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,

#3101

Pamela Rickard

#145081
Overall Influence
1928 - 2002 (74 years)
Professor Pamela Athalie Deidre Rickard was an Australian biochemist, serving as head of the University of New South Wales School of Biological Sciences from 1981 to 1988. Born in Sydney, she worked for a few years at the Daily Telegraph newspaper, before completing a TAFE course and entering Sydney University as a mature age student. She then gained a master's in biochemistry at the New South Wales University of Technology, writing her thesis on the "iron-containing pigments of certain fungi" under Professor Bernhard Ralph and Dr Frank Moss, and graduating in 1961. She then began a PhD in London on the biosynthesis of porphyrins under Professor Claude Rimington, finishing in 1963.
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#3102

Anne Madden

#179242
Overall Influence
Anne Arnold Madden is an American biologist, inventor, and science communicator who advocates for finding "microbial solutions to human problems." Madden’s research on microscopic life is often featured in the press, particularly her studies on the microbial community of food, using advanced DNA techniques to create the first atlas of arthropods in USA homes, investigating the microscopic life in dust, and using insect yeasts for ethanol production and beer brewing.
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#3103

Ann Sakai

#182159
Overall Influence
Ann Kiku Sakai is a plant biologist at the University of California, Irvine known for her work on plant breeding and speciation. She is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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#3104

Rae Wynn-Grant

#170529
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Rae Wynn-Grant is a large-carnivore ecologist and a fellow with National Geographic Society. She is best known for her research of the human impact on the behavior of black bears in Montana and is an advocate for women and people of color in the sciences.
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#3105

Graziela Barroso

#182433
Overall Influence
1912 - 2003 (91 years)
Graziela Maciel Barroso was a Brazilian botanist who has known as a leading expert of the flora of Brazil, as well as a specialist of Compositae. She was Chairman and Professor of the Department of Plant Biology at the University of Brasília, and has published three volumes of Sistemática de Angiospermas do Brasil.
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#3106

Mirela Delibegovic

#112581
Overall Influence
Mirela Delibegovic is a British pharmacologist/biochemist who is Dean for Industrial Engagement in Research & Knowledge Transfer and Director of Aberdeen Cardiovascular and Diabetes Centre. She holds a Personal Chair in Diabetes Physiology and Signalling at the Institute of Medical Sciences at the University of Aberdeen. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Delibegovic used artificial intelligence to develop technologies that would allow mass-screening for coronavirus disease 2019.
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#3107

Christine Lambkin

#179111
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Christine Lynette Lambkin is an entomologist, scientific illustrator, and Curator of Entomology at the Queensland Museum. Career Lambkin began her career as a science teacher in Sydney and Brisbane after graduating from the University of Queensland with a Bachelor of Science and Diploma of Education in 1976. She became a Scientific Illustrator at the Queensland Museum in 1986, then with the CSIRO Division of Entomology, Long Pocket, Queensland in 1993. In 1994 Lambkin completed a Certificate of Visual Arts and Design at the Queensland College of Art.
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#3108

Carol Palmer

#110376
Overall Influence
Carol Palmer is a British anthropologist, environmental archaeologist and botanist. She is currently Director of the British Institute in Amman, an Honorary Fellow at Bournemouth University, and a part of the Thimar collective. Her primary research interests are in rural societies in the Arab world, changes in the practices of food production on the landscape and in society, and ethnobotany. She collaborates as Project Partner of the INEA project, which aims to examine archaeological site usage using phytolithic and geochemical evidence. She has also been a part of the Antikythera Survey Proje...
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#3109

Chenghua Gu

#169365
Overall Influence
Chenghua Gu is a Professor of Neurobiology at the Harvard Medical School where her research focuses on the Blood–brain barrier. She is also part of the Harvard Brain Science Initiative and has won numerous awards for her groundbreaking research on the brain's vascular component.
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#3110

