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,

#301

Jenny Clack

#51116

Overall Influence

1947 - 2020 (73 years)

Jennifer Alice Clack, was an English palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist. She specialised in the early evolution of tetrapods, specifically studying the "fish to tetrapod" transition: the origin, evolutionary development and radiation of early tetrapods and their relatives among the lobe-finned fishes. She is best known for her book Gaining Ground: the Origin and Early Evolution of Tetrapods, published in 2002 and written with the layperson in mind.

#302

Rachel Haurwitz

Rachel Haurwitz

#37857

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (39 years)

Rachel Elizabeth Haurwitz is an American biochemist and structural biologist. She is the co-founder, chief executive officer, and president of Caribou Biosciences, a genome editing company. Early life and education Haurwitz was born on May 20, 1985. She grew up in Austin, Texas. Her mother is an elementary school teacher and her father, an environmental journalist.

#303

Maria Fitzgerald

#46286

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Maria Fitzgerald is a professor in the Department of Neuroscience at University College London. Early life and education Maria Fitzgerald was born in Hampstead, London. Her mother was Booker Prize–winning novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, author of the Blue Flower. Her father, Desmond Fitzgerald, was a major in the Irish Guards. Her older brother, Edmund Valpy Fitzgerald, is an emeritus professor in the Oxford Department of International Development. Maria was educated at Godolphin and Latymer School and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she studied physiology. She was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1975 from the University of Oxford.

#304

Ellen Vitetta

#50242

Overall Influence

Ellen S. Vitetta is the director of the Cancer Immunobiology Center at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. Background Vitetta earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at Connecticut College and advanced degrees at New York University Medical and Graduate Schools.

#305

Birgit Vennesland

#46637

Overall Influence

1913 - 2001 (88 years)

Birgit Vennesland was a Norwegian-American biochemist. Vennesland spent the majority of her career as an academic for the University of Chicago from 1941 to 1968. While at Chicago, she compared the enzymes that animals use during metabolism and to the enzymes used by plants in photosynthesis. After leaving Chicago for Germany, Vennesland was the director of the Max Planck Institute for Cell Biology from 1968 to 1970. She later was the director of an eponymous research facility by the Max Planck Society from 1970 until her retirement in 1981. During her career, Vennesland received the Stephen ...

#306

Sarah Otto

#43888

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Sarah Perin "Sally" Otto is a theoretical biologist, Canada Research Chair in Theoretical and Experimental Evolution, and is currently a Killam Professor at the University of British Columbia. From 2008-2016, she was the director of the Biodiversity Research Centre at the University of British Columbia. Otto was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow. In 2015 the American Society of Naturalists gave her the Sewall Wright Award for fundamental contributions to the unification of biology. In 2021, she was awarded the Darwin-Wallace Medal for contributing major advances to the mathematical theory of ev...

#307

Hannah Monyer

#28865

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Hannah Monyer is a Romanian-born German neurobiologist and, since 1999, she has been Director of the Department of Clinical Neurology at the University Hospital in Heidelberg. In 2004 she was awarded the 1.55 million euro Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. She received the Philip Morris Research Prize—described by Bio-pro as "one of the most prestigious science awards in Germany"—in 2006. In 2010, the European Research Council awarded her a total of 1.87 million euros for her research.

#308

Ruth Ella Moore

Ruth Ella Moore

#33550

Overall Influence

1903 - 1994 (91 years)

Ruth Ella Moore was an American bacteriologist and microbiologist, who, in 1933, became the first African-American woman to be awarded a Ph.D. in a natural science. She was a professor of bacteriology at Howard University. A decade later, she was installed as the head of the department of bacteriology, which she renamed to the department of microbiology. During that period she was promoted to associate professor of microbiology.

