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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School

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Biology,

#3201

Kathrin Muegge

#99933

Overall Influence

Kathrin Muegge is a German physician and molecular biologist researching chromatin organization during embryonic development and in tumor progression. She is a senior investigator and head of the epigenetics section at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research.

#3202

Irene Moon

#181467

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Irene Moon is an American entomologist, performance artist, musician, playwright, actor, and filmmaker. She has published in the field of entomology as Katja Seltmann, and is the current director of the Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

#3203

Francine Cournos

#100247

Overall Influence

Francine Cournos is Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Cournos is also Principal Investigator of the Northeast Caribbean AIDS Education and Training Center at the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies.

#3204

Kimberly Hughes

#115379

Overall Influence

Kimberly A. Hughes is an American biologist. Hughes completed her doctoral studies at the University of Chicago in 1993. She is a professor of biological science at Florida State University. In 2018, Hughes was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#3205

Nicole Boury-Esnault

#184264

Overall Influence

Nicole Boury-Esnault is a retired French researcher of sponges, formerly at Centre d'Océanologie de Marseille, Aix-Marseille University. Research In 1995, Nicole Boury-Esnault and Jean Vacelet discovered a species of carnivorous sponges of the genus Asbestopluma, during an exploration of a shallow cave in the Mediterranean. Caves can recapitulate the environment of the deep sea-bed due to the darkness and lack of nutrient, permitting the study of deep-sea-like regions in shallow areas of water. Carnivorous sponges, lacking the normal filter feeding apparatus, had been previously discovered during deep-sea trawls and presumed to be damaged since they did not have a known feeding mechanism.

#3206

Karen Moxon

#176927

Overall Influence

Karen Anne Moxon is a Professor of Bioengineering at University of California, Davis and a specialist in brain-machine-interfaces. She is best known for her neural engineering work, and is responsible for the first demonstration of a closed-loop, real-time brain machine interface system in rodent subjects, which was later translated to both non-human primates and humans with neurological disorders. She currently runs the Moxon Neurorobotics Laboratory at the University of California, Davis.

#3207

Eirian Jones

#184581

Overall Influence

Elisabeth Eirian Jones is a New Zealand phytopathologist, and a full professor at Lincoln University, specialising in sustainable control strategies for cropping industries. Academic career After a BSc at the Manchester Metropolitan University, Jones completed a PhD titled Comparative behaviour of mycoparasitic Pythium species at the University of Edinburgh. Jones then moved to the University of Warwick, before being appointed to Lincoln University in New Zealand. She was promoted to full professor in 2022.

#3208

Kathleen Kelly

#183981

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Kathleen Jacobs Kelly is an American biologist specializing in genetic regulation of cell growth, cancer progression, and metastasis. She is chief of the laboratory of genitourinary cancer pathogenesis and deputy director of the National Cancer Institute Center for Cancer Research.

#3209

Barbara Mitcalfe

#100195

Overall Influence

1928 - 2017 (89 years)

Barbara Jean Mitcalfe née Fougère was a New Zealand conservationist, botanist and educator. She is best known for being an expert field botanist, for her conservation work in and around the Wellington region, and for helping to establish the first Māori preschool.

#3210

Darla Zelenitsky

#175839

Overall Influence

Darla K. Zelenitsky is a Canadian paleontologist most notable for her research on dinosaur reproductive biology and fossils. She was a part of a team that first found evidence of feathered dinosaurs in North America, and since then has co-authored over 50 different publications. Her research primarily focuses on paleobiology and paleoenvironments, with a key look on dinosaurs using extinct taxa to detect and infer the changes seen over time.

#3211

Ludmila Prokunina-Olsson

#170842

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Ludmila Prokunina-Olsson is a molecular medical geneticist who conducts genetic and functional analyses downstream of genome-wide association studies for various human traits, including cancer, immune and infectious diseases. She is chief of the Laboratory of Translational Genomics at the National Cancer Institute.

#3212

Daniela Cristina Zappi

#184634

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Dr. Daniela Cristina Zappi is a Brazilian botanist, plant collector, and research scientist at the herbarium of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew noted for studying and describing Neotropical flora, Rubiaceae, and Cactaceae. She has described over 90 species.

#3213

Shona M. Bell

#155392

Overall Influence

1924 - 2011 (87 years)

Shona Margaret Bell was a New Zealand palaeontologist. She studied the fossils of the Corbies Creek area of North Otago and the Benmore Dam area. The 1954 Directory of New Zealand Science records her as an assistant palaeontologist at the Geological Survey of New Zealand. She was employed by GSNZ from 1948 to 1950, but resigned on her marriage to Tom Grant-Taylor, as was expected at the time.