Sigrid Veasey

#150500
Overall Influence
Sigrid Veasey is a physician and scientist affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in medicine. Veasey is a professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology where she conducts research on sleep disorders and sleep disruption.
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#3111

Kittie Fenley Parker

#179755
Overall Influence
1910 - 1994 (84 years)
Kittie Fenley Parker was a botanist for the National Museum of Natural History and author of An Illustrated Guide to Arizona Weeds. Biography Parker née Fenley was born in 1910. She attended the University of California, Berkeley and earned her PhD from the University of Arizona in 1946. She began her teaching career at the University of Arizona's School of Agriculture where she taught from 1949 through 1953. She went on to teach botany at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. She was a research associate at the National Museum of Natural History from 1959 through 1989. Parker...
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#3112

Bojana Stefanovic

#177224
Overall Influence
Bojana Stefanovic is a Canadian neuroscientist. She is a senior scientist at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Functional Brain Neuroimaging at the University of Toronto.
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#3113

Michal Rivlin

#106696
Overall Influence
Michal Rivlin is a Senior Scientist and Sara Lee Schupf Family Chair in Neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute of Science. She was awarded the 2019 Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists for her research on the neuronal circuitry of the retina.
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#3114

Astrid Linthorst

#177357
Overall Influence
Astrid Linthorst is a professor of neuroscience at the School of Clinical Sciences at the University of Bristol, UK. Specializing in the neurochemistry and neuroendocrinology of stress and behavior, she heads a research group on the mechanisms that support coping with stress in the brain. She is also chair of the Scientific Programme Committee of the ECNP Congress and a member of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology Executive Committee.
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#3115

Anne Goriely

#178752
Overall Influence
Anne Goriely is a British geneticist who is a professor of human genetics at the University of Oxford. Her research investigates the molecular mechanisms that underpin genetic variation, particularly mutations in the male germline.
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#3116

Diane Kelly

#182366
Overall Influence
Diane Kelly is a Professor of Microbiology, Institute of Life Science, Swansea University Medical School and Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. Career After undergraduate study in London, she undertook a PhD at Swansea University followed by postdoctoral work at the University of Sheffield, researching microbial cytochromes P450. After a position at Aberystwyth University she returned to Swansea University Medical School as Reader and then Professor. She continues to research sterol metabolism and microbial cytochromes P450 as targets for antifungal agents in medicine and agriculture, and has authored over fifty papers on these subjects.
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#3117

Caroline Palavicino-Maggio

#176495
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Caroline Palavicino-Maggio is an American neuroscientist and an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She also directs the Neurobiological Mechanisms of Aggression Laboratory at McLean Hospital. Palavicino-Maggio explores how gene expression in amine neurons and neural circuits leads to changes in social behavior, specifically aggression. Palavicino-Maggio is committed to mentoring and inspiring first-generation students in STEM and serves as the Director of Outreach for the Journal of Emerging Investigators, an open-access journal that publishes research conducted by m...
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#3118

Pamela Templer

#115478
Overall Influence
Pamela H. Templer is an ecosystem ecologist and professor at Boston University who focuses on plant-microbial interaction and their effect on carbon exchange and nutrient cycling. She is also interested in examining how urban ecosystems function, how human actions influence nutrient cycling, atmosphere-biosphere interactions, and other ecosystem processes.
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#3119

Tinde van Andel

#180467
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Tinde van Andel is an ethnobotanist. She is the Special professor of the Clusius chair of History of Botany and Gardens at Leiden University. Using ethnobotany and genomics, she studies how human populations and plant species migrated from Africa to the New World.
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#3120

Rebecca Johnson

#154659
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Rebecca Nicole Johnson is an Australian scientist and science communicator. Since April 2015, Johnson has been Director and Chief Scientist of the Australian Museum Research Institute , Sydney, the first female to be appointed to the role since the establishment of the Australian Museum in 1827. She is also head of the Australian Museum's Australian Centre for Wildlife Genomics, a wildlife forensics laboratory based at the Australian Museum.
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#3121