#309

Patricia J. Kailola

#48286

Overall Influence

Patricia J. Kailola is a noted ichthyologist. Her primary focus is in tropical Indo-Pacific fishes. She is an Australian Museum Research Associate. Among her numerous publications are listed several books covering tropical fish. She also has written texts on catfish. As of April 2006, she was working on a textbook on Western Indian Ocean fishes. She has assisted the Australian Museum in confirmation of species identification among their collection. Worldcat.org lists 27 works in 57 publications in 1 language and 603 library holdings.

#310

Lindsay Zanno

#33290

Overall Influence

Lindsay E. Zanno is an American vertebrate paleontologist and a leading expert on theropod dinosaurs and Cretaceous paleoecosystems. She is the Head of Paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and an Associate Research Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at North Carolina State University.

#311

Alicia Lourteig

Alicia Lourteig

#31292

Overall Influence

1913 - 2003 (90 years)

Alicia Lourteig was an Argentine and French botanist, world specialist in Oxalidaceae. Personal life and education Alicia Lourteig was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her parents originated from France and Argentina. She studied pharmacy and biochemistry at university in Buenos Aires, and her doctorate was awarded in 1946.

#312

Jewel Plummer Cobb

Jewel Plummer Cobb

#18272

Overall Influence

1924 - 2017 (93 years)

Jewel Plummer Cobb was an American biologist, cancer researcher, professor, dean, and academic administrator. She contributed to the field of cancer research by studying the cure for melanoma. Cobb was an advocate for increasing the representation of women and students of color in universities, and she created programs to support students interested in pursuing graduate school.

#313

Jill Farrant

#61550

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Jill Farrant, professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, is a leading expert on resurrection plants, which 'come back to life' from a desiccated, seemingly dead state when they are rehydrated.

#314

Janet Treasure

#45019

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Janet Treasure , OBE PhD FRCP FRCPsych, is a British psychiatrist, who specialises in research and treatment of eating disorders. She is currently the Director of the Eating Disorder Unit and Professor of Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College, London. In early-2013, she was awarded Officer of the Order of the British Empire for Services to People with Eating Disorders.

#315

Jane Reece

#62910

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Jane B. Reece is an American scientist and textbook author. Along with American biologist Neil Campbell, she wrote the widely used Campbell/Reece Biology textbooks. Reece received an A.B. in Biology from Harvard University, an M.S. in microbiology from Rutgers University, and a Ph.D. in bacteriology from the University of California, Berkeley. Her doctoral thesis was entitled 'The RecE pathway of genetic combination in Escherichia Coli'. Having completed her Ph.D., she stayed at UC Berkeley for a while as a postdoctoral researcher, before accepting tenure at Stanford University as a researcher.

#316

Astrid Fagraeus

#49932

Overall Influence

1913 - 1997 (84 years)

Astrid Elsa Fagraeus-Wallbom, born May 30, 1913, in Stockholm, Sweden and died February 24, 1997, was a Swedish immunologist. Education and career Fagraeus received a PhD in medicine in 1948 from the Karolinska Institute. In 1949, she was appointed associate professor of bacteriology at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. She became head of the virology department at the Swedish Bacteriological Laboratory in 1953. In 1961–1979 she served as the first professor of immunology in Sweden, at Karolinska Institutet.

#317

Gretchen Daily

#30352

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Gretchen C. Daily is an American environmental scientist and tropical ecologist. She has contributed to understanding humanity's dependence and impacts on nature, and to advancing a systematic approach for valuing nature in policy, finance, management, and practice around the world. Daily is co-founder and faculty director of the Natural Capital Project, a global partnership that aims to mainstream the values of nature into decision-making of people, governments, investors, corporations, NGOs, and other institutions. Together with more than 300 partners worldwide, the Project is pioneering s...

#318

Christine Guthrie

#55776

Overall Influence

Christine Guthrie was an American yeast geneticist and American Cancer Society Research Professor of Genetics at University of California San Francisco. She showed that yeast have small nuclear RNAs involved in splicing pre-messenger RNA into messenger RNA in eukaryotic cells. Guthrie cloned and sequenced the genes for yeast snRNA and established the role of base pairing between the snRNAs and their target sequences at each step in the removal of an intron. She also identified proteins that formed part of the spliceosome complex with the snRNAs. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences i...

