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).

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List of the most influential female people in Biology,

#2751

Catherine Tallon-Baudry

#116711
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Catherine Tallon-Baudry is a CNRS senior researcher and group leader working at the Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris. Biography Tallon-Baudry completed her PhD at the Claude Bernard University Lyon 1 in 1997 working with Olivier Bertrand. In 1998 she started as a Marie Curie research fellow in the lab of Andreas Kreiter at the University of Bremen in Germany. In 2002 she won the young researcher award from the Fyssen foundation and started working at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. In 2012 she started her own group at the Cognitive Sciences department of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and in 2014 was the recipient of a European Research Council advanced grant.
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#2752

Eileen Lacey

#172178
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Eileen A. Lacey is an American biologist who specializes in the evolution of behavioral diversity among vertebrates.  Lacey’s research focuses on identifying ecological causes of sociality and assessing the genetic consequences of sociality in subterranean rodents. She is most known for her research on the social structure of naked mole rats and her arguments regarding the eusociality continuum
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#2753

Tina M. Widowski

#174641
Overall Influence
Tina M. Widowski is an American animal welfare scientist and a professor of applied animal behaviour and welfare at the University of Guelph. Education Widowski earned her bachelor’s degree in Ecology, Ethology and Evolution from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1983, a master’s degree in animal science from University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1984, and a doctoral degree in animal science from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1988.
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#2754

Marion Robinson

#100344
Overall Influence
1923 - 2003 (80 years)
Marion Frances Robinson was a New Zealand nutritionist and physiologist. She was professor of nutrition at the University of Otago, and is particularly noted for her investigation of the importance of selenium in the human diet.
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#2755

Sarah M. N. Woolley

#149842
Overall Influence
Sarah M. N. Woolley is a neuroscientist and Professor of Psychology at Columbia University's Zuckerman Institute. Her work centers on the neuroscience of communication, using songbirds to understand how the brain learns and understands vocal communication.
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#2756

Christina M. Hull

#157214
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Christina M. Hull is an American mycologist and Professor in the Department of Biomolecular Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. Education and career Christina Hull completed her B.S. degree from the University of Utah in 1992. She then went on to complete a Ph.D. with Alexander D. Johnson at the University of California, San Francisco in 2000. Her thesis was titled "Identification and characterization of a mating type-like locus in the "asexual" pathogenic yeast Candida albicans". She then went on to complete a postdoctoral fellowship with Joseph Heitman at Duke University from 2000 to 2003.
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#2757

Mary Julia Wade

#125320
Overall Influence
1928 - 2005 (77 years)
Mary Julia Wade was an Australian palaeontologist, known for her role as the Deputy Director of the Queensland Museum. Some of her most renowned work was on the Precambrian Ediacaran Biota in South Australia.
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#2758

Lorraine Maltby

#169946
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Lorraine Lucy Maltby is a British biologist and who is a professor of environmental biology at the University of Sheffield. She serves as deputy Vice-President for research and innovation and chair of the board of trustees of the Freshwater Habitats Trust. Her research investigates interactions in the riparian zone and the environmental impacts of agri-plastics.
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#2759

Linda Katherine Escobar

#169465
Overall Influence
1940 - 1993 (53 years)
Linda Katherine Albert de Escobar , was an American botanist, plant collector, and educator noted for her study of Passiflora as well as her work as a teacher and administrator at the University of Antioquia. She was director of the university's herbarium from 1981 to 1988, and served as President of the Herbariums Colombian Association. The species Passiflora linda was named in her honor. She identified over forty species, mostly in Passiflora.
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#2760

Jennifer Byrne

#82672
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Jennifer Anne Byrne is a Professor of Molecular Oncology at University of Sydney, Australia. Byrne is notable for not only her cancer research, but the uncovering of academic fraud and junk science in cancer research.
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#2761

Mary Kay Lobo

#151900
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Mary Kay Lobo is an American psychiatric neuroscientist who is a Professor of Neurobiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Her research considers the molecular mechanisms that underpin drug addiction and depression. She was named a finalist in the 2011 Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists.
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#2762

Kadri Põldmaa

#169605
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Kadri Põldmaa is an Estonian mycologist. Põldmaa is the daughter of mycologist Peeter Põldmaa . She graduated from Tartu Secondary School No. 2 in 1988. In 1992, she graduated from the University of Tartu's Department of Biology, receiving her master's degree from the institution in 1994, and her PhD in 1998 with the dissertation Studies in the Systematics of Hypomyces and Allied Genera . From 1999 until 2000, she was a postdoctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania and from 2002 to 2003 at the Estonian Biocentre.
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#2763

