouri. Klein is also a professor in the Departments of Medicine, Anatomy & Neurobiology, and Pathology & Immunology. Her research explores the pathogenesis of neuroinflammation in the central nervous system by probing how immune signalling molecules regulate blood brain barrier permeability. Klein is also a fervent advocate for gender equity in STEM, publishing mechanisms to improve gender equity in speakers at conferences, participating...
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#2295

Birgitta Strandvik

#163904
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
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#2296

Stéphanie P. Lacour

#133315
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Stéphanie P. Lacour is a French neurotechnologist and full professor holding the Foundation Bertarelli Chair in Neuroprosthetic Technology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne . Lacour is a pioneer in the field of stretchable electronics and directs a laboratory at EPFL which specializes in the development of Soft BioElectronic Interfaces to enable seamless integration of neuroprosthetic devices into human tissues. Lacour is also a co-founding member and director of the Center for Neuroprosthetics at the EPFL Satellite Campus in Geneva, Switzerland.
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#2297

Rachel Chikwamba

#116868
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Rachel Kerina Chikwamba is a Zimbabwean plant geneticist born in 1967. She is in the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Group Executive: Strategic Alliances and Communication. She is an active member of the Academy of Science of South Africa.
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#2298

Betty Ida Roots

#147826
Overall Influence
1927 - 2020 (93 years)
Betty Ida Roots was a British-born zoologist based at the University of Toronto in Canada. She was an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Career In 1927, Roots was born in South Croydon Surrey, England, in the UK. She completed a Bachelor of Science degree in zoology at the University of London's University College , a Diploma in Education at the Institution of Education . and later, a doctorate in comparative physiology at the University of London . Roots held a number of teaching and visiting scientist positions at a variety of institutions, including the Royal Free Hospital Scho...
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#2299

Annunziata Gloghini

#164078
Overall Influence
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#2300

Jennifer Tank

#159481
Overall Influence
Jennifer L. Tank is an American ecologist who is the Galla Professor of Ecology of Streams and Rivers at the University of Notre Dame. Her research considers the biogeochemistry of streams, the influence of agriculture on land conservation, stream restoration and stream transport. She was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2020.
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