#319

Magdalena Götz

#29583

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Magdalena Götz is a German neuroscientist. She is noted for her study of glial cells and holds a chair at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich's Department of Physiology. She is involved in the field of adult neurogenesis. Götz discovered that glial cells are neural stem cells in the developing mammalian brain. Current investigations study the mechanisms involved in determining how adult neural stem cells are specified. Götz current work focuses on refining ways to reprogram glial cells into neurons in organisms with traumatic brain injury. The German Stem Cell Network published an intervi...

#320

Caroline Dean

#42370

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Dame Caroline Dean is a British plant scientist working at the John Innes Centre. She is focused on understanding the molecular controls used by plants to seasonally judge when to flower. She is specifically interested in vernalisation — the acceleration of flowering in plants by exposure to periods of prolonged cold. She has also been on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize from 2018.

#321

Catherine Forster

#45043

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Catherine Ann Forster is an American paleontologist, taxonomist and expert in ornithopod evolution and Triceratops taxonomy. She is a Professor in the Geological Sciences Program and the Department of Biological Sciences at George Washington University. She obtained a B.A. and B.S. from the University of Minnesota in 1982, followed by an M.Sc. in 1985 and a Ph.D. in 1990 from the University of Pennsylvania. She then completed post-doctoral work at the University of Chicago between 1990 and 1994 in their department of Organismal Biology. She is known in part for unique bird fossils she and her ...

#322

Nicole C. Karafyllis

#20012

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Nicole C. Karafyllis is a German philosopher and biologist. As of 2010, she has been a Professor of Philosophy at the TU Braunschweig, Braunschweig/Brunswick Institute of Technology . Biography Nicole Christine Karafyllis was born in Germany to a German mother and a Greek father. From 1989 to 1994, she studied biology at the Universities of Erlangen and Tübingen. She was awarded her doctorate in biology from the International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities at the University of Tübingen in 1999. Her Habilitation in philosophy was completed at the University of Stuttgart in 2006, dealing with the topic Phenomenology of Growth.

#323

Sunetra Gupta

#12969

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Sunetra Gupta is an Indian-born British infectious disease epidemiologist and a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford. She has performed research on the transmission dynamics of various infectious diseases, including malaria, influenza and COVID-19, and has received the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London and the Rosalind Franklin Award of the Royal Society. She is a member of the scientific advisory board of Collateral Global, an organisation which examines the global impact of COVID-19 restrictions.

#324

Nalini Nadkarni

Nalini Nadkarni

#27252

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Nalini Nadkarni is an American forest ecologist who pioneered the study of Costa Rican rain forest canopies. Using mountain climbing equipment to make her ascent, Nadkarni first took an inventory of the canopy in 1981, followed by two more inventories in 1984. She is also known with a characteristic nickname, «the queen of the forest canopy».

#325

Sarah Gilbert

#19022

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Dame Sarah Catherine Gilbert FRS is an English vaccinologist who is a Professor of Vaccinology at the University of Oxford and co-founder of Vaccitech. She specialises in the development of vaccines against influenza and emerging viral pathogens. She led the development and testing of the universal flu vaccine, which underwent clinical trials in 2011.

#326

Fiorenza Micheli

#62652

Overall Influence

Fiorenza "Fio" Micheli is an Italian-American marine ecologist and conservation biologist. Early life and education Micheli was born and raised in Italy. Upon graduating from the University of Florence, where she studied animal behavior, she accepted a job collecting intertidal animals for a nature documentary. Following this, she enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for her PhD and at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis for her post-doctoral research. In 1996, Micheli obtained a grant from the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries to settle a...

#327

Jeannie T. Lee

#50863

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jeannie T. Lee is a Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. She is known for her work on X-chromosome inactivation and for discovering the functions of a new class of epigenetic regulators known as long noncoding RNAs , including Xist and Tsix.