Catherine Freitag Clarke

#171491
Overall Influence
Catherine Clarke is an American biochemist who is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles. She was the first woman to serve as Head of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Her research considers the functional roles of Coenzyme Q.
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#2764

Jessica Cardin

#116563
Overall Influence
Jessica Cardin is an American neuroscientist who is an associate professor of neuroscience at Yale University School of Medicine. Cardin's lab studies local circuits within the primary visual cortex to understand how cellular and synaptic interactions flexibly adapt to different behavioral states and contexts to give rise to visual perceptions and drive motivated behaviors. Cardin's lab applies their knowledge of adaptive cortical circuit regulation to probe how circuit dysfunction manifests in disease models.
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#2765

Lidia Mannuzzu

Lidia Mannuzzu
#157453
Overall Influence
1958 - 2016 (58 years)
Lidia Mannuzzu was an Italian biologist, physiologist and academic. Biography Early years Lidia M. Mannuzzu was born in Sassari, Sardinia, Italy. She was the daughter of the writer Salvatore Mannuzzu; and she had a sister, Mary. Mannuzzu graduated with honors in Medicine from University of Sassari in 1984, with a thesis on favism. She continued her studies at the Max Planck Institute, at Brunel University in London, and Aachen Medical School in Westphalia.
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#2766

Jane M. Carlton

#171903
Overall Influence
Jane M. Carlton is a biologist at New York University whose research centers on the genomics of two groups of single-celled parasites: those which cause malaria , and trichomonads, which include the common sexually transmitted parasite Trichomonas vaginalis.
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#2767

Marie Jakus

#157125
Overall Influence
1914 - 1997 (83 years)
Marie Agnes Jakus was an American biologist and microscopist specialized in electron microscopic studies of the fine structure of eye tissues. She was a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Retina Foundation, and the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness before becoming a science administrator at the Center for Scientific Review.
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#2768

Amy O. Charkowski

#175177
Overall Influence
Amy Olymbia Charkowski is an American plant pathologist and Professor of Plant Pathology at Colorado State University. She was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2020.
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#2769

Alison Motsinger-Reif

#158151
Overall Influence
Alison Anne Motsinger-Reif is an American biostatistician and human geneticist specialized in association analyses, big data, and genomic analyses. In December 2018, she became the chief of the biostatistics and computational biology branch at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Montsinger-Reif was previously a professor of statistics at the North Carolina State University.
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#2770

Niki Moutsopoulos

#170361
Overall Influence
Niki M. Moutsopoulos is a Greek periodontist and immunologist. She is a senior investigator in the oral immunity and infection section at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research. Moutsopoulos specializes in oral immunology and periodontitis. Her research program focuses on host-microbial interactions that can drive chronic inflammatory responses and tissue destruction in the oral cavity.
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#2771

Susie Wood

#173235
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Susanna Wood is a New Zealand scientist whose research focuses on understanding, protecting and restoring New Zealand's freshwater environments. One of her particular areas of expertise is the ecology, toxin production, and impacts of toxic freshwater cyanobacteria in lakes and rivers. Wood is active in advocating for the incorporation of DNA-based tools such as metabarcoding, genomics and metagenomics for characterising and understanding aquatic ecosystems and investigating the climate and anthropogenic drivers of water quality change in New Zealand lakes. She has consulted for government de...
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#2772

Dení Ramírez Macías

#171543
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Dení Ramírez Macías is a Mexican marine biologist ocean scientist, and conservationist, and director of Whale Shark México since 2003. She leads the "Giants of Peru" project of the Save Our Seas Foundation.
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#2773

Pat Langhorne

Pat Langhorne
#81724
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Patricia Jean Langhorne is an Antarctic sea ice researcher. She retired as Professor in the physics department at the University of Otago, New Zealand in 2020. She was previously head of department . She was New Zealand's leading sea ice physicist. For a time she led the observational component of one of New Zealand’s National Science Challenges – the Deep South.
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#2774

Indre Viskontas

Indre Viskontas
#127468
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Indre Viskontas is a Lithuanian-Canadian neuroscientist and operatic soprano. She holds a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience and a M.M. in opera. She is a Professor of Psychology at the University of San Francisco and serves on the faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. She is also the Creative Director of Pasadena Opera.
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#2775