#3214

Sarah Hook

#184747

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Sarah M. Hook is a New Zealand immunology academic, and as of 2019 is a full professor at the University of Otago. Academic career After a 1995 PhD titled 'Cervine Interleukin-4' at the University of Otago, Hook joined the staff, rising to full professor.

#3215

Susan Perkins

#184404

Overall Influence

Susan L. Perkins is an American microbiologist and the Martin and Michele Cohen Dean of Science at The City College of New York . Her expertise includes the pathology and genetics of malaria parasites and other haemosporidians infecting myriad non-primate species.

#3216

Jeanne Spurlock

#90822

Overall Influence

1921 - 1999 (78 years)

Jeanne Marybeth Spurlock was an American psychiatrist, professor and author. She served as the deputy medical director of the American Psychiatric Association for seventeen years. She chaired the Department of Psychiatry at Meharry Medical College starting in 1968, and she taught at George Washington University and Howard University. She also operated her own private psychiatry practice, and she published several works.

#3217

Jennifer Smith

#120266

Overall Influence

Jennifer E. Smith is an American marine ecologist and coral reef expert who works at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Her research investigates how physical and biological processes impact the function of marine communities.

#3218

Amina Pollard

#180952

Overall Influence

Amina Pollard is an American limnologist and ecologist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency . Pollard leads the U.S. EPA National Lakes Assessment, which seeks to provide information on the health of lakes, ponds, and reservoirs across the United States. She currently serves on the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography board of directors , chairs ASLO's annual awards committee, and is a scientific advisor to Canada's Lake Pulse research program.

#3219

Susan Geertshuis

#172520

Overall Influence

Susan A. Geertshuis is an English-New Zealand academic. She is currently a full professor at the University of Auckland. Academic career After a PhD at the University of Nottingham, she worked at the University of Wales Bangor and the University of Northampton, before moving to the University of Auckland, rising to full professor.

#3220

Annette Byrne

#178506

Overall Influence

Annette Therese Byrne is an Irish physiologist, Professor and Head of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland Precision Cancer Medicine group. Her research considers metastatic colorectal cancer and glioblastoma.

#3221

Irena Roterman-Konieczna

#180755

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Irena Roterman-Konieczna is a Polish biochemist and a professor at the Jagiellonian University Medical College. Biography Irena Roterman-Konieczna was born on 13 March 1950 in Kraków. She received a master's degree in chemistry in 1973 at the Jagiellonian University, her doctorate in 1985 at the Medical College there, and a postdoctoral degree there in 1996. In 2005 she received the title of professor. She has been the head of the Department of Bioinformatics and Telemedicine at the Jagiellonian University, and an editor in chief of the Bio-Algorithms and Med-Systems journal.

#3222

Kathryn Mary Murphy

Kathryn Mary Murphy

#180357

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Kathryn Mary Murphy is a Canadian neuroscientist and professor who studies development and plasticity of the brain. She has been a professor at McMaster University since 1994, where she founded the neuroscience program and prior to that was at McGill University where she won a University Research Fellowship from NSERC and a Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

#3223

Jane El-Dahr

#174026

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Jane Maroney El-Dahr is a clinical professor of pediatrics and the head of the division of pediatric allergy and immunology at Tulane University School of Medicine, where she has worked since 1990. She is also the president of the Louisiana Society of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. She has expertise in allergy, immunology, and rheumatology.

#3224

Susan Rossell

#148423

Overall Influence

Professor Susan Rossell is a British researcher based at Swinburne University of Technology specialising in Neuropsychology and Neuroimaging. Originally from Nottingham, UK; she now resides in Melbourne, Australia. Her research on the neuropsychology of schizophrenia and body dysmorphic disorder is internationally recognised.

#3225

Delia Abbiatti

#183403

Overall Influence

1918 - Present (108 years)

Delia Abbiatti is an Argentinian botanist and pteridologist, noted for studying Eriocaulaceae, Loranthaceae, Thelypteris, and Cyclosorus. The species Perezia abbiattii and Thelypteris abbiattii were named in her honor.

#3226

Arang Rhie

#178915

Overall Influence

Arang Rhie is a South Korean bioinformatician serving as a staff scientist in the genome informatics section at the National Human Genome Research Institute. Rhie earned a B.S. in computer science and a M.S. in bioinformatics from the Ewha Womans University. She graduated with a Ph.D. at the Seoul National University College of Medicine in 2017. She conducted postdoctoral research at the National Human Genome Research Institute .

#3227

Anne Buist

#39045

Overall Influence

Anne Buist is an Australian researcher and practising psychiatrist specializing in women's mental health, in particular postpartum psychiatric illnesses. She is also a novelist, author of the Natalie King crime fiction series, and co-author, with her husband Graeme Simsion, of the novels Two Steps Forward and Two Steps Onward .