#328

Brigitte Askonas

#39800

Overall Influence

1923 - 2013 (90 years)

Brigitte Alice Askonas was a British immunologist and a visiting professor at Imperial College London from 1995. Education Brigitte Askonas was born to Czechoslovak parents, Jewish converts to Catholicism, who fled Austria after the Nazi takeover. Vienna-born Askonas studied biochemistry at McGill University and carried out her postgraduate work in the school of biochemistry at the University of Cambridge where she was a student of Girton College, Cambridge.

#329

Margaret D. Lowman

Margaret D. Lowman

#48639

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Margaret D. Lowman, Ph.D. a.k.a. Canopy Meg is an American biologist, educator, ecologist, writer, explorer, and public speaker. Her expertise involves canopy ecology, canopy plant-insect relationships, and constructing canopy walkways.

#330

Charis Eng

#53529

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Charis Eng is a Singapore-born physician-scientist and geneticist at the Cleveland Clinic, notable for identifying the PTEN gene. She is the Chairwoman and founding Director of the Genomic Medicine Institute of the Cleveland Clinic, founding Director and attending clinical cancer geneticist of the institute’s clinical component, the Center for Personalized Genetic Healthcare, and Professor and Vice Chairwoman of the Department of Genetics and Genome Sciences at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.

#331

Li-Huei Tsai

#46152

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Li-Huei Tsai is an American neuroscientist and the director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#332

Alejandra Bravo

Alejandra Bravo

#56422

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

María Alejandra Bravo de la Parra is a Mexican biochemist who was laureated with the 2010 L'Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science – Latin America for her work on a bacterial toxin that acts as a powerful insecticide. Bravo has co-authored multiple papers with her husband Mario Soberon.

#333

Suzanne Oparil

#57250

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Suzanne Oparil is a clinical cardiologist and Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Professor of Cell, Developmental, and Integrative Biology. She is the Section Chief of Vascular Biology and Hypertension and the Director of the Vascular Biology and Hypertension Program of the Division of Cardiovascular Disease at the University of Alabama-Birmingham Medical School.

#334

Barbara Wold

#57011

Overall Influence

Barbara J. Wold is the Bren Professor of Molecular Biology, the principal investigator of the Wold Lab at the California Institute of Technology and the principal investigator of the Functional Genomics Resource Center at the Beckman Institute at Caltech. Wold was director of the Beckman Institute at Caltech from 2001 to 2011.

#335

Linda Vigilant

#59113

Overall Influence

Linda Ann Vigilant is an American primatologist and geneticist. Vigilant works at the Department of Primate Behavior and Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

#336

Nancy Rabalais

#33225

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Nancy Nash Rabalais is an American marine ecologist. Born in Wichita Falls, Texas, she is the daughter of Kathryn Charlotte Preusch and Stephen Anthony Nash, a mechanical engineer, and the second of four children. She researches dead zones in the marine environment and is an expert in eutrophication and nutrient pollution.

#337

Leslie Ungerleider

Leslie Ungerleider

#36567

Overall Influence

1946 - 2020 (74 years)

Leslie G. Ungerleider was an experimental psychologist and neuroscientist, previously Chief of the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at the National Institute of Mental Health. Ungerleider was known for introducing the concepts of the dorsal and ventral streams, two pathways of information processing in the brain that specialize in visuospatial processing and object recognition, respectively.

#338

Margaret S. Collins

Margaret S. Collins

#46949

Overall Influence

1922 - 1996 (74 years)

Margaret James Strickland Collins was an African-American child prodigy, entomologist specializing in the study of termites, and a civil rights advocate. Collins was nicknamed the "Termite Lady" because of her extensive research on termites. Together with David Nickle, Collins identified a new species of termite called Neotermes luykxi. When Collins earned her PhD., she became the first African American female entomologist and the third African American female zoologist.

#339

Stella Chess

#17621

Overall Influence

1914 - 2007 (93 years)

Stella Chess was an American child psychiatrist who taught at New York University . With her husband, Alexander Thomas, she undertook research into whether the temperaments of children are innate or are dependent on their nurturing. She also conducted studies on the potential links between rubella during pregnancy and autism in the child.