Gwenda Louise Davis

#171126
Overall Influence
1911 - 1993 (82 years)
Gwenda Louise Davis was an Australian botanist. She is known for her work on embryology, in particular, for work on the embryology of Australian Asteraceae and the genus Eucalyptus. She started her career as a plant taxonomist in 1945 at the New England University College at Armidale
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#2776

Idah Sithole-Niang

#126860
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Idah Sithole-Niang is a Zimbabwean biochemist and educator. Her main area of research has been viruses which attack the cowpea, one of the major food crops of Zimbabwe. Biography Idah Sithole was born in Hwange, Zimbabwe, on 2 October 1957. She attended the University of London, on scholarship, earning a BS in biochemistry in 1982. When she was awarded a USAID Fellowship in 1983, Sithole chose to continue her education, studying plant and virus genetics. She earned a PhD in 1988 from Michigan State University in Lansing, Michigan. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Plant Researc...
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#2777

Tara C. Smith

Tara C. Smith
#150617
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Tara C. Smith is an American epidemiologist and science communicator. She is a professor at the Kent State University College of Public Health who studies zoonotic infections. Smith was the first to identify strains of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus associated with livestock in the United States.
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#2778

Courtney A. Miller

Courtney A. Miller
#164864
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Courtney A. Miller is an American neuroscientist and Professor of the Department of Molecular Medicine at the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Florida. Miller investigates the biological basis of neurological and neuropsychiatric diseases and develops novel therapeutics based on her mechanistic discoveries.
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#2779

Diana Fleischman

#109286
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Diana Santos Fleischman is an American evolutionary psychologist. Her field of research includes the study of disgust, human sexuality, and hormones and behaviour. She is also involved in the effective altruism, animal welfare, and feminism movements.
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#2780

Ellen Covey

#148949
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Ellen Covey is an American neurobiologist, researcher, perfumer and professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Washington. Member Association for Research in Otolaryngology, Society for Neurosci., European Neurosci. Association, Sigma Xi.
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#2781

Elaine M. Tobin

#175337
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Elaine Munsey Tobin is a professor of molecular, cell, and developmental biology at the University of California, Los Angeles . Tobin is recognized as a Pioneer Member of the American Society of Plant Biologists .
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#2782

Kirsten Benkendorff

#172280
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Kirsten Benkendorff is a marine scientist who works on molluscs, antibiotics, anti-inflammatory properties and cancer fighting properties. She was awarded Young Australian of the Year in 2000 and a Dorothy Hill Medal for Science in 2011.
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#2783

Elizabeth Gavis

#174977
Overall Influence
Elizabeth Gavis is an American biologist who is the Damon B. Pfeiffer Professor of Life Sciences, at Princeton University. Gavis served as the President of the North American Drosophila Board of Directors in 2011.
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#2784

Susan Mackem

#175253
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Susan Marie Mackem is an American anatomic pathologist and physician-scientist. She researches vertebrate primary axis formation and the regulation of patterning and differentiation during limb development. She is a senior investigator and head of the regulation of vertebrate morphogenesis section at the National Cancer Institute's Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research. She is also an attending pathologist at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center.
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#2785

Soejatmi Dransfield

#130762
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Soejatmi Dransfield is an Indonesia-born British plant taxonomist specializing in bamboos and currently honorary research fellow at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK. Early life Soejatmi Soenarko was born in Nganjuk, Indonesia in 1939.
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#2786

Dayu Lin

#170965
Overall Influence
Dayu Lin is a neuroscientist and Professor of Psychiatry, Neuroscience and Physiology at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine in New York City. Lin discovered the neural circuits in the hypothalamus that give rise to aggression in mice. Her lab at NYU now probes the neural circuits underlying innate social behaviors, with a focus on aggressive and defensive behaviors.
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#2787

Asuman Baytop

Asuman Baytop
#71430
Overall Influence
1920 - 2015 (95 years)
Dr. Asuman Baytop was a Turkish botanist, plant collector, pharmacologist, and educator known for her research regarding the medicinal properties of the flora of Turkey. In 1964, she founded the Department of Pharmaceutical Botany at Istanbul University, and established the department's herbarium, to which she contributed over 23,000 specimens. She is also noted for describing several species of crocus, and the species Allium baytopiorum and Colchicum baytopiorum are named in her honor. She was married to fellow botanist Turhan Baytop.
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#2788