#3228

Maria Paz Martin Esteban

#185055

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

María-Paz Martín Esteban is a Spanish mycologist. She has been a fellow of the Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid since 1999, and a researcher at the Spanish National Research Council since 2019. She has authored more than 200 scientific articles on the biodiversity of fungi.

#3229

Sarah Pett

#179585

Overall Influence

Sarah L. Pett is a Professor of Infectious Diseases at University College London. Pett is interested in the immunopathology of infections and the development of optimised treatment pathways for infections. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Pett led a clinical trial that investigated the efficacy of remdesivir as a treatment for coronavirus disease.

#3230

Kate Brauman

#175168

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Kate A. Brauman is an American scientist who uses an interdisciplinary tool set to examine the interactions between land use change and water resources. Brauman is the lead scientist for the Global Water Initiative at University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment.

#3231

Debra Waters

#181278

Overall Influence

Debra Lynn Waters is a New Zealand exercise physiologist and medical researcher in the field of health ageing, director of Gerontology Research and professor at the University of Otago. Academic career With a BS and PhD, exercise physiologist Waters moved from the University of New Mexico, where she retains the role of adjunct professor, to the University of Otago in New Zealand in 2005. In December 2019 Waters was promoted to full professor at the University of Otago with effect from 1 February 2020.

#3232

Pamela Marrone

#183330

Overall Influence

Pamela Marrone is a serial entrepreneur in agriculture biotechnology and biological pesticides. She is one of 22 women who founded and led companies to be listed on public stock exchanges She held more than 500 patents. She also serves on a number of company boards and is on serval advisory councils.

#3233

Karin M. Kettenring

#184289

Overall Influence

Karin M. Kettenring is an American plant ecologist based in Logan, Utah. Her research focuses primarily on aspects of wetland plant ecology, including invasive plant ecology and management, native wetland seeds and seedlings, and wetland restoration. Kettenring worked in several labs and research stations across the United States before obtaining a faculty position at Utah State University as a professor of wetland ecology. Her most cited publication, “Lessons learned from invasive plant control experiments: a systematic review and meta-analysis,” looks at the literature discussing invasives s...

#3234

Paulina D. Jenkins

#185316

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Paulina D. Jenkins – active from the 1970s – is a British zoologist, specialising in mammals and employed as curator at the Natural History Museum, London. Jenkins has published research in a large number of papers, especially on smaller mammals such as shrews and bats. Her honours include the specific epithet derived from her first name for a species of rock rat found in Laos, Saxatilomys paulinae, prompting the invention of a common name "Paulina's rock rat". The mammalogist's surname is also the eponym of other animal names, the shrew-tenrec Microgale jenkinsae, and derived in the masculin...

#3235

Gabriella Gibson

#182588

Overall Influence

Gabriella "Gay" Gibson FRES is a medical entomologist in the UK, she specialises in mosquitoes. In 2013 she was appointed Professor of Medical Entomology at the University of Greenwich. Education and career Gibson was educated at the University of Sussex where she studied a PhD looking at mosquito behaviour and was awarded the degree in 1981. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the Silwood Park campus of Imperial College London and later a lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

#3236

Nicole Calakos

#184464

Overall Influence

Nicole Calakos is an American neuroscientist and neurologist. She is the Lincoln Financial Group Distinguished Professor of Neurobiology at Duke University. She is an elected Member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Society for Clinical Investigation, and National Academy of Medicine for her "pioneering work in optogenetic approaches, and substantial contributions in the area of synaptic plasticity with a focus on striatal circuity of the basal ganglia."

#3237

Kayri Havens

#149529

Overall Influence

Kayri Havens is an American botanist with expertise in reproductive ecology and rare, threatened, and endangered species conservation, including seed banking. She is the Medard and Elizabeth Welch Director of Plant Science and Conservation at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Havens is the co-director of Project Budburst, a community science project that facilitates the collection of plant phenology observations. In 2019, she was the recipient of the American Horticultural Society's Liberty Hyde Bailey Award for her achievements in plant conservation.

#3238

Emily Leproust

#182451

Overall Influence

Emily Leproust is an American scientist and entrepreneur. She is the CEO and co-founder of Twist Bioscience, a public company working on DNA synthesis. The company harnesses synthetic biology, providing tools to manufacture insulin from yeast, to tackle malaria, produce spider silk at scale or store information on DNA. She was awarded the BIO Rosalind Franklin Award in 2020.