#340

Julie Theriot

#31894

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Julie A. Theriot is a microbiologist, professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and heads the Theriot Lab. She was a Predoctoral Fellow and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She was a fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

#341

Eliora Z. Ron

#56623

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Eliora Zenziper Ron is an Israeli microbiologist who is the Secretary General of the European Academy of Microbiology and President of the International Union of Microbiology Societies. Life and career Ron received her MSc in microbiology, Genetics and Biochemistry in 1962 from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, before moving to the US to do her PhD at Harvard University under the supervision of Professor Bernard D Davies in 1967. Her PhD thesis was entitled ‘Studies on the regulation of RNA synthesis in Escherichia coli’.

#342

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

#5530

Overall Influence

1926 - 2004 (78 years)

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was a Swiss-American psychiatrist, a pioneer in near-death studies, and author of the internationally best-selling book, On Death and Dying , where she first discussed her theory of the five stages of grief, also known as the "Kübler-Ross model".

#343

Margaret Kidwell

#62812

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Margaret Gale Kidwell is a British American evolutionary biologist and Regents' Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona, Tucson. She grew up on a farm in the English Midlands during World War II. After graduating from the University of Nottingham in 1953, she worked in the British Civil Service as an Agricultural Advisory Officer from 1955 to 1960. She moved to the US in 1960 under the auspices of a Kellogg Foundation Fellowship to study Genetics and Statistics at Iowa State University. She married quantitative geneticist James F. Kidwell in 1961, obtained her MS degree in 1962 and moved with her husband to Brown University in 1963.

#344

Thea Tlsty

#31664

Overall Influence

Thea D. Tlsty is an American pathologist and professor of pathology at the University of California, San Francisco . She is known for her research in cancer biology and her involvement in the discovery of cells that may be at the origin of metaplastic cancer, an invasive form of breast cancer.

#345

Maria Leptin

#61593

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Maria Leptin is a German developmental biologist and immunologist, and the current President of the European Research Council. She was the Director of the European Molecular Biology Organization from 2010 to 2021.

#346

Rowena Green Matthews

Rowena Green Matthews

#32374

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Rowena Green Matthews, born in 1938, is the G. Robert Greenberg Distinguished University professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research focuses on the role of organic cofactors as partners of enzymes catalyzing difficult biochemical reactions, especially folic acid and cobalamin . Among other honors, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002 and the Institute of Medicine in 2004.

#347

Elizabeth Robertson

#62754

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Elizabeth Jane Robertson is a British developmental biologist based at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford. She is Professor of Developmental Biology at Oxford and a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow. She is best known for her pioneering work in developmental genetics, showing that genetic mutations could be introduced into the mouse germ line by using genetically altered embryonic stem cells. This discovery opened up a major field of experimentation for biologists and clinicians.

#348

Leemor Joshua-Tor

#53759

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Leemor Joshua-Tor is the W.M. Keck Professor of Structural Biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Her research focuses on the role of the argonaute complex in RNA interference.

#349

Jane M. Oppenheimer

#46936

Overall Influence

1911 - 1996 (85 years)

Jane Marion Oppenheimer was an American embryologist and historian of science. Early life, interests, and education Oppenheimer was born in Philadelphia, the only child of James H. Oppenheimer and Sylvia Stern. Her father, a physician, encouraged physical activity: sports at school and a personalized exercise regimen at home. She was tutored in French and piano, and developed a love of classical music, fine food, and travel. Oppenheimer's interests in Art were eclectic. The collection she donated to Bryn Mawr includes jade, ivory, and bronze objects, landscape watercolors, and etchings by Pab...

#350

Paramjit Khurana

#59932

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Paramjit Khurana is an Indian scientist in Plant Biotechnology, Molecular Biology, Genomics who is presently Professor in the Department of Plant Molecular Biology in the University of Delhi, Delhi. She has received many awards and published more than 125 scientific papers.

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