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,

#3051

Sue Gardiner

#180951

Overall Influence

Susan Elizabeth Gardiner is a New Zealand horticultural scientist, who works on using genetics and genomics for fruit breeding. Gardiner has received multiple awards. Gardiner has been a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi since 2020 and is a Fellow of the International Society for Horticultural Science. She is an Honorary Fellow of Plant & Food Research.

#3052

Hilary Godwin

#123753

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Hilary Joan Arnold Godwin is a professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the University of Washington and the dean of the School of Public Health. Godwin studies the biochemistry of lead and how to diminish the impact of climate change on public health.

#3053

Karen Davis

#101899

Overall Influence

Karen D. Davis is a neuroscience professor at the University of Toronto, and is the head of Division of Brain, Imaging & Behaviour, Krembil Research Institute at the University Health Network. Davis was inducted into the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars in 2009, the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences in 2018 and the Royal Society of Canada in 2020 and is currently the president of the Canadian Pain Society.

#3054

Kirsty Penkman

#83320

Overall Influence

Kirsty Elizabeth Helena Penkman is a biochemist and geochemist known for her research in biomolecular archaeology, the use of ancient DNA, amino acid dating, and other biomolecules in order to date fossils and learn about the world as it was in prehistoric times. She is a reader in chemistry at the University of York.

#3055

Margaret Loutit

#171784

Overall Influence

1929 - 2020 (91 years)

Margaret Wyn Loutit was a New Zealand microbiologist. She was a full professor at the University of Otago from 1981, and was the inaugural director of the university's Research Office from 1988 to 1995

#3056

Barbara Maria Patoleta

#112190

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Barbara Maria Patoleta is a Polish arachnologist who specialises in the taxonomy, evolution and zoogeography of jumping spiders in the Pacific Islands. Education Patoleta studied biology and chemistry at high school before studying biology at the Faculty of Agriculture at Siedlce University of Natural Sciences and Humanities between 1988 and 1993. She obtained her master's degree in the Department of Anatomy and Vertebrate Morphology in 1993, and subsequently her doctorate in 2002.

#3057

Lisa Boulanger

#175975

Overall Influence

Lisa Boulanger is an American neuroscientist and who is a professor at Princeton University. Her research considers immune proteins in the formation and function of neuronal connectivity. Early life and education Boulanger was a doctoral researcher at the University of California, San Diego, where she worked under Mu-ming Poo. Her research considered regulation of the synaptic action of neurotrophin. Afterward she was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School with Carla J. Shatz.

#3058

Patricia J. Johnson

#172084

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Patricia Jean Johnson is a Professor of Microbiology at University of California, Los Angeles . She works on the parasite Trichomonas vaginalis, which is responsible for the most prevalent sexually transmitted infections in the United States, Trichomoniasis. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019.

#3059

Margaret Mulholland

#179828

Overall Influence

Margaret Ruth Mulholland is professor at Old Dominion University known for her work on nutrients in marine and estuarine environments. Education and career Mulholland has a B.S. from the University of Notre Dame , and an M.S. in biological oceanography and an M.M. in marine affairs from the University of Washington. In 1998 she earned her Ph.D. in biological oceanography from the University of Maryland. As of 2022 she is a professor at Old Dominion University.

#3060

Hamutal Slovin

#179687

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Hamutal Slovin is an Israeli neuroscientist and neurophysiologist who studies the visual system using optical imaging techniques. Slovin, is a professor at Bar-Ilan University, at the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center. Her research focuses on deciphering the cortical mechanisms underlying visual and perceptual processing and their relation to eye movements, as well as reconstruction of visual stimuli from brain activity and artificial vision.

#3061

Mary Louise Phillips

#102422

Overall Influence

Mary Louise Phillips is a Pittsburgh Foundation-Emmerling Endowed Chair in Psychotic Disorders and Professor of Psychiatry and Clinical and Translational Science at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. As the director of the Mood and Brain Laboratory, Phillips performs neuroimaging research designed to elucidate the neuropathophysiological basis of bipolar disorders and associated behavioral traits.