Deborah McGregor

#88416
Overall Influence
Deborah B. McGregor is a Canadian environmentalist. She is an associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Environmental Justice at Osgoode Hall Law School. Early life and education An Ojibway person from Whitefish River First Nation, McGregor was born in Birch Island, Ontario, to Elder Marion McGregor. She earned her PhD in Forestry from the University of Toronto.
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#3122

Ofelia Olivero

#181377
Overall Influence
Ofelia Ana Olivero is an Argentine-American biologist specialized in HIV/AIDS and biomedical research. She pioneered the discovery of nucleoside analogs induced centrosomal amplification and aneuploidy while working as a senior staff scientist at the National Cancer Institute . In 2016, she became chief of the NCI diversity intramural workforce branch.
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#3123

Daniela M. Ferreira

#182421
Overall Influence
Daniela M. Ferreira is a Brazilian British immunologist. She is a specialist in bacterial infection, respiratory co-infection, mucosal immunology and vaccine responses. She is currently Professor of Respiratory Infection and Vaccinology at the Oxford Vaccine Group in the Department of Paediatrics at the University of Oxford and the Director of the Liverpool Vaccine Group at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. She leads a team of scientists studying protective immune responses against pneumococcus and other respiratory pathogens such as SARS-CoV2. Her team has established a novel method of inducing pneumococcal carriage in human volunteers.
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#3124

Louise Chilvers

#179416
Overall Influence
Barbara Louise Chilvers is a New Zealand marine biologist who researches marine mammals. She is Professor of Wildlife Ecology in the School of Veterinary Science at Massey University and Director of Wildbase Oiled Wildlife Response at the university.
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#3125

Kate Trinajstic

#171473
Overall Influence
Professor Kate Trinajstic or Katherine M. Trinajstic is an Australian palaeontologist, evolutionary biologist, and winner of the Dorothy Hill Award. She is the Dean of Research, Faculty of Science and Engineering at Curtin University.
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#3126

Valerie Saena Tuia

#101587
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Valerie Saena Tuia is a plant scientist from Samoa. She served as Officer in Charge of the Genetic Resources at the Secretariat of the Pacific Community Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees for over 15 years, retiring in 2017.
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#3127

Janet McCarter Woolley

#110747
Overall Influence
1906 - 1996 (90 years)
Janet McCarter Woolley was an American bacteriologist. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1944, for her work in immunology. Early life and education Janet Ruth McCarter was born in 1906 in Duluth, Minnesota, the daughter of William and Mary Blackburn McCarter. She briefly attended Carleton College, and earned three degrees at the University of Wisconsin. As a doctoral student, she worked with professor E. G. Hastings on tubercule bacilli, which became the focus of her own work for decades.
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#3128

Helena Hansen

#106352
Overall Influence
Helena Hansen is an American psychiatrist and anthropologist who is a professor and Chair of Translational Social Science at University of California, Los Angeles. Her research considers health equity, and has called for clinical practitioners to address social determinants of health. She holds an Honorary Doctorate from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and was elected Fellow of the National Academy of Medicine in 2021.
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#3129

Sally-Ann Poulsen

#171552
Overall Influence
Sally-Ann Poulsen is an Australian chemical biologist who is a Professor and Director at Griffith University. Her research considers medicinal chemistry and drug discovery. She is Chair of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute Medicinal Chemistry and Chemical Biology Division.
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#3130

Jo-Anne Sewlal

#176400
Overall Influence
1979 - 2020 (41 years)
Jo-Anne Nina Sewlal was a Trinidad and Tobago arachnologist. She discovered several new species of spiders in Trinidad and Tobago, and published some of the first surveys of spider populations in many countries of the Caribbean.
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#3131