Stephanie S. Watowich

#175696
Overall Influence
Stephanie S. Watowich is an American immunologist. Watowich is the deputy chair of the Department of Immunology at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX. She is a professor within the department as well and serves as the co-director of the Center for Inflammation and Cancer at the MD Anderson Cancer Center. Watowich’s research has focused on transcriptional control of innate immunity, with specific interest in the actions of the cytokine-activated STAT transcriptional regulators.
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#2789

Lori Burrows

#175780
Overall Influence
Lori Lee Burrows is a Canadian microbiologist. She is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Microbe-Surface Interactions at McMaster University. Early life and education Burrows completed her Bachelor of Science degree and PhD at the University of Guelph. Upon completing her degrees, she was an Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Industrial Fellow with Langford Inc. and a Cystic Fibrosis Canada Kinsmen Postdoctoral Fellow.
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#2790

Catherine Anderson

#102356
Overall Influence
Catherine Anderson is a Canadian scientist. She researched pre-eclampsia, a potentially fatal disease that can impact pregnant women, at BC Children's and Women's Hospital and the University of Nottingham. She currently serves as Clinical Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at University of British Columbia and runs the Future Science Leaders program at Science World. Maclean's described her as a "nationally renowned science educator."
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#2791

Elizabeth Rakoczy

#142658
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Elizabeth P. Rakoczy is a Hungarian-born molecular ophthalmologist. She is a professor at the University of Western Australia. She started the molecular ophthalmology department at the Lions Eye Institute. In 2017, Rakoczy was awarded the Florey Medal for her human gene therapy trial to modify viruses for the treatment of wet age-related macular degeneration.
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#2792

Anne Lingford-Hughes

#175939
Overall Influence
Anne Lingford-Hughes is a British psychiatrist who is Professor of Addiction Biology at Imperial College London. She works on addictions at the Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust. Her research uses neuroimaging and pharmacology to understand the neurobiology of addiction.
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#2793

Joanne Berger-Sweeney

Joanne Berger-Sweeney
#113398
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Joanne E. Berger-Sweeney is an American neuroscientist and the 22nd president of Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. She is the first African-American and the first woman to serve in the position. Earlier in her career, Berger-Sweeney did proof-of-concept work on galantamine , the second-most used drug to treat Alzheimer's disease.
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#2794

Kristina Micheva

#171116
Overall Influence
Dr Kristina Micheva is a Bulgarian-American neuroscientist at Stanford University. She is one of the inventors of Array Tomography, a technique in which proteins are detected with antibodies in ultra-thin sections of brain tissue using confocal microscopy.
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#2795

Jessica Meeuwig

#142827
Overall Influence
Professor Jessica Meeuwig is the inaugural director of the Centre for Marine Futures at the University of Western Australia . In 2012 she was appointed as a Conservation Fellow of the Zoological Society of London and was also named as one of the 100 most influential people in Western Australia by The West Australian newspaper.
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#2796

Paula DePriest

#168830
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Paula DePriest is an American lichenologist and specialist in artefact conservation. She has been curator of the lichen collection at the National Museum of Natural History, USA and Deputy Director of the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute.
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#2797

Margarita Behrens

Margarita Behrens
#173171
Overall Influence
Margarita Behrens is a neuroscientist and biochemist. She is currently an associate professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies where her lab studies the impact of oxidative stress on the post-natal brain through probing the biology of fast-spiking parvalbumin interneurons in models of schizophrenia.
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#2798

Aola Richards

#173118
Overall Influence
Dr Aola Mary Richards was a New Zealand entomologist specialising in the study of New Zealand and Australian cave crickets, or wētā , and Australian ladybird beetles . She was the first New Zealand woman to gain a PhD in biology.
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#2799

Susan Kilham

#147334
Overall Influence
1943 - 2022 (79 years)
Susan Soltau Kilham was an American aquatic ecologist. She made notable contributions to phycology and to ecological stoichiometry, and much of her research focused on diatoms. Kilham has also been described as a particularly prolific and impactful scientific mentor. She served on the faculty of the University of Michigan from the early 1970s until the early 1990s, and then moved to Drexel University, where she was a professor in the Department of Biodiversity, Earth and Environmental Science, as well as chairing that department and serving on the faculty senate. Kilham received the Phycologi...
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#2800

Katrina Forest

#142137
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Katrina T. Forest is an American biologist who is the EB Fred Professor of Bacteriology and Chair in the Department of Bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research considers the use of structural biology to better understand pathogenesis. Forest is a Fellow of the American Society for Microbiology.
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