#3062

Amal Bishara

#77958

Overall Influence

Amal Bishara is an Israeli Arab doctor, and the director of Bone Marrow Registry Outreach, Hadassah Medical Center, which is associated with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. There she runs the only bone marrow transplant registry in the world for unrelated Arab donors. Dr. Amal has published and presented internationally on her research into immunogenetics. She serves on the Accreditation Committee of the European Federation for Immunogenetics.

#3063

Lesley Hoyles

#180906

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Lesley Hoyles is a Welsh microbiologist who is Professor of Microbiome and Systems Biology at Nottingham Trent University. She combines in vivo and in vitro microbiology and bioinformatics research to better understand how the gut microbiota influences health and disease.

#3064

Tanya Leise

#66759

Overall Influence

Tanya L. Leise was an American biomathematician specializing in the mathematical modeling of circadian rhythms and related phenomena such as jet lag and hibernation. She was a professor of mathematics at Amherst College.

#3065

Emily H. Vokes

#174341

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

Emily Hoskins Vokes is an American malacologist, palaeontologist, and former university professor. She is an authority on the Muricidae, a large and diverse family of predatory sea snails, or marine gastropod mollusks. Vokes worked both on her own and with her husband, geologist Harold Ernest Vokes.

#3066

Ana Sofia Reboleira

#116447

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Ana Sofia Pereira Serrenho Reboleira is a Portuguese biologist and speleologist, best known for her discovery of over 70 species of flora and fauna, and the description of 17 new taxa, and for her exploration work at the Krubera Cave.

#3067

Katy Payne

#110188

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Katharine Boynton "Katy" Payne is an American zoologist and researcher in the Bioacoustics Research Program at the Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell University. Payne studied music and biology in college and after a decade doing research in the savanna elephant country in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Namibia, she founded Cornell's Elephant Listening Project in 1999.

#3068

Lyn G. Cook

#181558

Overall Influence

Lynette Gai Cook is an Australian botanist and entomologist. She earned a PhD from the ANU in 2001 with a thesis entitled The biology, evolution and systematics of the Gall-inducing scale insect Apiomorpha Rübsaamen

#3069

Tara McAllister

#169633

Overall Influence

Tara G McAllister is a New Zealand freshwater ecology academic and is associated with Te Pūnaha Matatini at the University of Auckland. She is a Māori of Te Aitanga ā Māhaki, Ngāti Porou, and European descent.

#3070

Andrea Grottoli

#139069

Overall Influence

Andréa Geneviève Grottoli is a Canadian biologist who is Professor of Earth Sciences at the Ohio State University. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was named the 2021 American Geophysical Union Rachel Carson Lecturer. She is the President of the International Coral Reef Society.

#3071

Sarah Reichard

#180811

Overall Influence

1957 - 2016 (59 years)

Sarah Reichard was a botanist and tenured full professor who held an endowed chair at the University of Washington's School of Environmental and Forest Sciences in the College of the Environment. Reichard was also the first permanent woman director of the University of Washington Botanic Gardens, overseeing the Washington Park Arboretum and Center for Urban Horticulture. Her research focussed on plant conservation, including rare and invasive species. She published more than 50 studies in peer-reviewed journals and two books. Reichard has been described as "a trailblazing scholar in a time wh...

#3072

Cheryl A. Zimmer

#177603

Overall Influence

Cheryl A. Zimmer is a conservation biologist whose research interests are focused marine population ecology, specifically the role of hydrodynamics as a driving force in the evolution of marine life.

#3073

Doris Wagner

#181704

Overall Influence

Doris Wagner is an American biologist who is the Robert I. Williams Term Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research looks to better understand the structure-function relationships of plant cells. She established the Epigenomics of Plants International Consortium. Wagner is a Fellow of the American Society of Plant Biologists.

#3074

Molly S. Bray

#181900

Overall Influence

Molly S. Bray is an American geneticist, currently the Susan T. Jastrow Human Ecology Chair for Excellence in Nutritional Sciences at University of Texas at Austin. Bray is a nationally recognized expert and a featured speaker on the genetics of obesity, energy balance, and exercise response. She is a Professor and chair in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, with a master's degree in Exercise Physiology from the University of Houston and a PhD in Human and Molecular Genetics from the UT Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. She also served as the for...

#3075

Sophie Achard

#110869

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Sophie Achard is a French statistician and neuroscientist whose research concerns the statistics of the pattern of connectivity in the brain. She is a director of research for the French National Centre for Scientific Research , affiliated with the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation laboratory at Grenoble Alpes University.