Mary Barkworth

#178443
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Mary Elizabeth Barkworth is an American botanist and professor emerita at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. Education and career Barkworth has a B.Sc. from the University of British Columbia, and went on to teach school in British Columbia after graduation. She has an M.Ed. and a Ph.D. in 1975 from Western Washington University where she worked on variation in Brodiaea. Following her Ph.D. she worked with Agriculture Canada until moving to Utah State University in 1979, where she also served as the director of the Intermountain Herbarium. Barkworth retired in 2012.
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#3132

Bénédicte Menez

#84023
Overall Influence
Bénédicte Menez is a French geomicrobiologist and university professor in Earth Sciences at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris. In 2012, she received the Irène Joliot-Curie Prize in the “Young Female Scientist” category for her work.
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#3133

Elissa P. Benedek

#104634
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Elissa Panush Benedek is an American psychiatrist specializing in child and adolescent psychiatry and forensic psychiatry. She is an adjunct clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan Medical Center. She served as director of research and training at the Center for Forensic Psychiatry in Ann Arbor for 25 years and was president of the American Psychiatric Association from 1990 to 1991. She is regarded as an expert on child abuse and trauma, and has testified in high-profile court cases. She also focuses on ethics, psychiatric aspects of disasters and terrorism, and domestic violence.
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#3134

Christy Morrissey

#180212
Overall Influence
Christy Ann Morrissey is a Canadian ecotoxicologist. She is a Professor of biology at the University of Saskatchewan and was elected to the Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists.
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#3135

Rampa Rattanarithikul

#179628
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Rampa Rattanarithikul is a Thai entomologist and taxonomist. She is a leading expert on mosquitoes, having discovered 24 new species and identifying at least 420 during her career. She was the lead author of the six-volume Illustrated Keys to the Mosquitoes of Thailand. The mosquito species Anopheles rampae and Uranotaenia rampae are named for her.
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#3136

Rochelle Constantine

#181215
Overall Influence
Rochelle Lee Constantine is a New Zealand marine biologist, and is a full professor at the University of Auckland. Constantine specialises in marine mammal conservation. Academic career Constantine completed a PhD titled The behavioural ecology of the bottlenose dolphins of northeastern New Zealand: a population exposed to tourism at the University of Auckland in 2002. Constantine then joined the faculty, rising to full professor, and leader of the Marine Mammal Ecology Lab.
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#3137

Indira Raman

#183068
Overall Influence
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#3138

Heidi Steltzer

Heidi Steltzer
#112798
Overall Influence
Heidi Steltzer is a German-born American scientist of arctic and alpine ecology and professor at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado teaching Biology and Environment and Sustainability. Steltzer is known for her work on snow melt and how it affects ecosystems in the surrounding areas.
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#3139

Zuleyma Tang-Martínez

#134866
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Zuleyma Tang-Martínez is an emeritus professor of biology at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Earlier in her career she published under her former married name, Zuleyma Tang Halpin. Early life and education Tang-Martínez was born in Venezuela on March 9, 1945. She and her family lived in ethnically segregated camps that were operated by an American oil company. Her father was a company accountant, permitting Tang-Martínez to be among the very few Venezuelans to be raised and attend school in the American camps. In 1960, she was sent by her parents to attend a Catholic, all-girls, boarding high school in Tampa FL because the oil camp schools did not go beyond the 8th grade.
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#3140

Jan E. Lovie-Kitchin

#122221
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Jan E. Lovie-Kitchin is an Australian optometrist, former professor at Queensland University of Technology and founder of the university's Vision Rehabilitation Centre. She was the co-developer of the Bailey-Lovie visual acuity chart.
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#3141

Helen Mason

#182481
Overall Influence
Helen Mason is a British endocrinologist who specialises in reproductive endocrinology and is deputy head of Biomedical Sciences at St. Georges . She graduated from Aston University and Imperial College London, and is now a director of PCOS UK, which provides support for health-care professionals dealing with polycystic ovary syndrome. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Biology. Mason also specialized in reproductive functions of patients with eating disorder and has published several papers and contributed to a number of books on the subject.
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#3142