#3239

Josephine Milne

#181126

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Josephine Milne is an Australian bryologist, and former Manager Collections at the National Herbarium of Victoria at the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria. Education and career Milne completed a Bachelor of Education in Environmental Studies in 1978, with a double major in Biology and Geography. She then taught biology, science and geography for eleven years at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Secondary College, in Bentleigh, Melbourne. Following this, Milne tutored students in animal biology, genetics and human physiology at Deakin University, before beginning a PhD on the reproductive biology of f...

#3240

Ann M. Hardy

#108788

Overall Influence

Ann Marie Hardy is an American epidemiologist and microbiologist who served as the human research protections officer at the National Institutes of Health Office of Extramural Programs. Education Ann Marie Hardy completed a master of science degree in microbiology and a doctor of public health in epidemiology in 1983 at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. Her dissertation was titled Infections in renal transplant recipients receiving cyclosporine.

#3241

Tanja Schwander

#185030

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Tanja Schwander is a Swiss evolutionary biologist and professor at the University of Lausanne. She is known for her work on the Evolution of sexual reproduction. Education and career Tanja Schwander obtained her PhD in 2007 from the University of Lausanne on 'Evolution, maintenance and ecological consequences of genetic caste determination in Pogonomyrmex harvester ants'. Tanja Schwander then took a postdoctoral position at Simon Fraser University in Prof. Bernard J. Crespi's lab, before being hired as an independent researcher at the University of Groningen. In 2013, she moved back to Univer...

#3242

Elizabeth Carrington Pope

#170799

Overall Influence

1912 - 1993 (81 years)

Elizabeth Carrington Pope was a New Zealand-born zoologist and marine biologist. She was born in Nelson in 1912, and migrated to Bellevue Hill, Australia with her family that same year. Pope was curator of worms and echinoderms at the Australian Museum, and was deputy director of the museum for one year before her retirement in 1972.

#3243

Hagit Eldar-Finkelman

#184867

Overall Influence

Hagit Eldar-Finkelman is an Israeli scientist and a principal investigator of an active research laboratory at the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University. Eldar-Finkelman’s research is focused on the signal transduction field and drug development targeting protein kinases. She is well known for her pioneering work on the functions of GSK-3 and its contribution to diabetes and other pathogenies, including depressive behavior, Alzheimer’s diseases, and Huntington’s diseases. Novel findings also include the unique evolution of GSK-3 isozymes. Eldar-Finkelman is a leading figure in dev...

#3244

Anju Chadha

#60832

Overall Influence

Anju Chadha is an Indian biochemist. She is a professor at Indian Institute of Technology Madras. She works in the fields of biocatalysis and enzyme mechanisms, enzymes in organic synthesis, asymmetric synthesis using enzymes, chirotechnology, green chemistry and biosensors.

#3245

Jenny Taylor

#169741

Overall Influence

Jenny Carmeron Taylor is a British geneticist who is Professor of Genomic Medicine at the University of Oxford. Taylor is the Director of the Oxford Biomedical Research Centre Genetics Theme. Her research considers whole genome sequencing and ways to integrate genetic research into the National Health Service.

#3246

Shahina A. Ghazanfar

#185232

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Shahina Agha Ghazanfar is a Pakistani botanist and author best known for her work on plants from the Arabian Peninsula, Pakistan and East Africa. Education Ghazanfar studied at the University of the Punjab and the University of Cambridge.

#3247

Lynn L. Silver

#185165

Overall Influence

Lynn L. Silver is an American born scientist best known for her contributions to the field of antibacterial discovery and development. With over 30 years of experience in the antibacterial discovery field and over 70 peer reviewed publications, Silver provides insight and advice to the research community on global advisory panels, international collaborations for addressing antibiotic resistance issues. Silver has published several highly cited reviews in the field of antibacterial discovery.

#3248

Claudia Cenedese

#176886

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Claudia Cenedese is an Italian physical oceanographer and applied mathematician whose research focuses on the circulation and flow of water in the ocean, and on the theoretical fluid dynamics needed to model these flows, including phenomena such as mesoscale vortices, buoyancy-driven flow, coastal currents, dense overflows, and the melting patterns of icebergs. She is a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

#3249

Almut Gitter Jones

#135715

Overall Influence

1923 - 2013 (90 years)

Almut Gitter Jones was a German-American botanist, mycologist, and plant taxonomist known for her work researching the genus Aster, as well as for her work as curator of the herbarium at the University of Illinois.

#3250

Joanna Putterill

#185672

Overall Influence

Joanna Jean Putterill is a New Zealand molecular botanist. She is currently a full professor at the University of Auckland. Academic career After a Master of Science thesis titled 'Par homology and incompatibility in the IncFI plasmid group' and a 1985 PhD titled 'Molecular strategies for developing aluminium tolerance in plants' both at the University of Auckland, Putterill joined the staff, rising to full professor in 2016.

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