#3076

Jin Zhang

#131260

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Jin Zhang is a Chinese-American biochemist. She is a professor of pharmacology, chemistry and biochemistry, and biomedical engineering at the University of California, San Diego. Early life and education Zhang was born in Beijing, China. She received her Bachelor of Science in chemistry from Tsinghua University in Beijing in 1995. She completed her PhD with David G. Lynn at the University of Chicago in 2000, and conducted postdoctoral research with Roger Y. Tsien and Susan S. Taylor at the University of California, San Diego.

#3077

Maria Follieri

#172550

Overall Influence

1932 - 2012 (80 years)

Maria Follieri was a pioneering Italian archaeobotanist and held the Chair of Palaeobotany at La Sapienza. Early life Follieri was born in Rome in 1932. She studied Natural Sciences at the University La Sapienza, graduating in 1954.

#3078

Stavroula Mili

#180670

Overall Influence

Stavroula "Voula" Mili is a Greek molecular biologist researching the regulation, functional consequences, and disease associations of localized RNAs. She is a NIH Stadtman Investigator at the National Cancer Institute.

#3079

Mónica Medina

#132241

Overall Influence

Dr. Mónica Medina is a professor of organismal biology at the Pennsylvania State University. She is known for environmental activism, such as fighting to protect Varadero Reef, and her research on the ecology and evolution of symbiosis by studying the relationships between cnidarian, endosymbiotic dinoflagellates, and other microbes.

#3080

Anita Dolly Panek

#86149

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

Anita Dolly Haubenstock Panek is a Brazilian biochemist. She emigrated from Poland to Brazil because of World War II. She received a B.Sc. in Chemistry, 1954 and a Ph.D. in 1962. She became a professor at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.

#3081

Lene Buhl-Mortensen

#121985

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Lene Buhl-Mortensen is a Dano-Norwegian marine biologist. She is a Research Professor at the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research. She is an expert on the biogeography of the amphipod fauna in Norwegian waters, on the taxonomy of amphipods, barnacles and copepods, and on mapping of biodiversity in the Barents Sea.

#3082

Wanda Quilhot

#173967

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

Wanda Quilhot is a Chilean biologist, most noted for her work in lichenology. She was among the first women scientists allowed to participate in research in Antarctica with the International Council for Science , conducting research there beginning in 1963. Three lichen species Menegazzia wandae, Pseudocyphellaria wandae, and Strigula wandae have been named in her honor. The Latin American Group of Lichenology has created a prize in her name to recognize research excellence in the field of lichenology.

#3083

Crystal Watson

#163657

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (43 years)

Crystal Watson is a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering. She is an expert in health security, biodefense, and risk assessment and preparedness for emerging infectious diseases. She is currently working on the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

#3084

Juliet Wege

#175759

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Juliet Ann Wege is an Australian botanist. She graduated in 1992 and gained a PhD at The University of Western Australia in 1999 with a thesis titled "Morphological and anatomical variation within Stylidium : a systematic perspective". As of 2021 she works as a researcher at the Western Australian Herbarium run by Western Australia's Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions and is managing editor of Nuytsia. Her main area of expertise is in taxonomy and study of the Stylidiaceae family of triggerplants.

#3085

Susana Lima

#175761

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Susana Q. Lima is a Portuguese neuroscientist and principal investigator at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal. Her research studies neural mechanisms of sexual behavior and mate choice.

#3086

Catherine Hartley

#170917

Overall Influence

Catherine Hartley is an American psychologist and an Associate Professor of Psychology within the Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science at New York University in New York City. Hartley's research explores how brain development impacts the evaluation of negative experiences, decision-making, and motivated behavior. Her work has helped to elucidate how uncontrollable aversive events affect fear learning and how learning to control aversive stimuli can improve emotional resilience.

#3087

Lisa Frenkel

#181255

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Lisa M. Frenkel is an American pediatrician currently Professor at University of Washington and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Education She earned her B.A. at University of Kansas from 1973–77 and her M.D. at University of Kansas Medical Center from 1977-81.