Georgette D. Kanmogne

#179434
Overall Influence
Georgette D. Kanmogne is a Cameroonian American geneticist and molecular virologist and a full professor and vice chair for resource allocation and faculty development within the Department of Pharmacology and Experimental Neurosciences at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, Nebraska. Kanmogne's research program focuses on exploring the pathogenesis of neuroAIDS by deciphering the mechanisms underlying blood brain barrier dysfunction and viral entry into the central nervous system. Her research also addresses the lack of HIV therapies that cross the blood brain barrier and has...
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#3143

Sarah Romans

#111119
Overall Influence
Sarah E. Romans FRANZCP is a New Zealand academic psychiatrist and Emerita Professor at the University of Otago. Academic career Romans holds a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery and Doctor of Medicine from the University of Otago. She moved to the University of Toronto where she researched gender differences and depression. She returned to the University of Otago and was appointed a full professor, effective 1 February 2011. As of 2020 she is Professor Emerita at the University of Otago and also conducts a private psychiatric practice for adults.
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#3144

Rebecca Woodgate

#181190
Overall Influence
Rebecca Woodgate is a professor at the University of Washington known for her work on ocean circulation in polar regions. Education and career Woodgate has a B.A. from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. from the University of Oxford . Following her Ph.D., she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research. In 1999, she moved to the University of Washington and, as of 2022, she is a professor at the University of Washington.
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#3145

Mirit I. Aladjem

#177056
Overall Influence
Mirit I. Aladjem is an Israeli-American biologist researching cellular signaling pathways that regulate DNA synthesis. She is a senior investigator in the National Cancer Institute's developmental therapeutics branch and head of the DNA replication group.
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#3146

Barbara Harland

#182328
Overall Influence
1925 - 2020 (95 years)
Barbara F. Harland was a biologist, dietician, nutritionist, and professor of nutritional sciences at Howard University, within the College of Nursing and Allied Health Services. Harland was licensed as a dietician and nutritionist by the State of Maryland and worked in the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a research biologist. In 1984, she accepted a faculty position at Howard University and served as a professor of nutritional sciences for over 30 years, where she was awarded tenure and joined the graduate faculty. She was also involved in supporting student aid and school supply funding, establishing the Dr.
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#3147

M. Elizabeth Tidball

M. Elizabeth Tidball
#172830
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
Mary Elizabeth Tidball was an American physiologist. She was an advocate for women in academia and STEM and a supporter of women's colleges. Tidball was a longtime faculty member at George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences where she became the institution's first woman appointed professor of physiology. Her research in the 1960s on the career outcomes of graduates from women's colleges versus those from coeducational institutions sparked discussions that continued for decades. Tidball was the first female president of the Cathedral Choral Society where she sang for a...
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#3148

Maryam Shanechi

#115055
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Maryam M. Shanechi is an Iran-born American neuroengineer. She studies ways of decoding the brain's activity to control brain-machine interfaces. She was honored as one of MIT Technology Review's Innovators under 35 in 2014 and one of the Science News 10 scientists to watch in 2019. She is Professor and Viterbi Early Career Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Viterbi School of Engineering, and a member of the Neuroscience Graduate Program at the University of Southern California.
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#3149

Udelgard Körber-Grohne

#174559
Overall Influence
1923 - 2014 (91 years)
Udelgard Körber-Grohne was a German archaeobotanist. Early life and education Körber-Grohne was born in Hamburg. Her father Ernst Grohne was an archaeologist and museum curator in Bremen. She studied biology at university, graduating from Braunschweig Technical University in 1948.
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#3150

Christine Jasoni

#182546
Overall Influence
Christine Jasoni is an American-born New Zealand academic specialising in foetal neural development. She is a professor at the University of Otago and has been the director of the university's Brain Health Research Centre since 2016. In 2020 she was elected a Ngā Takahoa a Te Apārangi Companion of Royal Society Te Apārangi.
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