#3088

Dana Lepofsky

#166648

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Dana Sue Lepofsky is a Canadian archaeologist and ethnobiologist. She is a professor at Simon Fraser University, a former president of the Society of Ethnobiology, and received the Smith-Wintemberg Award in 2018. Her research focuses on the historical ecology of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast.

#3089

Arlette Nougarède

#175349

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

Arlette Nougarède, wife Lance, born in 1930 in Narbonne, is a cell biologist specializing in plant development from embryogenesis to flowering. She was Professor Emeritus at Pierre and Marie Curie University from 1992 to 2013. She has been a corresponding member of the French Academy of sciences since 1987.

#3090

Cornelia Ulrich

#94892

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Cornelia "Neli" Ulrich is executive director of the Comprehensive Cancer Center at Huntsman Cancer Institute , Jon M. and Karen Huntsman Presidential Professor in Cancer Research, and former Division Chief of Cancer Population Sciences in the Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Utah. Ulrich oversees HCI's academic consortium of nearly 200 cancer research teams. She leads efforts to advance the impact of HCI's research in laboratory, clinical and population science, with the goal of improving cancer prevention and treatment. Prior to joining HCI, she was the director ...

#3091

Laura Miller

#38940

Overall Influence

Laura A. Miller is an American mathematical biologist, known for her research in biomechanical applications of fluid dynamics including insect flight, jellyfish propulsion, and blood flow in embryonic hearts. She works at the University of Arizona as a professor of mathematics.

#3092

Karen Wishner

#181401

Overall Influence

Karen Frances Wishner is an American oceanographer currently at University of Rhode Island and an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her interests include coastal shelf and zooplankton behavior and environment, and has published her findings.

#3093

Patricia Casey

#45734

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Patricia Rosarie Casey is an Irish psychiatrist, academic, journalist and conservative commentator on social issues. She is Professor of Psychiatry at University College Dublin and consultant psychiatrist at the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital, Dublin. She is known for her regular column with the Irish Independent newspaper, and her conservative views on a variety of social issues.

#3094

Trisha Davis

#170274

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Trisha Nell Davis is an American biochemist, the current Earl Davie/ZymoGenetics Chair of the department of biochemistry at the University of Washington. Her early research focused on Calmodulin, though the primary focus of her lab has since shifted to the molecular machinery of cell division in budding yeast, especially the microtubule organizing centers and the kinetochores.

#3095

Ann Bucklin

#175656

Overall Influence

Ann Bucklin is Professor Emeritus of Marine Sciences at the University of Connecticut known for her work using molecular tools to study zooplankton. Bucklin was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1995.

#3096

Elisa G. Nicora

#181949

Overall Influence

1912 - 2001 (89 years)

Elisa Gernaela Juana Raquel Nicora de Panza was an Argentinian botanist noted for her research on grasses, especially Malpighiaceae, Caryophyllaceae, Gramineae. She was a founding member of the Argentine Society of Botany, and was a curator at two herbaria. In the course of her career, she described over sixty species and gathered thousands of specimens.

#3097

Mel Thomson

#174477

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Dr. Melanie Thomson is a microbiologist and science communicator based in Victoria . She is the General Manager of Education, Skills and Events at the Medical Technologies and Pharmaceuticals Growth Centre.

#3098

Barbara Barratt

#181402

Overall Influence

Barbara Ingeborg Patricia Barratt is a New Zealand entomologist and biocontrol expert. In 2022 she was elected as fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi. Early life and education Barratt was born in England and has recalled that an interest in science was influenced by her father and a teacher who took her on nature walks to collect "creepy crawlies". At this stage she knew she wanted to get involved in natural history, particularly involving insects. She completed her PhD at Durham University in 1975, with a thesis on the sex pheromones of the drugstore beetle. She arrived in New Zealand as ...

#3099

Marilyn Gunner

#116987

Overall Influence

Marilyn Gunner is a physics professor at the City College of New York and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. She is known for her work on molecular biophysics and structural biology. Education Gunner received her B.A. from the State University of New York . She completed her Ph.D. in 1988 at the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked on topics such as electron transfer in proteins with Leslie Dutton.

#3100

Marie-Agnès Letrouit-Galinou

#181533

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Marie-Agnès Letrouit-Galinou is a French botanist, mycologist, and lichenologist, known for her contribution to revolutionizing the scientific understanding of ascomycete development and classification.

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